This week, Alexandra Serrano is guest-posting. The French-Mexican photographer holds a Master degree in Photographic Studies from Westminster University. Her work features in various international publications and has been exhibited in both group and solo exhibitions, besides that she is also part of the »Intimate Space« project organized by the Brazilian artist Georgia Creimer. Welcome, Alexandra! We are looking forward to your posts!

For the next seven days we will show Alexandra Serrano’s series »Between Finger and Thumb«. One photograph out of this series has been published in the fifth issue. Alexandra’s work will be exhibited at »Circulation(s) – festival de la jeune photographie européenne«, starting this saturday in Paris.

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with Luigi Vitali

»All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt. “The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world ‘picturesque.«

― Susan Sontag, On Photography

With whom [do] the adherents of historicism actually empathize[?] The answer is inevitable: with the victor. And all rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them. Hence, empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers. Historical materialists know what that means. Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

— Walter Benjamin (‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, p. 258)

As already announced, here’s Joke de Wilde’s last post with her analogue portraits. Thanks, Joke! Besides that a short notice concerning Lea Golda Holterman: Lea was fighting with technical problems so far, that’s why you didn’t hear anything from her side yet. That will change tomorrow at the latest.

This week, we like to introduce Lea Golda Holterman to you. The Jerusalem and Berlin based photographer was born in Haifa in 1976 and has studied at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. She has won several prizes and her work has been shown at single and group shows in Tel Aviv, Vienna, LA, Berlin and Amsterdam. Welcome, Lea! We are very much looking forward to reading your blog for the next seven days!

In this weeks portrait we show the series »Orthodox Eros« by Lea Golda Holterman. One image out of this series has been published in our latest issue, excerpts from the series were shown in Kunsthalle Vienna in the exhibition »No Fashion, please!« until the end of January. Besides that, Lea will be our second guest-blogger for the upcoming 7 days.

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