GALLERY

Photographer Mathias Sterner was born in Kalmar, a town on the Swedish east coast. He is educated at Gamleby photo academy, and after having spent a year in Paris post graduation, he moved to Stockholm. Nowadays Sterner divides his time between Stockholm and London, and has contributed to magazines such as Dazed & Confused, Tank and Livraison.

He draws his inspiration from Nature: from the shapes and patterns of landscapes and forests. Sterner also loves the inspiration he finds in renaissance painting and sculpture. These combined influences can be seen in his sensitive and intriguing imagery, where he beautifully makes light, form and textures come together.

The images Mathias took for Dazed Digital in the fashion story "The Beautiful Fall" features the designs of the talented Japanese fashion student Chiaki Moronaga.

Photography: Mathias Sterner

Stylist: Elisabeth Fraser-Belle

Hair: Christos Kallaniotis at Terrie Tanaka using Pantene pro V

Make-up: Nobuko Maekawa using MAC

Model: Yana at M and P models

minkmgmt.com

Ernesto Neto is a contemporary artist from Brazil, considered one of the absolute leaders in the country's art scene. For the artist, it is important that the viewer should interact with his work, engaging multiple senses and exploring a multi-sensory experience.

Inspired by Brazilian Neo-concretism, a movement in the 50s and 60s that rejected modernism and its geometric abstraction, Neto's work resembles living organisms and an organic architecture. As described by the artist, his work is an exploration of the body's landscape from within.

His work is primarily exhibited in large exhibitions, where the abstract installations grow and often fill the entire space. Pourous and stretchy nylon or cotton fabrics create a skin around wooden skeletons or hang from the ceiling like tear drops. These materials are often filled with spices, inviting the spectator not only to touch the work but also smell and sense it. In other works, the material is used to make organic structures itself.

Neto has been awarded Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for his installation at the Panthéon in Paris called Leviathan Thot. In 2009 the artist exhibited at New York's Park Avenue Armory, filling the 5,100 square meter hall with a maze-like structure.

His latest installation is for the Louis Vuitton store in Tokyo, where visitors were invited to walk on and interact with a suspended pathway made from his stretchable material.

Ryan Moritz

espacelouisvuittontokyo.com

Jerimie Souteyrat's website

When Vogue Korea asked Kim Kyoung Soo, a renowned fashion photographer to realize a series of fashion portraits that would re-actualize the traditionnal Korean costum (Hanbok), he also decided to realize his series Full Moon Story. His models are elegantly staged, wearing somptuous Hanbok, with their haircuts and make-up done perfectly. There is a serenity, poetry and softness which emanates from the pictures that astonishes and instantly puts the viewer in a contemplative state of mind.

As he said : "During the National traditionnal festivities called 'Chuseok', many Korean people used to wear the hanbok. I wanted to show this typical ambiance with both a lyric and modern touch. I wanted a neutral stage; only shadows and reflections mattered to me: Colours, faces and models were enhanced by cold and light tones creating an almost surreal feeling."

www.parisbeijingphotogallery.com

While pursuing her graduate degree at the School of Fine Arts in Paris, Estelle Hanania spent her free time in the photo lab, experimenting with the large-scale color prints for which she has become renowned. She decided to pursue a career behind the lens and the payoff was immediate : a month after receiving her degree, Hanania won the photo prize at the 2006 Hyères Festival.

Since then, her photographs have appeared in Vice, The Wire, Exit, Sang Bleu and Capricious, among others, and she has been commissioned by fashion brands including Maison Martin Margiela, Opening Ceremony, Damir Doma, Issey Miyake and Zucca.

Her pictures brings us in a parallel and fantasy world, the same world you're going when you're listening to Tchaikovsky's Swan lake.

Full of grace, her creatures seem to be there for ages, and we're witness of an incredible scene through Hanania's eyes. Documentaries is an artistic form that inspires her a lot, it reality has a stronger impact on her and when it is directed by an inspired person that can be amazingly strong.

The sharp realness of her photographs makes a startling contrast to the ethereality of their subjects : burning hands, glittery crystals, spookily-real human scarecrows, and men dressed as eery, totem-like birds.

It seems that she is searching for a form language to reconnect with the ancestors, trying to get back to the origins. A primary language which is hidden inside everyone of us, but which we have forgotten, finding the magic in the common things, with a certain naivety of a childish glance.

