Alessandra Testa was born in Milan in 1980. Her’s an interesting creative story, as Alessandra doesn’t define herself as an artist (yet). Although, as she told us during a very spontaneous phone interview, she feels, since she was a little girl, the urge to explore how to fill her spare time with artistic hobbies, such as dance or theatre. Despite this, her interests grew towards a different career, so she became a criminal defense lawyer. The years passed by, while Alessandra had to focus quite exclusively on her challenging job. But one day, as she was walking next to her office, an art gallery caught her attention. It was a photography gallery exhibiting digitally manipulated images made of juxtaposed layers. At first glance, she only felt attracted to those colorful artworks, but as soon as she discovered their high cost, she started nurturing the idea of doing some by herself. But again, her demanding job took most of her time for her to fulfill this aim.

ABOUT ALESSANDRA TESTA’S CREATIVE PATH

It all re began on a sleepless night while she was in Miami for a holiday. Alessandra was suffering from jetlag and couldn’t sleep, so she grabbed her phone and started playing around with some images she took those days of the American city. The more she was doing so, the more she discovered new tricks and tools to develop the resulting creative ideas she has been thinking of so far. The timing was the right one, as Alessandra was shortly launching her new law firm and was looking for original art to hang on the wall of her brand new office. Motivated by her first creative attempts, she kept layering photographs, and this is how she created her first work Miami.

When she got back to Italy, despite being reimmersed in her lawyer-look, she was now convinced in keeping her creative hobby alive. As for today, Alessandra created several artworks with a recognized style of vivid digital manipulation of her photographs.

During our conversation, we asked what pushed her to do so, and she straightly explained how she aims at creating collages of her memories to remind her of all the joyful things that took place in her life. Also, the objective of decorating her home with personal, joyful artwork is what kept her in doing so. The reason why she never thought of taking a step further in her art is probably this one: to keep it as a diary to herself. Today she has to withdraw this thought as she agreed about being part of a creative collective such as st-Art.

When motivated by founder and curator Carlo Tozzi to deepen her artistic skills, she came to Amsterdam for few days to know more about it and, together with the st-Art team, to examine in-depth her portfolio of works. Alessandra could then begin considering her passionate hobby as more structured and is today very capable of taking her art seriously. Alessandra indeed well explains as her artistic process is as an urge to depict her fears and emotions. She dreads the concept of emptiness, both figurative and emotional, and this is what pushes her to create collages of works filled with personal feelings and memories. She also wishes to arise in the viewer to search for its own thrill, as she suggests to dig all the juxtaposed layers and details to discover eventually some emotional connection.

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Aerial photographer Bernhard Lang was born in Crailsheim (southern Germany) in 1970. He has mainly been freelancing since early 2000, especially as a portrait and advertising photographer for various international clients. Today, he exclusively works on his personal projects about aerial views, shooting landscapes out of small planes and helicopters. It all started on a Munich to Tokyo flight as he was flying over Siberia.

Through the window, 10 000 meters up, Bernhard Lang contemplated the patterns in the landscape as seen from the air “These all looked like paintings to me.”

CREATIVE PROCESS

Lang aims at showing a different point of view, the above one. From above, he thinks, things obtain an unexpected geometric shape and become more interesting. With these aerial views, Bernhard Lang is also attempting to make us more conscious of man’s impact on nature, which is more apparent from the sky. This hidden message is often within the aesthetic he is now renowned for.

What brought him to choose the photographic medium was the urge to combine creativity with technical skills. “I had been a late starter and didn’t find photography seriously until I was 23 years old. At the beginning of my apprenticeship, I did not know anything about photography, but fortunately, it turned out that am a visual person, and my passion for and to create imagery developed step by step”, he says in an interview for the World Photography Organisation.

Lang is today known for his aerial studies of industry, wildlife, and landscapes around the world.

