Vulnerable Valiance by Natalia L Rudychev

I was born queer, mildly autistic and afflicted by multiple autoimmune conditions. I started Vulnerable Valiance project during suicide prevention month. It is dedicated to all those who have lost the ability to express themselves due to prejudices and stigma associated with difference.

Handmade photographic prints (pigment lift transfers to washi paper) that form this body of work invite appreciation of the imperfect beauty of being alive.

Vulnerable Valiance series was born after years of photography practice, meditation and the wabi-sabi lifestyle.

The images in this project are like visual haiku poems. They are open to multiple interpretations. I invite people to pause, to find beauty in things imperfect and incomplete, and to appreciate the fleeting beauty of here and now.

Difference is often not treated kindly. I create with the aim to change that. I am inspired by the philosophical ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari expressed in A Thousand Plateaus: becoming is never a majoritarian it is always minoritarian.

Natalia L Rudychev
Natalia L Rudychev is an award-winning Russian-born New York and Paris based photographer, multidisciplinary artist (writer, performer, print maker) and curator. She is best known for her work with the aesthetics of wabi-sabi.

Natalia’s work has been exhibited in New York at Foley Gallery, Soho Photo Gallery, Culture Lab LIC, Westbeth Art Gallery, Brooklyn Art Cave, Cargo Project Gallery, as well as in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago and internationally in Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, Glasgow, Le Mans and Tokyo where her work on sustainability was awarded the Bronze Prize.

The artist's recent achievements include Gold Prize in Analog Sparks Film Photography Awards 2024 and 1st Prize in International Photography Awards 2024

Her work is in the public collections of the California State Library, Haiku Literature Museum in Japan and Duquesne University Library. Her haiku photobooks have been awarded. She is a Fulbright Scholar, a member of The Photo Group, a poet, a dancer, and studied Philosophy of Art in the PHD program at Duquesne University.
nataliarudychev.com
@natalia_rudychev_haiku

Virginia Hanusik: Into the Quiet and the Light

By Virginia Hanusik

Publisher : Columbia Books on Architecture and the City

2024 | 184 pages

In South Louisiana, where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico, water―and the history of controlling it―is omnipresent. Into the Quiet and the Light: Water, Life, and Land Loss in South Louisiana glimpses the vulnerabilities and possibilities of living on the water during an ongoing climate catastrophe and the fallout of the fossil fuel industry―past, present, and future. The book sustains our physical, mental, and emotional connections to these landscapes through a collection of photographs by Virginia Hanusik. Framing the architecture and infrastructure of South Louisiana with both distance and intimacy, introspection and expansiveness, this work engages new memories, microhistories, anecdotes, and insights from scholars, artists, activists, and practitioners working in the region. Unfolding alongside and in dialogue with Hanusik’s photographs, these reflections soberly and hopefully populate images of South Louisiana’s built and natural environments, opening up multiple pathways that defy singularity and complicate the disaster-oriented imagery often associated with the region and its people. In staging these meditations on water, life, and land loss, this book invites readers to join both Hanusik and the contributors in reading multiplicity into South Louisiana’s water-ruled landscapes.

With texts from Richie Blink, Imani Jacqueline Brown, Jessica Dandridge, Rebecca Elliott, Michael Esealuka, T. Mayheart Dardar, Billy Fleming, Andy Horowitz, Arthur Johnson, Louis Michot, Nini Nguyen, Kate Orff, Jessi Parfait, Amy Stelly, Jonathan Tate, Aaron Turner, and John Verdin.

Rawsht Twana: Twana’s Box

By Rawsht Twana

Publisher : Fraglich Publishing

2024 | 252 pages

Twana’s Box' can be described in many ways: a journey through a photographer’s rare archive, documenting the Kurdistan region of Iraq from 1974–1992; a son’s quest to find his lost father, who was murdered by a military regime; a young man’s way to piece together the fragments of a scattered family in a scattered culture; the becoming of a photographer who, through the stories of others, starts to understand his own identity in times of war. 'Twana’s Box' is not only the photo book that holds a selection of Twana Abdullah’s archive; it is a unique insight into a time and place in a region that has since completely transformed. Rawsht has spent years piecing together his father’s negatives and stories. His archival work inspired him to become a photographer himself, working for Metrography – the first independent Iraqi photo agency – before immigrating to Europe. ills colour & bw, 21 x 27 cm, hb, Kurdish/Arabic/English

Akinbode Akinbiyi: Being, Seeing, Wandering

By Akinbode Akinbiyi

Publisher : Spector Books

2024 | 252 pages

Taken across Europe and Africa, Akinbiyi’s images of everyday city life muse on the sociopolitical labyrinths of urban society

Whether in Bamako, Berlin, London, Lagos or Durban, British photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi (born 1946) creates black-and-white street scenes that function as visual metaphors, ruminating on cultural change, social exclusion and colonialism’s effect on urban planning.

Grace Wales Bonner: Dream in the Rhythm

By Grace Wales Bonner

Publisher : The Museum of Modern Art, New York

2024 | 184 pages

A deeply personal meditation on and around modern Black expression, curated by the acclaimed London-based designer
This volume, Grace Wales Bonner: Dream in the Rhythm―Visions of Sound and Spirit in the MoMA Collection, is an artist’s book created by the acclaimed London-based designer Grace Wales Bonner as “an archive of soulful expression.” Through an extraordinary selection of nearly 80 works from The Museum of Modern Art’s collection and archives, this unique volume draws multisensory connections between pictures and poems, music and performance, hearing and touch, gestures and vibrations, and bodies in motion. Photographs, scores and films by artists such as Dawoud Bey, Mark Bradford, Roy DeCarava, Lee Friedlander, David Hammons, Glenn Ligon, Steve McQueen, Lorna Simpson and Ming Smith, among others, are juxtaposed with signal texts by Black authors spanning the past century, including Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, June Jordan, Robin Coste Lewis, Ishmael Reed, Greg Tate, Jean Toomer, Quincy Troupe and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Published on the occasion of the exhibition Artist’s Choice: Grace Wales Bonner―Spirit Movers, this resplendent publication is a deeply personal meditation on and around modern Black expression that echoes Wales Bonner’s own vibrant, virtuosic designs.

Vulnerable Valiance by Natalia L Rudychev

Selected Books