“Everything was new, different, and foreign. But at some point, discovering the unknown became my new passion.”

“I landed in North Carolina with one piece of luggage, poor English, and no expectations,” writes Tomanova in the new book, in which she centres on the shifting notion of home as told from the perspective of an expat. “Never had I felt so lonely and isolated,” she says. “Everything was new, different, and foreign. But at some point, discovering the unknown became my new passion.”

Because of complications with her immigration status, the painter-turned-photographer could not visit the Czech Republic for eight years. In that time, Tomanova relocated to New York City and established herself as one of the most exciting voices on the emerging photography scene. Nearly a decade after she first set foot in the US, freedom arrived in an envelope delivered to her East Village flat in the autumn of 2018 – it contained her Green Card. 

A few months later in December, Tomanova finally made it back home to Mikulov. Her life was not the only one to have changed. “My nephews and nieces had grown up, my grandma had passed away,” says Tomanova. “Not even my dog was there anymore.” Though these were all things she had been informed about, the reminder of not being there to witness them was heartbreaking. 

Tomanova’s new monograph – possibly her most personal, revealing book yet – emerged from that first trip home, a 20-day-long stay with her family. “I was taking pictures in an old quarry where I used to walk with my dog and swim with friends in the summer,” she says of the moment when the book’s title “popped” into her head. “I was overwhelmed by the fact that, for so long, this little corner of the world was my entire universe. It was all that mattered.” 

Shot with her loyal analogue Contax camera, the series chronicles the photographer’s attempt to reconcile with the deeply contrasting emotions that the long-awaited homecoming evoked in her. It takes Tomanova’s vivid observation into a new context, where the rural landscapes of her family’s farm are shown alongside self-portraits in which she appropriate clothes, paintings, living spaces, and outdoor locations of her fading memories. It Was Once My Universe offers a portrait of the artist that is as endearing as it is haunting. She has outgrown the wooden-floored rooms of her family home, and feels, once again, unrooted. “I shot everything that sparked feelings, memories or confusion,” she says. “I felt like a collector of sorts, trying to assemble and capture everything that defined my home and myself.” 

The opening photograph of the book, for example, shows Tomanova standing in a field behind her house, wearing an oversized, pine green jumper and a pair of worn-out jeans. Titled In Dad’s Sweater (All That Is Left), the image is a moving dedication to her father, who died two days before her 16th birthday. 

The photographs that follow [in the book] continue the artist’s search for grounding among emotional turmoil. Three years on from that trip in 2019, the existential dilemma – “where is home?” – eventually saw Tomanova regain a strong sense of self, grounded in the enriching complexity of her Mikulov and New York City experiences. “Today I know that Mikulov will always be home,” she says. “That’s where my family and closest friends are. Nothing can change it.”

marietomanova.com

It Was Once My Universe by Marie Tomanova is published by Super Labo. The book launches at the New York Art Book fair in NYC on 15 October 2022, and at Fotograf Gallery in Prague on 14 November 2022.

“Without school to distract us, everything fell into place,” says Gat. “There was definitely a sensation of freedom, that you were able to build your own curriculum, and actually choose what you want to do with your time… With this comes a great deal of responsibility.” Rather than following a prescribed route, “you really decide,” she continues, “you realise to what extent your life is in your own hands”.

Born in 1997 in Israel, and now based between Marseille and Rotterdam, Gat’s work has received recognition from numerous international awards, and has been exhibited in Europe and the US. She is currently exhibiting Khamsa Khamsa Khamsa as part of the official programme of Les Rencontres d’Arles, but also as a solo show at Galerie Huit Arles. Last week, she launched her debut photo book with French publisher Actes Sude, to coincide with the opening of the festival. 

As time goes on, Gat is “more and more grateful” for the childhood her parents chose for her. In engaging with her work, Gat hopes viewers will recognise that there are alternative routes to traditional educational structures, which don’t always serve every individual. “It’s like asking an elephant, a fish and a monkey to climb a tree. They don’t all have the same skills,” she says. “[Homeschooling] is not a system. You let the plant grow, and you see what it becomes.” 

