Tales of the Invisible – Yanxin Guo

A hidden gem from the Lianzhou Foto festival was the series by Yanxin Guo “Tales of the Invisible”. Stamping from her personal experience when she returned to China last summer where she witnessed the biggest typhoon yet and 13 people died, it strikes her that the invisible can become something powerful and one should never overlook.

© Yanxin Guo, from the series ‘Tales of the Invisible’ ; Source @ Yanxin Guo

Her series of photographs are images which hints the invisibles through the visible. Clean, poetic and sentimental images transcend this strong feeling that there is some magical power in the nature which is stirring behind e.g. an image of a gush of water in the ocean pairing with the boy curling up, or the lite up trees at night pairing with a portrait of a Chinese girl with her hair blowing.

© Yanxin Guo, from the series ‘Tales of the Invisible’ ; Source @ Yanxin Guo

The images are subtle, which combined with the fragmented story written by Guo reinforced further the concept of “Tales of the Invisible”. The series is highly metaphorical yet could be easily felt and filled the room with mystery.

© Yanxin Guo, from the series ‘Tales of the Invisible’ ; Source @ Yanxin Guo

© Michelle Chan, series ‘Tales of the Invisible’ by Yanxin Guo at 15th Edition Lianzhou Foto Festival 2019

 

The book will be printed soon so watch out for this one.

La Vertigine – Federico Clavarino

Italian photographer Federico takes poetic and free-form images for his work La Vertigine, which means Vertigo in English. Vertigo means – a sensation of whirling and loss of balance, associated particularly with looking down from a great height, or caused by disease affecting the inner ear or the vestibular nerve; giddiness.

The poetic photographs connects one and other, somehow spinning your head from here to there, in a soothing and free way. There’s this sensation of freedom and openness, leading the viewer to imagine what’s not there. The tightly cropped images allow a lot of free associations when combined together in a book. It creates a tension between what is shown in the image, and what could be outside. Clavarino is drawn to shadows, hands, and the spaces in between things, he said “There is a very active frame in all of the pictures. It’s more about that than the actual things I photographed.”

References:

http://federicoclavarino.com

https://www.bjp-online.com/2018/12/la-vertigine-by-federico-clavarino/

http://federicoclavarino.com/assets/la_vertigine/La%20Vertigine%20PDF%20150.pdf