Yearly Archives: 2012

New Works on Paper

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For his latest series, Ion Zupcu continues his works on paper, manipulating sheets of black paper to create small sculptural objects which he then photographs in natural light. With these works, however, rather than sepia toning his prints, Zupcu is working in pure black-and-white.

Desperately Perfect

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Desperately Perfect focuses upon students at the renowned Vaganova Ballet Academy in St. Petersburg, Russia. From the age of ten until eighteen; twelve hours a day; six days a week; on the barre or in the classroom; students of this school spend the majority of their youth in fierce competition with one another. In their hope for fame, fortune, and a better life, these adolescents strive for a level of perfection that seems always just out of reach.

Rachel Papo, inspired by her own memories of nine years of ballet classes as a child, emphasizes the emotional side of these children’s experience.

Serial No. 3817131

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At the age of eighteen, Israeli girls enter a two-year period in which they will be transformed from girls to women under the Israeli Defense Forces, a rigorous institution where individuality comes second to nationalism. Rather than portraying the soldier as heroic, confident, or proud, Papo’s photographs reveal the soldier and the teenage girl in constant negotiation, caught between two extremes: a soldier who lives on an army base with hundreds just like her, and an individual who wishes to be noticed.

Photographer Rachel Papo, who was serial no. 3817131 during her service in the Israeli Air Force, considers these photographs a bridge between past and present–each is a self portrait that explores the complex range of emotions inherent in all adolescents, showing the vulnerable side of each soldier.