A Photo Journal

Members Only: Take The Challenge With Me

This March we had the opportunity to hang out with photo editor and photographer Eva- Teréz, whose two roles mutually affect each other. Her sharp editor's eyes scour existing photographs for new stories and meaning. In this way, she gives us a different perspective and details that we might have missed if we just looked at the photos as a whole.

This month, our writer Karen Grace wrote about Katy Hessel's new art history book The Story Of Art Without Men. We haven't questioned art history in decades because it has been accepted as is. For decades, we haven’t questioned art history, it was accepted as is. However, Hessel zoomed in on art history books, just like Teréz did with her photos, and discovered blank pages…. pages that should’ve been filled with female artists names.

How many stories do we fail to tell?

I wrote the story Alice Was Going Down To The Beach For A Swim entirely from snippets of memory and details gathered from various points in my life, news pages, and culture. My mind became a scrapbook of memories over time.

When our writer and house photographer Kristina Aleksyniate introduced Eva-Teréz at the beginning of the month, she encouraged our paid subscribers to choose a few of their favorite photos and edit them. “Find an unexpected colour, invert it to film, use any social media program and make something new from it. Let your creativity explore turning familiar images into new visual creations.” 

After years of practice, I am quite good at editing words, but I wanted to take Kristina's challenge to see if I could edit an image and bring us another meaning or elicit a different feeling.

So, here are the steps I took:

1. I chose an insignificant photo, one I took from the car to send to my mother to show her spring in Stockholm. It’s not pretty, it’s not focused …. nothing … it was only meant to be a quick weather report because it had begun to snow fifteen minutes before.

Spring?

2. Duplicated the photo 4-5 times. Clicked on edit, and crop the image in my iPhone.