Documenting moments of joy, intimacy, and play, Khamsa Khamsa Khamsa is an invitation to reimagine what we define as learning. But it is also an autobiography, an intimate document of Gat’s unique childhood, as well as her development as a photographer. In the words of her mother: “Your archive keeps that world we lived in as a real place, which otherwise could be easily mistaken for a dream.”

Julia Gat is exhibiting at Galerie Huit Arles and Les Rencontres D’Arles until 25 September 2022.

OpenWalls Arles is a global photography award that exhibits both emerging and established photographers alongside Les Rencontres D’Arles. OpenWalls 2022 opens for entries on 6th October. Pre Register now.

Currently on show at Galerie Huit Arles, the winning series of OpenWalls Arles 2020 presents a succession of derelict human structures juxtaposed against the majestic terrain of California’s Eastern Sierra

In his book Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs, Ansel Adams recounts the production history of his 1944 image “Winter Sunrise,” depicting darkened hills beneath the vast, craggy peaks of Mount Whitney, Sierra Nevada. Lone Pine High School graduates had climbed the rocky slopes of the Alabama Hills to whitewash an imposing “L P” against the stone, which the famed American landscape photographer later ruthlessly removed in his negative: “I have been criticised by some for doing this,” he writes, “but I am not enough of a purist to perpetuate the scar and thereby destroy — for me, at least — the extraordinary beauty and perfection of the scene.”

Where Adams epitomised idealised landscape photography, which elevated the natural and the elemental in deliberate omission of human interference, some decades later the “New Topographic” era would materialise in partial response. Through the 1970s, the likes of Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz and Catherine Wagner employed landscape photography to visualise man-made America in all its rigorous banality: monochrome warehouses, industrial sites, parking lots.

It is between these two extremes that the work of Osceola Refetoff, series winner of the OpenWalls Arles 2020 ‘Daily Life’ category, is realised. The work is on show at Galerie Huit Arles until 06 August 2022,  and then by appointment until 26 September. Refetoff’s winning body of work, It’s a Mess Without You, presents a succession of derelict human structures juxtaposed against the majestic terrain of California’s Eastern Sierra. The series exists as part of a wider set of projects surveying man’s presence in the deserts of the American West.

“I’m interested in creating photos that are beautiful,” the photographer tells British Journal of Photography, speaking from his home in Los Angeles. “I’m less interested in creating a world that’s perfect.”

Crucially, to Refetoff, the Eastern Sierra is beautiful despite its earmarks of human development: roads, transmission lines, garbage dumps. “There are no more ‘virgin landscapes’ anywhere on Earth,” he remarks, “and the idea is problematic on so many levels — but particularly in terms of discouraging environmental thoughtfulness.” Characterising his practice as “defiantly old-school” (It’s a Mess Without You is made up solely of single exposures, not composites), the photographer is particularly wary of the dangers of Photoshop in presenting illusory depictions of the natural world. “We expose people to these idealistic images,” he says, “then when we look out and see what’s actually there, they think, ‘that’s not even worth preserving. It’s already ruined.’ We have to get on board with preserving areas that have already been impacted.”

At once dreamlike and hyper-realistic, fragile and formidable, It’s a Mess Without You sees crisp blue skies engulf abandoned alfalfa farms. Jagged mountain tops peek through long-decayed window frames as bright orange sunlight pours over remnants of lives left behind. Partially inspired by Edward Hopper, the project finds new meaning in the age of isolation, when the window has been rendered our foremost way of experiencing the world — a shared symbol of a global crisis. Here, the window is employed not only as an architectural subject, but a narrative device to frame the stories of millennia-old lands, and the tenuous marks we inflict upon them in our wake.

“I’m contrasting the very mortal lives of the people that built and inhabited these structures against a truly timeless backdrop of the Eastern Sierra mountains,” Refetoff explains. “The harsh desert sun is a powerful spotlight to shine on hubris versus mortality — or the grand ambitions of all of us little ant people.”

Shot over ten years, the project dissects the tragedy of abandoned dreams against the vast cultural legacy of California’s deserts — a mythical land, charged with human hope and promised opportunity. Needless to say, for many immigrants and settlers, the West has symbolised a chance to “make it”: picture the opening scene of Clint Eastwood’s classic musical western Paint Your Wagon (1969), showing a succession of caravans bustling across the bountiful landscape in search of fortune and a new life.

