Ruth Van Beek
Ruth Van Beek's Hibernators
In the early 20th century, around the time cars filled our streets, planes found their way into our skies and cameras began to capture our daily life, we started to see space being cut up and transformed in art works. Inextricably linked to this rise of modern technology, collage art took on a new role. While once strictly fantastical, now collage could be utilized to visually pull together reality-based images of day-to-day life. In keeping with the fast pace of 20th-century life, multiple ideas could now exist within one frame.
This new way of creating photo collages took many forms in the past hundred years—seen most distinctly in the works of the Surrealists in the 1920s and the pop artists in the 1960s. Today's generation of photo collage artists use everything from found images on the Internet and historical reportage to references appropriated from mass global media. Dutch artist Ruth van Beek's newest book and installment of photo collages, Hibernators, represents this new direction of collage art.
Van Beek uses found photographs, amateur family photographs, newspaper clippings and magazine tears in her work, in which she tries to create something that never existed before. "I try to make the animals come to life again by cutting and folding the paper," she says. "I restrain them in a new shape. This way I turn them into creatures that are silent like stones, but are also showing a tension."
Van Beek's work represents a more controlled, more intimate breed of collage work. Hibernators cuts and folds common domestic pets and animals into creatures that exist somewhere between photography and collage. Through van Beek's handy work, the facial features of the animals are often removed—further abstracting them from a sense of space. With the loss of distinguishing features, the altered animals begin to take on new identities.
The Hibernators was published this month by RVB books.
Ruth van Beek graduated from the renowned Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2002. She has shown her collage work both in her native Netherlands, as well as throughout Europe and North America.
http://lightbox.time.com/2011/11/...
collage artist
Hibernators
Liz Hingley
mass global media
Religion Road: Liz Hingley's Under Gods
For photographer Liz Hingley, one of the most familiar locales was also one of the most uncharted. The images in her series "Under Gods" capture cultures from all parts of the globe, many in various states of religious practice. In one, a Jainist woman prays while wearing a mask over her mouth, preventing her from inadvertently breathing any microbes or insects in, which would go against her religion's non-violent beliefs. Another photograph shows three Catholic children, Polish immigrants, rehearsing carols. In another, a Hare Krishna trudges uphill, through the snow, to distribute books. Each photograph seemingly shows a different world, yet all of the images were shot along a single stretch of road in Birmingham, U.K.
Crammed along a two-mile stretch on Soho Road are more than 30 religious buildings in a city that is home to more than 90 different nationalities. Hingley grew up in Birmingham so she had personal knowledge of the religious diversity that existed in her hometown, which she was often reminded of whenever she returned. "I was going back to Birmingham and seeing this celebration among all this diversity and I thought that this was something that I wanted to look at," Hingley, the daughter of two Anglican priests, told TIME. And look she did, spending nearly two years capturing the practices and interactions of this multi-faith community. The result is the Under Gods: Stories From Soho Road series, which has been shown around the world and made into a book.
Though she was familiar with the area, having lived in Birmingham until she was 18, Hingley said she was caught off guard by the religious mélange the community held. "I had no idea that there were so many different religions and practices going on in just one street," she said.
It was a lot to document. A day of shooting could start as early as 5 a.m. meeting Hare Krishnas who gathered to chant, before she'd attend a lunch at the Vietnamese Buddhist temple and then move on to the park with members of the Jesus Army, an evangelical Christian movement. "It was a very difficult project to finish [each evening] because you're tired at the end of the day and you think, oh, I'll just see what that building is," said Hingley, who describes herself as "nosy."
That nosiness clearly paid off, however, as she captured some wonderfully intimate moments. Several photographs show the ways in which the different cultures overlap in the small community, as their paths frequently intersected. One photograph shows a young Muslim girl, cloaked in Islamic dress, speaking over the fence in her backyard to her Jehovah witness neighbors. Another shows a Jain schoolgirl, sitting on the floor reading in front of an Indian sitar while beside her poses another girl, her neighbor, in white ruffled Holy Communion dress.
For all of the stark contrasts that appear in the work, there's also a sense of ease to the images. Soho Road — which enfolds people of the Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Jain, Christian and Sikh faiths — appears as a cultural mosaic, with each set of traditions represented as a distinct part of the community's whole. Hingley said that the work has inspired her to continue the series in Paris, where she's just completed a show with Next Level projects, adding that she's interested in the experiences of religion in the secular state. She's also quick to point out that her series isn't about dogmatic beliefs, but rather how beliefs pervade people's lives. She claims that Stories From Soho Road was personal for her—a look at her own journey living in Birmingham.
"I don't feel that it's documenting religion or just that. I feel it's about many things. Religion is definitely a part of your daily life. It's everything," she said. "I wanted to show what it gives people and the beauty it can bring to people's lives."
Liz Hingley is a photographer currently based in Paris. See more of her work here.
Megan Gibson is a Writer-Reporter at the London bureau of TIME. Find her on Twitter at @MeganJGibson.
Hare Krishnas
Jesus Army
Megan Gibson
religion pictures
Pictures of the Week, November 18–25
From renewed riots in Egypt and Saif al-Islam Gaddafi's capture to the pepper spray outrage at University of California-Davis and the Kabaddi World Cup, TIME's photo department presents the best images of the week.
See last week's Pictures of the Week.
Athens Stock Exchange
Bangkok floods
car wreck
Chadian-Libyan conflict
Pan-Africanism
Reno fire
Saif al-Islam Gaddafi
Saif al-Islam Muammar Al-Gaddafi
Somali militia
Soyuz TMA-02M
Suk island