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PERIPHERAL PLACES A project by Catia Montagna that distills fleeting encounters and spatial poetics into triptychs - visual short stories that capture the in-between, where meaning often hides. PERIPHERAL PLACES June 15, 2025 INTERVIEW PHOTOGRAPHY Catia Montagna INTERVIEW Melanie Meggs Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link SHARE In ‘Peripheral Places’, Catia Montagna constructs a lyrical topography of the ephemeral — a series of triptychs that speak softly but resonate deeply. Born in Italy and now living between the United Kingdom and her homeland, Catia is an academic economist by profession, but her artistic voice is shaped not by data, but by a deep, intuitive sensitivity to the poetry of the everyday. A Progressive Street photographer with a growing international presence, her work reveals a philosophical and reflective perspective — one grounded in an awareness of time, memory, and social impermanence. ‘Peripheral Places’ is part of her long-term series ‘Short Stories’ — a project that distills fleeting encounters and spatial poetics into carefully curated triptychs. These “short stories,” as Catia terms them, are not narratives in the traditional sense. Instead, they are elliptical visual fragments, as minimal and open-ended as whispers of verse, anchored in the belief that less is often more. The triadic structure, like a literary vignette, provides just enough to provoke memory and emotion without closing the interpretive door. The places Catia captures are non-places in the Augé sense, but they hum with subtle presence. The human figure is nearly absent, but never far. Traces remain: an empty chair, a bent signpost, an empty vehicle — all imbued with the quiet echo of lives once present. Catia’s skill lies in making these echoes visible. Her photographs are not didactic; they ask rather than answer. Who passed through here? What moment unfolded just before or after the shutter clicked? There is an undeniable temporal dimension to her work. Time does not march forward. Each image is a still point in a turning world, evoking that moment when something is already becoming memory. This feeling is enhanced by her muted tones and soft natural light, which eschew the harshness of modernity for something quieter and more reflective. Her compositions feel accidental yet exacting, and always respectful of the space they depict. The photographs avoid central focal points, compelling us to explore the margins — mirroring Catia’s deeper thematic exploration of the periphery, both as a physical and conceptual space. The tension between the built and the grown is constant, neither fully dominant, each quietly coexisting in states of neglect and endurance. The power of Catia’s work lies in its suggestion rather than its certainty. Each story gains resonance. Images echo and enrich one another through subtle repetition and variation. Sequenced together, the works invite a slow, inward movement — not forward, but deeper into perception. What do we ignore? What lies just beyond our field of view? What stories do the edges tell? In this conversation, we explore the quiet architecture of her vision: her relationship to time, place, and disappearance, and how her dual background in economics and art shapes a photographic voice that speaks not in statements, but in questions. “Looking back at photographs, I often wonder what became of those people with whom I briefly coexisted in a certain place and at a given moment in time. People who only left a trace of light through the lens of my camera, an impression in my memory. Who were they, where were they going? These questions always evoke the idea of a story in my mind and raise the further question of how long a photographic narrative should be – so as not to provide the viewer with too narrow an interpretative key. This is how I began to conceive a project consisting of a series of ‘short stories’ – each of three photographs – that, as in literature, are more ‘open-ended’ than longer, more articulate narratives. Tales that are as short as the chance encounters that underpin them, with human presences often barely hinted at, and united by the fact that the narrator in each is the ‘place’ in which they unfold: places that speak of the passing of time and the ephemerality of existence reflected in the imprints it leaves on objects and landscapes. In Peripheral Places the stories unfold outside large urban centres in sometimes anonymous places, places of passage and of discrete existences frozen in instants of the present as they are already turning into the past.” - Catia Montagna IN CONVERSATION WITH CATIA MONTAGNA THE PICTORIAL LIST: Each story is structured as a photographic triptych. What did the 3-image structure offer you narratively or emotionally that a single image or longer series could not? CATIA MONTAGNA: I think the triptych works well on both a narrative and emotional level for me. The idea of developing short photographic stories did not come to me till the first story in this series – The King of Diamonds – was born. On our way to Brescia to see a Fontana’s exhibition, we stopped at a café near Cremona. It was a quiet and rather hot summer day, with a glaring light, and I was immediately taken by the almost out-of-time atmosphere of the place. I wanted to capture it and took a handful of photos. As we got back on the road, without looking at the photographs, I started to visualise a triptych. It was all rather instinctive, really. I felt there was a story to be told and one single photo could not do it: there was the sign, the dusty courtyard, the somewhat dated décor of the café and inside, behind the old rope curtain, the young people chatting quietly in the rarefied silence of the heat. But to convey the uncertain aura of the place, I knew the story had to be barely sketched, as short as a Japanese haiku. Looking back at it later, it reminded me of the first collection of short stories by Katherine Mansfield I ever read, as a teenager. I was thoroughly captivated by their narrating power – sketched, and yet precise, descriptions of places and people, stories that lingered in the mind and provoked strong emotional responses partly because of their very sense of unfinished. That is how the idea of developing this concept came to me. TPL: Your visual stories lean into ambiguity and openness. How do you negotiate the tension between revealing just enough and allowing space for mystery, interpretation, and the viewer’s own projection? CATIA: I see photography as being intrinsically relational: it is in its nature to say and not to say, to suggest rather than reveal, leaving room for interpretation in what is, ultimately, an open dialogue, a conversation between the photographer, her subjects and the viewer. And as with any conversation, communication is the most effective if any one actor does not take over and dominate the exchange! So, clearly, there is always a tension between the richness of a story and that ‘space for mystery’, as you call it, that has to offer room for the viewer’s freedom of interpretation – or the freedom of interpretation of the photographer, for that matter… A degree of ambiguity needs be there for me too; if a lot is left unsaid, I myself see something different every time I look back at a story. I suppose that is how I resolve this tension – I put into a story just enough not to kill my own curiosity… TPL: You refer to the narrator in these stories as ‘the place’ itself. How do you decide when a place is speaking – and what gives a place, in your eyes, narrative authority? Yes, in these short stories I chose to put the ‘place’ at the centre, as narrator, and to barely hint at the human presence – which I find is increasingly the case when I do street photography. I suppose this partly reflects the strong sense I have of the importance of places, of how they shape and are shaped by our lives. Places speak and can reveal more of a society and a culture than the people who move in them do. I spoke earlier of the relational nature of photography. I very much agree with the view – so powerfully expressed by Ariella Azoulay in her Civil Imagination – that the subject-actors relationship in photography unfolds in and is influenced by the ‘public space’. And our interaction with the public space occurs at the intersection between our personal experiences and the social and cultural structure that precedes those experiences – which, incidentally, is another reason why these stories may speak differently to different people. So, to go back to your question: how do I decide when a place is speaking – and what gives a place narrative authority? It is very subjective. The atmosphere of a place is the first trigger for me when taking photographs. And it is that atmosphere that gives it narrative authority. I need to ‘feel’ the place – and I find that for me this is all the more likely the most ‘normal’ is the place, be it in a city or in the countryside. When a place speaks to me, I want to give it voice through my photographs…whether others will hear the same story remains to be seen – but that is the beauty of it all, I think. 1 - The King of Diamonds © Catia Montagna 2 - The King of Diamonds © Catia Montagna 3 - The King of Diamonds © Catia Montagna 4 - Coca-cola © Catia Montagna 5 - Coca-cola © Catia Montagna 6 - Coca-cola © Catia Montagna TPL: There is a powerful meditation on time and memory throughout this work. How does photography help you process the ephemerality of life – the sense of ‘things passing’ – both personally and conceptually? CATIA: The unstoppable passing of time – I felt it since I was a child. This sense that we are ourselves very transient has gone hand in hand with a certain inability to live in the moment. Photography helps me in this. It is a powerful way for me to feel the moment; it accentuates my awareness of the here and now. I guess for me the experience of photography is what gets closer to a state of meditation. When I photograph, I become oblivious to everything else, and all that exists is that instant. Transient and insignificant as a moment might be, by pressing the shutter I freeze it and recognise its importance, not so much or not always with the intention of documenting it or constructing memories, but to experience it fully in the very instant it is already turning into the past. In this sense, the personal and the conceptual are very much entwined, as it were. TPL: What does the term ‘peripheral’ mean to you – geographically, emotionally, philosophically – and how does it manifest through the series? CATIA: The ‘peripheral’ has always been quite central to my academic interests and work, not least because it is such a multifaceted and dynamic concept. As the non-centre, it can be seen as referring to what is marginal or less important, e.g. in the context of geographical, economic, or social hierarchies – what makes a ‘periphery’ and what does a periphery reveal about the ‘centre’? But the peripheral can also hold the unexplored or the unknown and invite exploration. In a narrow sense, in this series of short stories, the periphery manifests itself in the locations of passage from which we can at best glimpse the busy life of the ‘centre’, or in the sense of quietness but also of remoteness and isolation of a place. But there is more to the idea of periphery than this. To live in the world, to interact with it, to even begin to make sense of it, we need to be able to transcend our own skin and, from within our core, to cross our mental and emotional periphery. And photography can act as the key that unlocks our own boundaries and allows us to look beyond what we see... When a place speaks to me, I want to give it voice through my photographs. TPL: Do you find these peripheral places reflect aspects of your own identity, perhaps your experience of living and travelling between countries, cultures and disciplines? CATIA: Yes, our photography, the lens through which we look at and interpret reality is always the product of who we are. So, I guess my fascination with these peripheral places is somewhat shaped by my personal experiences. Growing up in a working-class environment meant experiencing to an extent both the geographical and the sociological meaning of periphery. And living abroad, travelling across borders has given me glimpses of what it means to inhabit the periphery of a culture. TPL: Is there a relationship between stillness in place and stillness in thought that you are seeking through your photography? CATIA: Yes, I think unconsciously this may well be the case. As I said, photography is also a means for me to fully live in the moment, and achieving a state of temporary stillness is instrumental to it. TPL: Do you set out with a narrative intent when photographing, or does your story form in later reflection – almost like finding poems in prose? CATIA: Normally, setting out with a narrative intent in photography does not work for me! I am rather instinctive – I respond to a situation, to a place, or to an atmosphere. At times, the idea forms while I am taking a photograph and this prompts me to take more pictures, to try to tease out a story that can articulate what I feel. At other times the idea forms later when, looking back at photographs, I start to see patterns emerge that bring out new meanings and interpretations. 7 - The Fiat © Catia Montagna 8 - The Fiat © Catia Montagna 9 - The Fiat © Catia Montagna 10 - The Bridge © Catia Montagna 11 - The Bridge © Catia Montagna 12 - The Bridge © Catia Montagna 13 - The Chair © Catia Montagna 14 - The Chair © Catia Montagna 15 - The Chair © Catia Montagna TPL: If so, how has your work on this project changed your relationship with photography? CATIA: My relationship with photography changes all the time; the more I photograph, the more my photographic interests evolve and the more I feel the need to experiment. This project has had a strong impact because it has changed my view of what a narrative can be. Interestingly, as I am developing the short stories, I have started to work on a couple of projects that are more documentary in nature and therefore require more articulate narratives. But even in these projects, I am very much aware of the tension between revealing and leaving space for the viewer’s interpretation. TPL: What possibilities are you imagining for the next chapters of Short Stories? CATIA: I see it continue to evolve as an exploration of the narrative power of photography, developing in several directions, both in terms of ‘places’ and ‘themes’. In this series of short stories, I used colour – something I do not often do – because when it all started, in the King of Diamond café, I was struck by the light and colour of the scene. I am now working on a black and white series. But the project is still very much fluid, and its final shape could well be very different from what I am currently imagining. PORTFOLIO INSTAGRAM read more interviews >>> CONTOURS OF ABSENCE Where concealment unsettles recognition and ordinary spaces turn psychological, the photographs of Serhii Fett suspend identity between presence and absence. THE ART OF ATTENTION Curiosity turns portraits, objects, and places into discoveries as Len Irish reflects on a life shaped by the camera’s attention. WHERE EMOTIONS BREATHE Simple encounters Irina Sedletskaya almost missed become photographs shaped by silence, distance, uncertainty, memory, hope, and resilience. THE VILLAGE A workers’ neighbourhood becomes a living archive as Virginia Cassano photographs the people, streets, and memories that continue to shape Villaggio Piaggio. MUTABLE MORPHOGENESIS By merging scientific methodologies with photographic experimentation, Emma Varga creates images that challenge fixed distinctions between human and non-human, visible and invisible. THE ARCHITECTURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS Chad Coombs’ Polaroids are small psychological scenes where identity, memory, culture, and belief push against each other. WHERE WE BELONG Community storytelling lies at the heart of The Pictorial List’s mission, and Marlon Ramos’ photographs reflects the spirit of the place we now call home. GUIDED BY A WHISPER Guided by reflection and the quiet presence of art history, Isolda Fabregat Sanz makes photographs that resist certainty and invite the viewer to remain inside the act of looking. WHAT REMAINS, WHAT EMERGES Laetitia Heisler transforms risk, memory, and the body into layered analogue visions — feminist rituals of seeing that reveal what endures, and what quietly emerges beyond visibility. WHAT WE ARE, WHAT WE DO Culture lives where art and community meet, and in this space Alejandro Dávila’s photographs reveal the unseen labor and devotion that sustain creation. ANALOGICAL LIMBO Nicola Cappellari reminds us that the photograph’s power lies not in what it shows, but in what it leaves unsaid. THREADS OF MOROCCAN LIFE Through gestures of work and moments of community, Kat Puchowska reveals Morocco’s overlooked beauty. IT STARTED AS LIGHT…ENDED IN SHIVERS… Between intimacy and estrangement, Anton Bou’s photographs wander — restless fragments of light and shadow, mapping the fragile terrain where self unravels into sensation. WITH EYES THAT LISTEN AND A HEART THAT SEES For decades, Rivka Shifman Katvan has documented the unseen backstage world of Broadway, capturing authenticity where performance and humanity intersect. DIPTYCH DIALOGUES Through the beautiful language of diptychs, Taiwanese photographer Jay Hsu invites us into a world where quiet images speak of memory, resilience, and hope. UNKNOWN ABYSSINIA In Ethiopia, Sebastian Piatek found a new way of seeing — where architecture endures, but women in motion carry the narrative forward. THE PULSE OF THE STREET Moments vanish, yet Suvam Saha holds them still — the pulse of India’s streets captured in fragments of life that will never repeat. WHAT DO WE WANT? More than documentation, David Gray reveals the human pulse of resistance and asks us to see beyond the surface of unrest. CRACKED RIBS 2016 Cynthia Karalla opens up about the art of survival, the power of perspective, and why she believes each of us holds a monopoly on our own narrative. STREETS OF KOLKATA Ayanava Sil’s reveals Kolkata’s soul, capturing moments with empathy, presence and humility while offering deep insight into both city and self. PERIPHERAL PLACES A project by Catia Montagna that distills fleeting encounters and spatial poetics into triptychs - visual short stories that capture the in-between, where meaning often hides. POINTE-AU-CHIEN IS NOT DEAD Through Wayan Barre’s documentary, we are invited not only to see but to feel the lived realities of a community standing at the crossroads of environmental collapse and cultural survival. QUEER HAPPENED HERE Author Marc Zinaman sheds light on the valuable contributions that LGBTQ+ individuals have made to the cultural and social fabric of New York City. TRACES OF TIME Marked by an ongoing visual dialogue with time, memory, and impermanence, Zamin Jafarov’s long-term projects highlight the quiet power of observation and the emotional depth of simplicity. THERE MY LITTLE EYES Guillermo Franco’s book is an exploration of seeing beyond the obvious. His work invites us to embrace patience, curiosity, and the unexpected in a world that often rushes past the details.