The idea was originally propagated through images and text produced and commissioned by the American government to entice citizens and immigrants to settle there; in those pictures, the West exuded promise, natural resources and open land for the taking — a boundless Eden where dreams could be made. While a pantheon of American painters, photographers and filmmakers have fuelled this mythology for over a century, the reality that exists today is a loose patchwork of struggling communities, military-industrial compounds and failed mining projects. In the near future, immense wind and solar projects will likely dominate many areas, transforming the landscape in ways that are complex and irreversible.

Indeed, as Refetoff points out, the myth of the West has always been just that. A myth. Aside from the active displacement and slaughter of large First Nations populations in order to make room for such “dreams”, forging them into realities in such a barren environment was never an easy undertaking. “To this day, a lot of people make a go of it and then abandon their homes,” Refetoff explains — aptly summarising what It’s a Mess Without You is really about: the people who are absent from the frames. “When shooting, so often I’d stand by these windows and think, ‘someone stood here and did dishes and looked at this view for hundreds of hours. Then at some point, they packed up all their stuff and walked out of their home forever.’”

Ultimately, Refetoff considers his wider artistic purpose as engaging Californian people with environmentalism in a different way. Not just in urban centres like Los Angeles, where thinking is already substantially liberal, but crucially within the rural, distinctly conservative desert communities themselves. While the two adjacent populations tread a complex relationship (Refetoff cites the California water wars, a series of political conflicts throughout the 19th century over water rights between LA and farmers and ranchers in the Owens Valley), he uses visual storytelling as a way of appealing to those on both sides of the ideological fault line.

“We live in a sharply partisan country, and words like ‘environmentalism’ are fighting words in a lot of these small desert communities. But we all have to inhabit this planet — so we have to reflect more deeply about how we exploit these resources. We have to act as a society.”

OpenWalls 2022 opens for entries on 6th October. Pre Register now.

During his studies in the Egyptian capital, Basheer taught himself photography. He had been fascinated by the medium since looking at his uncle’s old photographs, and began taking photos on his phone. After he graduated, he studied photojournalism at the Danish School of Media and Journalism, finishing in 2021.

“At the start of my photography career, most of my work was street photography,” he recalls. “At some point, I felt a need to express myself more through the medium and that is when I started my first long-term project, Sweet Taste of Sugarcane [2017–ongoing]. It explores my memory of brotherhood and the time I spent studying in the Quranic school when I was a kid.”

In 2018, Basheer started his series The Home Seekers. The work reflects on discrimination in Cairo, and tells the story of ‘Ali’ and ‘Essam’ – two Sudanese men who emigrated to Egypt, fleeing persecution in their home country for a better life only to be faced with hardships once again.

The photographer Tasneem Alsultan, who nominated Basheer, says: “During the protests in Sudan, Salih went back to his home country [in 2019] and covered the capital city of Khartoum differently to the other photographers. His images were evocative, without the need of a headline.” Alsultan describes the work as “poignant, serene, quiet and, at times, uncomfortable”. “Salih wants us viewers to feel the awkwardness and discomfort of the spaces he’s in. He quietly moves in and out of spaces that are moody and heavy with emotion.” 

The Home Seekers is ongoing, and Basheer is working on a new chapter, Is This Home, following Essam’s story to Sweden. Essam’s grandmother offered him safety and security in her Sudanese home when he was rejected from society for being gay, but after her death, he was expelled from his family. “He thought he would find a tolerant society in Cairo but that was not the case. He thought of returning to Sudan, but finally his request to resettle in Sweden was accepted,” says Basheer. 

The photographer is also working on two new projects: 22 Days In Between and Blue: Children of January. The former ruminates on memory and loss, and won Basheer the W Eugene Smith Student Grant in 2021. “I wanted to make a body of work that would allow me to learn more about my family and serve as a way to heal from the trauma of losing parents,” he says. Blue: Children of January is about the ongoing Sudan revolution that began in December 2018, with a focus on the youth. It questions the country’s history with military coups and how they affect Sudan today and in the future. 

salihbasheer.com

Abundant in warm light and a near-hypnotising serenity, the 28-year-old’s portfolio sees delicate portraits of Black and brown subjects interlaced with still lifes and landscapes: an afro comb placed on a table; palm trees enveloped by a fading sky. Rather than chronicling reality in the typical documentary sense, the artist’s objective is to “get the feel of a place; of the people you can encounter there, and how this builds a universe”.

