Artist
Silvana Trevale
Silvana is a Photographer born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela. Her portrait based work is a fusion between documentary and fashion, where she explores her Latin American roots within both spectrums.
The escalating crisis in her home country of Venezuela has motivated her to produce Trevale’s ongoing recent piece “Venezuelan Youth”, which has been widely exhibited notably at her solo show at ThePrintSpace in London and at Vogue Italia’s Photo Vogue Festival this year. Through the progress in her MA, she has taken a closer look at the women of her family. As her work carries a nostalgic density towards her home and family, she returned to her childhoods memories and recent events. By collaborating with her grandmother Rosa and mother Maria, she explores the past of her great grandmother Cayetana. With the intention to celebrate her bravery as an indigenous woman and her roots. By, observing the Latin essence the women of her life grew up with.
Venezuelan Youth
Since 2017 I have returned to my home country of Venezuela every year, exploring the lives of the youth and their daily struggles. Traveling outside Caracas, the capital, I met a number of subjects and families who I shared time with in order to gain a more intimate insight into their realities. I initiated this project due to the frustration and anger I feel towards the current crisis in Venezuela. As well as a faint nostalgia towards a Venezuela that my parents once lived, yet one that myself and the young living in Venezuela today didn’t. What intrigues me are the children’s constant shifts from a state of playful naivety, hardening into a more rigid, stoic attitude to their lived realities. Not only are they confronting the extreme food and medicine shortages that have caused the death of many around them, but also the lack of opportunities, leaving little room for hope, except for the possibility of leaving the country. With the images, I intended to create an abstract calming state I imagine the young feel between their innocence and a seemingly inevitable premature maturation.
London-based Sophie Gladstone produces refreshingly honest work about her pursuit of cultural capital, through considered still lifes and self-portraits. She draws attention to society’s obsession with performance and perception of success, honing in on details of daily rituals and consumerism. Gladstone curates a duality in her aesthetic, which many might recognise and relate to in appreciation or distaste.
Studies in Huddersfield brought Silvana Trevale to the UK from Venezuela, where she was born and raised. Though the photographer has already seen notable success with her commercial work, her personal projects deserve equal recognition. Her ongoing series, Venezuelan Youth, captures the younger generation of her home country with a warmth that contrasts the social and political crisis currently unfolding there.
Billy Barraclough is a recent graduate from the MA photography course at University of the West of England, Bristol. In his tender black and white documentary projects, he captures moments of quiet contemplation with captivating sensitivity. The fact that he approaches his practice from a personal perspective is a token of his understanding of human connection and communication.
Another recent graduate, Tayo Adekunle completed a BA at Edinburgh College of Art this year. Placing herself in front of the camera lens, she directly confronts
photography’s dark history by recreating 19th century images of sensationalised Black bodies. Her work is as much an interrogation of dehumanisation, as a personal exploration of her culture, ancestry and inherited trauma.
Swiss photographer Matthieu Croizier completes our 2021 nominations. Taking inspiration from a variety of sources, which ranges from 19th century medical archives to David Lynch’s 1977 horror sci-fi Eraserhead, he uses his lens to explore queerness and his experience of it. For Croizier, photography gives him the space to understand his identity, the language of the queer community, and all the superficial social constructs that have been connected to them over time. It is an act of self-expression – literally and figuratively.