2022 Nikon-NOOR Academy France

The third edition of the 2022 Nikon-NOOR Academy workshop took place in Paris, France. From April 11 to April 14, fifteen photographic practitioners joined NOOR authors Bénédicte Kurzen, Sanne De Wilde, Francesco Zizola, and NOOR’s creative director, Stefano Carini, for an intensive initiative focusing on new approaches and innovative practices in visual storytelling.

Participants engaged with presentations by NOOR, educators, and Nikon France; they explored storytelling devices concerning their own projects, participated in peer reviews, edited collections of imagery, and shared their work with the workshop.

The Nikon-NOOR Academy has been made possible thanks to the generous support of Nikon Europe. Below is a selection of work shared at the workshop in France.

Natalia Kepesz | Salome Jishkariani | Svetlana Talanova | Phyllis Wong | Francesco Andreoli | Luca Rotondo | Arianna Todisco | Tim Gassauer | Moses Omeogo | Mirko Viglino | Julia Albrecht | Antonio Rodriguez | Ivan Navarro | Viviana Peretti

Julia Albrecht

NO MEN’S LAND

The work floats between examining sociological, psychological, and gender-scientific research and an intensive preoccupation with personal experiences. It constantly draws from a profound curiosity for humanitarian issues and cultural phenomenons. It tells the story of struggles, failures, and successes during the journey.

Working with personal experience allows the project to emerge from memory. This is like a clinical process from an autobiographical reflection, requiring a close look to abstract it again. The way it is presented lets the viewer take a new look at the subject matter through uncertainty and find their memories again. Emotions will be aroused, through which further questions will open up.

Julia Albrecht

Julia Albrecht is a German-born fine art photographer. Her work examines the link between sociological and gender-scientific research and an intensive preoccupation with personal experiences. It constantly draws from a profound curiosity for humanitarian issues and cultural phenomenons. Her body of work touches the realms of life's paradoxical. Through the camera, she vividly tries to reach the mind and explore the depths of life and its' emotions. According to her, these topics are just everyday things we all have to get through. Her focus points oscillate between pain and joy, between letting life take one and taking life in. Her works stem from what she could run into growing up in a small village in eastern Germany: from everyday life matters like the horses, the hay, the scrapyard of her dad with hands full of motor oil, and rainbow reflections in a small corner to more dire local issues. These roots continuously influence her work, as does her love for Art, Psychology, Biology, and Gender Studies.

Tim Gassauer

EINIG: Territorium

The series "EINIG: Territorium" deals with the German subject of Heimat from a consciously critical perspective. Heimat is about questions of belonging, of being part of a bigger narrative, a cultural identity. However, these questions can be answered very differently at different times by different people. Therefore, the concept is extremely flexible and can include someone at one point in time and exclude them again at another point in time.

Constructions of Heimat and the mechanisms of exclusion and hierarchisation inherent in them are the central object of investigation in the images. In this way, a photographic examination of German fantasies of superiority, structures of violence in the past and present, and romanticised notions of Heimat occur.

This strategy is to find traditional notions of Heimat from the (violent) German past and then search for their equivalents or traces in the present. The aim is to explore how this results in interferences and connections.

The pictures show places where the Wehrmacht organised the Second World War, where right-wing underground networks committed targeted murders of people with a migration history, where Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels went for walks, and where thousands of Germans cheered on the war of aggression on Europe in mass conferences.

This and the in-between.

The images currently shown on this website are a curated selection showcasing a work-in-progress.

Tim Gassauer

Tim Gassauer lives and works in Berlin. He is currently studying at the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie. Before that, he studied communication and political science at the Freie Universität in Berlin. His bachelor thesis focused on the photographic representation of suffering in the context of constructions of “the other.” In his photography, he pursues a documentary approach and is increasingly concerned with social and political issues. One focus of his work is the investigation of the use and design of social spaces as well as the political discourses and positioning interwoven with them. Deep research into political, social and historical traces plays a central role in his approach.

Viviana Peretti

A PORTRAIT OF ABSENCE

An estimated 120,000 people have been victims of enforced disappearances in Colombia over the last sixty years. Nine out of ten of these individuals are still missing today. Impunity is the core of enforced disappearance. There is neither a body nor a motive and, thus, no culprit. It is a silent, almost invisible crime, far from the bloody visual imagery of any armed conflict. Most of the disappeared have been thrown into anonymous mass graves, rivers, sugar mills, and crematorium ovens. 

The world tends to associate forced disappearance with Southern Cone dictatorships, but rarely with Colombia where the number is three times as high, and the crime continues even today. Here, forced disappearance turned into one of the most effective social control strategies. The hidden outcome of a complex low-intensity war related to territorial control, illicit crops, and economic mega-projects (from hydrocarbons to dams, agribusiness, and tourism). The goal has been to wipe out any political opposition, and the crime itself, carried out by state agents, members of paramilitary and guerrilla groups, politicians, and civilians who benefited from the strategy. 

Besides collecting visual fragments of the crime in the landscape turned into a mass grave, I have photographed the altars that many families have built in their homes while hoping for their loved ones to return. I have also followed marches and urban interventions promoted by the relatives of the disappeared to demand for justice, and documented part of the Plan Cementerio program, implemented by Colombian authorities to exhume and identify thousands of Colombians buried in public cemeteries around the country. In many Colombian cemeteries, victims of extrajudicial crimes were, for decades, thrown into mass graves, unregistered, so that they could not be found and those responsible could not be judged. 

This eight-year project embodies the frustration of putting together a puzzle to build an impossible: A visual tribute to absence. 

Viviana Peretti

Viviana Peretti is an Italian freelance photographer based in Bogotá, Colombia. In 2000, after graduating with a bachelor's in literature from the University of Rome, Peretti moved to Colombia, where she completed a master's in journalism. In 2010, she graduated in documentary photography and photojournalism from the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. Peretti has received fellowships and awards from the World Press Photo, ICP, CNN, the Fondation Bruni-Sarkozy in France, FotoVisura, Sony, the WPO in London, L’École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie (ENSP) in France, the Camargo Foundation and the Bogliasco Foundation in the United States, and the Colombian Ministry of Culture, among others. Her work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Rita K. Hillman Gallery in New York, the MACRO Museum in Rome, and the Museo Archivo de la Fotografía in Mexico City, among others, and has been published by international media outlets including The New York Times, Newsweek, BBC, CNN, and Vice. 

In 2022 A Portrait of Absence won a honourable mention at the World Press Photo Contest.