Patricia Morosan Sun Stands Still [ EPF 2017 – SHORT LIST ] “Every photo is a ghost story.” The images in the photoseries “Sun Stands Still” were shot during the years…
The images in the photoseries “Sun Stands Still” were shot during the years 2014-2016, while traveling through my homecountry Romania, as well as through Poland, Portugal and Germany. But the concrete places dissolve in this work and they become my own personal metaphorical space. In this space and through this images, I tell stories both of intimate encounters, as well as from a brief glance at the little stories I met along the way, which may have happened, or will still happen while passing by. And in doing so, images came along and have been found (again); as if they could arise from my memories, hunches and dreams. The images in ‘Sun Stands Still’ are therefor seen as momentary reliefs, which may be found in reality as in a dream.
Mikael Owunna met and photographed more than 50 L.G.B.T.Q. Africans in 10 countries across Europe and North America, and the resulting images exhibit the power that comes from insiders documenting their own community.
When Mikael Owunna returned to his family’s home in Pittsburgh after finishing a Fulbright Fellowship in Taiwan, it was unsettling. He and his family were originally from Nigeria, where gay Africans like him were scorned and mistreated. While grappling with long suppressed anxiety and depression because of that cultural tension, he saw an exhibition of the work of Zanele Muholi, the chronicler of queer experience in South Africa.