Scheidig’s ongoing project, Insular, captures the formation of a growing African community in Malta as a result of modern migration on the central Mediterranean route. A Life In-Between explores the 200,000-strong West Indian population living in mainland France. Central to Scheidig’s work is an interrogation of dual heritage, and the experience of being caught between worlds. But also, crucially, a rebuttal of the white colonial gaze.

“I don’t want my pictures to document [Black] struggle because people know it’s there,” says Scheidig. Rather, through a soft and loving gaze, “what I am trying to do is normalise [the diaspora’s] presence… Root them through pictures.”

Scheidig graduated in 2021 with an MA from the French National School of Photography in Arles, where the development of her craft was inspired by the writings of Édouard Glissant, WEB Du Bois and other Black thinkers. Alongside several artist residencies in the past year, she won the 2021 Dior Prize for Photography and Visual Arts for Young Talents, and has worked on assignments for the likes of Nike and The New York Times. She will be exhibiting in various capacities in Paris, Malta and Switzerland throughout 2022 and 2023.

“Cédrine Scheidig embodies a discreet but strong new generation of young French photographers working within the realm of post-documentary,” says writer and curator Taous Dahmani, who nominated her for Ones to Watch. “She contains within herself the audacity to work with reality, and the intelligence necessary for this task. Her humanity informs her methodology and images.”

It is significant that most of Scheidig’s projects are ongoing. Her process is painstakingly slow: allowing ideas time to distil; returning to places and people over the course of several years. As for her message, this is more urgent. To subscribe to Glissant’s philosophy, if we are to achieve a world wherein Black diasporic people can truly live at peace, we must first be able to imagine it. The art of Cédrine Scheidig exists to help us do just that. 

@csheidig

The Castle explores the emotional significance of home and what happens when personal space is encroached upon. It all began in 2019, when Wojciechowski was helping his mum deal with some concerning family issues. “A colleague advised me that I could register to have my father officially ordered out of the apartment my mum lives in,” he explains. “At the time [my parents] had already been separated for 15 years and had lived apart for three of those. Yet he would still come over unannounced and a lot of his stuff remained all over the house.” Wojciechowski filed the papers and waited for a decision. At the same time, he entered a photography competition organised by the Arsenal Gallery in Poznan. Under the theme of ‘Places of Everydayness’, entrants had to look through records from the city’s Archives of Research on Daily Life and make pictures in response. “That’s how this idea came to me,” he says of his latest project. “I wanted to dive into the world of everyday objects, relate it to my parents, and turn everything upside down.”

The images in The Castle are a hodgepodge of comical scenes shot with an array of items found around the home. In some pictures, Wojciechowski has created makeshift sculptures, precariously balancing piles of plates or twisting wires into the shape of hearts. Elsewhere he directs his mum to perform absurd poses, balancing plates on her feet and a brick – the fundamental element of house-building – on her head. In one picture, a marriage certificate peeks out beneath a gaudy dessert of jelly and cut bananas. Wojciechowski’s favourite diptych from the series is one of his mother kneeling on the floor, using a footstool to make it look like she’s proposing. It is a lighthearted play on the subject of marriage, and the fact that his father had never asked for his mother’s hand. “I think it’s hilarious,” he says.

A sense of humour is at the heart of everything The Castle is about for Wojciechowski, and the project ultimately became a collaborative way for mother and son to process their circumstances. “I made those sculptures to explore the broken relationship of my parents, and it was even more powerful because all of the objects from that apartment brought back memories or emotions,” he says. “But me and my mum didn’t want to be dramatic about it. Turning drama into a joke was my approach from the beginning. And, actually, my mum and I improved our relationship with my dad by confronting it.” Now based in Kosovo, Wojciechowski continues his interest in the relationships between people and the places we carve out for ourselves. 