IT STARTED AS LIGHT…ENDED IN SHIVERS… Between intimacy and estrangement, Anton Bou’s photographs wander — restless fragments of light and shadow, mapping the fragile terrain where self unravels into sensation. IT STARTED AS LIGHT…ENDED IN SHIVERS… Between intimacy and estrangement, Anton Bou’s photographs wander — restless fragments of light and shadow, mapping the fragile terrain where self unravels into sensation. October 12, 2025 INTERVIEW PHOTOGRAPHY Anton Bou INTERVIEW Melanie Meggs Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link SHARE In the work of Anton Bou, photography unfolds as both a method of inquiry and an act of exposure. A self-taught photographer who also carries the long practice of psychoanalysis, Anton situates his images in the fragile space where identity is less a fixed truth than a shifting encounter. His series It Started as Light…Ended in Shivers… reflects this search: photographs that oscillate between the intimate and the uncanny, between the momentary shimmer of sensation and the residue of fracture. Anton’s photographs resist conventional anchoring. They operate nomadically, migrating between personal memory, collective atmosphere, and visual estrangement. This restlessness mirrors his own life divided between Montreal, Mexico, and “other elsewheres,” where the camera becomes what he calls “a mouth that devours everything.” It is through this appetite for sensation that his practice navigates collapse and renewal, gathering fragments of self that remain in constant motion. What emerges is not a documentation of identity but a staging of its disintegration — a sustained inquiry into how we live through rupture, how we carry wounds, and how photography might bear witness to metamorphosis without resolution. In conversation, Anton Bou invites us to consider the photograph not as a mirror of self but as a trembling threshold, where presence dissolves into light and returns as shiver. “I feel a growing hunger to turn more intentionally toward human subjects — to give more room to slowness, to duration, and to the subtle shifts that occur when an obsession is allowed to unfold over time. Visually, I’m also curious to explore working more without flash — letting natural light and the shadows it carves guide my eyes differently. Concretely, I’m drawn to develop a practice that sits at the intersection of observation and encounter. I’d love to be invited into the homes of strangers, to return, to take my time. And through the mouth of my camera, to feast on whatever captures my attention — whether it belongs to the space itself or to the person who inhabits it.” IN CONVERSATION WITH ANTON BOU TPL: You describe yourself as “self-taught”, yet you also carry the discipline of psychoanalysis. How do these two worlds — photography and psychology — intersect in the way you approach your work? Do you find your photographs reveal things that theory cannot? ANTON: Your question makes me think that the term “self-taught” is quite reductive. It doesn’t account for the cultural influences that, in my case, have prepared me for photography. What it mostly means is that I didn’t go to art school and have no technical training in the field. However, I do have an academic background in clinical psychology with a psychoanalytic approach. My photographic method is actually inspired by the investigative method used in analytic clinical practice: “Say whatever comes to mind, just as it comes, without censoring yourself,” says the psychoanalyst to the patient. This method, known as “free association,” encourages a more dreamlike, intuitive, sometimes fragmented form of speech — and in fortunate moments, a speech that escapes familiar thoughts, those locked in celebreality or caught in consensus. I bring this openness to the instinctual and the unexpected into the early stages of my work. In a way, I tell myself: “Move toward whatever draws your attention and photograph it” — without any predetermined goal or project. Opening one’s attention to the unexpected, to what insists in spite of oneself: this is a psychoanalytic invitation that deeply inspires me. As for comparing my photographs to theoretical texts, I’d say my images are closer to the emotional speech of a patient (who expresses, who trembles, who is moved, without necessarily understanding) than to the theorizing discourse of a psychoanalyst. My photographs attempt to “capture” what has moved me; they present experiences of being seized and try to share them so that others may explore their own sensitivity —whereas theory often seeks to reveal through the thickness of understanding. As I’ve written elsewhere: I photograph, and I do not understand. So yes, I believe my photographs often reveal what theory alone cannot: a trembling moment that is felt, not explained. TPL: You’ve said your camera is “a mouth that devours everything.” Can you take us back to the first time you felt this appetite awaken? Has that appetite changed over time — does it hunger for different things now? ANTON: I imagine a long time — maybe a lifetime? — passed between the first emergence of hunger and the moment I was able to name it in a phrase. That early hunger, I imagine, is the one I carried as an infant — a baby who, at three months old, still longed to nurse even though the breast was no longer available. Revived through photography — or even thought through it — this idea of the camera as a mouth that devours everything came to me while I was obsessively photographing a Mexican village called San Sebastián Xolalpa. There, every morning, hot-air balloons would rise and fall. Goats grazed in open fields, magnificent clouds drifted overhead, vast hedges of cactus lined the roads. Unfinished buildings, concrete walls, fences, shadows, splashes of color...it was all there. And adding to this familiar estrangement, the Airbnb I had rented was a room inside a primary school — a school I was allowed to wander through alone on weekends. During my umpteenth visit, one evening at dusk, I found myself running across the fields to catch a shadow before it disappeared — a shadow I had first noticed on a previous stay and had been haunted by ever since. That was the moment I not only felt the hunger again but finally named it — almost like a mantra. Textures, displaced structures, wide-open spaces, animals, and saturated colors remain within the reach of this hunger. But lately, it has started to shift — toward human subjects. Toward the human being, who may very well resemble the original object of my hunger. And yet, I feel I still need many detours before I can fully direct this hunger toward another person — to address it to them. Who would be willing to let me circle around them for hours, again and again, to observe them from different angles, at varying distances, under shifting light? Or perhaps more to the point: am I ready to show myself as vulnerable — as hungry — in front of someone? These are my anxieties speaking now. TPL: Splitting your life between Montreal, Mexico, and “other elsewheres,” what role does movement and dislocation play in shaping your photographic sensibility? Do you feel more like an insider or an outsider when you’re photographing in each place? I think travel — especially travel defined by repeated returns to the same places — has become part of my creative method. It sustains a kind of destabilization I find necessary. For me, the challenge lies in finding the right tension between estrangement and familiarity. I am both an insider and an outsider. One of my nicknames, in fact, was once el local perdido — the disoriented local, or perhaps: the displaced insider, slightly off balance. For such a gaze to emerge, I need to become familiar with the places I photograph — no matter how far they are from the world I come from. I need to inhabit them as if they were ordinary, everyday spaces. Otherwise, I get caught in a tourist’s gaze — exoticized, disconnected, too stable in my status as a stranger. A German word comes to mind: der Nebenmensch — literally, “the human beside.” I love how this word holds both proximity and alterity, while also preserving a certain openness: “beside” is not a fixed point. And what if that’s the place I try to photograph from? I love when a series weaves together images from a Québécois island, the Sinai desert, and a Mexican city — and you can’t tell where each one was taken. “Beside” is a position that belongs everywhere. In my perspective, I must work both to come closer and to step away — to seek the foreign and to create the familiar. To stand just beside. TPL: Your project It Started as Light… Ended in Shivers… traces the collapse of self. What led you to work with this fragile territory? ANTON: I’ll begin with an image: a house standing on stilts. One day, the fragility of one stilt becomes apparent, and the house collapses. Not entirely perhaps — but a part of it buckles, warps, falls apart. In real life, that fragile stilt took the face of my Ph.D. advisor — and with him, the possibility of completing the thesis I had been working on for many years. That stilt also took the shape of academic success — the structure I had long entrusted with a part of my self-worth. In my first artist bio, I had written — a bit dramatically, in a Sophie Calle kind of way: “Out of the blue, at the moment to submit my thesis, my Ph.D. advisor let me down. What could I do but buy myself a camera, throw myself into the world, and hope for healing through the creation of images?” Pain, exquisitely rendered. TPL: Do you view the project as an ongoing process of transformation, or as a body of work with a distinct beginning and end? ANTON: So far, I see photography as an ongoing process of transformation — a movement driven by different forces and recurring sensations. As for the series titled It Started as Light..., I consider it complete. It has reached its own internal coherence — in rhythm, in color, in theme. It has found its edges, its saturation point. That said, the source it draws from has not dried up. It continues to manifest in different forms, feeding other currents. I think of photographs as complex systems. I see them as zones of confluence — where multiple energetic streams or invisible flows meet and become visible. So, I wouldn’t be surprised to see one or more images from that series reappear in another one — reorganized around different existential concerns, different sensuous forms. TPL: Do you see the photograph as a site of healing, or is it closer to an open wound? ANTON: I see photography — from the moment of capture to the moment of sharing — as a potential site of healing. At least, that’s how I’ve practiced it so far, to a large extent. In my experience, photography allows for the emergence of connections and resonances on many levels: between the mind and the sensing body, between the self and the world, between the invisible and the visible, between images and sensations, between images and other images, between sensations and other sensations... Not to mention the work of language that also gets activated in the process — through captions, statements, or other forms of articulation. That said, I don’t think healing necessarily means closure. Photography sustains a kind of disturbance — raw sensations, lingering traces of the wound — but all of this is held within a structure that also gives pleasure. Let me put it this way: a photograph is a wound edged with imaginary borders — so it can become something else. Why not? I photograph, and I do not understand. TPL: Your images feel nomadic, able to belong to a constellation or stand alone. How do you know when a photograph wants to be solitary, and when it longs for relation? ANTON: I think they all long for relation — but sometimes it takes time to find the right counterpart(s). To me, that’s what nomadism is about: not a refusal of belonging, but a sustained openness to possible resonance. Solitude, in that sense, is not antithetical to connection. It’s simply part of the journey. Series form gradually. Well, at least, that’s how It Started as Light... came together. Or perhaps it’s better to say: to the solitude of images, something gets added — a moment of resonance, suddenly heard. It’s hard to put into words, but suddenly there’s a sense of conviction: “this