Issue 28 - Contents

Emma Lewis on the work of Sardinian-born-and-raised, Valeria Cherchi, whose series pieces together a narrative around the island’s kidnapping phenomenon between the 1960s and late 1990s, a collaged approach to the documentary form: assembling a many-layered, multi-textured picture from disparate sources that may not otherwise be in close proximity.

Two dual exhibitions in Amsterdam of work by Czech-born, London-based photographer Tereza Zelenkova entice us into acts of contemplation about the nature of reality, or about nature and reality. This strange and complex weaving of a literary photography working within the realm of a fecund Symbolist imagination has Max Houghton spellbound.

Gerry Badger extols the virtues of the work of Paddy Sommerfield, one of British photography’s hidden gems on the occasion of a new monograph with Dewi Lewis Publishing, in which he delves into the darker side of his psyche, encompassing religion, depression, sex, alienation, and Rock ‘n’ Roll.

1,078 Polaroids of blue skies, photographed exactly above where genocidal acts took place in Nazi concentration camps during WWII, collectively contain the memory and bear witness to the trauma of the Holocaust. Martins Barnes considers this epic attempt to engage at a conceptual and expressive level with the atrocity, to truly comprehend it.

Duncan Wooldridge on Taryn Simon’s interdisciplinary project that brings together professional mourners from around the world to simultaneously broadcast their lamentations within a monumental sculptural setting, enacting rituals of grief, and examine the complicated visa application process in facilitating their travel.

Combining intimate prose with photographs, Ghost Guessed explores the after-effects of two separate air accidents as filtered through technology and visual media. Accompanied by an essay from Natasha Christia examining how absences caused by death make memories, no matter how abstract, more salient and complex.

Book Review

John Myers

The Portraits

RRB Photobooks

Interview

Katrina Sluis

Digital Curator at The Photographers’ Gallery and Senior Lecturer

London South Bank University