Roland Barthes attributes to Émile Benveniste the idea that language is the only semiotic system able to interpret another. We cannot analyse pictures with music or music with pictures. All other arts become comprehensible only when transferred into the medium of the spoken or written word. Perhaps evidence for this is the interpretative closure that the aphorism brings to the visual image.
 
We can frame the corollary question around Tara Yarte’s beautiful pictures of the natural world and human embellishments on it. Do the remarks she appends inject the photographic material with meaning, or do they narrow the range of viable interpretations? We could also couch the same problem as an issue of analytical liberty: to what degree do these aphorisms and quotations wrestle interpretive authority from the viewer?
 
Tara’s photography reifies the interesting hybridity that occurs when these discrete signifying systems come into necessary contact.
 
Website: Society6.com/TaraYarte 

When I last considered astrophotography on this blog, I looked at NASA’s majestic images of the sun during a coronal mass ejection. Truth is, however, that you need not belong to a multi-million-dollar space programme to capture beautiful images of the night sky. It is much more about timing and enthusiasm – two qualities that, taken together, have enabled Violet D’Art to produce the images above.
 
These photographs depict the Perseid meteor shower of 2012. This particular cosmic event occurs yearly and reaches its peak between August 9 and 14, although it begins in the middle of July. In some of these photos you can see a ‘shooting star’. Put thus in its colloquial form, it retains its magical connotations. But to restate in scientific language, these streaks of light are merely the trail of glowing pieces that the meteoroid sheds as it enters the earth’s atmosphere and begins to disintegrate.
 
It is always a pleasure to come across photographers who are interested in the natural world and take pains to capture cosmic events in action.
 
Website: Society6.com/morningvioleta 

At just 16, Finnish photographer Mikko Puttonen already had an admirable portfolio and fan base under his belt with frequent magazine features and a very successful fashion and photography blog. Mikko gained popularity by frequently posting highly professional images of his fashion style on famous fashion website lookbook.nu. Modeling his clothes, styling himself and taking photos of himself, he displayed just how passionate he was about all of the areas surrounding photography. Now at the age of 18 (with over 7,000 fans on lookbook.nu), he is pursuing his dream of becoming a professional fashion photographer.
 
Growing up in Petäjävesi, a small village in Finland, he was surrounded by forests and lakes. This really translates into his work which has a strong natural, ethereal feel to it. There is also significant contrast in his work between innocent beauty and dark mystery. For such a young photographer, his work portrays a wide range of emotions and experiences. Taking inspiration from other photographers was also key in the development of his style. “My new favorite is photographer Brooke Shaden. Her pictures are filled with different emotions, they make me speechless every time. Most of all I like her gloomy pictures. I can’t stop staring at them.”
 

 
Mikko’s photography has the essence of a photographer who has never been told “how to take a picture”. He bought his first camera at 14 and grasped the skill through experimentation, working in a way that felt natural to him. He is clearly very passionate about his work as he dedicates himself to creating new photo shoots on a daily basis: For his blog, his portfolio and his fans. “I would really like to become a professional photographer. But I won’t lose my passion! Passion creates successful photographers.”

 
Website: Mikkoputtonen.com
 
Quotes: Culturestarved.com 

Photography is a craft we ordinarily associate with a maker, or, more specifically, a photographer. This word ‘photographer’ is loaded with artistic connotations. Long gone are the days when photography was not considered an art; gone are the days when being a photographer was simply deemed the job of clicking a button on a camera. Photography is now a major part of what we now think of as ‘art’, and it would be a crime to define the images above as anything less.

They were taken by ‘full-time traveller and explorer’, Kevin Russ on his journey through the American West.
His work has been featured on the Daily Mail website, and has been a hit on tumblr. Kevin’s blog is filled with questions from fans of his photography, asking anything from what he considers to be the most important thing to think about when shooting landscapes to advice on which places to visit in the American West.

Surprisingly, Kevin’s photographs are not taken with any kind of specialist camera equipment. Rather, it was the iPhone through which these spectacular images were captured – no special lenses required. It is surprising, in part, because of their exceptional high quality, but also because we do not ordinarily identify the iPhone with artistic equipment. We’ve all seen those Instagram photos adorning Facebook and Twitter posing as artistic photography. To tar Kevin’s work with the same brush, however, would be wrong. It is clear from Kevin’s answers on his tumblr page that he knows what he is doing when it comes to photography:

Anonymous asked: How do you achieve sky that isn’t white and blown out? I just got my iPhone by anytime I touch on screen to adjust the exposure it just changes back to what it was or way too dark.

Kevin answers: Easy, two ways. Use even light like just before the sun comes up or just after it goes down, or overcast. You might have a slightly underexposed foreground but it’s easy to fix that in post. If you do have a blown out sky, use the “Russ” filter in the Afterglow app and it will turn light grey. You can also use the highlights tool to do the same thing. And in the vscocam app, use filter “04” or “05” and your whites will turn grey. 