fits,” “this belongs together.” That’s when something starts to coalesce — not through logic, but through a felt sense of belonging. TPL: Do you work intuitively in the moment, or do you find yourself consciously constructing images to test certain ideas? ANTON: I usually work intuitively, in the moment — drawn by a feeling of attraction toward a scene or a detail. Something calls me, and I seize the opportunity. Later, if the situation allows, I may spend more time constructing the composition or even introducing more intentional staging — either right then, or by returning to the same place and continuing to study it. For example, the opening image of It Started as Light... — the torn gate facing the sea — was taken instinctively, during my very first encounter with that fence at sunset. Still, I returned to that location several times, photographing it from different angles, using natural light and flash. Yet that very first image remains my favorite. By contrast, the photograph of the man lying on the ground resulted from a more elaborate staging process. In that same space, on the carpet, I had previously done a shoot with another model — and afterward, that session sparked ideas for scenes I hadn’t yet realized. I decided to try them with a second model: my father. Initially, I envisioned him nude, but sensing his hesitation, I shifted toward a different kind of styling — an office-worker outfit, more aligned with my dad’s comfort zone. That photo session was, quite literally, the Christmas gift I had asked for that year. TPL: Do you see your work as autobiographical, or do you imagine it as a stage where anyone’s sense of self might enter and fracture? ANTON: Not autobiographical, no. If anything, the word autographical would better describe my approach. I borrow it from the psychoanalyst Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, who used it to describe a kind of writing that, through the act of writing itself, gives rise to a ‘’self’’ - not by recounting a life, but by forming a subjectivity in the act. In other words, my aim is not to tell the story of my life through photography. I don’t use these images to narrate the loss of my thesis advisor, nor do I use them to objectively document the geographical journeys during which they were taken. And I don’t believe that, to connect with my work, viewers need to have lost a thesis advisor themselves or even know the physical location where a given photograph was made. If I have a goal — beyond the immediate pleasure of making images — it is to feel myself into being by visually writing something. To write it from an inner vibration, reawakened through an encounter with a fragment of the world, be it living or inanimate. I hope that this attempt at being might leave enough of a gap for others to feel something too — something that concerns them. TPL: How important is ambiguity in your practice? Do you resist clarity, or is clarity simply not the point? ANTON: I don’t know if I resist clarity. To put it somewhat allegorically, I’d say I mostly fear North Korea — or rather, what North Korea shares with certain aspects of our own Western ways, as societies and as individuals, perhaps less destructively but still disturbingly. The totalitarian tendency. The freezing of ideas. The way things settle into immovable certainty, never to be questioned again. I fear the death that becomes embedded within life. Maybe it’s human — terribly human — to freeze what’s in motion, to seal the void that makes a subject possible. If my work sometimes carries an ambiguous effect — in the photographs, or in the texts — it might be a consequence of my leaning toward openness: openness to multiple possibilities, openness to complexity. It’s also surely a consequence of what, within me, remains untamed. TPL: Are there artists — visual or otherwise — who have helped shape the way you think about photography? Do you see yourself in dialogue with these influences, or resisting them? ANTON: I believe every new photograph — or any new visual or written work — that moves me somehow reshapes both the way I see and the way I understand what it means to photograph. More specifically, I deeply admire the work of Jason Fulford. His images, at once simple and striking, often carry me into that zone of familiar strangeness I’m drawn to — where things quietly creak, where coordinates begin to slip, where the everyday feels ever so slightly askew. My work with my mentor Colin Czerwinski has also been a major source of inspiration: he encouraged me to photograph without preconceived ideas, to trust my gaze, and to let the images themselves generate meaning — through their own force and visual resonance. Beyond photography, several thinkers from psychoanalysis and the humanities silently accompany my process: Roland Barthes, Sigmund Freud, Jean Laplanche, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel de M’Uzan, Cynthia Fleury, Jean-Claude Rolland, Francis Ponge... Even if most of them did not write directly about photography (except Barthes), their reflections on the human psyche and its unconscious depths, on the creative act and its ties to archaic, pre-verbal vitality, resonate deeply with my practice. And the work of Sophie Calle — both performative and intimate — remains a major source of inspiration. TPL: When you’re not behind your camera, what are the other passions or simple enjoyments that shape your days? ANTON: When I’m neither behind the camera nor sitting in a consulting room — as a psychologist or as a patient — there’s a good chance you’ll find me in an indoor cycling class, putting into action what my Instagram handle suggests: spinning to sublime. I also write a lot — fragments, reflections, and sometimes dreams. Writing helps me metabolize the world differently, with words rather than light. Otherwise, I find a lot of comfort and joy in simple evenings with a friend — cooking, laughing, talking. Just being present in those shared moments. PORTFOLIO INSTAGRAM read more interviews >>> CONTOURS OF ABSENCE Where concealment unsettles recognition and ordinary spaces turn psychological, the photographs of Serhii Fett suspend identity between presence and absence. THE ART OF ATTENTION Curiosity turns portraits, objects, and places into discoveries as Len Irish reflects on a life shaped by the camera’s attention. WHERE EMOTIONS BREATHE Simple encounters Irina Sedletskaya almost missed become photographs shaped by silence, distance, uncertainty, memory, hope, and resilience. THE VILLAGE A workers’ neighbourhood becomes a living archive as Virginia Cassano photographs the people, streets, and memories that continue to shape Villaggio Piaggio. MUTABLE MORPHOGENESIS By merging scientific methodologies with photographic experimentation, Emma Varga creates images that challenge fixed distinctions between human and non-human, visible and invisible. THE ARCHITECTURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS Chad Coombs’ Polaroids are small psychological scenes where identity, memory, culture, and belief push against each other. WHERE WE BELONG Community storytelling lies at the heart of The Pictorial List’s mission, and Marlon Ramos’ photographs reflects the spirit of the place we now call home. GUIDED BY A WHISPER Guided by reflection and the quiet presence of art history, Isolda Fabregat Sanz makes photographs that resist certainty and invite the viewer to remain inside the act of looking. WHAT REMAINS, WHAT EMERGES Laetitia Heisler transforms risk, memory, and the body into layered analogue visions — feminist rituals of seeing that reveal what endures, and what quietly emerges beyond visibility. WHAT WE ARE, WHAT WE DO Culture lives where art and community meet, and in this space Alejandro Dávila’s photographs reveal the unseen labor and devotion that sustain creation. ANALOGICAL LIMBO Nicola Cappellari reminds us that the photograph’s power lies not in what it shows, but in what it leaves unsaid. THREADS OF MOROCCAN LIFE Through gestures of work and moments of community, Kat Puchowska reveals Morocco’s overlooked beauty. IT STARTED AS LIGHT…ENDED IN SHIVERS… Between intimacy and estrangement, Anton Bou’s photographs wander — restless fragments of light and shadow, mapping the fragile terrain where self unravels into sensation. WITH EYES THAT LISTEN AND A HEART THAT SEES For decades, Rivka Shifman Katvan has documented the unseen backstage world of Broadway, capturing authenticity where performance and humanity intersect. DIPTYCH DIALOGUES Through the beautiful language of diptychs, Taiwanese photographer Jay Hsu invites us into a world where quiet images speak of memory, resilience, and hope. UNKNOWN ABYSSINIA In Ethiopia, Sebastian Piatek found a new way of seeing — where architecture endures, but women in motion carry the narrative forward. THE PULSE OF THE STREET Moments vanish, yet Suvam Saha holds them still — the pulse of India’s streets captured in fragments of life that will never repeat. WHAT DO WE WANT? More than documentation, David Gray reveals the human pulse of resistance and asks us to see beyond the surface of unrest. CRACKED RIBS 2016 Cynthia Karalla opens up about the art of survival, the power of perspective, and why she believes each of us holds a monopoly on our own narrative. STREETS OF KOLKATA Ayanava Sil’s reveals Kolkata’s soul, capturing moments with empathy, presence and humility while offering deep insight into both city and self. PERIPHERAL PLACES A project by Catia Montagna that distills fleeting encounters and spatial poetics into triptychs - visual short stories that capture the in-between, where meaning often hides. POINTE-AU-CHIEN IS NOT DEAD Through Wayan Barre’s documentary, we are invited not only to see but to feel the lived realities of a community standing at the crossroads of environmental collapse and cultural survival. QUEER HAPPENED HERE Author Marc Zinaman sheds light on the valuable contributions that LGBTQ+ individuals have made to the cultural and social fabric of New York City. TRACES OF TIME Marked by an ongoing visual dialogue with time, memory, and impermanence, Zamin Jafarov’s long-term projects highlight the quiet power of observation and the emotional depth of simplicity. THERE MY LITTLE EYES Guillermo Franco’s book is an exploration of seeing beyond the obvious. His work invites us to embrace patience, curiosity, and the unexpected in a world that often rushes past the details.

Born in France, I began my apprenticeship by practicing drawing, and then spontaneously took up photography in 2020 with a Gx9 in my hands. I then embarked on long solitary walks, camera around my neck, in the streets of Lyon where I live, or during trips to Korea. As the photos developed, my destiny as a street photographer inevitably unfolded. Working in black and white allows me to rise above the surface of the world, to simplify my view. I seek to capture the dazzlingness of what is, of what lies dormant in everyone. Fascinated by faces, gestures and scenes, my images transform reality into an emotionally powerful and complex photographic narrative, giving voice to the secret world of the individual. I am a photographer of solitude, wandering, and the passage of time. Always the same sensation, where pleasure and pain mix, pushes me to press the trigger. JUSTINE GEORGET Born in France, I began my apprenticeship by practicing drawing, and then spontaneously took up photography in 2020 with a Gx9 in my hands. I then embarked on long solitary walks, camera around my neck, in the streets of Lyon where I live, or during trips to Korea. As the photos developed, my destiny as a street photographer inevitably unfolded. Working in black and white allows me to rise above the surface of the world, to simplify my view. I seek to capture the dazzlingness of what is, of what lies dormant in everyone. Fascinated by faces, gestures and scenes, my images transform reality into an emotionally powerful and complex photographic narrative, giving voice to the secret world of the individual. I am a photographer of solitude, wandering, and the passage of time. Always the same sensation, where pleasure and pain mix, pushes me to press the trigger. LOCATION Lyon FRANCE CAMERA/S Panasonic Lumix Gx9 @JUSTINE_OXALIS FEATURES // DO YOU SEE MY SILENT TEARS DRYING UP THE STREETS?

