Unhappy families: Weronika Gesicka’s warped Americana – in pictures

As seen in The Guardian

These rather disturbing but fascinating images are by Weronika Gęsicka

Gęsicka is a guest artist at the Circulations festival for young European photographers, Paris, until 5 March. All images: Weronika Gęsicka

Polish photographer Weronika Gęsicka takes corny American photography and manipulates it into something surreal and uncomfortable.  Weronika Gesicka, born in 1984 in Włocławek (Poland). Graduated from the graphics department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and the Academy of Photography in the same city. She received a scholarship from the polish Minister of Culture and National Heritage. Weronika is doing projects about memory and its mechanisms. She is interested in the scientific and pseudoscientific theories, mnemonics and various disorders concerning it. Her main field of activity is photography, but she also create objects and artifacts, often in collaboration with craftsmen and sometimes with other artists. An important part of her art is working with archive materials of various sources. These are both image banks or images found on the Internet and police archives or old press photography.

‘Who are, or were, these people in the images? Are they actors playing happy families, or real persons whose photos were put up for sale by the image bank? That is not fully clear’

‘Who are, or were, these people in the images? Are they actors playing happy families, or real persons whose photos were put up for sale by the image bank? That is not fully clear’

Polish photographer Weronika Gęsicka takes corny American photography and manipulates it into something surreal and uncomfortable

See more from The Guardian article here

 

The female street photographers of Instagram – in pictures

From the Guardian

The art of street photography was long dominated by men and the ‘male gaze’, but new project Her Side of the Street celebrates women’s role in the practice…

Graciela Magnoni, a French-Uruguayan-Brazilian former photojournalist, captures two women walking in Singapore. Photograph: Graciela Magnoni

Throughout history, women have often been subject to observation and evaluation from men as they walk down city streets – whether ogled as objects of desire or judged for their appearance or even presence in certain spaces. In literary and social history, men have usually been the ones who watch, rather than be watched; the urban observer which 19th-century poet Baudelaire made famous as the “flâneur”……

As in the literary tradition, so in the artistic one: the concept of the “male gaze” – depicting the world from a male perspective – dominates much of the history of visual arts. Most early street photographers were men – from Eugène Atget andHenri Cartier-Bresson to Weegee. In time, however, there were exceptions to this rule, notably Vivian Maier and Diane Arbus who became some of the most celebrated street photographers of the 20th century.

A tribute to female flâneurs: the women who reclaimed our city streets

 

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Last year, American photographer Casey Meshbesher felt compelled to create a compendium of street photography by women after noticing that very little could be found about the practice online or in print. She founded the blogzine Her Side of the Street focusing on female street photographers, as well as setting up the growing Women Street Photographers community and trying to map female street photographers around the world……

more here