prism in IWA final for The Best Online Magazine

Good news! We are happy to announce, second year in a row, prism has found its way to La Grande Finale of the Irish Web Awards for The Best Online Magazine in the News and Media section! It is extremely rewarding to see our work being noticed and appreciated. Thank you to the 88 judges who judged the last round and warm congrats to all finalists!  See you soon at the big night!

Here are seven other great magazines in our extremely tough group: Totally Dublin, Irish Examiner, The Irish Times, Irish Independent, le cool Dublin, The Cork News and Fit Magazine.

California Über Alles - Steven Nestor

California Über Alles

Text and Photography by Steven Nestor
Originally published in prism #13

As with most people throughout the world - and maybe especially Anglophonic Europeans - the United States has been a continual, largely one-way, cultural and linguistic presence in our lives. Similar, I imagine, to that of the inhabitants of the known world in the time of the Roman Empire. When I was a teen Levi’s or Wrangler jeans were de rigueur. Hit music and especially films were almost exclusively American in origin. Later at university I took American history as a module every year. Whether it was to be loathed or loved I wanted to understand this country that had come to dominate our lives so completely.

California Über Alles © Steven Nestor

Finally in 2012 I got the chance to go to the United States on an 18 day vacation. Of course we were not visiting the whole country: it was just one part of one state. But it was California; one of the biggest and wealthiest of the states and the engine room behind the greatest projector of Americana.

This body of work came out of this journey and could be broadly defined as ‘travel photography’. However, it is not travel photography with the typical sole purpose of honouring or promoting key places, characters and rituals in the same way that a postcard might “sum up” a location. I suppose the core question surrounding travel photography is whether its superficiality allows for the revelation of anything insightful. By being so potentially “shallow” and literal, it often appears to offer no more than an exact reflection of a world we expect and desire: a globe squared and rationalized away while at the same time we are invited to “explore” and “adventure”. But how do you explore the explored? It seems to me that it can only be a profoundly personal experience and deep inner reaction to new surfaces, topographies, smells and sounds. In global travel today we are most likely only following the cartographer’s precision or the previous photographers’ multitude of findings.

California Über Alles © Steven Nestor

'Still, We Work', Gallery of Photography, 19th-26th October

National Women’s Council of Ireland (NWCI) will present STILL, WE WORK, an exhibition featuring artists Sarah Browne, Vagabond Reviews, Miriam O’Connor (prism #01) and Anne Tallentire. The exhibition has been devised as part of NWCI’s Legacy Project developed by project curator Valerie Connor for NWCI to mark their 40th anniversary year and is funded by the Atlantic Philanthropies. The artists were asked to reflect on contemporary representations of women’s work in the context of the centenary of the 1913 Dublin Lockout. They have responded by making new works addressing women’s experience of precarious contemporary working conditions and the invisibility of much of ‘women’s work’.

Untitled from Attention Seekers (2010-2011), Miriam O'Connor

STILL, WE WORK will be launched in the Gallery of Photography, Dublin, on October 18 and is open to the public from 19th to 26th October. Admission is free.

'Warsaw Photo Days' Festival is launched

Sarah Maple “Lollipop Lollipop“, 2011

First edition of Warsaw Photo Days Festival has been officially launched yesterday, Friday, the 4th of October 2013. In case you missed the news, here's a little recap. Warsaw Photo Days festival was initiated by its organizer, the Association of Polish Artists Photographers ZPAF Warsaw District in 2013. Its first edition will be held from October 4 to October 31, 2013 and is planned to be a place for meetings and presentation of various forms of photography, both from historical perspective and contemporary activities.

The Main Programme presented consists of three group exhibitions: "Female Metamorphoses of the Interwar Period" - a historical exhibition of Polish interwar photographs (curator: Magdalena Durda-Dmitruk), "PHOTO OBJECT" – an exhibition presenting the spatial objects created- with the use of photographs - between the '60s of the twentieth century and present days  (curators: Leszek Golec, Jagna Olejnikowska) and "Princesses" - a multimedia exhibition about the world of 'girlish' desires and fantasies depicted by contemporary Polish and foreign artists (curator: Katarzyna Majak, substan-tive consultant: Agnieszka Żechowska).

Zofia Rydet, Metamorphosis series, 1957-80,
courtesy of the Foundation of Zofia Rydet in Cracow 

The additional curatorial selection will review the most interesting photocasts of the recent years (curator: Andrzej Zygmuntowicz), as well as photographic workshops, meetings with authors and panel discussions.

There is a special highlight planned for the festival, an unique, in both concept and formula, Performative Symposius Gesture Towards Photography, during which the artists will partner with each other in order to exchange ideas and co-create photographic dialogue. The main idea is to investigate, describe, and above all, to "demonstrate" the visual and practical ways of expressing thoughts and "show" how the imagination and the critical mind work. The material recorded during the symposium will be a base for preparing the movie – a specific visual "treatise" on gesture.

Open Programme, themed "CLASH," will exhibit six projects drawn from more than 600 entries from around the world.



For full progamme and detailed information about the festival please visit their website.

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Jadwiga Witkiewicz née Unrug,
ca 1923, 17,2 x 12,5 cm (from the collection of
S. Okolowicz and E. Franczak)