Hope, Despair and Miracles

Barry Rosenthal brings our attention to this pertinent issue. His pictures of colourful plastic packaging of crisps, chocolate and other snacks are reminiscent of Andreas Gursky — a startling number of objects creating a pool of words and colours to a dizzying effect. They are found man-made objects that the artist has collected and photographed.

Zak Dimitrov turns to his home country of Bulgaria where obituaries are displayed everywhere — trees, houses, coffee shops, any random place one can imagine, but more often than not places that were once of significance for the deceased. The starting point for the photographer was the evidently blurred line between private and public. Grief is a very private experience, yet the families choose to display theirs out in the open.

Dafna Talmor’s Constructed Landscapes are the end result of many years of frustration caused by her own photographs. The images are taken in different countries, among which are Israel, Venezuela, the UK and the United States, but their initial purpose was nothing more than personal keepsakes. As Talmor accumulated a large archive, she became increasingly conscious that the photographs don’t show much about the places that they depict and they are just that — pictures of places she once visited. She decided to use them as her source material instead of photographs in their own right in order to create something new and this is how her ongoing series was born.