S t r e e t C o r e

WINTER

2016

p h o t o g r a p h y

S t r e e t C o r e P h o t o g r a p h y 2 0 1 6

Dear readers, this is the 4th eBook of the Street Core Photography Group. You can find all of them on, and download them for free from: http://issuu.com/michailfotografia Our Facebook addresses are: The new STREET CORE PHOTOGRAPHY group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/496641317130357) and Street Core Photography (page) (https://www.facebook.com/streetcorephotography) Our newest critique group: INSTANT CRITIQUE by SCP (https://www.facebook.com/groups/523219157834495) Thank you Michail 1.1.16

INTRO

Curated photographs selected from the SCP Group by Michail Moscholios

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© Manolis Negris Cannot take out of my mind the uneasiness that many friends of mine live at this very moment. That is why I can use any amount of hope this world can spare. But how a dividing wall (any wall) and some steel bars (a pure Orwellian scene) can be a source of hope? I can suppose that it is at the remains of the Berlin wall, but I do not really need to know, because the contextual information does not diminish the strength of the multiple and punchy messages this frame irradiates.

The probably highly touristic venue, through the author's vision, acquires a historical, moral and existential hypostasis. I can see entering the frame the ones having lived behind, the ones having tried to break through, the ones who hammered it down, lost and new hopes, lost and new lives. The details are, a hole in the wall, a man walking by, sober buildings, a cracked texture on the wall's surface. But it is the whole of the image which makes the difference. The subdivision operated by the natural lines (bars, cylindrical stones, windows and roof) guides us through contradictory perceptions. Freedom/captivity, despair/hope, anger/peace. Al the above coupled with a sublime B&W and a captivating sharpness (which is not always a bourgeois concept). Michail Oct. 2015

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© Thanos Savvidis I wanted to pick a classic street/straight photograph with the B&W palette only masters like Robert Frank and Kudelka have created. I didn't know the author, but I was sure it could not be Thanos because he is excelling in another domain, that of the candid and the spontaneous photography. Once again I was wrong! And I am glad for that. The present frame is one of these that will catch your attention even from the tiniest thumbnail. And which, once opened, looked at closely, will unveil the rest of the details with the same intensity as the powerful abstraction of the thumbnail. What is to admire first? The antithesis between rural and industrial, the fugitive rush of the woman leaving the ordinary path that leads back home? The fugitive or the hunter? A full of symbolisms picture, with the inherent surrealism that the lack of precise timestamp confers, and the obsessive hunting of the photographic eye. All the ingredients that we have initially set for this group and the Street Core Photography. Of course you would think that the scarf is impressive and that it makes the picture, but you can simply cover it up and you will see that no, it was not that. A great picture, as Henri was saying, is a magic combination of form and content that nothing can explain its appeal. So no, it is not the scarf! Or, not only the scarf. It is the whole and the absence of it!

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© Oliver Merce

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© Michelle Liberti

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A few days before the new edition of #VSLO, I am about to commit another "blasphemy", another betrayal of self. I have to talk about something I just do not understand. About hidden emotions unable to be described. About the unseizable differences between fake talent and "talented faking". Or about how mannerism (fell free to use any definition of it, it would fit) is the worst enemy of originality and change. And I realise that I need once more to take huge distances from the established, to take vacation from myself. So, coming back to our regular selection, it is with extreme precaution for the curating qualities of the undersigned, that I am inviting you to discover some of the finest examples of obsessive photography and of liberating art essays. They all go against the rules, and I would say, they go even against the mannerist breaking of the rules. They offer the essentiality of the photographic endeavour as this is best expressed through the spontaneous, but mentally prepared, petrification of self and of the other. Corneliu with a chromatic discordia (Eris) ignores every taught chromatic harmony and in fact, as the name of Eris implies, he disagrees with everything in order to lure us to explore the other elements of his frame. Florin is cutting a raw slice of his surroundings with a tight frame in order to melt these fragments of subjects and objects in an nightmarish scenery. Roderick does the same thing only thousands of miles away (as in any human evolutionary process). Finally, Andreas is making eruption in a "closed" environment to give us a snapshot of "displaced" beauty, and of unexpected melancholy. Thank you all for your insight during this frightful summer (as oxymoron as this may sound). Michail 10 Aug 2015

