The photographers from the European Photo Exhibition Award show twelve perspectives on European society's new kinds of normal
Society is fluid – it changes, it takes on new guises, it rejects the normal of the past for the unexpected standards of the present. But how to capture the ever-changing and amorphous infrastructure of the world we live in? Obviously it’s not possible to present it all, but the European Photo Exhibition Award is making a sideways swipe, asking twelve young European photographers to present their own visual musings on the personal histories and cultures that have forged their realities. It is an eclectic collection of perspectives – Simona Ghizzoni’s atmospheric portraits; Linda Bournane Engelberth’s emotive and sensual portrayal of Latvian youth; village oddballs, touchingly shot by Espen Rasmussen; Paula Winkler’s recalibration of the centrefold using naked heterosexual men. Funny, sensitive, bleak, surreal, hopeful – together, under the title Horizons: The New Social, they capture a picture of society in flux, people taking on new personas, or pleading for their old ones.
"Society is fluid – it changes, it takes on new guises, it rejects the normal of the past for the unexpected standards of the present"
Here we present the work of our two favourites from the series. In Jan Brykczynski’s Collection, the photographer presents the personality and legacy of an unnamed woman through considered portraits of her possessions – clothes, objects d’art, statues, hats. Oddities alone, combined they form an opaque testimonial of a life, a visual mathematical equation that still adds up to a question mark; proof that a human essence cannot be recreated by things. In Arja Hyytiäian’s Family, found snapshots of her grandmother as a toddler and her parent’s marriage photograph sit alongside images from a modern album – indistinct family groups of husband and wife, wife and wife, husband and husband, children with all. Time has changed the fabric and shape of the nuclear family; there is no longer such a thing as normal – something effortlessly, beautifully celebrated in Hyytiäian’s pictures.
Horizons: The New Social is at Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, Paris until December 20.
