Swedish-born, San Francisco-based photographer Gabriel Isak shoots stylized photos filled with enigmatic symbolism and an enchanted ambiance. Solitary figures populate desolate nature scenes that seem to take place in the dead of winter. His color palette of black, grey, brown, and icy, cool blue underscores his work's dark mood. Take a look at some of his recent photos below.
Swedish-born, San Francisco-based photographer Gabriel Isak shoots stylized photos filled with enigmatic symbolism and an enchanted ambiance. Solitary figures populate desolate nature scenes that seem to take place in the dead of winter. His color palette of black, grey, brown, and icy, cool blue underscores his work’s dark mood. Take a look at some of his recent photos below.
Antony Crossfield, an artist based in London, manipulates his photographs to create new ways of looking at our natural forms. Series like “Second Skin” take the outer shell of the human body and pushes it outside of the boundaries of superficiality. It’s in these exercises that Crossfield aims to “to present the body not as a protective envelope that defines and unifies our limits, but as an organ of physical and psychical interchange between bodies.”
Young photographer Kevin Welsh explores the dark turns the mind can take with his recent body of work, which focuses on the theme of delusion. In his latest pieces, Welsh turns still photographs into hypnotizing GIFs filled with dizzying patterns meant to illustrate obsessions spinning out of control. "In isolation, the mind can move and believe many different things. Delusions manifest and become inescapable," wrote Welsh in an email to Hi-Fructose. "The removal of the figure is to show the idea of a person and to try to find understanding in delusion. Repeat patterns are seemingly never ending and are used to display the reaffirmation in our minds of the delusions we face." Welsh is currently completing his degree in printmaking at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and we look forward to seeing how his work develops.
You might get a jolt of déjà vu looking at Brazilian artist Lucio Carvalho’s photographic work. Significant images in his portfolio feature monuments of culture - a towering Tate, a sinewy Bilbao Guggenheim, a sun-reflected Louvre - contemporary institutions that have proved integral to the architecture of a city’s art scene. However, in each of these images, something is a little off – the usual foreground and background are hijacked with paraphernalia (shopping bags, STOP signs, yellow plastic chairs) that reveal no explicit tie to the museum or gallery. The images are both familiar and unfamiliar, not so much a trick of the eye as a trick of our cultural systems.
Polish fine art photographer Waclaw Wantuch presents the nude figure in unusual and surprising ways. The models in his highly stylized black and white photographs are captured in dramatic positions against a vacant background. Many times they are cropped and contorted in a way that is completely unrecognizable as human. Each model's body is tense with a compressed energy, where muscled limbs, perfect breasts and buttocks are bent in a way that is reminiscent of those seen on ancient Greek figures.
