Tag Archives: Photography

Polar Light

Steve Giovinco is a New York-based photographer and a Yale MFA graduate. His night photographs at the edge of inhabited places trace evidence of epic but subtle change. Informed by the environment, history, and culture, his most recent work documents the extremely remote arctic Greenland with the goal of visualizing transformation since climate-related statistics can be difficult to grasp. His work is held in numerous public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the California Museum of Photography.

Earth, A Cosmic Spectacle

Louise Beer is an artist and curator, born in Aotearoa New Zealand, now working England. Louise uses installation, moving image, photography, writing, participatory works and sound to explore humanity’s evolving understanding of Earth’s environments and the cosmos. Her experience of living under two types of night sky, the first in low level light polluted areas in Aotearoa, and the second in higher level light polluted cities and towns in England, has deeply informed her practice. She explores how living under dark skies, or light polluted skies, can change our perception of grief, the climate crisis and Earth’s deep time history and future.

Perceiving Reality: The Enthalpy of Existence

‘Perceiving Reality: The Enthalpy of Existence’ traces a decade long investigation by British artist Alexander James Hamilton into the behaviour of light, matter, and perception as thermodynamic systems. Spanning the Siberian projects ‘Oil + Water’ (2013–2016) and ‘Empirical Research & Evidence’ (2021–2023), the work unites scientific observation with aesthetic consciousness. Through analogue photography and sustainable material practice, Hamilton visualises entropy, equilibrium, and environmental change as intertwined conditions. The resulting corpus proposes that perception itself functions as empirical instrument: a form of energy exchange in which to observe is to participate in creation.

Quantum leap: how we discovered a new way to create a hologram

Hugo Defienne is a Lecturer and Marie Curie Fellow, School of Physics & Astronomy, University of Glasgow.

“I am a lecturer at the University of Glasgow, working with the Xtreme Light research group. I am an experienced researcher in the fields of quantum optics, optical imaging and coplex optical media. My research aims to harness quantum properties of light to develop new applications in imaging, communication and information processing.
I started my career by a PhD in the Kastler-Brossel laboratory in France (2012-2015) during which I pioneered the use of quantum optical states in scattering and complex media. I then extended my research scope to quantum imaging as a postdoc at Princeton University in the USA (2016-2018). There, I initiated a new research direction by merging quantum imaging with structured illumination approaches. In 2019, I was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship (MSCA) and took up a post-doctoral researcher post at the University of Glasgow (UK) to develop quantum communication approaches with single-photon sensitive cameras. In the same year, I secured a position as a lecturer in physics there.”

Beyond the Bounds of Thought

Artist and writer, Richard Bright, has addressed the relationship between art, science and consciousness for over 40 years. He studied Fine Art and Physics before founding The Interalia Centre in 1990. Since then, he has lectured extensively on art and science and written articles on James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy and Susan Derges, among others. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally and was the recipient of the ‘Visions of Science’ Award, The Edge, Andrew Brownsward Gallery, University of Bath (Second Prize Winner). Co-author of ‘The Art of Science’ (Welbeck Publishers, 2021).

Boris Eldagsen: The Woman Who Never Was

The winners of the 2023 Sony World Photography Awards (SWPA) – reputedly the world’s largest photography competition – were announced in March. The image that won the Creative section was by the German artist Boris Eldagsen. Entitled ‘The Electrician’, it is a haunting image of two women: the older hiding behind the younger. A man’s hand appears mysteriously from out of frame. The vibe is 1940s retro and, while the image has its own enigmatic beauty, there is something uncanny about it.

Perhaps what underlies this sense of the uncanny are two facts: the young women and her shy companion never existed… and this is not a photograph. The image is from a series called ‘Pseudomnesia’ created by the artist using an Artificial Intelligence (AI) image-generation system called DALL E2.

Elemental Forms

Nadezda Nikolova is a Croatian-Bulgarian-American photographic artist working with wet plate collodion photograms. Her practice is informed by an experimental approach to early photographic processes and her interest in the image as an object. The abstract landscape series, ‘Elemental Forms’, ‘Landscapes and Elemental Forms’, ‘Landscape Rearticulated’, emerged as the artist’s direct response to her surroundings and to feeling a sense of well-being and security within the landscape. She believes that each locale has its specific identity, history, and emotional imprint.

Looking back from beyond the Moon: how views from space have changed the way we see Earth

Dr Alice Gorman is an internationally recognised leader in the field of space archaeology. She is an Associate Professor in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Flinders University, where she teaches the Archaeology of Modern Society.
Her research focuses on the archaeology and heritage of space exploration, including space junk, planetary landing sites, off-earth mining, rocket launch pads and antennas.
She is a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the Advisory Council of the Space Industry Association of Australia and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.
Her book ‘Dr Space Junk vs the Universe: Archaeology and the Future’ (2019) won the Mark and Evette Moran NIB People’s Choice Award for Non-Fiction and the John Mulvaney Book Prize, awarded by the Australian Archaeological Association. It was also shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards, the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and the Adelaide Festival Literary Awards.

Science images can capture attention and pique curiosity in a way words alone can’t

Science photographer Felice Frankel is a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the department of Chemical Engineering with additional support from Mechanical Engineering. She joined MIT in 1994.
Frankel is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was previously a Senior Research Fellow in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences in the Initiative for Innovative Computing (IIC), and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Systems Biology.

Ways of Seeing at 50: an icy blast of a book about male voyeurism, art, capitalism and so much more

Joanna Mendelssohn is Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne. Her first book was the seminal study on Sydney Long (1979). This was followed by a series of studies on Lionel Lindsay. Her most recent book, co-authored with Catherine De Lorenzo, Alison Inglis and Catherine Speck, is Australian Art Exhibitions: Opening our eyes, (T&H 2018). This project is the culmination of an ARC Linkage Project with UNSW, University of Melbourne and University of Adelaide in partnership with the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of South Australia and Museums Australia.