The Void by Nina Menconi

Through darkness, the light we find shines brighter and we see in new ways.

This series was inspired by my own process through grief, after losing my mom to cancer at the young age of 60. Feeling completely overwhelmed by pure darkness after such a loss, I very slowly began to notice how much brighter spots of joy felt in contrast to that deep dark. Amidst the pain I began to see beauty, too, in how my grief showed the depth of my love for my mom, in the sweet fragility of life, and how this stark contrast is what makes us truly human. With this series I wanted to explore this journey of entering into dark places and instead of turning away from the fear of the void, stepping fully into it and seeing what richness can be found there.

My aim was to explore with my subjects, what feelings darkness brings, and what is seen when we have only little light to illuminate.

The images were shot in a very old cellar in Arles, France in complete blackout with just tiny pinpoints of light (using punctured aluminum over set lights). I set up the space to create a very comfortable, nurturing environment as best I could for the subjects, to help them relax into the darkness, to allow them to be a bit more vulnerable. Each subject was asked the question:

''What does the dark evoke for you?''

Peggy: Seule avec soi même / alone with yourself © Nina Menconi

Cécile: La solitude / solitude © Nina Menconi

Dorrie: Le confort et le vide / comfort and emptiness © Nina Menconi

Antoine: Avancer / moving forward © Nina Menconi

Nina: La profondeur / depth © Nina Menconi

Nina Menconi
Nina Menconi is a California-born photographer and visual artist who splits her time between San Francisco and Seville, Spain. Her work explores the intricate, often hidden layers of human experience, drawing on themes of the universal feminine, ancestral inheritance, personal psychology, and grief. Through an interplay of light, shadow, and experimental techniques, Menconi creates imagery that speaks to the complexity of identity and the subconscious.

Menconi received her BA in Photojournalism from San Francisco State University, and has been working in the commercial photography space for over 15 years. In 2018 she began her fine art practice which she has used as a personal journey of self-discovery, finding a visual language of her own to express what words cannot. Her work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles Center for Photography, the Griffin Museum, and the Arles-Off Festival in Southern France, among others.
www.ninamenconi.com
@ninamenconi

Torsten: Je n’aime pas / I don’t like it © Nina Menconi

Diana: L’univers / the universe © Nina Menconi

Elisa: L’inconnu / the unknown © Nina Menconi

Karl: Une zone calme / a calm zone © Nina Menconi

Marie: Le sommeil / sleep © Nina Menconi

Cedric Roux: Before Rebirth

By Cedric Roux

Publisher : ODYSSEE

2024 | 96 pages

Empty storefronts dot the downtown, while massive brick tobacco warehouses stretch the length of city blocks—abandoned and awaiting creative reuse. Wilson, North Carolina, feels frozen in the 1970s. Invited by the Eye on Main Street festival, photographer Cedric Roux made several trips to this enigmatic town. For a photographer used to capturing the vibrant energy of New York City streets—his first book, My Wonderland (now sold out), vividly chronicled the bustling metropolis—his initial encounter with Wilson was a profound shock.

Expecting a town in the midst of a vibrant renaissance, Roux wandered Wilson daily, exploring its diverse areas: downtown, affluent suburbs, and struggling neighborhoods. On either side of the railroad tracks that symbolically and socially divide the city, he sought a light that might suggest an emerging revival..

In his latest book, Before Rebirth, Roux captures this sense of disconnection, using his lens to explore a promise not yet realized. With a population of just 47,000, Wilson is a far cry from Manhattan’s 1.5 million. Used to the dense human energy that fuels his photographic style, Roux found himself reimagining his approach. His work took on a more stripped-down, documentary aesthetic, yet it remains deeply rooted in place and retains the distinctive palette and framing that define his vision..

In collaboration with artistic director Jean-Matthieu Gautier, Roux drew from his imagination and visual archives to craft a narrative that stays true to his photographic roots while stepping far beyond his usual realm.

All About Cedric Roux

John Divola: San Fernando Valley

By John Divola

Publisher : Nazraeli Press

2024 | 60 pages

From the publisher: San Fernando Valley is where John Divola was born and raised, and it served as both backdrop and subject for his earliest, serious photographic explorations, made during the early 1970s. This previously unpublished body of work shows “the Valley” through the eyes of a young photographer who would soon become an internationally-recognized artist with the exhibition and publication of his much more conceptual “Zuma” series. The black and white photographs in “San Fernando Valley” comprise a series of subject groupings which, pulled together, show early manifestations of the deadpan humor and the ability to capture everyday scenes wrapped in loneliness, for which Divola is now well-known. The book is also, and not incidentally, a fascinating record of a quintessentially 1970s Los Angeles culture. John Divola’s work is the subject of numerous books and catalogues. Widely exhibited and collected throughout the United States, Europe, Japan and Australia, Divola’s photographs are included in the permanent collections of many public and private institutions, including those of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

All About John Divola

Cig Harvey: Emerald Drifters

By Cig Harvey

Publisher : The Monacelli Press

2025 | 224 pages

Following her celebrated monograph Blue Violet (Monacelli, 2021), photographer Cig Harvey continues her personal study of sensory experience, focusing on the ephemeral nature of light, pigment, and vision. Her latest photographs are lush tableaux of her signature subjects – flora, cakes, domestic interiors, and the human figure in landscape – accompanied by prose vignettes on the science and art of color, written in her vibrant, intimate style. Featuring an afterword by award-winning novelist and poet Ocean Vuong, Emerald Drifters is a catalogue of pleasures and heartbreaks, and ‘an urgent call to live.’

All About Cig Harvey

Helmut Newton. Berlin, Berlin

By Helmut Newton

Publisher : Taschen

2025 | 244 pages

Born in Berlin in 1920, Helmut Newton trained as a teenager with legendary photographer Yva, following her lead into the enticing pastures of fashion, portraiture and nudes. Forced to flee the Nazis aged only 18, Newton never left Berlin behind. After his career exploded in Paris in the 1960s, he returned regularly to shoot for magazines like Constanze, Adam, Vogue, Condé Nast's Traveler, ZEITmagazin, Männer Vogue, Max and the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin as well as his own magazine Helmut Newton’s Illustrated. In 1979, the newly relaunched German Vogue commissioned him to retrace the footsteps of his youth to capture the fashion moment. The resulting portfolio, Berlin, Berlin!, inspired the title of the exhibition which celebrates 20 years of the Helmut Newton Foundation. This collection includes Newton’s most iconic Berlin images, as well as many unknown shots from the 1930s to the 2000s: nightcrawlers in uber-cool clubs and restaurants, nude portraits in the boarding houses he knew from his youth, and the Berlin film scene, featuring Hanna Schygulla and Wim Wenders at the Berlin Wall, John Malkovich and David Bowie. In October 2003, only months before his death, Newton moved large parts of his archive to his new foundation, housed in the Museum of Photography beside the Zoologischer Garten station―the very station from which he fled Berlin in the winter of 1938. This publication thus closes a circle in the story of his extraordinary life and work.

The Void by Nina Menconi

Selected Books