Sabrina Gaudio (The Netherlands) has attended the URBAN AND INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPES workshop with Mark Power.
I was born in 1982 in Roosendaal, The Netherlands. I started practicing photography as a persistent youngster, when I got introduced in the surreal world of photographers as Ed van der Elsken, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa. Inspired by these grandmasters, I recorded many friends on film, thanks to my analog, almost antique Minolta camera. www.sabrinagaudio.com
Encouraged by my environment I started a Fine Arts study at Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, but soon changed to The Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague to dedicate my life to the camera by starting a study in photography. After graduation I started traveling all over the world, accompanied by my camera and a backpack. Later I started a parttime study at Fontys School of Arts in Tilburg, to become a teacher in Fine Arts. I am currently working as a freelance photographer, for several clients among which Dutch newspapers BN/DeStem and Brabants Dagblad, Chamber of Commerce South West Brabant, culinary magazine Hap&Tap Magazine and lifestyle magazine Qaviaar Magazine. Also I am working part time as a teacher in photography at Grafisch Lyceum Rotterdam, The Netherlands, a university in media and design. As a photographer, but also as a teacher, I strive to continue developing myself in the photography field. Keeping myself challenged is one of my main reasons to participate in this workshop. I have practiced various styles of photography, among which fashion, portrait and journalism. Since two years I also started a career as a writing journalist for several magazines. But I continue pushing my limits… Currently I am working on a project on urban photography in London. This master workshop will absolutely contribute to this new exciting challenge. You can describe my style of photography as natural and genuine. www.sabrinagaudio.com
MARTINE RAVACHE
Picture editor, France
Why is it good ? Straight on, I am assured that you do have a photographic eye. You see what has to be seen, without any problem. You even perfectly know the capacity of seduction of a photographic image. You perfectly master light and colors that you use with refinement. You even do a colorist work if we consider all the subtleties and nuances that you deploy. You process landscape exactly as you would do with a portrait, which gives an interesting approach, a bit cold but precise. For all those comments, your work as a very contemporary quality to it, where technique and concept seem perfectly over control (too much maybe?).
Why is it less good? Repetitive frameworks, systematic close ups don’t make out a language because things are less simple than that. The series you show may give an impression of quickly-reached limits. Does La Defense resume to a set of details? Difficult idea to communicate about a place that is before all a space, but let’s admit that this accumulation of details is a real point of view. First pitfall, it can be perceived as a facility, avoiding the real questions raised by the gigantism of the site. Second pitfall, it can create a confinement sensation. Confinement that touches equally the photographer and the viewer.
The ultimate risk (but is it a risk?) touches the decorative part. To be honest, you manage very well in this kind of decorative approach mixing in a interesting way shapes and volumes, the ordinary and the abstract.
It is one or the other: either you continue in this professional decorative field (I am picking this word in the good sense of it) that you perfectly control and you take the risk to “succeed” with facility or you take more risk, you are not afraid of making mistakes and you dare leave a field that is a bit scholar, you assume your mistakes that you’ll probably find helpful one day but not straight on…it is closely like a choice of life. In both cases, you have the talent maybe equal to the challenge.
