Aleix Plademunt Perez: My work reflects on different social attitudes, analyzed through the landscape. I am interested in the landscape when it has a direct relationship with the social, with us. I’m interested in analyzing the landscape from a present perspective, from the moment of history in which I am living. I’m questioning why I have found the landscape in this way, how we use it, how we move about in it, and what we understand by the term ‘landscape’. Dubai has had the privilege of being able to create a city from scratch, from nothing. The city has the space and money to enable it to realize the dreams of a society. The city speaks of the desires, hopes and habits of today’s society. A city was built by appropriating Western symbols and taking them to the extreme, to the limit. The result is a thematic and fictionalized city which in many cases borders on the absurd.

Selected by Marta Daho on July 19, 2010

“My son, there will be a post petrodollar economy in Arabia and it will be up to you create it.” That is what Sheikh Maktoum’s father said in 1990, shortly before his death, says Swiss photographer Florian Joye. “I chose the United Arab Emirates to work on, and especially Dubai, for a variety of reasons. After googling Dubai on the net, my curiosity and interest were drawn to the confusing mass of Dubai images that can be found there. The vast juxtaposition of virtual images, scale models and augmented reality of which there were many more than real pictures of Dubai is confusing. The idea of the city preceded its reality. My fascination for this new city caught between utopia and excessiveness, pride and seduction is the palpable reality of the purpose o f Sheikh Maktoum.”

Selected by Nathalie Herschdorfer on June 9, 2010

“In my photographs from the last few years, I have intervened upon the landscape, creating scenes or sets with a wide range of natural and manmade elements. In this way, amidst the sometimes oppressive vastness, I construct and photograph intimate spaces: some of them are metaphors for the painful desertification of the planet caused by man, while others work as ironic allusions to our relationship with the desert. The action I perform deals with reintegration: it’s a reflection on what the desert has lost, but also a way of restoring its ravaged memory through a personal intervention.”

Selected by Patricia Gouvea on June 1, 2010

Esteban Pastorino Díaz: “I wanted to create an ambiguous image that resembles the way we look at the scale models but which is actually a photograph of the real world. The main technical points that I defined for that were: the apparent short deep of field in the images, and the high point of view from which the images would be taken. The first effect is given by tilting the lens in relation to the film. For that I constructed a cardboard camera which has the lens in that position and fixed focus. To reach a high point of view, I use a kite that lifts the camera between sixty and four hundred feet up into the air.

Selected by Patricia Gouvea on May 31, 2010

Selected by Marc Feustel on March 30, 2010

Selected by Marc Feustel on March 26, 2010

My works aim for the reconsideration of disappearing things that are falling into oblivion, and emphasize the value of trivial things in our everyday life. The memories made by humans lie in between reminiscence and oblivion. They are blended inside the vagueness and illusions of the past. I wish to talk about how ambiguous and abstract a specific event or the past is. The images and texts I reconstruct are my desired illusions of the past as well as an outcome of structuring other’s memories, and a revised world.

Selected by Jeong Kim on March 13, 2010

Exactly what is it you are looking at when viewing Kevin Rekkers’ photographs? Is it China in Orlando, Orlando in China? It is clear that this is a place where two cultures meet, symbolically. Kevin found a derelict amusement park named “Splendid China,” where visitors could marvel at the wonders of China without having to fly to Beijing. Splendid China closed its doors in 2003. Kevin climbed through a hole in the fence and found a small world invisible to many.

Selected by Marga Rotteveel on March 5, 2010

Alejandro Cartegena focuses his lens on the development in Northern Mexico in a series of projects from which this portfolio is drawn. The rapid modernization and quick pace of pre-fab construction threatens not only local natural resources but also the traditional culture of the region.

Selected by Michael Itkoff on February 20, 2010

Zhao Liang’s photographs are abstract, beautiful landscapes which, upon closer inspection, depict the scenes that best represent the massive changes in Beijing: construction sites covered by green netting and drifting waste in rivers. With these photographs, Zhao Liang succeeds in creating subtle, yet powerful social commentary.

Selected by Three Shadows Photography Art Centre on January 16, 2010