PICTORIAL STORY JURJEVO ST. GEORGE'S DAY July 2, 2021 PICTORIAL STORY Photography by Pavieł Hancar Story by Karin Svadlenak Gomez SHARE Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link Pavieł Hancar is based in Minsk, Belarus. He enjoys finding beautiful and uplifting scenes, and he considers finding beauty with his lens his calling. Pavieł visited Cividaūka village in the Minsk region in May 2021 and documented the Belarusian traditional St George's day celebrations in the countryside. St. George's Day is a Slavic religious holiday, the feast of Saint George. Depending on the country, it is celebrated either on April 23 by the Julian calendar or on May 6 by the Gregorian calendar. In Belarus St. George is called Jur’je. Similarly in Croatia and Slovenia, a Roman Catholic version of Saint George's Day, Jurjevo , is celebrated. In the Eastern Orthodox church, Saint George, who is held to have died for his faith and who is usually depicted as killing a dragon while riding his horse, is one of the most important saints, a patron saint in military tradition. Christian synaxaria hold that Saint George was a martyr who died for his faith. But the celebrations have meaning beyond Orthodox Christian tradition, they are also more generically a spring festival, since it is at this time of year that the farmland turns green again and the cattle can be led to pastures. The festivities, although now part of Christian tradition, actually have a relationship with pagan customs. In Slavic folklore and Baltic mythology, the god Jarilo is associated with death and rebirth and agricultural fertility, much like the Greek gods Adonis and Olympian god Dionysus. In Christianity Jarilo became identified with St. George and St. John as the festivities of those two saints fall in the period between the first growth of grass and leaves and harvest, which made them suitable as Christian interpretations of this god. There are other variants of the names of the holiday dedicated to this deity, such as Jarylavica, Jarylki. In Belarus villagers go out with songs and dishes of offering to inspect their fields turned green. The first grazing of cattle is also connected with Jur’je. The spring feasts’ cycle includes holidays such as Shrovetide, Easter and the celebration of St. George. Each of them is characterized by specific cycles of spring songs. The oldest one is Jur’je (Jura, Jury, Jehory), a traditional holiday celebrated on May 6 (April 23 in the old style). It is one of the most distinctive holidays of the agricultural calendar, furnished with a series of solemn ceremonies. The holiday is celebrated in honor of St. George the Victorious - the patron saint of livestock and peasant fields. Spring Jur’je marks the true beginning of spring. A typical ritual, which is reflected in "St. George's Day" songs and calls to find the keys and release his mother (Earth, Nature), is to give free rein to grass, flowers, and animals (a symbol of life in most Indo-European cultures), and to serve pancakes (the wheel is an important magical form - it reflects the sun.) St. George's Day is celebrated in Belarus by all people, but it is especially considered to be a holiday of shepherds. On this day every sheep owner gives the shepherds bread, lard, eggs, vodka, and they, after having driven the animals into the field, set up a feast for themselves there and necessarily bake scrambled eggs in the afternoon, with the participation of all the shepherds of the village. If there is the least bit of disturbance to this ritual of the preparation of scrambled eggs around the gathered herd, it is said that St. Yuri will consider himself offended and will give the flock and shepherds to the wolves. St. Yuri is considered the ruler of wild beasts, and predators have the right to eat the animals he allows them to have. A camel, horses and a donkey also live at the farmhouse in Cividaūka, where Koła club decided to organize a festival. After the Jur’je celebrations, local girls made a short performance - unrelated to the St. George's festivities - with a pony dressed up as an angel and a demon horse. The role of Yury in the livestock business is very eloquently evidenced by charms chanted during the grazing of cattle to ward off various dangers: “On the blue sea, on the lukomor there is an oak, under that oak there is a white stone. As no one eats a stone, so no one eats or takes our cattle: neither a reptile crawling, nor a running beast. I beg you, I beg you, St. George, to come out with your locks, your golden keys. Lock your servants' unfaithful teeth, lips: the first, the middle, the last. That our cattle seemed in a field - a mint, a stone, in a valley - a mound, and in wood - a log, a bush, on the road - a falcon. Save, save our cow. Safely, calmly, until it comes back from the field.” © Paviel Hancar © Paviel Hancar © Paviel Hancar © Paviel Hancar © Paviel Hancar © Paviel Hancar © Paviel Hancar © Paviel Hancar © Paviel Hancar St. George's day is celebrated not only in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, but also in Western European countries such as the United Kingdom and Spain, in somewhat different manifestations. In fact, in the past St. George's Day was a major feast and national holiday in England, as important as Christmas from the early 15th century, though now it has waned in importance by comparison. Sources: Wikipedia articles on Jarilo and St. George, and information received from Pavieł Hancar. view Pavieł's portfolio Read an interview with Paviel >>> Instagram >>> The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to the author/s, and are not necessarily shared by The Pictorial List and the team. read more stories >>> THE LIFE WITHIN THE MOUNTAIN Ten years after first seeing Larung Gar, Jing Wei returns to a changed mountain, finding continuity in faith, memory and the lives held within it. PROSCENIUM GHOSTS Said Manseur honors these young actors, their courage, and the unseen work they give to keep theatre alive against the odds. REGINA: BOARDING SCHOOL LIFE AND DREAMS A boarding school room becomes the frame for Cleopatra Joint’s portrait of ambition, instability, and a young woman’s search for freedom. LIFE ALONG THE RIVER Along the Hooghly, Shubhodeep Roy photographs Kolkata through faith, labour and memory, revealing a city shaped by water, inheritance and shared life. A HOME OF MEMORIES AND THE PRESENT Davide Santangelo returns to his family home by moonlight, tracing how absence, memory, and love continue to live within place, objects, and atmosphere after loss. THE PULL OF THE EARTH This is more than a record of rural Bengal. It looks at the bond between Sayan Biswas and the place that shaped him, even after distance has changed that relationship. ARE THOSE WINDS Along Istanbul’s northern edge, Ci Demi photographs the last water buffalo herders as they keep working, remembering, and staying put while the city closes in. COLORS OF HÜZÜN Through fragments and gestures, Pedro Vidal traces Istanbul as shared melancholy lingers in everyday life, the city unfolding slowly and refusing to settle into a single, definitive understanding. OUT OF PLAY An exploration of abandoned interiors in which Marco Lugli examines how objects, light, and space carry memory beyond human presence, establishing absence as a condition of material continuity rather than loss. REIMAGINING TALIESIN Form gives way to flux in Amy Newton-McConnel’s photographs, where architecture unfolds as a field of shifting relations and perception moves with light, geometry, and time. WHERE THE MUSIC BEGINS Before the strings, Jeevan Akash Jayavarthanan leaves the movement of the street for the rhythm of the workshop, where time holds, hands work, and each moment forms what will later be heard. LAND, LABOR, AND THE GOLDEN FIBER In West Bengal’s jute fields, Rajesh Dhar examines the systems of land and labor, tracing how a single material sustains communities and informs a changing ecological future. WITH GRATITUDE AND DEVOTION A quiet and intimate account of devotion in Zaraza, Venezuela, Rafael Ayala Páez reflects on faith, memory, and community through photographs and words that honor the enduring power of small gestures. SILVER AND BREATH Within this fragile space between looking and being seen, Eva Christina Nielsen has developed a practice that is both restrained and deeply attentive. RUPTURE REPAIR REMNANT In this reflection on rupture, Donna Bassin invites us to consider how grief settles into the body and the image, and how the slow work of witnessing becomes a form of repair. DELTA DUSK John Agather weaves image and text into a single current, tracing how music, memory, and daily life continue to move through the Mississippi Delta. SILENT BEAUTY Tamara Quadrelli photographs the world by slowing down inside it. There is no rush to explain what we are seeing. The pleasure comes from staying with it. SOLITUDE UNDER A TECHNIFIED SUN Tracing the space between movement and stillness, Héctor Morón reveals a city that persists as human presence slips by. 4320 MINUTES WITHOUT COLOR Moving between photography and narration, Mohammed Nahi traces a period in which sight could no longer be assumed as reliable, and attention shifted toward memory and duration. THE PAINTED VILLAGE OF LABANDHAR Anjan Ghosh’s photographs carry us to Labandhar, where painting becomes language, tradition stays present, and art grows through shared ground. ORDINARY GRIEF What endures when everything else is uncertain? Through photography, Parisa Azadi asks us to see Iran not as story, but as feeling. THE EVERYMAN Eva Mallis uncovers the quiet strength of overlooked lives, capturing everyday encounters in Mumbai’s industrial districts as intimate portraits of labor and resilience. IN BETWEEN LIFE AND AFTER In Cairo’s City of the Dead, families carve out ordinary lives among centuries of tombs — Paola Ferrarotti traces the fragile line between memory and survival. UNFIGURED Nasos Karabelas transforms the human body into a site of emotional flux — where perception fractures and inner states become visible form. VISIONS OF ICELAND FROM ABOVE Massimo Lupidi takes flight above Iceland — capturing nature’s abstract brushstrokes where land, water, and sky blur into poetic visions beyond the ordinary eye.

I’m originally from South Shields in the North East of England. I was dragged to Australia kicking and screaming by my parents some years ago. I’ve now lived in Adelaide, Australia for the majority of my adult life and feel blessed to live in such a wonderful country as Australia. I’m married and the proud owner of a Rhodesian Ridgeback (@ridgebackhalle) who is also my running companion. My first true love is Everton Football Club (don’t tell the wife LOL) I love to travel and see what this beautiful planet/world has to offer before we manage to destroy it all. I’m utterly addicted to good coffee and have at least 2 – 4 cups a day (more on the weekends). I started on my photography journey taking pictures of coffee with my mobile phone (don’t judge me!) progressing to images of buildings/architecture in and around Adelaide before stumbling into the genre of street/urban photography after watching a Sean Tucker You Tube video. In June 2018, I bought my first DSLR camera (Nikon D3400) utterly clueless on how to use it. I merely twiddled the dials until I got a half decent image. I then decided to pull the trigger and buy a Fujifilm XT3 which I just love!! I participated in my first ever exhibition which was held in Melbourne as part of SITHOM 2019 and was most recently invited by the Adelaide City Council to be a part of their SALA 2019 exhibition. I was nominated as 2019 SALA finalist for best latent image and in Nov-Dec 2019 held my first solo exhibition. By pure chance photography has opened up a door and taken me down a path I never thought was there let alone possible. JOHN ST. Out of gallery I’m originally from South Shields in the North East of England. I was dragged to Australia kicking and screaming by my parents some years ago. I’ve now lived in Adelaide, Australia for the majority of my adult life and feel blessed to live in such a wonderful country as Australia. I’m married and the proud owner of a Rhodesian Ridgeback (@ridgebackhalle) who is also my running companion. My first true love is Everton Football Club (don’t tell the wife LOL) I love to travel and see what this beautiful planet/world has to offer before we manage to destroy it all. I’m utterly addicted to good coffee and have at least 2 – 4 cups a day (more on the weekends). I started on my photography journey taking pictures of coffee with my mobile phone (don’t judge me!) progressing to images of buildings/architecture in and around Adelaide before stumbling into the genre of street/urban photography after watching a Sean Tucker You Tube video. In June 2018, I bought my first DSLR camera (Nikon D3400) utterly clueless on how to use it. I merely twiddled the dials until I got a half decent image. I then decided to pull the trigger and buy a Fujifilm XT3 which I just love!! I participated in my first ever exhibition which was held in Melbourne as part of SITHOM 2019 and was most recently invited by the Adelaide City Council to be a part of their SALA 2019 exhibition. I was nominated as 2019 SALA finalist for best latent image and in Nov-Dec 2019 held my first solo exhibition. By pure chance photography has opened up a door and taken me down a path I never thought was there let alone possible. LOCATION Adelaide AUSTRALIA CAMERA/S Fujifilm XT3 @GIANT_EVERTONIAN @GIANTEVERTONIAN FEATURES // The Street Files Out of gallery Welcome to Street Life Out of gallery