Like most photographers, Kevin uses post-production to create the final visually stunning impact of his images. Unlike most photographers, however, Kevin doesn’t use Photoshop, but iPhone apps.

Who knew you could create art from a phone?

Blog: Kevinruss.tumblr.com
To buy Kevin’s work go to: Society6.com/KevinRuss 

Arde

La manana

Luna Llena

Preterito Perfecto

Luis González has a penchant for capturing nature when it is most awesome. Although many of his pictures focus on complex, intricate flowers and tremendously deep and colourful skies – images common to any regular appreciator of the photographic object – he extracts from them a new vivacity, as if we encounter this sky, this flower, this landscape for the first time, our critical faculties refreshed.
 
However, I do not wish to downplay the breadth of González’s work, which invokes a multitude of themes and is not content to justify itself with mere aesthetic beauty. ‘Pretérito perfecto’, for instance, comments bleakly on the solitude of the human subject – a message in stark contrast with these other images of the sublime, which make us forget our own transience as we reflect instead on the vast and the unending.
 
Compare that photograph with ‘La mañana’. This one, we will agree, is invested with an almost sanguine quality. As the child explores the colourful but antiquated street, the image expresses hope within novelty. González is able to resurrect from even the most recognisable scenes and structures a fresh interest.
 
Website: Society6.com/unaciertamirada

Ontario-born photographer and artist Amy Friend takes inspiration from many different forms. Her most recent work named “Dare Alle Luce” (an Italian phrase used to describe the moment of birth) took inspiration from this phrase, quite literally giving new life to old photographs. By altering vintage images, allowing light to pass through them, Amy Friend managed to reincarnate a collection of almost celestial images that echo history and embody the emotions behind them. Her work has an eerie silence that sets her apart from other photographers; which is why it is so successful.

 
Another great inspiration to Amy Friend is her family and its past. Her work tells personal stories and focuses on objects that have been in her family for many generations. “Throughout my life I have been surrounded by the accumulated possessions of deceased relatives.” One of her photographic collections “Soon This Space Will Be Too Small” featured and was inspired by the nightgowns and bedding that had once belonged to her Grandmother. This relationship between person and object is portrayed in her photography resulting in a powerful and moving collection of images. “The worn areas, marks of where her body had been emit an aura of her presence.” 
 
All of Amy Friend's photographic collections emit an aura of her past and personality and are all equally beautiful and moving.
 
Website: Amyfriend.ca 

I am a Photographer currently studying at Winchester School of Art.  My work is driven by my interest and passions outside of photography such as shows I have seen on television, places I have visited, books I have read and fond memories and perceptions from my childhood. 
 
In November of last year I worked on my first still-life project using photography within a studio to transform an existing object into something else.  Taking inspiration from ‘The Deep’, an episode from the BBC’s Blue Planet, I wanted to recreate a world I dream to one-day photograph, the ocean.  In this world countless species of strange, alien-like aquatic creatures float in a dark abyss untouched by sunlight. 
 
Using a mesh of wire I found in a scrap yard, I transformed it into a variety of shapes, some reflecting creatures I had studied, others being my own creations.  The result is a series of six photographs, three depicting a jelly I recreated and three depicting my own ‘creatures’ of the deep, which I have named Crepusculum.  From a distance the photographs show these creatures, floating endlessly in a dark world, but up close you begin to see their true form and identity. 

Blog: Jagobells.tumblr.com  

Last year in FUSSED we examined the extreme ends of the photographic spectrum. On the smallest level we dissected the individual of portraiture, and on the largest we stood in awe at the beauties discoverable in astrophotography. But if this breadth of study has rendered one common factor, it is that photographers are always prepared to question how their apparatus relates to the world it reproduces. We might say that, as it reaches into new domains and works with new raw materials, the subtle admission of formerly unknown limits and theoretical boundaries is inherent in the photographic act itself. And it is because of, not in spite of, this equivocal and slightly misaligned connection with the object world that photography is such a profound, articulate, and above all interesting medium. The artists I have chosen below are interrogators both of the world and of their art. They promise to intrigue us well into 2013.

 
 
Mark Giarrusso

 
I’d like to begin with someone whose work I looked at last year. What impresses me most about Mark Giarrusso is how, by limiting the retrospective editing of the picture, he leaves intact its intrinsic surrealism. Better than so many of his contemporaries, Mark exposes the fissures and abnormalities that subsist everywhere in reality without artificially emphasising any feature or object in the frame. What results is an image suspended between the natural and the absurd, and the experience is always memorable.
 
To see more visit: Society6.com/markgiarrusso

 
 
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

 
The uses of astrophotography extend far beyond the science classroom. The technological achievements behind the twin disciplines of spaceflight and photography come together in this genre to represent perspectives that most of us will never witness first-hand. The popular attraction to photography relies on the medium’s ability to pick out or accentuate what we otherwise miss with the eye, and this image of the earth, as many other photographs on the NASA Goddard Flickr, is therefore the extreme expression of what all pictures do to a greater or lesser extent. As our contact with areas of the spectrum otherwise invisible to us increases, as light reaches us from ever farther away, photography encroaches on an ever greater region of the universe. Following the NASA Flickr throughout 2013 is both a creative and a cognitive decision.
 
