Maria Clara Macrì questions the representations of femininity and Julien Hananel mixes travel with minimalism. Here are our latest readers picks.
Maria Clara Macrì
During her teenage years, Maria Clara Macrì started focusing on political and social questions. Her favourite subject? Genders. In 2012, she left Italy and moved to London. And, at the heart of the British capital, she discovered photography. Between 2015 and 2017, she travelled back to Italy, in Naples, and started a research project around female representation. “I began to spot women and photograph them in the street. Thanks to them, I would experiment the links between empathy, intimacy and representation”. The project is far from over. In 2018, Maria Clara Macrì decided to widen her field of study, and to include images showcasing the environments in which modern women would live their intimacy freely: their bedrooms. Several travels followed, to big cities such as New York, Los Angeles, London or even Paris to meet women from other cultures.
© Maria Clara Macrì
Julien Hananel
“Born in Paris in 1978 of an Argentinian father from Egyptian descent, and a French mother from Norwegian descent, I am fascinated by travel”,
Julien Hananel writes, on his website. It was in the family bathroom, turned into a makeshift laboratory, that the photographer started experimenting with the media. Then, the arrival of digital cameras acted as a stimulus. “There were no more limits to my creative mind, I would rework on my images to find their uniqueness. Today I work both on commissions and on my own pictures”, he adds. The artist views photography as a long journey. “A journey which started on my street corner, and is spreading endlessly”. His series Brut (Raw, ed.) is the result of his travels in a Parisian street, by the seaside or in the mountains, one common goal linking them all: “the hard and real contrast of light”.
© Julien Hananel
Cover picture © Julien Hananel