THE CROWD French photographer Aurélien Bomy captured the joy of the crowd at the Goûtez Electronique when the pandemic had eased a little. THE CROWD April 8, 2022 PROJECT SPOTLIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY Aurélien Bomy INTERVIEW Karin Svadlenak Gomez Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link SHARE The French amateur photographer Aurélien Bomy developed a taste for the arts at an early age. A clinical psychologist by profession, Aurélien continues an artistic practice, discovering and learning from other artists. Besides photography he also enjoys the creation of animated collages. Aurélien understands that street photography is a very different genre from other types of photography, because it captures moments that cannot be repeated and creates something that is completely new every time. Normally Aurélien likes to capture "cinematic moments" of people in their environment. For this story, however, he went down a documentary path. He captured the joy of the crowd at the event Goûtez Electronique that took place in September 2021 in Nantes, the first event of such magnitude that he attended after the pandemic-induced restrictions in France. The Goûtez Electronique offers a palette of Nantes, French, European and international DJ artists. It's a free electronic music concert with several DJ's. It lasts 8 hours on Sunday afternoons in a park near the Loire River. “It was a wonderful moment full of joy with very pleasant music, sunshine, and people were very happy to experience again a moment like this! I thought it was something not to be missed! You know! We had missed enough!” IN CONVERSATION WITH AURÉLIEN BOMY THE PICTORIAL LIST: Tell us a bit about this event. And was this the first mass event you attended after the Covid restrictions? AURÉLIEN BOMY: LA FOULE* is a series I took at an open air electronic music concert in Nantes in September 2021 on a sunny Sunday afternoon in a park near the Loire River. The event is entirely organized by volunteers of an association on their free time and funded solely by bar revenue. It started in 2006, there were usually two dates each year in the summertime until Covid. So it had been since 2019 that the event had not taken place and people where very happy! During that period the health restrictions due to Covid were less drastic and we could meet without masks as long as we were vaccinated. So people were happy to be able to meet again in such events. They were dancing and smiling. There was a peaceful and joyful ambiance. This environment was for me the perfect context to try to approach a crowd from a subjective point of view from a quite close distance, focusing on individualities and to work on portraits. For me, the challenge of this series was to bear witness to the atmosphere that prevailed at that time and place. Particularly after a long period during which meetings were restricted and these kinds of moments were very rare. But how do you convey this kind of atmosphere in photography? For this I decided to treat the crowd not as a unity, a totality, but as an incomplete collection of individualities and personalities. I chose the subjective point of view. For the challenge was to capture something of the life that occurs in one-on-one relationships in encounters in the crowd. My principle was not to turn to the stage, but to the public. To do this, I had to adopt a different posture from that which generally consists of a photographer standing back and excluding himself from the situation. So I joined the party. This is how I collected these beautiful attitudes and these many eye contacts. I was one of the others. The only difference was that I had a camera and used it to take photographs of others (just doing photography for myself, not for the event). I had been to few cultural events before since the restrictions were lifted. We have had different periods of restrictions in France: Lockdown, confinements, curfews... since the beginning of Covid crisis, but I didn't go to events of that magnitude at that time! TPL: How did it feel to you personally to be there? AB: It was a wonderful moment full of joy with very pleasant music, sunshine, and people were very happy to experience again a moment like this! I thought it was something not to be missed! You know! We had missed enough! And when I saw this atmosphere, this mood, I immediately thought that there was a testimony to do something like that! But how do you tell the story of this in photography? It's not easy! Two ways and you have to choose : The collective way or the subjective singular way! TPL: What gave you the idea that you could focus on individuals in the crowd, rather than, for example, concentrating on the musicians, as most people might? AB: I chose the way that I could tell the story of each one who had to make the sacrifice of him/herself for the collective during the sanitary restrictions. That's why I titled the series "La Foule" (The Crowd)! Cause there is a conflict between each human being and the collective! And it was a moment when we could live for ourselves in the presence of the others in a crowd! The song "La Foule" by Edith Piaf tells the story of a woman who's "carried away by the crowd"... This moment was for me a unique occasion to treat that question of the border between the individual and the collective, which is an essential theme (even in my practice as a psychologist) ! We are each unique and each of us has his/her own difference. We all dream of being one with the other, but we can´t! The crowd is the place where the dream is in conflict with that impossibility. You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down. - Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon TPL: You told us that you chose to process your pictures in black and white to focus on the essential. Please expand on that a bit - what do you mean by that? What would have been the disturbing element of colour? AB: I took the series in a four hour time frame, and the light changed a lot! Some of the pictures were taken with a strong daylight and others with a soft end of the day light! And there were a lot of different colours of clothing and green trees in the background! That didn't fit at all with the aesthetic that I search for! All those photos and people on them were so different! And that is what I found. That's what I wanted. But there is a need in a series to present the images in a kind of coherent way...not as a unity...not totality...but as a collection! So only the monochrome, black and white, could put all those different photos together. And maybe it fit more with my purpose of showing that duality of conflict between individual and crowd. TPL: What happened later in the year - did France go back into lockdowns as Covid-19 flared up again. what was the mood among the people like then? And your own feelings about it? AB: In November/December the Covid impact grew and restrictions were back on mass cultural events. Not strict lockdowns, but a closure of cultural places. We did not expect it! It was hard! And at the same time it imposed itself as a necessity to which we were not accustomed, but which we had already learned to deal with. TPL: How have you personally been coping with Covid restrictions? AB: I have always respected them, as I knew they were necessary for the survival of the greatest number from the point of view that considers the collective. These restrictions are an opportunity to give, through the defect they engender in the social bond, the crucial importance of one-to-one relationships and intentions directed towards a particular person, insofar as s/he is not anonymous, but has a particularity, his/her own difference from any other! To be interested in someone for what s/he has that is singular and who does what s/he is, that is what seems to me to be the important thing in social relations. *La foule is an song performed by Édith Piaf in 1957. The lyrics are by Michel Rivgauche and the music by Ángel Cabral. PORTFOLIO WEBSITE INSTAGRAM read more interviews >>> CONTOURS OF ABSENCE Where concealment unsettles recognition and ordinary spaces turn psychological, the photographs of Serhii Fett suspend identity between presence and absence. THE ART OF ATTENTION Curiosity turns portraits, objects, and places into discoveries as Len Irish reflects on a life shaped by the camera’s attention. WHERE EMOTIONS BREATHE Simple encounters Irina Sedletskaya almost missed become photographs shaped by silence, distance, uncertainty, memory, hope, and resilience. THE VILLAGE A workers’ neighbourhood becomes a living archive as Virginia Cassano photographs the people, streets, and memories that continue to shape Villaggio Piaggio. MUTABLE MORPHOGENESIS By merging scientific methodologies with photographic experimentation, Emma Varga creates images that challenge fixed distinctions between human and non-human, visible and invisible. THE ARCHITECTURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS Chad Coombs’ Polaroids are small psychological scenes where identity, memory, culture, and belief push against each other. WHERE WE BELONG Community storytelling lies at the heart of The Pictorial List’s mission, and Marlon Ramos’ photographs reflects the spirit of the place we now call home. GUIDED BY A WHISPER Guided by reflection and the quiet presence of art history, Isolda Fabregat Sanz makes photographs that resist certainty and invite the viewer to remain inside the act of looking. WHAT REMAINS, WHAT EMERGES Laetitia Heisler transforms risk, memory, and the body into layered analogue visions — feminist rituals of seeing that reveal what endures, and what quietly emerges beyond visibility. WHAT WE ARE, WHAT WE DO Culture lives where art and community meet, and in this space Alejandro Dávila’s photographs reveal the unseen labor and devotion that sustain creation. ANALOGICAL LIMBO Nicola Cappellari reminds us that the photograph’s power lies not in what it shows, but in what it leaves unsaid. THREADS OF MOROCCAN LIFE Through gestures of work and moments of community, Kat Puchowska reveals Morocco’s overlooked beauty. IT STARTED AS LIGHT…ENDED IN SHIVERS… Between intimacy and estrangement, Anton Bou’s photographs wander — restless fragments of light and shadow, mapping the fragile terrain where self unravels into sensation. WITH EYES THAT LISTEN AND A HEART THAT SEES For decades, Rivka Shifman Katvan has documented the unseen backstage world of Broadway, capturing authenticity where performance and humanity intersect. DIPTYCH DIALOGUES Through the beautiful language of diptychs, Taiwanese photographer Jay Hsu invites us into a world where quiet images speak of memory, resilience, and hope. UNKNOWN ABYSSINIA In Ethiopia, Sebastian Piatek found a new way of seeing — where architecture endures, but women in motion carry the narrative forward. THE PULSE OF THE STREET Moments vanish, yet Suvam Saha holds them still — the pulse of India’s streets captured in fragments of life that will never repeat. WHAT DO WE WANT? More than documentation, David Gray reveals the human pulse of resistance and asks us to see beyond the surface of unrest. CRACKED RIBS 2016 Cynthia Karalla opens up about the art of survival, the power of perspective, and why she believes each of us holds a monopoly on our own narrative. STREETS OF KOLKATA Ayanava Sil’s reveals Kolkata’s soul, capturing moments with empathy, presence and humility while offering deep insight into both city and self. PERIPHERAL PLACES A project by Catia Montagna that distills fleeting encounters and spatial poetics into triptychs - visual short stories that capture the in-between, where meaning often hides. POINTE-AU-CHIEN IS NOT DEAD Through Wayan Barre’s documentary, we are invited not only to see but to feel the lived realities of a community standing at the crossroads of environmental collapse and cultural survival. QUEER HAPPENED HERE Author Marc Zinaman sheds light on the valuable contributions that LGBTQ+ individuals have made to the cultural and social fabric of New York City. TRACES OF TIME Marked by an ongoing visual dialogue with time, memory, and impermanence, Zamin Jafarov’s long-term projects highlight the quiet power of observation and the emotional depth of simplicity. THERE MY LITTLE EYES Guillermo Franco’s book is an exploration of seeing beyond the obvious. His work invites us to embrace patience, curiosity, and the unexpected in a world that often rushes past the details.

