Photo: Renaissance Collection © Raquel Fernández Pascual
This year at the Unseen Living Room, we partnered with Tucson’s Center for Creative Photography for the speakers’ series CCP Presents: Unseen & Undiscovered. Each morning, the Living Room kicked off with an instalment featuring curators, editors and collectors presenting their recent discoveries in photography, sharing their excitement about the work of emerging or overlooked photographers.
On the Friday morning of Unseen Amsterdam, the CCP’s Chief Curator, Rebecca A. Senf, spoke about a number of emerging artists, including Spanish photographer Raquel Fernández Pascual’s series Renaissance Collection, which features Renaissance-painting-inspired costumes made from non-traditional materials, suggesting a contemporary feel with modern styling and cultural references.
Photo: On Paper © Jesse Chun
The Saturday morning talk was headed by curator and writer Susan Bright and the owner and Director of Ag Galerie, Simindokht Deghani. Bright spoke about a number of artists from across the globe, including New York-based Jesse Chun, whose work On Paper deals with issues surrounding immigration and national identity. Drawing on her own experiences of immigration, the artist creates images that work to define what “home” means for her, as a mobile and immaterial state.
Deghani then took the stage to discuss a range of work from the young generation of Iranian photographers, including Hamed Jaberha, who uses photography to commentate on the food we eat and animals we kill. The artist is specifically interested in how things decay and how this can be communicated through striking photographs.
Photo: Earthy Resilience 1 © Roberto Fernández Ibáñez
On Sunday morning for the final instalment of the series, collector, author and Adjunct Professor at the School of Visual Arts, NY, W.M. Hunt spoke at length about a number of undiscovered artists, including Uruguay-based Roberto Fernández Ibáñez, who used to be a chemist. In a number of series, the photographer appropriates a number of graphs depicting contemporary issues such as climate change, the price of gold, or population growth over a period of time, photographing them and manipulating their emulsion to create new visual interpretations.
Photo: Amsterdam, 2017 © Maciej Markowicz
Finally, Krzysztof Candrowicz, Artistic Director of the Triennial of Photography Hamburg, spoke about five under-represented artists. The list included Polish artist Maciej Markowicz, who creates images by directly exposing chromogenic paper, making images that commentate on photography’s alchemical power. Markowicz’s practice is interesting because he was trained as both a photographer and a designer, so the works in oeuvre meet at the intersection of these two mediums. Making his images using a giant camera obscura in motion it sets him apart from other practitioners working in this way. He aims to examine the everyday dynamics of modern life in the city and to challenge our perception of time.
The series of talks was a great success, encouraging visitors to discover emerging photographers who often fly under the radar. As a retrospective guide to the talks, all speakers published their list of ‘Unseen & Undiscovered’ artists for L’Oeil de la Photographie, which you can browse here.