1 June 2022: 10×10 hosted a salon with photographers Alakananda Nag, Yelena Yemchuk and Rania Matar at dieFirma in Manhattan.
Alakananda Nag’s Armenians of Calcutta (self-published, 2021) is a book of photographs, text and rare archival material on the Armenian community of Calcutta who were the founders of the city as we know it today — a fact not widely known or accepted. Nag spent a decade on this work — researching, photographing, gathering previously unknown, unseen material, unique to the community and the city they helped build. Nag worked around the challenge of making this work from absence — of people, information, research material, reconstructing a reality, the memory of which is at best fractured. The book comes together seamlessly with an array of rich material to create a tableau of a very important community with an unparalleled contribution to an iconic city.
Alakananda Nag (@alkanag) is a photographer, archivist and writer. She graduated in Documentary Photography and Photojournalism from International Center of Photography in New York. Her first photobook, the self-published Armenians of Calcutta launched in February 2021 at Printed Matter’s Virtual Art Book Fair; the physical launch outside of India is at ICP’s Photobook Fest 2022. The book has been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum, SFMOMA and Caluste Gulbenkian Foundation among others. Nag is an Arts Practice grantee of the India Foundation for the Arts. She lives in Goa, India.
“Time is different in Odesa. It’s a city outside of time.” As a child growing up in Kyiv, Yelena Yemchuk was fascinated by the reputation of Odesa as a free place during Soviet times. The city seemed full of contradictions — “acceptance but also danger. A place of jokes and characters, populated by outlaws and intellectuals.” She first visited Odesa in 2003 and returned in 2015 to begin to photograph the city and its inhabitants over a period of four years. Odesa (GOST, 2022) is Yemchuk’s visual ode to the city.
Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, Yelena Yemchuk (@yemchuk) immigrated to the United States with her parents when she was eleven. She became interested in photography when her father gave her a 35 mm Minolta camera for her fourteenth birthday and she went on to study at both Parsons, New York and ArtCenter, Pasadena. Recognized for her surrealistic whimsy and dark romanticism, Yemchuk has exhibited both paintings and photographs in museums and galleries worldwide. She has shot for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Italian Vogue and others. Yemchuk’s previous books include Gidropark (Damiani, 2011), Anna (United Vagabonds, 2017), and Mabel, Betty & Bette (Kominek, 2021).
Rania Matar‘s She (Radius Books, 2021) focuses on young women in their late teens and early twenties, who are leaving the cocoon of home, entering adulthood and facing a new reality. Depicting women in the United States and the Middle East, this project highlights how female subjectivity develops in parallel forms across cultural lines. Each young woman becomes an active participant in the image-making process, presiding over the environment and making it her own. Matar portrays the raw beauty of her subjects—their age, individuality, physicality and mystery—and photographs them the way she, a woman and a mother, sees them: beautiful, alive.
Rania Matar (@raniamatar) was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. in 1984. As a Lebanese-born American woman and mother, her cross-cultural experience and personal narrative inform her photography. Her work has been widely exhibited in museums worldwide and is part of the permanent collections of several museums and institutions. A mid-career retrospective of her work was on view at Cleveland Museum of Art, Amon Carter Museum, and American University of Beirut Museum. Matar received several awards including: 2022 Leica Women Foto Project Award, 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in-residency grant and Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowships. Her previous books include L’Enfant-Femme (Damiani, 2016), A Girl and Her Room, (Umbrage 2012) and Ordinary Lives (Quantuck Lane Press, 2009).
A big thank you to Shiori Kawasaki, Victor Sira and Andrea Stern from dieFirma for hosting this salon.