PICTORIAL STORY THIS IS ESSEX June 25, 2021 PICTORIAL STORY Photography and story by Danny Jackson Introduction by Karin Svadlenak Gomez SHARE Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link Danny Jackson has captured the sometimes weird and often wonderful everyday lives of residents in Essex in pictures. As a passionate people watcher, in 2019 Danny started working on a portrait series called Eccentric Essex . The Pandemic has given him the opportunity to go through his work, which in turn has led to the development of the series This Is Essex , and Eccentricity . Both of these series focus on eccentric and interesting people. Why Eccentrics ? Danny has asked himself that question quite a lot, and his main reasoning is that eccentric people seem to live life somewhat differently from the norm, they rebel or let their interests and passions determine how they live their lives. When I was a child growing up in Basildon, a new town in South Essex, in the 80s and 90s, I became aware of a growing stigma attached to my county. The expression Essex Girl had recently found purchase in modern lingo; a derogatory term that was used to describe women who were considered promiscuous or lacking in intellect. It was a stereotype that was compounded by the television programme Birds of a Feather with its own archetypal Sharon and Tracy; vacuous characters who bumbled through each episode with dropped Hs and glottal stops galore. The Essex boys fared little better. They found their representative in Harry Enfield’s creation Loadsa Money . Enfield’s depiction of a brash, up and coming man with oodles of money and no accompanying substance or class was a clear comment on the generation of young Essex men who had found lucrative jobs in the nearby city of London. And so, it went on… Big Brother , Pop Stars , X Factor and more recently TOWIE . Any contestant that hailed from the county of Essex inevitably conformed to the classic stereotypes of the pretty but vapid Essex Girl and the materialistic and loutish Essex Boy . Modern culture has been saturated with the media’s propagation of this unkind and unfair stereotype, but if we look a little deeper then maybe we will find that there’s more to the Essex species than these narrow and restrictive generalisations acknowledge. Essex, as we know it now, has evolved and expanded over the duration of the last hundred years, a relatively short time. Before then it was mostly small farming communities and Victorian seaside towns. But after the Second World War and the devastation of London’s East End, the Labour government created a series of “new towns” across the country and Essex was the birthplace of two such towns: Harlow in North Essex and Basildon in the south. These new towns offered hope and fresh starts to a bruised and beleaguered generation of Eastenders. Massive council estates sprung up, the largest in Europe being one in Dagenham, and many Londoners flocked to Essex to join friends and relatives who had already settled here. Both sets of my grandparents originated from East London, as are my wife’s, and this is the same for the large majority of my friends too. So, to understand the nature of the people of Essex, we must first start with their forebears, the Eastenders. Just as Essex has a stereotype, so too have the people of East London. Ask any one from around the world what a cockney or an Eastender is like and a list of attributes common to this Londoner will be reeled off: speakers of Cockney rhyming slang; consumers of jellied eels and pie and mash; images of The Artful Dodger , Dickens’s famous pickpocket from Oliver Twist , or the Kray twins (gangsters of 50s and 60s London) spring to mind. But just as the Essex stereotype is narrow and reductive, so too is this one. It’s important to remember what happened to the East End of London during the Second World War; German planes bombed the area relentlessly during The Blitz of 1940. Thousands of homes were bombed out and lives lost. Parents had to evacuate their children to the countryside to live with unknown families. My nan was one of those children, who with her two sisters, was sent to Norfolk and spent the war living with a farmer and his wife. The phrase “ Keep Calm and Carry On ” can be said to embody the attitude of the nation as a whole, but it seems particularly pertinent to the East End. I believe that going through such hardship and embracing the ‘war-time spirit’ solidified in them those attributes of resilience, determination and kind heartedness and highlighted the importance of family and fun, even in the face of adversity. When broken down, what really is the idea of a ‘ wartime spirit ’? It’s a commitment to carry on no matter what; a conscious stance of thinking positively when times are hard; to move on and to move forward. So, who are the people of Essex now? Essex has a population of about 1.9 million. It borders Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, London and Kent. During the census a few years back Castle point in South Essex had the highest percentage in England of people identifying their ethnicity as ‘White British.’ Essex also has a very high percentage of over 65s, much higher than the national average. Much of the densely populated towns are on the coast where many older people go to retire; seaside towns like Southend on Sea and Clacton on Sea being a mix of young families and older residents. Leigh on Sea was recently voted the best place to live in England, with large 1930s family homes close to a classic British high Street and an old fishing village. Many Essex residents are tradesman or office workers who commute up to the city daily via the motorways or railway. And as for that perception of the people of Essex as being less academic; the University of Essex ranked 25th out of 130 in the most recent University League Table. Regardless of where you are in Essex, there are some common strains that seem cemented in the Essex persona like the letters in a stick of rock: the people of Essex have a friendly, warm nature - if workmen enter their home they will immediately be offered cups of tea, and at the end of the job a tip or drink will be given as a thank you; “Get yourself a beer,” they might say. Essex people love a bargain, with a glut of Pound Shops punctuating most high streets and Sunday mornings frequently being spent rifling through the goods at local car boot sales. The people of Essex are fun loving, neighbourly, sometimes eccentric, cheeky, money driven and confident. They can also drink far too much, burn in the sun far too easily, love a bit of gossip, are occasionally rowdy and sometimes vain. They love their fish and chips and English breakfasts, shop at Lakeside Shopping Centre and in the evenings many flock to Southend amusements or Peter Pans , a theme park by the pier that’s been called Adventure Island for over 20 years, but everyone still calls Peter Pan’s Playground . The V-festival is a yearly event where some of the biggest names in the music business come to play and for thousands across Essex this a must-see event of the summer. Another place that every Essex resident is familiar with is Southend Pier, the longest pleasure pier in the world at 1.34 miles long. Built in 1830, this pier is very much part of Essex’s heritage, in fact to quote Sir John Betjeman (the English Poet and broadcaster), “The pier is Southend, Southend is the Pier.’ © Danny Jackson © Danny Jackson © Danny Jackson © Danny Jackson © Danny Jackson © Danny Jackson © Danny Jackson © Danny Jackson © Danny Jackson © Danny Jackson © Danny Jackson © Danny Jackson © Danny Jackson So, in conclusion, when describing this collection of people…my people… it is clear that the people of Essex have a quirkiness to them, an eccentricity, a cheekiness. They have their own language - a mix of slang and colloquialisms - and they have certain habits that counts them apart from other people, much of this coming from their cockney ancestors. Their warmth and friendliness, family orientated attitude and gritty determinism have resulted in a can-do attitude and work hardy strength that comes from generations of tradesmen, dockworkers and factory workers. As a people they are strong, loyal and neighbourly. This is all a far cry from the crass Essex Lad or the promiscuous and unintelligent Essex Girls , in fact quite the opposite. Maybe in time the idea of who the people of Essex actually are will change and develop and we will finally be allowed to transgress these reductive and disparaging stereotypes, however whatever happens I’m happy to be one of them and I’m proud to be able to photograph them and document the county I love. view Danny's portfolio Read an interview with Danny >>> Instagram >>> The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to the author/s, and are not necessarily shared by The Pictorial List and the team. read more stories >>> THE LIFE WITHIN THE MOUNTAIN Ten years after first seeing Larung Gar, Jing Wei returns to a changed mountain, finding continuity in faith, memory and the lives held within it. PROSCENIUM GHOSTS Said Manseur honors these young actors, their courage, and the unseen work they give to keep theatre alive against the odds. REGINA: BOARDING SCHOOL LIFE AND DREAMS A boarding school room becomes the frame for Cleopatra Joint’s portrait of ambition, instability, and a young woman’s search for freedom. LIFE ALONG THE RIVER Along the Hooghly, Shubhodeep Roy photographs Kolkata through faith, labour and memory, revealing a city shaped by water, inheritance and shared life. A HOME OF MEMORIES AND THE PRESENT Davide Santangelo returns to his family home by moonlight, tracing how absence, memory, and love continue to live within place, objects, and atmosphere after loss. THE PULL OF THE EARTH This is more than a record of rural Bengal. It looks at the bond between Sayan Biswas and the place that shaped him, even after distance has changed that relationship. ARE THOSE WINDS Along Istanbul’s northern edge, Ci Demi photographs the last water buffalo herders as they keep working, remembering, and staying put while the city closes in. COLORS OF HÜZÜN Through fragments and gestures, Pedro Vidal traces Istanbul as shared melancholy lingers in everyday life, the city unfolding slowly and refusing to settle into a single, definitive understanding. OUT OF PLAY An exploration of abandoned interiors in which Marco Lugli examines how objects, light, and space carry memory beyond human presence, establishing absence as a condition of material continuity rather than loss. REIMAGINING TALIESIN Form gives way to flux in Amy Newton-McConnel’s photographs, where architecture unfolds as a field of shifting relations and perception moves with light, geometry, and time. WHERE THE MUSIC BEGINS Before the strings, Jeevan Akash Jayavarthanan leaves the movement of the street for the rhythm of the workshop, where time holds, hands work, and each moment forms what will later be heard. LAND, LABOR, AND THE GOLDEN FIBER In West Bengal’s jute fields, Rajesh Dhar examines the systems of land and labor, tracing how a single material sustains communities and informs a changing ecological future. WITH GRATITUDE AND DEVOTION A quiet and intimate account of devotion in Zaraza, Venezuela, Rafael Ayala Páez reflects on faith, memory, and community through photographs and words that honor the enduring power of small gestures. SILVER AND BREATH Within this fragile space between looking and being seen, Eva Christina Nielsen has developed a practice that is both restrained and deeply attentive. RUPTURE REPAIR REMNANT In this reflection on rupture, Donna Bassin invites us to consider how grief settles into the body and the image, and how the slow work of witnessing becomes a form of repair. DELTA DUSK John Agather weaves image and text into a single current, tracing how music, memory, and daily life continue to move through the Mississippi Delta. SILENT BEAUTY Tamara Quadrelli photographs the world by slowing down inside it. There is no rush to explain what we are seeing. The pleasure comes from staying with it. SOLITUDE UNDER A TECHNIFIED SUN Tracing the space between movement and stillness, Héctor Morón reveals a city that persists as human presence slips by. 4320 MINUTES WITHOUT COLOR Moving between photography and narration, Mohammed Nahi traces a period in which sight could no longer be assumed as reliable, and attention shifted toward memory and duration. THE PAINTED VILLAGE OF LABANDHAR Anjan Ghosh’s photographs carry us to Labandhar, where painting becomes language, tradition stays present, and art grows through shared ground. ORDINARY GRIEF What endures when everything else is uncertain? Through photography, Parisa Azadi asks us to see Iran not as story, but as feeling. THE EVERYMAN Eva Mallis uncovers the quiet strength of overlooked lives, capturing everyday encounters in Mumbai’s industrial districts as intimate portraits of labor and resilience. IN BETWEEN LIFE AND AFTER In Cairo’s City of the Dead, families carve out ordinary lives among centuries of tombs — Paola Ferrarotti traces the fragile line between memory and survival. UNFIGURED Nasos Karabelas transforms the human body into a site of emotional flux — where perception fractures and inner states become visible form. VISIONS OF ICELAND FROM ABOVE Massimo Lupidi takes flight above Iceland — capturing nature’s abstract brushstrokes where land, water, and sky blur into poetic visions beyond the ordinary eye.

