Collater.al Moodboard is an inspirational collection of images with no line of continuity or coherence. Each week a theme is tackled through design objects, images from movies, books, works of art and more generally any cultural stimulus received by the editorial staff of Collater.al.

Chapter 45: Comics, a moodboard to be read from left to right or right to left.

Tonje Thilesen was born in 1991 in Oslo, Norway, later moved to Berlin and now looks at the world through his camera from Brooklyn, New York. The change of landscape he has seen throughout his life is a key to his shots, and to the variety of subjects immortalised.
The city as seen through Thilesen’s eyes is populated by animals, which almost always seem to be free and uncatchable, but there is also a study of the human figure, its plasticity and its movements in physical space. The light reaches the subjects either uniformly or through defined beams, the same beams that can filter through trees or between buildings.

Tonje Thilesen’s subjects very often seem to almost glow, there are small flashes that create points of light, like those by which we might be dazzled in front of an expanse of snow for example.
Close-ups are one of the photographer’s favourite cuts, this is because his approach to photography was born out of the need to analyse reality, to study it during his years in Norway and then more consistently in Germany, when Tonje followed the protagonists of the city’s music scene.

On his way to join a friend in Sorrento, Brett Lloyd misses his last connection to the Amalfi Coast and finds himself alone in Naples at night. The English photographer left his ID in Rome, and without the possibility of finding a hotel for the night, he starts wandering the city’s alleys until dawn, falling in love with what will become his home, both physical and artistic, for the next 12 years.
Brett Lloyd’s bond with Naples is intense and emotional; the people and the classicism of the landscapes have inspired the photographer’s work for more than a decade, now collected in a new book published by Mörel Books and entitled “Napoli Napoli Napoli”, presented in Paris on 10 November and now the focus of an exhibition in Milan on the 16th at Spazio Maiocchi.

The 135 shots contained within the book recount a day in Naples, from dawn to dusk, staging the popular theatre that is the city at the foot of Vesuvius. Lloyd reflects on classicism and the power of the sea, an element at the centre of many shots and the lives of the often very young people portrayed by the artist.
The story of ‘Napoli Napoli’ is a patient work, running through four summers, the unit of measurement for defining the passing of time when one is young and carefree. it is precisely with these people that Brett has woven relationships over the years through shared glances and emotions, overcoming an initial language barrier that never seems to emerge in the photos. the harmony between the photographic lens and the subjects is total, the eyes and rosaries point straight at the lens, while the sea continues its perpetual motion.

A little more than a year ago Aleksandr Babarikin moved to New York, he works as a software engineer but he wanted to look for a tool to fully understand the inhabitants of the city, its rhythms and more generally the context of a world very different from that of Belarus, the nation where he was born.
Photography for Aleksandr Babarikin is thus a hobby, his impressions of New York are very strong, and the interesting aspect is in his choice to understand the tool not as an in-depth knowledge, not as an exhaustive study of the reality around him, rather as a collection of sensations, as happens in the early stages of any knowledge.
The concept of the “impression” of New York is made visually clear through the nuances that unify the entire scene shot by Babarikin. The subjects blend with the background, the shadows of the city, the cabs and the concrete backdrop are blurred, as unstable and elusive, perhaps an “impression” that is already certainty.