Cave formations draw on the same principles, but they tend to be three-dimensional so usually include more depth. There is no sky and often no sense of place. Delano does not view this series as being in any way a comprehensive study of street prostitution—it does not try to explain the sociological or political reasons behind the phenomenon, nor does Delano suggest that his photos explain the lives of the women. “This is not as much a documentary project as a silent movie,” he says. “It is a drama play without dialogue. It is intended to raise more questions than deliver answers. Most people engaged in such work are not going to open up. Life can be that way. It can be exceedingly unfair but still there is a distinctive grace to these women.” HS: Because you use yourself as your model and main character, the process of your own aging appears in your imagery. How do you see age or aging as an element of your work? How do you feel that your art, your ideas, and yourself have evolved over time? Stan Douglas is an established artist who has been represented at Documenta, the Venice Biennale and has had exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, The Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid as well as at the DIA Center of the Arts in New York. Most of his video installations employ computers and multiple projectors with varying film or video length to overlap dialogue and action resulting in a wide variation of occurrence within a given storyline or situation. This multiplicity of perspective is central to Douglas’s work as he is constantly revisiting, recreating and uncovering implied and universal truths in a specific circumstance. Many of his videos last for several hours and provoke viewers to decide for themselves when they have comprehended the meaning or have become satisfied with a complete story which, as Douglas’ work reminds us, can never be fully complete and continues to evolve in waves of repercussion and new interpretation. FS: I think that a few decades ago, time and support was given to a journalist going to a place and understanding it from the ground up. Financial imperatives

The figure represented in Ana/chrony is neither erotic nor social. It is surely not political, but it looks nice. The figure we see in Hammam’s set is an allegory—I've found out—a representation of the ultimate truth, in the Arabic world. Her name is Al Haquiqa. It is said that by removing the veil of Al Haquiqa, a person will know the ultimate truth. She continues, “Eyes are also different and depending on the age, the health, etc, there are some things we have to battle. Like white rings around the iris, irises that aren't round (more like an egg shape, maybe it’s the eyeball itself), pupils that aren’t round, older eyes fade with age too. Who knew there was so much going on in there!” CM: In your panoramas, you play with multiple focal points and depth of field, thereby directing the attention of the viewer much like a film director. How did this photographic device evolve for you? What do you think it communicates? What do you hope the viewer experiences? In those performances where Soltau carries out the binding on members of her audience rather than herself, for instance Permanente Demonstration am 21.1.1976, questions arise as to issues of power, of victim and perpetrator, of deprivation of liberty, of reduction of identity. Hans M. Schmidt describes Soltau’s performances as acts of mummification, which on completion change the viewers’ perception of the participants. He suggests that from initially empathising with the increasing physical restriction of the participants, once the limit of the wrapping has been reached, the viewer feels “less a feeling of compassion than a relatively disinterested curiosity.” In this reading, issues of ‘otherness’ might be seen to arise once the body no longer looks as we expect it to. If it no longer fulfils our perceptions of the body because it fails to remind us of our own, or reminds us too much of what our own might look like in similar circumstances, for instance, bound, degraded and abject, then our reactions to it might be called into question. BR: I think you are right. The key word is respect, if I were disrespectful for five minutes I would take down my camera and stop. I have a very moral attitude about that. I push them or I can be a bit of a thief, but I am only a crook with crooks. I have to have someone strong and powerful in front of me.

GIGI STUDIOS AURORA TOSRTOISE

Earlier examples of this kind of approach may be found in the work of Aaron Siskind, Minor White, Andreas Feininger, Ernst Haas, and Heinz and Elizabeth Bertelsmann among others, but none of them seem to have traveled extensively in search of of unusual formations, as Simpson has been doing for over a decade.

For many years, Euro Rotelli had the need to express his feelings and emotions towards the phenomenon of immigration through photography. Not wanting to make a display of suffering and tragedy but more of hope and a successful living together. His new project started when an architect friend who lived in Paris suggested him to visit Saint-Denis and Aubervilliers, two districts that were protagonists of a phenomenon of constant change and movement.CM: I think that comes through and makes your work different from a regular fashion shoot. Your subjects do seem powerful and, like you said, in charge. There seems to be a respectful intimacy that comes through your images. Likewise, Shidomoto captures that separateness between one’s own mortality and the light that will survive it. To look at these photographic mayflies is to share in Shidomoto’s effort. We are “joyfully to see” as much as we possibly can—to embrace, if only for a moment, all those things which cannot last. I see Liulitun now through inri's eyes, its rambling, riot of greenery—vine tendrils reaching out into space, grasping for each other, like the new lovers united after a nine month separation of agonising, mute phone calls—and bohemian ambience offering a delicious space in which to breathe freely. I see the sensuality of their half-eaten dragon fruit, suggestive, moist and magenta-skinned; the shy declarations of their bare feet touching; inri's wonder at the unfamiliar foods in local stores, the rows of strange meats in plastic wrap, culinary mysteries to lay on their table; red roses, hot crimson and belligerent with fragrance; carnal-ethereal moments of the sort we pray never to end, those moments of corporeal discovery in which the tangled limbs of self and other become momentarily indistinguishable, and in the eyes of one's mate you see your own soul; the journeys and homecomings; the mundane rituals of the everyday that make the string of moments hold together in the irreducible chain of subtle repetitions and variations that you come to call your life. DH: In this case maybe it’s not that complicated. I think that many of us, myself included, are continually searching for “something”, be it love, friendship, community, family, sexual fulfilment or material gain. As a gay man, much of my life, especially in my early years, was spent searching for an identity that was acceptable to both society and myself. Sex has always been complicated and often dangerous. It goes without saying that often times when we finally get what we think we need…it leaves wanting for more. It’s our nature.