Samantha Casolari: I Saw a Cloud this Morning

by heartbeat

 «I Saw a Cloud this Morning is a series of images of those moments when I felt completely entranched with the world, where the world in its own natural magic amazed and hypnotized me. They are images taken on the boundary between dream and waking, when your psyche behaves like being mesmerazed, and is allowed to take those magical flights towards your inside as well as towards the other outside. My universe is a place that amazes me as it had when i was a child, a place afraid of the the general lack of awareness towards naked beauty and the «spirits» that populates the earths. It shows me the world as the magical stage it is, bewitched, fairylike, and life as a cosmic fable»

Samantha Casolari is an Italian photographer based in NY. She has been working as free-lance photographer for the past three and a half year. With mainly focus on documentary stories and portraits and shoot for magazines such as Vogue Man, Vanity Fair, Flair, GQ, New York Magazine, City Magazines, the Independent UK, Vice.

Brenda Ann Kenneally: Upstate Girls

by heartbeat

Kenneally's photo essay «Upstate Girls: What became of Collar City» documents the coming of age of a group of young women in Troy, New York. It is a honest view of poverty, dysfunction and teen pregnancy, but also the search for love and survival in lower working class America. Kenneally was born here, and the story she documents could have been her own.

- Growing up as a young girl in this surrounding, I think it is important to have a healthy amount of «fuck-you-ism». A certain arrogance without being disrespectful. Some people come to this world with the knowledge that there will always be a free seat for them. It was not my case. I always felt I had to struggle to deserve that seat, Kenneally said when visiting Oslo in February.

- But all humans are equal, why be afraid of shaking hands with other people? If you have the basic experience of equality, I guess you don't need that «fuck-you-ism», she adds.

Kenneally fled the Troy neighbourhood at 16, and settled in Florida where she found photography. Through her intimate long-term projects, Kenneally forces the viewer into a reality most people don't want to see. Social issues that intersect where the personal becomes political.

- I don't believe in the American Dream, but I am definitively a dreamer, Kenneally says.

Brenda Ann Kenneally has received numerous prestigeous awards for her work, including a Canon Female Photojournalist Award, a Getty Images Grant for Editorial Photography and a first prize for «Upstate Girls» in World Press Photo.

Her book and web publication MONEY, POWER, RESPECT; Pictures of My Neighbourhood also won numerous awards.

Through Kenneally's web publication The Raw File and Upstate Girls, you can see more of her great and important work, both pictures and movies.