She likes to be in an unknown environment and loose her mark for a while to get that innocent and fresh look. Fortunately this position seems to suit her, she's still entertained and has an huge inquiring mind, so she's not giving up this naive look and will surprised us a lot more.

Caroline Aufort

estellehanania

Esther Voisin is  a photographer based in Paris and in the USA. She specializes in still-life, portrait, and editorial photography.She uses black & whites as well as colours. Several of her books have been published in Paris and are sold in the Centre Pompidou and the Palais de Tokyo, among other places.

For you to get to know her better, we interviewed her for Trendtablet:

Which color touches you the most ?

White, peaceful and strong.

What is the first thing you do in the morning?

I open my eyes; from my bed I look through the window and see the sky and palm trees. The light and colors set the tone for my day. It's same image every day with different hues. A joy.

Which song lets your imagination carry on away somewhere ?

"Out of this world" by John Coltrane

What's your favorite food/meal?

Anything with veggies, grains, olive oil and parmesan.

What is your favorite moment of the day ?

Dawn & sunset

Do you remember the first picture you ever took?

No, I don't. But I have a feeling it was still-life.

In what kind of mood  are you into those days?

Secretive & creative.

What do you feel is influencing photography and photographers in a big way today?

The Art market, and the overload of information and images we ingest every day from the virtual world.

Some of your favorite references ? (photography, art, movies, literature.....) 

This is a long and ever-growing list, but I would say that my favorite references in art, literature, photography, cinema, and music are rooted in the contemporary art/cultural movements. The avant-garde movement, counter-culture, independent culture, the abstract and minimalism.

Anything with an innovative, visionary and unique voice, and a rebellious scream.

www.esthervoisin.com

When I first saw a serie of pictures of Scheltens & Abbenes, I though "That's amazing, a fashion shoot, without girls and so elegant, so beautiful, so refreshing !" Then I looked at their website and I saw Art, commissions and editorial series of pictures. There is just a few photographers who try to be fashion and fine art photographers and make it with that success and talent.

They fascinated us by their methodical arrangements of assorted objects to create new ones. Even if it's really a strict and considerable precise work process, for a really geometric outcome, we feel liberty and poetry when we look at it. They show us a new way to see objects and photography. Just as Charles and Ray Eames introduced a new way to see design years ago. The similarly between them is not just to be visionary, even in the way of working you can see it : Eames used to say "Art resides in the quality of doing, process is not magic" and "Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose."

Their last serie "Detail in Reverse" show us one more time the magic touch they have: create,with the immaterial process of photography, objects by illusion.

 They transformed common household draperies or stacked goblets made of cheap, reflective plastic or basics tins in pictures of sacred and decorated vessels."After all, anything created solely for the camera is a projection. If the various props used here appear to be of great monetary value while in fact being nearly worthless the viewer will come away deceived. But it is up to the viewer to explore his own projections and transform his own disillusion into an analytic quest for the true nature of the photographic. To this end, the artists really offer more than enough clues in the form of tapestries which bring optical illusion and the reversal of handicraft as a counterpoint to the fore." Very well explained by Frank van der Stok on their website's introduction.

If photography is just about capture moments to keep them, it is the best demonstration!

Caroline Aufort

www.scheltens-abbenes.com

Living in Paris, Lucie & Simon, a duo of a french and a german photographer, have been working together since 2005.

Lucie & Simon’s projects are conceived as series, which all outsmart our perception of reality by staging a quirky view of daily life. From urban or family solitude to existential wanderings, their compositions capture different moods of man’s silent melancholy, focusing on the narrow chink between our existence and the world of dreams. In an enigmatic universe rekindling the memory of Edward Hopper’s paintings, each character seems totally absorbed by the timelessness of dreams.

The silent world is suddenly endowed with an oppressive eloquence. Is it a poetic day after an apocalypse? A fantasy of huge cities became quiet where few survivor are going for a walk in intact remains of a dead civilization.

This serie of about thirty pictures comes with a seven minutes film. The spectator get absorbed in desert places, wandering about the way we are living in our current world…

Subject and text by Caroline Aufort.

www.lucieandsimon.com

Tomás Saraceno’s “Cloud Cities” — most recently featured at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin — is a collection of geometric, inflated shapes that challenge our notions of space, place, gravity and future.