PICTORIAL STORY IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF ANSEL ADAMS In following the footsteps of the masterful Ansel Adams, Karin Svadlenak not only paid homage to his timeless work but also embarked on a transformative journey. March 2, 2024 PICTORIAL STORY photography KARIN SVADLENAK story KARIN SVADLENAK introduction MELANIE MEGGS SHARE Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link In following the footsteps of the masterful Ansel Adams, Karin Svadlenak not only paid homage to his timeless work but also embarked on a transformative journey. Her project in the Dolomites stands as a testament to the enduring power of black and white photography and the emotional depth it can convey. Through her endeavours, Karin has not only deepened her own understanding of the craft but also offered a contemporary homage that resonates with the timeless beauty Ansel Adams captured. A public relations manager for a university department in Vienna, Austria, a world traveller, and passionate magazine editor and blogger, Karin combines an insatiable curiosity for art, culture, and photography with a love for storytelling. Karin’s photography project serves as a compelling reminder that the art of photography is not merely in the act of capturing an image, but in the meticulous process of creating a visual narrative that speaks to the soul. Just as Ansel Adams believed, a photograph is indeed made, not taken. Karin’s journey reminds us all to look beyond the surface, to study the play of light and shadow, and to find inspiration in the legacy left by the masters of our past. Through her photography and writing, Karin continues to be inspired by Ansel Adams and his legacy. She, like many others, recognises him as the Master of Landscape Photography and is grateful for the opportunity to honour his work through her own. “You don't take a photograph, you make it.” - Ansel Adams I started landscape photography at a young age. At that time, I was shooting with a Minolta XG 2, a high school graduation gift, and on trips I would look for deserted landscapes for my compositions. One day, I came across a book of Ansel Adams’ photographs in a bookstore and was deeply impressed by his dramatic black and white images. Ansel Adams is considered one of the most important photographers of the 20th century. His landscape photographs of the American West, beginning with his photos of Yosemite National Park in the 1930s, are world famous. Adams used the elements of composition, such as lines, shapes, light and shadow, for his high-contrast black and white photography. These were not snapshots; he went out with a large format camera on a tripod and would wait patiently for the right light and compose his images very carefully. He also developed his ‘Zone System’, a photographic technique used to achieve optimal exposure and development in black and white photography. It’s essentially a system for understanding and controlling the tonal range of your image. The system divides the tonal range of an image into eleven zones, numbered 0 to 10. Zone 0 represents pure black, zone 5 represents middle gray, and zone 10 represents pure white. The system was developed for film photography, where exposure has to be handled a little differently from digital photography (exposing for the shadows rather than the highlights for the most part). But some of it was also done in post processing. The development process further affects the final tonal range. When one is not familiar with film photography, one might think that analog photographers did not have a lot of editing possibilities. This is true if you have your photos printed in a lab. But if you develop your own negatives and prints, you could actually do quite a lot. By adjusting the development time for both, you can influence the contrast and density of your negatives, you can highlight certain areas of an image and darken others, further refining the tonal relationships within your image. Knowing this, I did not feel apprehensive about using dodge and burn on my digital images to achieve the desired effect, even when I digitalise analog photographs. For my “homage” project, I had the opportunity to photograph (with an Olympus EM10 Mark III) the beautiful mountain landscape in the Dolomites. The Alpine landscape that I photographed was particularly suited to black and white images, because I was also primarily interested in the dramatic shapes and lighting conditions that I found there. The atmospheric conditions that day were perfect, lots of fog and clouds, but also later blue skies and a lot of good light for contrasty images. Although I originally shot the images in colour, for this homage to Ansel Adams I tried to edit them in his style: high contrast, with a lot of dodging and burning (in my case digitally), and of course in black and white. Ansel preferred black and white even when colour photography became popular. The contrasts between light and shadow underline the drama and intensity of his images. I undertook this project for a final exam presentation at the Prager Photo School for Artistic and Applied Photography in Linz, Austria. I completed a two-year training program there in December 2023. One of the elective modules was Landscape Photography, so this was it. This project was a great learning experience for me. While I was familiar with Ansel’s photography, for this project I looked at many photographs more closely and learned a lot about his photography style. I am very happy with the results of this project, and I am grateful for the opportunity to have it highlighted. © Karin Svadlenak Gomez © Karin Svadlenak Gomez © Karin Svadlenak Gomez © Karin Svadlenak Gomez © Karin Svadlenak Gomez © Karin Svadlenak Gomez © Karin Svadlenak Gomez © Karin Svadlenak Gomez © Karin Svadlenak Gomez © Karin Svadlenak Gomez © Karin Svadlenak Gomez © Karin Svadlenak Gomez © Karin Svadlenak Gomez As we reflect on Karin’s beautiful photographs, we are reminded of the profound impact a single photographer can have on generations to come. The ability to see beyond colour, to manipulate light and shadow, and to harness the raw beauty of nature in a frame, is a skill that Adams mastered, and Karin has respectfully emulated. Her work encourages us all to explore the world with fresh eyes and to appreciate the intricate balance between technique and vision. In the spirit of Adams’ wise words, Karin Svadlenak has not merely taken photographs; she has made art. May her dedication inspire others to pick up their cameras, to study the Masters, and to create with passion. For in the dance of light across the film — or the pixels on a sensor — we are all bound in the pursuit of capturing the sublime, and in doing so, honouring the Masters upon whose shoulders we stand. view Karin's portfolio Read an interview with Karin >>> Read Karin's exhibition review "City of Images" >>> Website >>> Viennacultgram >>> Spectaculum Magazine >>> Instagram >>> The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to the author/s, and are not necessarily shared by The Pictorial List and the team. read more stories >>> THE LIFE WITHIN THE MOUNTAIN Ten years after first seeing Larung Gar, Jing Wei returns to a changed mountain, finding continuity in faith, memory and the lives held within it. PROSCENIUM GHOSTS Said Manseur honors these young actors, their courage, and the unseen work they give to keep theatre alive against the odds. REGINA: BOARDING SCHOOL LIFE AND DREAMS A boarding school room becomes the frame for Cleopatra Joint’s portrait of ambition, instability, and a young woman’s search for freedom. LIFE ALONG THE RIVER Along the Hooghly, Shubhodeep Roy photographs Kolkata through faith, labour and memory, revealing a city shaped by water, inheritance and shared life. A HOME OF MEMORIES AND THE PRESENT Davide Santangelo returns to his family home by moonlight, tracing how absence, memory, and love continue to live within place, objects, and atmosphere after loss. THE PULL OF THE EARTH This is more than a record of rural Bengal. It looks at the bond between Sayan Biswas and the place that shaped him, even after distance has changed that relationship. ARE THOSE WINDS Along Istanbul’s northern edge, Ci Demi photographs the last water buffalo herders as they keep working, remembering, and staying put while the city closes in. COLORS OF HÜZÜN Through fragments and gestures, Pedro Vidal traces Istanbul as shared melancholy lingers in everyday life, the city unfolding slowly and refusing to settle into a single, definitive understanding. OUT OF PLAY An exploration of abandoned interiors in which Marco Lugli examines how objects, light, and space carry memory beyond human presence, establishing absence as a condition of material continuity rather than loss. REIMAGINING TALIESIN Form gives way to flux in Amy Newton-McConnel’s photographs, where architecture unfolds as a field of shifting relations and perception moves with light, geometry, and time. WHERE THE MUSIC BEGINS Before the strings, Jeevan Akash Jayavarthanan leaves the movement of the street for the rhythm of the workshop, where time holds, hands work, and each moment forms what will later be heard. LAND, LABOR, AND THE GOLDEN FIBER In West Bengal’s jute fields, Rajesh Dhar examines the systems of land and labor, tracing how a single material sustains communities and informs a changing ecological future. WITH GRATITUDE AND DEVOTION A quiet and intimate account of devotion in Zaraza, Venezuela, Rafael Ayala Páez reflects on faith, memory, and community through photographs and words that honor the enduring power of small gestures. SILVER AND BREATH Within this fragile space between looking and being seen, Eva Christina Nielsen has developed a practice that is both restrained and deeply attentive. RUPTURE REPAIR REMNANT In this reflection on rupture, Donna Bassin invites us to consider how grief settles into the body and the image, and how the slow work of witnessing becomes a form of repair. DELTA DUSK John Agather weaves image and text into a single current, tracing how music, memory, and daily life continue to move through the Mississippi Delta. SILENT BEAUTY Tamara Quadrelli photographs the world by slowing down inside it. There is no rush to explain what we are seeing. The pleasure comes from staying with it. SOLITUDE UNDER A TECHNIFIED SUN Tracing the space between movement and stillness, Héctor Morón reveals a city that persists as human presence slips by. 4320 MINUTES WITHOUT COLOR Moving between photography and narration, Mohammed Nahi traces a period in which sight could no longer be assumed as reliable, and attention shifted toward memory and duration. THE PAINTED VILLAGE OF LABANDHAR Anjan Ghosh’s photographs carry us to Labandhar, where painting becomes language, tradition stays present, and art grows through shared ground. ORDINARY GRIEF What endures when everything else is uncertain? Through photography, Parisa Azadi asks us to see Iran not as story, but as feeling. THE EVERYMAN Eva Mallis uncovers the quiet strength of overlooked lives, capturing everyday encounters in Mumbai’s industrial districts as intimate portraits of labor and resilience. IN BETWEEN LIFE AND AFTER In Cairo’s City of the Dead, families carve out ordinary lives among centuries of tombs — Paola Ferrarotti traces the fragile line between memory and survival. UNFIGURED Nasos Karabelas transforms the human body into a site of emotional flux — where perception fractures and inner states become visible form. VISIONS OF ICELAND FROM ABOVE Massimo Lupidi takes flight above Iceland — capturing nature’s abstract brushstrokes where land, water, and sky blur into poetic visions beyond the ordinary eye.

Being a shy person poses challenges in everyday life and adopting personae to feel comfortable in interaction with people is crucial. It's a bit strange perhaps to choose professions that put you right in front of groups of people, where you have no chance of blending into the background, but, I feel very comfortable in my roles as a teacher and a fashion model; I find it delightfully stimulating and a well balancing contrast to my quiet time after work hours. As a photographer I started out using the skill you often develop very well as a shy person, quiet observation. I focused on lines and shapes, mainly architecture and abstract, but gradually moved onto street photography - from a distance. With a growing comfort in the streets it felt a natural progression to further challenge myself, step out of my comfort zone also in this arena, and so instead of merely observing a scene I started immersing myself in the scenes and take candid portraits. LAINE MULLALLY Being a shy person poses challenges in everyday life and adopting personae to feel comfortable in interaction with people is crucial. It's a bit strange perhaps to choose professions that put you right in front of groups of people, where you have no chance of blending into the background, but, I feel very comfortable in my roles as a teacher and a fashion model; I find it delightfully stimulating and a well balancing contrast to my quiet time after work hours. As a photographer I started out using the skill you often develop very well as a shy person, quiet observation. I focused on lines and shapes, mainly architecture and abstract, but gradually moved onto street photography - from a distance. With a growing comfort in the streets it felt a natural progression to further challenge myself, step out of my comfort zone also in this arena, and so instead of merely observing a scene I started immersing myself in the scenes and take candid portraits. LOCATION Stockholm SWEDEN CAMERA/S Canon 200D @LAINE.E.M FEATURES // Soho Small Hours

I live in the Tuscany region of Italy. For years I have been passionate about photography specific to the landscape and reportage genre, however I also practice other genres such as macro and street. I shoot with the search for light and atmosphere. This suits me more and better conveys my photographic vision. In recent years I have been dedicating myself to enhancing my territory both with landscape shots and reportage, always with the great passion for photography that I have since childhood. SIMONE BATINI I live in the Tuscany region of Italy. For years I have been passionate about photography specific to the landscape and reportage genre, however I also practice other genres such as macro and street. I shoot with the search for light and atmosphere. This suits me more and better conveys my photographic vision. In recent years I have been dedicating myself to enhancing my territory both with landscape shots and reportage, always with the great passion for photography that I have since childhood. LOCATION Tuscany ITALY CAMERA/S Nikon D610, Nikon D800, Nikon Z50 @SIMOBATI78 FEATURES // Times Past Nuances of Light An Artist's Place Shades Of The Coalman

PICTORIAL STORY WITH GRATITUDE AND DEVOTION A quiet and intimate account of devotion in Zaraza, Venezuela, Rafael Ayala Páez reflects on faith, memory, and community through photographs and words that honor the enduring power of small gestures. April 2, 2026 PICTORIAL STORY PHOTOGRAPHY Rafael Ayala Páez STORY Rafael Ayala Páez INTRODUCTION Melanie Meggs SHARE Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link Rafael Ayala Páez photographs from a place of respect and closeness. The Christ of Health: Gratitude and Devotion remain with people as they move together, attentive to the quiet strength that emerges through shared belief and collective action. Rafael does not approach faith as something to be explained or translated. He treats it as something lived — steady, familiar, and deeply human. The story moves the way the day moves. Slowly. Purposefully. People gather. They wait together. They walk together. Rafael allows gestures to speak for themselves: a pause, a touch, the weight of time passing. His writing carries a gentle confidence, grounded in observation and shaped by trust in the resilience of communal life. The photographs echo this sensibility. Rendered in black and white, Rafael’s photographs remain closely framed around faces, hands, and bodies in motion, foregrounding movement, intimacy, and embodied expression. His camera does not interrupt; it listens. The images honor participation, presenting faith not as display but as presence, something held, shared and borne together. Together, the writing and photographs offer a portrait of belief shaped by care and continuity. Rafael Ayala Páez invites the reader to witness the quiet grace of a community sustained by devotion. In the procession of the Christ of Health, we breathe gratitude and devotion — intrinsic realities that are part of my hometown, Zaraza, Guárico, Venezuela. Every January 1st, the faithful wake at dawn with a sacred restlessness. The aromatic steam of coffee permeates the house, awakening our senses as we prepare for the Dawn Rosary: a moment of deep introspection that anticipates what is to come. At six o’clock, the Christ emerges from the Church of Saint Gabriel the Archangel. The bells toll. One, two, three fireworks thunder in the air, and from the loudspeakers, a voice rises — a soft voice, laced with plea; the voice of a woman praying and singing to guide the way. Transformed into an offering, the Crucified walks the streets of Zaraza accompanied by a multitude. Entire families — men and women alike — wait for Him from their doorways, windows, or balconies. The bearers, weary yet joyful, take turns over the course of eight hours to ensure the procession moves forward seamlessly. The people thirst for transcendence, for healing. The atmosphere is heavy with reverence and shared memory. But where does this desire, this longing for the divine, spring from? According to local historians, a young girl named Carmen Díaz, shortly before succumbing to yellow fever, told her parents of a dream: she saw frail people carrying an image of Christ, who were healed after drinking lemon juice. Sometime later, a man walking down Liberty Street fell face-first, overwhelmed by the first symptoms of the plague. Remembering the child’s premonition, he drank the