Paper Journal photobook – announcing our selected photographers
We are pleased to announce the 4 selected photographers for our first photobook;
Zora J Murff, At No Point In Between
Eleonora Agostini, A Blurry Aftertaste
Rodrigo Sombra, Insular Nights: Invisible Gardens
Kovi Konowiecki, Borderlands
Each artist was chosen after submitting their work to our photobook call-out, which ran from 18 June – 6 July. We received over 400 submissions during the 3-week call-out and were really impressed by the overall standard of work.
Zora J. Murff is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Photography at the University of Arkansas. Zora received his MFA in Studio Art from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and holds a BS in Psychology from Iowa State University. Combining his education in human services and art, Zora’s photography focuses on how images are used to reinforce social and cultural constructs including race and criminality. His work has been exhibited nationally, internationally, and featured online including Aperture Magazine, The New Yorker, VICE Magazine, The British Journal of Photography, and The New York Times. In 2017, Zora was named the Daylight Photo Award Winner and was also selected as a LensCulture 2017 Top 50 Emerging Talent with his collaborative partner Rana Young. Zora’s first monograph, Corrections, was published by Aint-Bad Editions in 2015 and his second monograph, LOST, Omaha, was published by Kris Graves Projects in 2018. Both books are available for purchase through the links below.
Eleonora Agostini (b.1991) is an Italian artist based in London. She received her BA in photography from the Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan and she is currently completing her Master in Photography at the Royal College of Art in London. She works at the intersection between photography, performance and sculpture and her practice is driven by her interest in the reconsideration of everyday objects, surfaces and activities. Eleonora has exhibited in Britain, Italy and the United States. Recent exhibitions include There is No Threat, a group show that took place in New York, A Day Like the Others, a public installation in Greenwich in London, and A Blurry Aftertaste, as part of the Royal College of Art final show in London. Whilst her first projects explored the ideas of temporality and transition through the observation and documentation of public spaces used as intimate locations, in her more recent work Eleonora has moved her attention to the domestic space, used as a stage to understand how human experience is shaped and time is perceived.
Rodrigo Sombra was born in Ipiaú, Brazil, in 1986. His work has appeared in multiple publications in Brazil and abroad, including De Greif, This is Paper, Fotoroom, Folha de São Paulo, O Globo. In 2012, he joined the group exhibition “Uma Visita Ao Benin,” dedicated to the country of Benin, Africa, in the Afro Brazilian Museum, São Paulo. His work was also shown in group shows in San Francisco, California, where he lived from 2012 to 2015. Since his early childhood Sombra was raised in the city of Salvador. One of the largest Brazilian metropolia, Salvador is the city with the largest Black population out of Africa, what is key to Sombra’s work, which is attuned with the dispersion of African diasporic cultures in Brazil, Cuba and Benin. Sombra´s is also known for his non-conventional portraits of artists such as Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Agnès Varda, and Leonardo Padura.
Kovi Konowiecki (b.1992) was born in Long Beach, California. He holds a BA in Media Communications from Wake Forest University and an MA in Photography from University of the Arts London. After playing professional soccer in Europe, he turned to photography as a way to document the things around him and shed light on different aspects of his identity. Kovi was shortlisted for the 2016 Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize and was the first ever nominee to have two images shortlisted for the first place prize. He has also been featured and published on platforms such as i-D, British Journal of Photography, The Guardian and TIME, amongst many others.
We will be sharing more details of the photobook over the coming months, and our book will be available to pre-order soon.