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© Corneliu Sarion

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© Florin Stanca

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© Andreas Neophytou

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© Roderick Tan

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© Rafael Ianos Francesca Woodman in "On being an angel" explores in a surrealist manner the strong feelings that a woman body creates to the viewer. At the same time the ambiguity, necessary to burn the viewer's memory, is omnipresent. What it takes to become an angel? Rafael knows that nothing needs to be said. It takes no words, it takes no projects or conceptual series of pictures. It takes just one picture! And it takes to feel and recognize when this picture appears. That is all. And that is huge. I am sure that when Rafael visualised his photograph had the same revelation: Our (photographic) existence is not fragmentary but cumulative. Everything rushes in a tiny frame. The visual trail when we finally release the shutter is: sensibility, emotion, impulse, awareness. Then it becomes absence. Until we meet again with the framed "reality". Which, as someone said, is never the one we have imagined. It is either worse or better. Let's embrace here a moment of a better reality, of a hopeful humanity.

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Thanos Savvidis is exploring once again the joy of life today. Are the sun and the sea the same to all? Absolutely not. Thanos is documenting his preferred (or were they imposed?) surroundings knowing two things. 1. An image becomes surreal the very next moment after its creation. These images from Cyprus' summers will definitely be charged with an emotional, nostalgic and melancholic burden at every viewing in the days, months, years to come. 2. Obsession is good! The tension and the alert state of mind of the photographer is the only way to make a capture stand out. Otherwise the emotions and the intensity we would like to convey will not be visible.

But most of all, his subjects are becoming inseparable protagonists of a never-ending play. "The inhabitants of the Mediterranean Lake." If Munkacsi's "Lake Tanganyika" made Cartier-Bresson to start photography, Thanos' pictures make me wanting to join the stage of these sublime performances.

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© Thanos Savvidis

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© Thanos Savvidis

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© Thanos Savvidis

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© Andreas Neophytou With today's pic(k) we would like to recall the appeal and the virtues of the raw and gritty street photography, the one with the unconstructed image unreadable for its meanings. Void from any conceptual construction this kind of photograph(y) leads us to a purely psycho-sensory contact with the world. Moreover the B&W's incomplete details (partial materiality) invites our capacity to concentrate and essentialise without being overexposed to the appearances. Baudelaire would define great art as the ability to distil experience in gestures of synthesis and abbreviation, gifts of memory and imagination, which are in synergy with the memory and imagination of the viewer, so that the latter can reconstruct and participate in the originating experience. And the ultimate experience in SCP is the compositional instability which makes the scene "pregnant" with an upcoming event but where the real is absent. In Andreas' picture, the uneasiness of the hands gesture, irrefutable entry point of the frame, is balanced by the harmless immateriality of the shadows. At the same time, the obscured human figures maintain their full mystery as to what is going to happen. The whole scene is taking place in an abstract geometrical world where the walls and the stairs become graphics, plotted lines and legends of a huge fluctuating diagram. Welcome to Andrea's magical imaginary. Michail 10 Sept 2015

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© Gabriel Kovats Aim, trigger, shoot … Why all the firearms nomenclature? The metaphor was, and is, obvious. The world’s first handheld movie camera was shaped like a gun and all the modern cameras did percussive sound with a bright flash. Building on the same metaphor, would you today rely on a gun that fires with an unknown lag of some fractions of a second? And yes I am referring to low-responsive cameras. And I am afraid that I have to warn you that everything less than a DSLR *is* a low response camera. I start believing that they will never capture a decisive moment because of that lag. And all the fine compositions relying on the fast-food recipe: "Street photography is the juxtaposition of human body parts in the foreground and some unrelated objects in the background", wouldn't be due to the fact that the camera reacted when the main subject has already started leaving the frame? From today on … I will only consider pictures that go beyond the mirrorless "accident". FLAMES are on! The picture presented here is a literally still image. Time, one of the two major elements of a picture (time and light), is petrified. As are all the subjects which have chosen to stay there. To stop the quest, usually futile, of doing better, faster, higher, stronger. After all don't we all want to be stones at a certain moment? "Au ascultat apoi, pierduti, tropaitul ploii pe frunze si stresini, si s-au lasat coplesiti de rasete vioaie de copii. Dar nici rodul acesta, plamadit in minte, al dragostei ce tocmai ii unise nu le-a fost de-ajuns. In final, ar fi vrut sa fie pietre ... Sa incremeneasca pe nisip"