citrus juice and prayed to God that, if He healed him, he would make that dream a reality. After a miraculous recovery, he kept his word, inaugurating the tradition of the procession on January 1, 1857. Over the decades, this expression of faith became so deeply rooted in the community that when anyone tried to stop it, the town’s response was etched into living history. A testament to this occurred a century later, when chronicler Francisco Gustavo Chacín reflected on the possibility of suspending it. His conclusion was clear: “Think not of it! It has already been proven that such a thing will not happen. Years ago, the author of these lines witnessed it. A Capuchin friar, an old man with a hard face and a long beard as black as a raven, tenaciously opposed the procession...On the first day of the year, the procession was nowhere to be seen. People gathered in Bolivar Square; the town smelled of tragedy. Finally, a group of men ready for anything arrived at the temple…’Father’; they said firmly, ‘we know how to keep our promises. We have come to take the Crucified out, whether you like it or not.’; The procession went out without a priest, yet it was more solemn than in previous years.” © Rafael Ayala Páez © Rafael Ayala Páez © Rafael Ayala Páez © Rafael Ayala Páez © Rafael Ayala Páez © Rafael Ayala Páez © Rafael Ayala Páez © Rafael Ayala Páez © Rafael Ayala Páez © Rafael Ayala Páez © Rafael Ayala Páez Rafael Ayala Paez concludes with a personal reflection, turning inward to consider his own place within the procession. “Just as the storytellers recorded this fervor, I seek for my photographs to be evidence of that same permanence: An elderly hand clinging to the robe. A woman cradling a single white rose in her hands. A man leaning against a wall, like someone waiting for an old friend. The strain on the shoulders and the glint of sweat on the faces of the bearers. And, at the center, the Christ amidst His people. In every image, I have sought to document the poetry of the procession. The Christ of Health reminds us that hope and love live in small gestures, and not in the grandiosity of the world.” view Rafael Ayala Páez's portfolio Website >>> Instagram >>> The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to the author/s and are not necessarily shared by The Pictorial List. read more stories >>> THE LIFE WITHIN THE MOUNTAIN Ten years after first seeing Larung Gar, Jing Wei returns to a changed mountain, finding continuity in faith, memory and the lives held within it. PROSCENIUM GHOSTS Said Manseur honors these young actors, their courage, and the unseen work they give to keep theatre alive against the odds. REGINA: BOARDING SCHOOL LIFE AND DREAMS A boarding school room becomes the frame for Cleopatra Joint’s portrait of ambition, instability, and a young woman’s search for freedom. LIFE ALONG THE RIVER Along the Hooghly, Shubhodeep Roy photographs Kolkata through faith, labour and memory, revealing a city shaped by water, inheritance and shared life. A HOME OF MEMORIES AND THE PRESENT Davide Santangelo returns to his family home by moonlight, tracing how absence, memory, and love continue to live within place, objects, and atmosphere after loss. THE PULL OF THE EARTH This is more than a record of rural Bengal. It looks at the bond between Sayan Biswas and the place that shaped him, even after distance has changed that relationship. ARE THOSE WINDS Along Istanbul’s northern edge, Ci Demi photographs the last water buffalo herders as they keep working, remembering, and staying put while the city closes in. COLORS OF HÜZÜN Through fragments and gestures, Pedro Vidal traces Istanbul as shared melancholy lingers in everyday life, the city unfolding slowly and refusing to settle into a single, definitive understanding. OUT OF PLAY An exploration of abandoned interiors in which Marco Lugli examines how objects, light, and space carry memory beyond human presence, establishing absence as a condition of material continuity rather than loss. REIMAGINING TALIESIN Form gives way to flux in Amy Newton-McConnel’s photographs, where architecture unfolds as a field of shifting relations and perception moves with light, geometry, and time. WHERE THE MUSIC BEGINS Before the strings, Jeevan Akash Jayavarthanan leaves the movement of the street for the rhythm of the workshop, where time holds, hands work, and each moment forms what will later be heard. LAND, LABOR, AND THE GOLDEN FIBER In West Bengal’s jute fields, Rajesh Dhar examines the systems of land and labor, tracing how a single material sustains communities and informs a changing ecological future. WITH GRATITUDE AND DEVOTION A quiet and intimate account of devotion in Zaraza, Venezuela, Rafael Ayala Páez reflects on faith, memory, and community through photographs and words that honor the enduring power of small gestures. SILVER AND BREATH Within this fragile space between looking and being seen, Eva Christina Nielsen has developed a practice that is both restrained and deeply attentive. RUPTURE REPAIR REMNANT In this reflection on rupture, Donna Bassin invites us to consider how grief settles into the body and the image, and how the slow work of witnessing becomes a form of repair. DELTA DUSK John Agather weaves image and text into a single current, tracing how music, memory, and daily life continue to move through the Mississippi Delta. SILENT BEAUTY Tamara Quadrelli photographs the world by slowing down inside it. There is no rush to explain what we are seeing. The pleasure comes from staying with it. SOLITUDE UNDER A TECHNIFIED SUN Tracing the space between movement and stillness, Héctor Morón reveals a city that persists as human presence slips by. 4320 MINUTES WITHOUT COLOR Moving between photography and narration, Mohammed Nahi traces a period in which sight could no longer be assumed as reliable, and attention shifted toward memory and duration. THE PAINTED VILLAGE OF LABANDHAR Anjan Ghosh’s photographs carry us to Labandhar, where painting becomes language, tradition stays present, and art grows through shared ground. ORDINARY GRIEF What endures when everything else is uncertain? Through photography, Parisa Azadi asks us to see Iran not as story, but as feeling. THE EVERYMAN Eva Mallis uncovers the quiet strength of overlooked lives, capturing everyday encounters in Mumbai’s industrial districts as intimate portraits of labor and resilience. IN BETWEEN LIFE AND AFTER In Cairo’s City of the Dead, families carve out ordinary lives among centuries of tombs — Paola Ferrarotti traces the fragile line between memory and survival. UNFIGURED Nasos Karabelas transforms the human body into a site of emotional flux — where perception fractures and inner states become visible form. VISIONS OF ICELAND FROM ABOVE Massimo Lupidi takes flight above Iceland — capturing nature’s abstract brushstrokes where land, water, and sky blur into poetic visions beyond the ordinary eye.

PICTORIAL STORY THE RED POPPY AND THE SUN Through lyrical visual storytelling, Mei Seva’s work between the personal and the political, the living and the residual, the intimate and the historical. August 24, 2024 PICTORIAL STORY photography MEI SEVA story MEI SEVA SHARE Facebook X (Twitter) WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Copy link Mei Seva works as a storyteller, using photography to examine the layered narratives of human experience, migration, and socio-political change. Born in Elbasan, Albania, her practice is shaped by the experience of displacement, an understanding that informs the way she approaches people, place, and memory. Now based in New York City, Mei’s work engages contested histories and social narratives, attending to what is often overlooked or obscured. She considers how socioeconomic and political forces shape communities over time, with a continued focus on Albania. Her photographs are marked by a restrained palette and a close, intimate gaze. Graduating with a combination of Peace and Conflict Studies and Art from Hampshire College in Massachusetts, her academic background informs the conceptual framework of her practice, extending its concerns beyond representation. Her 2022 outdoor installation, funded by the Amherst Arts Council, reflects an engagement with public discourse, bringing together refugee narratives through photography. The question of heritage remains central to Mei’s work, shaped by Albania’s political and economic conditions. Through family histories, she traces broader shifts in the country’s recent past, from the fall of communism to the effects of capitalism. In her ongoing project, shot on 35mm film, Mei works through images that connect personal and collective histories, tracing continuities across generations within a changing landscape. There is one photograph imprinted in my brain of my grandpa. The photograph was taken the day I left Albania for America when I was six years old. I am sitting on his lap outside the airport, and he is wearing sunglasses that hide his red eyes, red from the tears. Despite being thousands of miles apart from them for most of my life, my grandparents have been a guiding force in my life, serving as parental figures despite the geographic, cultural and, at times, linguistic, barriers between us. Albania, a small Balkan country, is one of the most economically disadvantaged countries in Europe and has faced a mass exodus of people in the past three decades. The Albanian diaspora, estimated at 8 million, is larger than the population of the entire country, estimated at 2.8 million. Nearly every family has been touched by migration – my grandparents have faced the pains of immigration and family separation firsthand, having both of their children and all three grandchildren leave Albania. Touching on themes such as immigration, the legacy of communism, and the impacts of capitalism, my long-term photography project is a visual diary of Albania’s past and present, 35 years after the end of communism, through a personal lens. Rooted in family histories, the work explores the residues of the past and political systems, and how ideology leaves its mark on land, bodies, and collective experiences. © Mei Seva © Mei Seva © Mei Seva © Mei Seva © Mei Seva © Mei Seva © Mei Seva © Mei Seva © Mei Seva © Mei Seva © Mei Seva © Mei Seva © Mei Seva © Mei Seva © Mei Seva © Mei Seva © Mei Seva © Mei Seva © Mei Seva © Mei Seva © Mei Seva © Mei Seva In summary, Mei Seva’s body of work reflects the strength and complexity of human experience in the face of migration and societal upheaval. Through her photography, she goes beyond documentation and offers a thoughtful examination of Albania’s history and its effects on future generations. Her work sheds light on the unseen threads of displacement and identity but also encourages viewers to engage in a larger conversation about the impact of political and economic forces on individual lives. Her work serves as a reminder of the ability of art to bridge gaps, provoke introspection, and foster a deeper understanding of the human experience. view Mei Seva's portfolio Website >>> Instagram >>> The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to the author/s, and are not necessarily shared by The Pictorial List and the team. read more stories >>> THE LIFE WITHIN THE MOUNTAIN Ten years after first seeing Larung Gar, Jing Wei returns to a changed mountain, finding continuity in faith, memory and the lives held within it. PROSCENIUM GHOSTS Said Manseur honors these young actors, their courage, and the unseen work they give to keep theatre alive against the odds. REGINA: BOARDING SCHOOL LIFE AND DREAMS A boarding school room becomes the frame for Cleopatra Joint’s portrait of ambition, instability, and a young woman’s search for freedom. LIFE ALONG THE RIVER Along the Hooghly, Shubhodeep Roy photographs Kolkata through faith, labour and memory, revealing a city shaped by water, inheritance and shared life. A HOME OF MEMORIES AND THE PRESENT Davide Santangelo returns to his family home by moonlight, tracing how absence, memory, and love continue to live within place, objects, and atmosphere after loss. THE PULL OF THE EARTH This is more than a record of rural Bengal. It looks at the bond between Sayan Biswas and the place that shaped him, even after distance has changed that relationship. ARE THOSE WINDS Along Istanbul’s northern edge, Ci Demi photographs the last water buffalo herders as they keep working, remembering, and staying put while the city closes in. COLORS OF HÜZÜN Through fragments and gestures, Pedro Vidal traces Istanbul as shared melancholy lingers in everyday life, the city unfolding slowly and refusing to settle into a single, definitive understanding. OUT OF PLAY An exploration of abandoned interiors in which Marco Lugli examines how objects, light, and space carry memory beyond human presence, establishing absence as a condition of material continuity rather than loss. REIMAGINING TALIESIN Form gives way to flux in Amy Newton-McConnel’s photographs, where architecture unfolds as a field of shifting relations and perception moves with light, geometry, and time. WHERE THE MUSIC BEGINS Before the strings, Jeevan Akash Jayavarthanan leaves the movement of the street for the rhythm of the workshop, where time holds, hands work, and each moment forms what will later be heard. LAND, LABOR, AND THE GOLDEN FIBER In West Bengal’s jute fields, Rajesh Dhar examines the systems of land and labor, tracing how a single material sustains communities and informs a changing ecological future. WITH GRATITUDE AND DEVOTION A quiet and intimate account of devotion in Zaraza, Venezuela, Rafael Ayala Páez reflects on faith, memory, and community through photographs and words that honor the enduring power of small gestures. SILVER AND BREATH Within this fragile space between looking and being seen, Eva Christina Nielsen has developed a practice that is both restrained and deeply attentive. RUPTURE REPAIR REMNANT In this reflection on rupture, Donna Bassin invites us to consider how grief settles into the body and the image, and how the slow work of witnessing becomes a form of repair. DELTA DUSK John Agather weaves image and text into a single current, tracing how music, memory, and daily life continue to move through the Mississippi Delta. SILENT BEAUTY Tamara Quadrelli photographs the world by slowing down inside it. There is no rush to explain what we are seeing. The pleasure comes from staying with it. SOLITUDE UNDER A TECHNIFIED SUN Tracing the space between movement and stillness, Héctor Morón reveals a city that persists as human presence slips by. 4320 MINUTES WITHOUT COLOR Moving between photography and narration, Mohammed Nahi traces a period in which sight could no longer be assumed as reliable, and attention shifted toward memory and duration. THE PAINTED VILLAGE OF LABANDHAR Anjan Ghosh’s photographs carry us to Labandhar, where painting becomes language, tradition stays present, and art grows through shared ground. ORDINARY GRIEF What endures when everything else is uncertain? Through photography, Parisa Azadi asks us to see Iran not as story, but as feeling. THE EVERYMAN Eva Mallis uncovers the quiet strength of overlooked lives, capturing everyday encounters in Mumbai’s industrial districts as intimate portraits of labor and resilience. IN BETWEEN LIFE AND AFTER In Cairo’s City of the Dead, families carve out ordinary lives among centuries of tombs — Paola Ferrarotti traces the fragile line between memory and survival. UNFIGURED Nasos Karabelas transforms the human body into a site of emotional flux — where perception fractures and inner states become visible form. VISIONS OF ICELAND FROM ABOVE Massimo Lupidi takes flight above Iceland — capturing nature’s abstract brushstrokes where land, water, and sky blur into poetic visions beyond the ordinary eye.