ACHIEVEMENTS

Over the last five years, his work has been recompensed by different international awards. In particular, he won first prize in the International Photography Awards in the ‘Abstract’ category for his series ‘Mar del Plastico’ taken from above the greenhouse agriculture in Andalusia as well as the Sony World Photography Awards for his series ‘Adria’ taken along the Italian coastline.

You can follow more of his recent photography on Behance or on his personal website.

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“This city is always in a hurry and these skyscrapers are silent guards, which are turned to the sky, but by staying for a second and then lifting the sight up, you’ll see in the sun another world – a world of slender geometry, architectural harmony, in its pure perfection. We so rarely look up and miss so much beauty.”, she says on her Behance page.

From May to September, Hong Kong’s typical weather is very unpredictable. The city is characterized by a gloomy yet mysterious atmosphere, and Ekaterina has managed to capture this unique atmosphere in this beautiful photo series.

Originally from Russia, Ekaterina Busygina has always aspired her work through architecture and design in all forms and manifestations. Her images are filled with a creative use of the detail and composition, to inform the viewer of the existence of other forms of beauty hidden in alternative perspectives. Her series ‘White City’, for instance, is a showcase of what future cities will look like according to her.

“If you are for the first time here (Moscow), you will be amazed by the atmosphere, the emptiness, the serenity of the white city,” Ekaterina says about this set. “But equally interesting will be the discovery that you are still in the center of Moscow.”

Ekaterina used Moscow’s architecture to explore the idea of ultra-modern cityscapes being white, serene, and strikingly coordinated. Through this series, she explains how architectural photography may be an effective tool to develop the power of imagination and prediction.

She recently won the One Eyeland Award 2017 and has been published worldwide, as in Vogue Italia and Elle Decoration Russia just to mention few.

Follow her on Instagram or view more of Ekaterina’s work on her personal website.

Interested in Photography? Check out this page.

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French photographer Thibault Brunet (b.1982) plays with the codified genres in photography to deepen the relationship between our reality and the entire social digitalized environment we currently live in.

He graduated at the Ecole supérieure des Beaux Arts in Nîmes and is recognized since 2008 by his outstanding series of images focusing on video games.

THIBAULT’S ACHIEVEMENTS

His work drew the attention of several institutions and competition juries, and in 2012 was selected for the Photo Month in Paris, Berlin and Vienna and was amongst the finalist of the Aperture Foundation Prize in New York, and in the Foam Talent prize in 2013 in Amsterdam.

In 2014 he took part to a collective project, France(s) Territoires Liquides.

He presented «Typologie du virtuel», a project in which he selected in Google Earth buildings that were co-produced by anonymous individuals, hence shedding a light on the desire to leave a trace in the digital world. Thibault Brunet collects fragments of this virtual world – shopping centers, public social housing, and seats of large commercial firms – that belong to a global architectural typology, unrelated to the territory itself. By adding a drop shadow defined with the date and time of its creation, the artist anchors these fragments to a specific moment and location. He re-contextualizes the image by connecting it to its creator’s action, and thus it becomes a new link in a collective creative chain. With the title of his series, a cataloging principle devoid of personal expression, and a composition dictated by a fixed procedure, Thibault Brunet refers to « anonymous sculptures » or the « typology of industrial buildings » made by the photographers Bernt and Illa Becher.

The images were exhibited at the Tri Postal museum in June 2015 and the Biennale de Lyon in September 2015.

Thibault started a new approach for the PMU Carte Blanche 2014 at the BAL and worked on the digitalization of the real world using a 3D scan. Since then, this project is ongoing with the technological partnership of Leica for the series « Territoires circonscrits » and has been exhibited for the first time in November 2015 at the Binôme Gallery.

PRESENT AND FUTURE

In the recent years, he has been working on the publication of two photography books: Typologie du virtuel was released in October 2016 (ed. La Pionnière) and Inexplorations was released in 2017.

He is currently being represented by the Binôme Gallery in Paris and the Heinzer-Reszler in Lausanne.

Check more about his work here.

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