To see more visit: Flickr.com/photos/gsfc

 
 
Cassia Beck

 
Cassia Beck’s images exemplify one of photography’s most powerful effects: the rearrangement of real subject matter into imaginary forms. Take the picture I have chosen, ‘Traffic Jam’. Here the sensuously humdrum and dull experience of being caught in gridlock transforms into a curious object of interest. By photographing small cars used in a child’s play, Cassia encourages us to see beyond the narrowly personal insult we feel when stuck in traffic and begin, instead, to glimpse a certain comedy behind our collective failure to get from A to B.
 
To see more visit: Facebook.com/cassiabeckphotography
 
 
Zero Division

 
Zero Division is a young photographer, but in his work there are already signs of a nuanced and genuinely original approach to the art form. His images cover a range of subjects, from recognisable signifiers of national identity to more anonymous portrayals of smaller social groups. Also witness the image I have chosen, in which he affirms his aptitude for capturing the beautiful.
 
To see more visit: Society6.com/FacesInTheHall

 
 
Mina Teslaru

 
Last but by no means least, Mina Teslaru is another prospect for next year. One thing we can be pretty sure about of the future is that we will long for the past, and Mina’s photography consists of a wonderfully nostalgic property. As Mina says on her website, her project focused on Coney Island recalls her childhood memories of the Black Sea. This association reminds us of the nostalgic mode of much (post)modern imagery, which recalls the structure of former experiences but with a subtly altered subject matter. In this sense, she is truly a photographer of the present day.
 
Website: Minagraphy.com 

Name: Nathaniel Shields
Age: 21
Occupation: Photographer
Inspiration: Philippe Halsman, Doug Aitken, Akos Major, Josef Koudelka

If you follow us on Facebook, you might recognise Nathaniel’s name and work from our recent ‘Silence’ competition. Nathaniel, along with other entrant Xana Murell, won the competition in which we challenged artists, photographers, illustrators, and designers alike to create a work which would encapsulate ‘Silence’. Something normally signified by sound, we were intrigued to see just how entrants would convey silence in a visual format…

How would you say your winning entry for our Facebook competition encapsulated the theme 'Silence'?

I have always imagined that the smoke looks like a person’s noiseless cogitation. When you find yourself in a silent situation the brain tends to fill itself inanely with thoughts and inner monologue as if to drown out the silence. 

Much of your work includes some kind of X-ray aesthetic. Why is this?

The aesthetic came from the multiple-exposure technique; where, multiple photographs are essentially overlaid to create one image. By over-exposing parts of the photographs, I was able to achieve a selectively layered effect that often resembled x-rays. I was particularly interested in how the combining of often juxtaposing images created a stronger narrative in the final photo.

What is the thing you most enjoy about photography?

How easy it is to experiment with. It’s not like a painting, where hours are invested in a single image that may turn out to be rubbish. I can take hundreds of photographs, adapting and fine-tuning as I go.

Describe your style in three words.

Ephemeral, minimal and explorative.

What is your method of working? How do you get from concept to finished product?

I don't really have a concise method. Projects usually start as an idle curiosity that I’ll experiment with and expand on. I very rarely start with a fully formed idea or concept that I wish to convey. The multiple
exposure project for example started just as an experimentation of the technique itself, and developed with no foreseeable goal as I pushed the technique as far as I could.

What are your hopes and dreams for the future?

I hope I end up in some sort of creative career. Possibly, an architect but really I’d be very happy with any sort of creative lifestyle. 

It is clear to see that Nathaniel has creativity in bucketloads. His photography demonstrates not only a wealth of originality, but also a drive to challenge himself and experiment.

See more of Nathaniel’s work at: Flickr.com

Alexandra Valenti is a Washington-born, Texas-based artist who originally worked as a photographer’s assistant before making her own mark on the art scene. She has worked for a number of alternative fashion names including Free People and Neon Magazine, shot numerous lifestyle portraiture and landscape images and has designed unique album artwork.

A particular favourite of mine is a series of hand painted photographs that incorporate psychedelic designs with black and white photographs of free spirits that roam their wild surroundings. Her technical and creative brilliance lends an unearthly quality to the images of models, appearing within the frame as magical and nymph like in their extraordinary costumes.
 

 
Mainly shot on location, Valenti’s images transport you to the abstractive moments of dreams and hallucinatory visions, reworking the images of the hippy culture in its heyday for our contemporary pleasure. And whilst the visuals of her work do not appear loud or exaggerated, Alexandra experiments with a phantasmagoria of delicate colours and light that seems to communicate something wild and supernatural.
 
For more of Valenti’s inspirational art, visit her website: Alexandravalenti.com