Each of the cloud city-pods is suspended in the air at various heights, and is dotted with succulent plants or lined with symmetrical string patterning. Two of the pods in this pseudo-biosphere are accessible to the public. Guests may climb a ladder to tread upon the diameter of the sphere or choose to rest on the moss-covered floor of the dome.

Saraceno’s installation is driven by his interest in utopian theory. He works in different media and is interested in our present and future living environment. He draws inspiration from soap bubbles, dust particles that float in the air, spider webs, and visionary figures such as Buckminster Fuller.

Tomás Saraceno was born in 1973 in Tucuman / Argentina. He currently lives and works in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

His next exhibition will be in New York at the Met.

Text & subject by Beth Lauck

www.tomassaraceno.com

www.metmuseum.org

Jim Hodges’ latest, two-part exhibition has opened at the Gladstone Gallery in New York City — mounted across both gallery spaces in Chelsea. For the last two decades, Hodges has utilized a broad range of materials  — both precious and commonplace — to transform quotidian objects into reflective sculptures. Merging the personal, political and universal, Hodges seeks to evince the immemorial; timeless discourses of identity, loss, mortality and love.

Using manipulated, mirror-like elements — inspired by his recent trip to India — Hodges features a greater focus on color, saturation and performance. His artwork creates a space for introspection, investigating notions of time, movement, and imagination. Employing organic shapes and synthetic materials, Hodges’ sculptures exemplify the importance of cross-disciplinary creation and analysis.

Employing organic shapes and synthetic materials, Hodges’ sculptures exemplify the importance of cross-disciplinary creation and analysis. Jim Hodges was born in 1957 in Spokane, Washington and received his MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. He was recently appointed to serve as the Acting Director of the Graduate Sculpture Department at the Yale University School of Art for the 2011/2012 academic year.

www.gladstonegallery.com

www.jimhodges.com

There are places in the world that carry and transform you, lights that enchant and transfix the mind, landscapes that evoke memory, illusion and imagination.

The work of Michel Rajkovic begins in such a setting. His photography does not reveal landscapes as we perceive them. Rather, he seeks to convey the mystic grandeur of the land he inhabits. The seas reveal his calm demeanor, the clouds above disclose the rare moments of solitude that define the breadth of his work.

With considerable patience, Rajkovic captures a kind of dream-crossed twilight; an elusive, yet tangible rendez-vous between the worlds of past, present and future.Opening the door to imagination, Rajkovic unearths the parallels between mind and matter. In a remarkable quest for the inner worlds of outer space, Rajkovic indelibly returns to the land until the ephemeral traces of the natural world are authentically illuminated.

www.michelrajkovic.fr

Valentino Fialdini is a photographer born in Sào Paulo in 1976. We would like to introduce you to his exhibition "Lego".

For you to get to know him better, we interviewed him for trendtablet. Which place do you love best? My house - The sound that carry you? Jazz - Your favorite meal? Risottos - At what moment of the day do you feel great? The time I wake up

What is your favorite material? Creativity - The color that moves you the most? Nature - Your first gesture in the morning? Turn the alarm clock off before it rings - Which smell/perfume give you emotion? Food in the owen

www.valentinofialdini.com

I was born in France in 1982 with spanish origins. I studied litterature and

philosophy for 2 years, and started photography a few years later. I learnt

all the technical things I had to learn in San Francisco and New York, before

moving back to Paris. I now shoot for a wide variety of clients  -magazines,

design and communication agencies, start-ups, etc- and for myself.

I am attracted to natural light playing on moving bodies, waters or trees;

it makes me feel alive in the most genuine way, and this is what I try to

capture and share when I take photographs.

www.agathephilbe.com

www.citiesandlights.com

Sometimes after a storm, the wind suddenly disappears and the water seems softer than ever. There is so much room in this renewed silence -it melts with the ocean itself.

The water was so cold that I forgot how cold I was when swimming in the waves; then I came back to Paris and got sick for a few days, but I think it was worth it. Spring cleaning.

Lobato is a photographer in art, still life and fashion. He is born in Paris in september 1973. He is half french by his mother and half Brazilian/Portugues by his dad. He lives in Paris, which he finds very inspiring.

He has been involved with photography since he was a kid. His vision is clear and clean. He loves pop, contemporary and conceptual art. Music, specially electronic -music is an important aspect of his creative process.

jeromelobato.com