LOOKING FOR LIGHT by Simon Norfolk
31/07/2012.
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Gas Natural Fenosa. [LA CORUÑA] Spain. 2-6/10/2012
metalocus, JOSÉ JUAN BARBA
metalocus, JOSÉ JUAN BARBA
"I would go out looking for some light. As a landscape photographer, I feel light, is the most important part of the narrative. Photographer will face the light in three ways: to study the need, to know how to find and how to capture it. The finding is that I spend most of my time when I'm in the field, and I have to share this practice with advanced photographers that might be useful to them."
Dates.- to October 3 till 6, 2012
Venue.- Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Gas Natural Fenosa. Avda. de Arteixo 171. 15007 A Coruña. Spain.
The brickworks at Hussian Khil, east of Kabul. With massive rebuilding taking place in Kabul, the demand for new bricks has soared. By Simon Norfolk.
RECIPIENTS
To participate in this masterclass candidates must submit a dossier containing a cv and a selection of works, all in digital format and in English. They valued the ability to photographic and assumes a fluent of the equipment.
The district of Afshar in western Kabul. This Hazara neighborhood was completely devastated during ethnic fighting between the residents and Rabbani's forces in the early 1990s. By Simon Norfolk.
The interior of the utterly destroyed Presidential palace at Darulaman, was damaged firstly by the Soviets and later in fighting between Rabbani and the Hazaras in 1992. By Simon Norfolk.
In October 2010, Simon Norfolk began a series of new photographs in Afghanistan, which takes its cue from the work of nineteenth-century British photographer John Burke. Norfolk's photographs reimagine or respond to Burke's Afghan war scenes in the context of the contemporary conflict. Conceived as a collaborative project with Burke across time, this new body of work is presented alongside Burke's original portfolios.
Simon Norfolk, born in Lagos, Nigeria (1963), studied documental photography in Newport and worked as a photojournalist until the 1990s when he is principally occupied with depicting genocide. He traveled a.o. to Ruanda, Bosnia, Palestina, and Afghanistan. The pictures below come from his photobook Afghanistan: Chronotopian published in 2002 for which he received the European Publisher Award.
Although being initially a photojournalist, Norfolk does not capture the very destruction process, pain, blood, and stuff. Rather, he remains out of action and photographs the traces left by the war in the landscape, the approach practiced already in the 1980s by Sophie Ristelhueber. Kind of missed-decisive-moment photography.
In Afghanistan, ravaged by wars for dozens of years, people do not know other conditions than ruins. The wars have turned this country into a large museum of abandoned military equipment and the only life that Afghanis know is led between skeletons of buildings, tanks, and airplanes. The preface to the book cites Michail Bakhtin, who called this kind of landscape a "chronotype": a place that allows movement through space and time simultaneously, a place that displays the „layeredness“ of time.