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© David Mar Quinto If surrealism is putting an umbrella on a sewing machine … then putting a car on high heels or disintegrating a London Bus is as ingenious as it gets. The fact is that David is creating fireworks. They last short but they have a great impact and, sometimes, we can get them with us. This last part makes them memorable enough to survive the critique of the purists. Some will say: they are "hotel lobby" artwork. Only I would add "with a twist". Splitting the time in two (a motionless part and a moving part) is his favoured game. The moving part is so important for the author that we wonder if he wouldn't prefer cinema over photography. We cannot deny the high technical qualities of his images and the fact that these long-exposure "snapshots" are the fruit of much patience and a keen eye. Are you looking for more? I am not! I'd put oversized prints on my wall to remind me that still simple is beautiful and that simple is complex to conceive and even more complex to implement with precision. Beautiful images with a neat content and an ideal form! And another thing: Only the moment is private and David is going further than recording the facts of the moment. He is not an intruder, he is giving time to time. He must be one of the few photographers "accepted" by the crowds and not considered a disturbance invading their privacy.

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© David Mar Quinto

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© Andres Cesar

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© Yuji Ishizaki Someone said that history evacuates the past (keeping only major figures and events) and photography populates it (with unknown figures and places which existed) and brings the irrefutable proof. When a photographer like Yuji is photographing the Laundrettes is he seeking the quiet revelations of the street or is he just creating another proof that this world (including himself) really exists? Am I trying to redefine the boundaries between documentary and street photography? Of course not! I am not in a position to do something like that. Art critics and historians do it better! Yuji is photographing in his home country (and I am indignated by the attitude of famous photographers who connect Japan with martial arts). I am also persuaded that no "stranger" will ever do better than Yuji. But then, surprise! His pictures are *not* defined by the place but by their astonishing, unbearable "cruelty". Let me explain: We cannot as viewers give no light interpretation to Yuji's world. The scene is sitting there, with a visual burden, with no prospects of alleviation. Cruelly real or hauntingly unreal those scenes are made of an extreme density with a multitude of objects and subjects highly compacted and condemned to the indivision. Flirting with conceptual contemporary photography, Yuji is obsessively seeking the frontal vision with horizontal frames where some viewers would see an effort from the photographer's part to keep a distance, to give a documentary touch to his frames. How wrong they are! Welcome to Yuji Ishizaki's maximalism of modern street photography.

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© Faisal Bin Rahman Shuvo Observe how Faisal's image oscillates between paint stroke touches and photographic sharpness. Upon entering the frame all is blurred, abstract, like an unfinished painting. This last impression is accentuated by the delicate colour palette and the white missing strokes due to the reflexions. Once we concentrate to the subjects/objects they become sharp to uncover their details. And what surprising details: The horse (with its head caught in an iconic graceful position) looks appended to what appears to be a ruined rear view mirror support. The deteriorated wall is melting on the horse's back making of it half alive and half designed on its surface. The busy human figure, otherwise unrelated to the scene, connects through the shirt's Indian blue symbolic colour, found also on the car's parts. Don't you ever wonder what made the author to go for this shot? Why is he attracted by a seemingly ordinary scene? And why is he so anxious to frame it letting a huge part of a car to interfere and "ruin" any compositional attempt? Start wondering because the majority of us would have left the scene with a picture of a horse or with a street portrait looking right to the lens. Good night and good luck!

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© Corneliu Sarion When Corneliu made this picture (https://goo.gl/4pX04K) I was sure it is probably its best in the remote location which he visits obsessively (Dobrogea, Turkish minorities). I also thought that others did as good or better (Kudelka, Gipsies https://goo.gl/Gfxo4p). I was extremely wrong. With his latest image Corneliu is getting beyond himself and the others by presenting the same theme but with a totally new sensibility. The light, the innocence (or is it alienation) are just enough, are just right. Or could it be that we all are aliens until we become adults? Cannot take my eyes from the light strip and the straw strip and whatever it is that creates the dancing flames, the lava flow, the luminous lance avoiding the boys, the bending silhouettes avoiding the flames. Cannot take my eyes from the penetrating frontal look of the brothers. Are they looking without seeing? "They are looking at nothing; they retain within themselves their love and their fear: that is the Look (Le Regard)" Corneliu succeeds to set everything on a precarious equilibrium. There is symmetry and the next second there is no more. There is spontaneity but when we try to describe how, it turns to seem like the most laborious theatrical performance. There is air (as defined by Barthes), attitude, aura, this "luminous shadow which accompanies the body", but the young age of the kids cannot confer them yet the animula. The author claims to want to grasp "kairos" (time) in the Heidegger way. He wants that his photographs illustrate resoluteness, that the human will always run towards its end. But the boys come to revindicate that they are confined to the present, that they have no projection to the future; that photography will always brightly declare: "That has been".

