Mikael Kennedy

www.mikaelkennedy.com

Photo Friends - Max Catterall

These are some of the images from my good friend Max Catterall who is on my course at University. Great landscape and interior photographer with a bronze award in the RPS 152nd International Print Exhibition for the top image under his belt too. Check out his website.

maxcatterall.co.uk/

David Ryle

http://davidryle.com/

New Photographers - Jonas Bendiksen

This is a photograph from the series Satellites by Jonas Bendiksen, in which Jonas travel for several years around the old Soviet Union, capturing the world that the tabloids have now forgotten about. He captures great scenes of survival in the fringe countries of the old Soviet Union spanning from Eastern Europe to Central Asian and over to Siberia.

In this photograph Jonas has captured the remnants of the Soviet space program in Kazakhstan being used by the locals as a way to make money to live from day to day without hunger. This is because Kazakhstan is one of the cheapest places in the world to launch space shuttles from and also to crash land as well. Now the residents near the crash sights scavenging the wreckages for titanium and aluminium rich metal alloys that the can then sell on.

What I like about Bendiksens work is the story behind them, taking an event that once had the whole world watching and showing them that even though it is not in the papers or on the news any more, it s still in plain sight that the countries in question are still struggling after so many years. Even if you can't see them on your television or in the tabloids, if you look hard enough they are still in plain sight and are in as much trouble as they were when you last read about the situation.

http://www.jonasbendiksen.com/index.html

New Photographers - Simon Norfolk

This is one of the many photographs from the series 'Afghanistan: Chronotopia' which is one of my favourite series from Simon Norfolk. This is because of three reasons, one being how hard hitting his photographs are, two his meaning behind this series and thirdly his love for large format cameras. This series for me is incredible thanks to the meaning behind it, Norfolk takes something from art as early as the Renaissance and give it a modern twist using a very political, social and economical matter that is common in today’s world. That is the war on terrorism and the invasion of Afghanistan. He takes the view of beauty and romance behind the painting of ruins from the Renaissance era and uses this to show this key event in the modern world, by turning this ideological view upside down. The ruin before you has not been excavated to show the old world in all its glory but instead shows the modern world in its most periling and destructive form. The ruins of what would have been the hub of laughter and bliss is now just a skeleton in a bleak landscape. This is thanks to almost 30 years on constant conflict in this once beautiful country. The only salvation for the modern world in this photograph is the lone balloon seller, which thanks to international help is allowed to sell something that was banned from the streets of this country for many years. These two juxtapose really well together to create one of my favourite photographs of the last ten years.

http://www.simonnorfolk.com/