Dominikwojciechowski.com

The title, Hexamiles, refers to the term ‘hexameter’, a form of writing where a line of verse contains six ‘accents’ or ‘pulses’ as used in Homer’s Odyssey. In this way, Suter sequences images of disparate landscapes. Derelict wastelands and wild forests sit amongst epic mountains and seascapes, shifting between the romantic and the menacing. 

Suter also creates “impossible landscapes”, layering geological and biological environments to transport us to another realm. “I love to imitate the dream, and I was very curious what they could trigger. In German, we call it ‘fernweh’, an ache or pain to explore another land.”

While the project considers multiple entry points, Suter’s longing for the Swiss landscape, her home country, is what inspired her. “I miss the physicality of the place,” she explains. “I miss the rocks, the mountains, the sturdiness.” This emotional impulse, a primal response to the way land imprints on every facet of our consciousness, conjures a haunting presence throughout the project, revealing our precarious symbiotic coexistence with our planet.

batiasuter.org

Over time, the work expanded to other underground spaces and touchpoints for the diaspora, including nightclubs, ballrooms and illegal amateur wrestling shows. 

Nightlife became a unifier, not just a subject of interest. As it was for many queer people, it also became part of Pérez’s identity formation. Their portraits of Latino, Black and Queer life are made with such care that they move beyond the candid moment and occupy a more formal and timeless space. 

Yet it’s the subtle observations that are more pertinent. In visceral details, such as worn door frames, well-trodden stairwells, sweat glistening on the walls, we witness the materiality embedded with the evidence of life.

Together the images illustrate a site of beauty in the face of years of exclusion and trauma. Always shooting in black- and-white, Pérez utilises the rhetoric of historical and documentary images to force inclusion. It is a documentation of a community that rarely exists in dominant histories. 

While the location is important, it’s the people and experiences that are most potent for Pérez. The work animates the intimacy between people – the individual and the collective – that proposes a true sense of home.

@elleperex

Responding to the prevailing and pervasive images of Black people in Bruce Davidson’s East 100th Street and Gordon Parks’ A Harlem Family, Green’s work proposes an alternative narrative – one that transcends violence and trauma. “I’m not interested in denying those realities,” says Green. “I’m focused on the fact that Black people are only situated in urban decay. When we only see images of death and grit, this leads to notions that Black life is disposable. I’m interested in what it means to see Black life in environments that are growing and vibrant. This is a reality I know is real and true, but I didn’t see anywhere.”

Like many of Green’s projects, community is at the core of the work. Jewels from the Hinterland is more than just a collection of images. It is an ecosystem of interconnected relationships formed over 10 years, traversing New York, Houston, Miami, Oakland and Chicago.

“There are a few different utopias that I’m reaching towards,” says Green. “With the project, I’m thinking about normalising seeing Black and Brown people being outside, just existing, and not having to worry about the dangers of daily life that we currently have to think about. I want people to have access to space that makes them feel vibrant and full – spaces of possibility.”

naimagreen.com

“It represents a space where I don’t have to rely on anyone else. I can just be myself and be free”

“I dreamed about training every night for years,” she explains. “It was a kind of healing process for everything that I had been through.” It wasn’t long before she began a new relationship, this time with the sea. She would set her alarm early, cycle to the beach and swim alone every day before school. “That was my first experience of freedom and independence. It was just me and the sea and none of the pressure I had in the pool. It was very liberating and remained a huge influence.”

As Capitán’s creative practice evolves, traversing fashion and fine art, the sea continues to inspire her. Its attendant themes of adventure and isolation are used as a framework to reimagine ideas around gender, queerness and our relationship with our body. Blue hues dominate her work, as she creates a space where fantasy collides with reality.

In her most recent work, Naïvy – shown in a solo exhibition at Maximillian William, London, in 2020 and published as a book earlier this year – she contemplates the role of the sailor; and its paradoxical embodiment of individual freedom and collective belonging.

For Capitán, water remains a site of growth and liberation – a home from home. “It represents a space where I don’t have to rely on anyone else,” says Capitán. “I can just be myself and be free.”

cococapitan.co.uk