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© Leontina Chiricioiu Overexposed figures have been used more and more in the recent years in street photography. It is true that they confer an unearthly mood in the ordinary candid pictures. But as sole element, the overexposed subject burns out rapidly (already burnt by birth). In the present picture the faceless overexposed man/boy serves perfectly its role. To attract attention together with the 2 bright squares and the vertical luminous lines on the wall. The whole background scene becomes this way unbearably stable and motionless, almost petrified, elevated to sculpture. But exactly this elevation makes it the most suitable stage to host the dreams of the girl in the foreground. Detached spatially, looking down, nevertheless she feels the existence of what appears to be the creature of her imagination. Too young to make her wishes come true, old enough to know what makes her resonate, she is consequently bound to a mere inception, raising concrete pillars and wooden walls, trying to give a face to her dream, and failing one more time. There is a third presence which alleviates the theatrical rigidity and gives a touch of spontaneity in an otherwise technically perfect frame. The understatement of the author is cried out loud: "This is not an accidental image, but you are witnessing another accidental life. Now it is brought to you, so bear with it." When the photographer "sees" her/his picture? Long before s(he) ever had a camera!

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Presenting 2 pictures in parallel is not only because of their similar approach, theme, even angle and compositional structure, but mostly because one of the main issues in photography is the forging of a signature, the unique attribute that would make an artist recognisable. The personal style is an unequal battle mostly due to the similarity of the instruments used, and due to the mechanical and technological nature of the medium. It is also an unfair battle because, any effort to take the result beyond the chemical/digital fixing of the image on its support, is seldom and rapidly considered as creative demagogy and shallow manipulation. Photographers are confined consequently within a very narrow set of choices, since in more than one century much has been said and invented, experiencing nowadays a frustrated imagination striving for the new, the original, the personal. So we stay just witnesses of the society's fragility, each of us in their own way, but inseparably united in a mass(ive) photographic endeavour. The two authors are carrying their wide angles everywhere and they do not hesitate to point them to the crowd without framing, inspired and influenced by the modern trend in photography where the "war-zone" journalistic approach invades and transforms what is supposed to be the fruit of long reflection and in depth preparation. For how long this trend will persist? And in which way it will be transformed or ever remembered? The answer lies with those who will not stop doubting the established and who constantly reinvent themselves.

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© Marion Junkersdorf

© Andreas Neophytou

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© Iris Maria Tusa

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© Blackpixel Whitepixel

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© Antonio Ojeda

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© Corneliu Sarion

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© Dragos-Radu Dumitrescu Where, who, when but most of all why? We may have some clear answers for the first 3 questions but for the last one we can only speculate. And this makes it the most important question in decoding a picture. Why Dragos is in that corn field, why is he wasting film roll to capture mostly green leaves. He could probably figure the image in B&W, however why is he getting all this high grain and motion blur? It was probably done under quite low light conditions, but then the situation is even more intriguing. Interesting looks, postures, background … someone would have said. But no! There is "nothing" in this image! It is not a rural documentary picture, no men at work under a "superb" colourful sunrise at the fields, no poverty hit people, no suffering. It is not either a portrait, nor a candid moment, no humorous situation, no peculiar juxtapositions. Only some grey scratches and grain(s) everywhere. Nevertheless, this picture carries majestically the quintessence of the photographic event. The core, the primal surrealism of the temporal paradox in photography. The absolute memento mori. Why the author was there? Simply to tell them: "Remember (that you have) to die". Funny thing, they both look like they'd know that already. Don't abuse of this power that photography possess. But thank you Dragos for reminding it to us in the best of ways! With a mute rage and a latent anxiety.

