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Teru
Kuwayama is a documentary photographer, an artist, and a
nomad--and one sees all these facets coming together in a body of
work that includes some of the most haunting contemporary
photography we have seen. A native New Yorker, Kuwayama is to be
found traveling through the Middle East and Asia to wild remote
places or to the frontiers of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan,
traveling from the heights of the Himalayas through some of the
poorest regions in Asia. Always, he looks on these things with the
eye of the artist and poet.
Kuwayama
manages to elicit a soulfulness, an eerie beauty where one would
think there is none to be found. A very difficult thing to pull
off--his lens is always aesthetic and hones in on an inner essence as if
his camera says all is art then, even this devastation; he finds a
strange poetry even in sorrow or ruins. The quality of the light,
shades of gray that bring out some other dimension--they are
nothing like reality. Dreamscapes perhaps, for even in the ravages
of war and nature he chronicles there is an otherworldly
atmosphere. His work is primarily in black and white with a grainy screened
quality that emphasizes the timelessness of the ethereal light.
All this is usually achieved with the simplicity of his favorite
camera--a Holga--and he rarely uses a digital camera or artificial
lighting.
A
photojournalist who is often seen in the pages of Time and Newsweek,
he is also the co-founder of Lightstalkers--an online community of
globe-trotting photographers, travelers and journalists and a
platform to pool information and resources.
Teru
Kuwayama's work will be a part of the group show Battlespace:
Unrealities of War which showcases photographs from Iraq and Afghanistan and opens at
the Sideshow Gallery in Williamsburg on Saturday and runs through November
16th.
In
Kuwayama's work the edginess is in the content--the photography is
always poetry.
Discover:
Teru
Kuwayama
Visit:
Battlespace,
Sideshow Gallery, Williamsburg
On
the web:
Lightstalkers.org
Tags:
photography
travel
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