Collective Shroud + At The Edge of The Universe +Lullaby

Auckland Festival of Photography Trust is pleased to present the international photography of 3 talented rising stars from Australia, Russia and USA. Shoufay Derz shares the work "Collective Shroud".*

The Great Barrier Reef was presumed dead and an assembly of ritual participants were given the chance to imagine returning to its once living biosphere to pay respects through the creation of its memorial. Through a succession of collective rituals this work speculated on the role of poetic potentialities in the fate of the Reef. The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living organism on the planet.

New York-based Cali Kurlan's work - "My intention is to channel new modes of communication through hybrid photography to create images that are seemingly unrecognizable, but in their very nature, direct. I arrive at the photograph through several steps from the film negative, to enlarging the print on lightsensitive paper, to re-photographing or scanning the image, to ‘screen-shoting’ the image on the screen, to Photoshop manipulation…"

Ilya Ivankin, Russia says about his work "For me, the revival of the analog photo can’t be reduced to impressionistic, pictorial rebellion against the digital academism. Not only in photographic technology but also in associative related topics – Freudian and left-social conflicts – we can find the opportunity of seeing something natural, cathonic, showing itself through the usual rational shape of the frame with its composition, and social order.

So I often combine graphics, sculpture, lith-process, and a subsequent digital post-processing and printing. Barely visible manipulation with natural grain structure is like genetic engineering, and the enlarged image generated by using almost biological, infectious lith-development makes the frame resembling the eyepiece of the microscope".