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© Oliver Merce They say that the best war photographer is the one who stays alive. Her/his photographs will be emotional, with impact, full of pain and suffering, with spontaneous framing and composition, surreal enough due to the war zone, thus all the ingredients of award-winning pictures. But why this would be talent? That is why I often say, don't go to Cuba or to India (the list is long) if it is to fall into the fallacy that the trip made you a better photographer. The scenery, the colours, the shadows, the exotic elements are all there. Don't underestimate yourself. You can do better than capturing yet another "prêt-à-exposer" exotic scene. Better, great, photographers we become looking around us constantly, obsessively, (then inside of us), then around again. Wherever we are, wherever we live. Our photographs have to be ourselves, not someone else, not somewhere else. Some try to overcome their fears and to approach their subjects better. But who needs an army of fearless photographers. What we really need is a genuine expression of an original talent coming from a (re)discovered self. Allow me to present an example of a photographer who doesn't need exotic places, silent undercover cameras or colourful scenes in order to produce regularly "punchy" images bringing in them the intensity that surrounds him. Who will be able to capture these glances and the intense mute dialogue as the one here, if he doesn't bring in him endless hours of observation and of intense watching even before touching a camera. Who will be able to wait for the jump in the background, if he didn't wait himself for the right moment in his life, suspending his steps before going further. Our photographs define us. With all the burden we carry with us. Faking has never been memorable. - dedicated to Lieven van Meulder

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© George Dobre Cristina reminded me that I once wrote: "Put dreams and nightmares in a single shot." Let me complete it: "as long as you (we) still have dreams, as long as you (we) are still haunted by nightmares." Looking at this picture I realize that I am a privileged viewer. Because I know the place (and the time). However, for this one time, knowing the context outside the frame does not weaken the impact to me. It makes it stronger because, in fact, I was there the moment of the storm ... or was I? I was but I was not looking. I walked but I didn't see. I felt but I was paralyzed. I was short of ... sensorimotor hallucinations with a narrative structure (the scientific definition of dreams). How much this last bit fits to a possible definition of art photography! So, George was really there ... and he felt it all, and he brought with him the "état second" of architecture. His dream (or nightmare) that one day nothing will be straight anymore, except maybe the horizon. It is a terminal, a categorical picture. The woman is too far, too introspective to be reached. The three light globes are too attractive and present to be ignored. The converging poles and umbrellas too beautifully skewed to be touched. And the only thing left for the photographer to do is to press the shutter button, walk out of the scene and face Vama Veche by night laying back there with the rest of us trapped somewhere in it.

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© Raluca Baintan The author is playing gracefully with our capacity to empathise and our shocking inability to accept the truth. With just a couple of lines she creates stability (the straight horizon) and then she breaks it with the tilted beach limit. She throws to us a peaceful seawalk only for us to discover in the next seconds the tensions, the muted dialogues, the desperate glances of the protagonists. The helping hand, the opposite directions of those lives, the perpetual sympathy of (for) the animal, the plastic cups, are there to offer context? To help us decode the scene? Not at all! The author doesn't make favours. And rightly so! She goes directly to the point where, unlike the majority of the pictures, there is nothing around the four corners of the frame, nothing after the frame. Everything stops here. Moreover, the photographic event could not be more denuded from its temporal dimension. It has already now, the inherent surrealism of a past capture and the melancholy of the memento mori. The old woman won't be back on her feet. The helping hand won't pick seashells. The alienated old couple won't kiss, won't hold hands, won't be back together again. Nobody will pick up the plastic cups, no-one will pick up the pieces of the unbearable beings. All is frozen and soon it will disintegrate. Perhaps we'll still perceive a dog leaving the scene. But what a memorable and majestic delivery of a hopeless humanity! PS: I wrote the above without having the picture in front of me. WIth just what my memory had registered. So there is no old lady, but trust me, if I could recall all these details it is because this picture is forcing itself to our brains.

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Julius Andres Manzano Antonio E. Ojeda Roderick Tan Tzen Xing Patrulescu Stela Arth Figueroa Jumagdao Iris Maria Tusa Yuji Ishizaki Rafael Ianos Arsenic Junior Frederic Deserva Chi Alvarez Iris Maria Tusa Anton Marinescu Octavian Cucolea David Mar Quinto

CREDITS

Photo credits of the last 4 pages, by order of appearance from left to right (upper) and from left to right (lower).

S t r e e t C o r e P h o t o g r a p h y 2 0 1 6

S t r e e t C o r e

WINTER

2016

p h o t o g r a p h y