The group exhibition for the 2019 edition of Foam Talent has just opened in Amsterdam. Here are seven photographers you should know about from the line-up
Each year, Foam Amsterdam’s Talent Call is an opportunity for emerging photographers from across the world to showcase their work on a global platform. 2019’s edition of Foam Talent – which opened in Amsterdam yesterday, and will travel to London in May of this year – sees the work of 20 photographers together in one exhibition, each image-maker with a unique subject and take on the field. Among this list of photography’s rising stars, we’ve selected seven we’re especially excited about.
1. Durimel (above)
Twins Jalan and Jibril photograph together under the name Durimel, their surname. Having grown up and lived between the French West Indies, on islands like Guadeloupe and St Maarten, and Miami and Los Angeles, the brothers explore identity in their film-inspired practice. There is a hazy warmth to Durimel’s shots, which they apply readily to their fashion photography, having shot for the likes of Kenzo and Pringle of Scotland and collaborated with Sampha and Grace Wales Bonner on the zine Shy Light.
Swiss photographer Senta Simond chose women she knew to be the subjects of her series of portraits, Rayon Vert. “Portraiture is the genre of photography that has always interested me,” she says. “I feel touched by looking at faces.” Simond’s deep interest in her subjects comes through in her intimate photography, which explores the relationship between artist and sitter. Her work has also recently been seen in the pages of AnOther Magazine, as she shot a series of portraits of Lou Doillon, Martine Syms, Carla Sozzani and Dev Hynes, among others, for the Autumn/Winter 2018 issue’s AnOther Thing I Wanted to Tell You section.
For her series Worry for the Fruit the Birds Won’t Eat, Sophie Gabrielle brings together new and found archive photography and puts the images through a process of reshooting, leaving to sit under plates of glass and negatives being “sunk in polluted water”. The resulting photographs – some of which were sourced in old medical research catalogues – are eerie, and address issues of memory, health and experimentation, which the Melbourne-based photographer became invested in following the cancer diagnoses of some family members.
“Everything I make is about my mother, directly or indirectly,” American artist Carmen Winant told Sophie Bew in the Autumn/Winter 2018 issue of AnOther Magazine. “It’s about her influence, her body, her politics and the history she lives through.” Winant’s practice is defined by her own feminist viewpoint, and her work often features found imagery – of women in various stages of childbirth or practising self-defence, for example – brought together to create arresting portraits of both contemporary and historical womanhood.
Dima Komarov’s energetic portraits capture contemporary Russian youth culture. Komarov started out in photography by shooting his peers in his hometown of St Petersburg, and his images can range from casual, intimate portraits at gigs or in bedrooms to stylised fashion shoots (still likely a collaboration with and starring his friends).
Maisie Cousins’ visceral, close-cropped still lifes are easily recognised in the Foam Talent line-up. The English image-maker’s use of a bright, sugary colour palette and subjects like damp skin, insects or sometimes even rotting food makes for arresting viewing, equal parts delightful and unsettling and often displayed as mammoth, floor-to-ceiling prints. “Food to me is always exciting, it changes form if you leave it, it’s colourful and textural,” she says. “It never bores me, I love that it makes me feel repulsion and hunger at the same time.”
Scientific experiments, cloning, cult ideologies and conformity are some of the subjects explored by Kiev-based photographer Valentine Bo in his series Your next step would be to do the Transmission. Photogrammetry, 3D printing and sculpture also come into play in the series, the uncanny images of which might range from a face ready for inspection beneath an imposing scientific device to test tubes and preserving jars filled with figures submerged in liquid.