Basketball plays a major role in Philippine culture. It’s been introduced during the American colonial period in the beginning of the twentieth century and since then it’s having a great impact on Philippine life as the most popular sport. Basketball is omnipresent both in the media and on the streets.

Using their manual skills and their talent for improvising Filipinos set up basketball courts literally everywhere. The most simple way is to nail a piece of board with an attached metal ring on a tree and you’re ready to take a shot, a t(h)ree-point shot!

For those of you who love Polaroids as much as I do Nicole Chahrokh’s beautiful collection of SX-70 gems is a feast. So delicate and poetic, but dark and mystic at the same time. Take a look at her website to see more of her Polaroids here.

The website shows a random triple of images which you can change by clicking further. Enjoy!

Rafa Raigón’s series „Ikigai“ appeals to me a lot – to my heart, to my sense of humor and of course to my eyes.

Ikigai is a Japanese term for „a reason for being” and is also thought of as „a reason to get up in the morning”. According to Japanese culture everyone has an Ikigai. Finding it requires a deep and often lengthy search of self and discovering one’s Ikigai brings satisfaction and meaning to life.

There’s so much easiness and wit and an awareness for the little things in these seemingly everyday life snap shots which I think is a wonderful way of dealing with one of the greatest questions of humanity.

Rafa describes his series as follows: „This project is an attempt to find out what the meaning in my life is. A search that unconsciously already begins in our childhood. But maybe I’m not searching for my own ikigay but I’m documenting how my children search for it. This project is a quest through photography and a personal desire.“

If you’d like to find out more about Rafa Raigón’s work, visit his website here.

Carolin Seeliger’s work „Deep Sea“ ranges somewhere between photography and painting. In an intuitive process using liquid or jellylike materials from cosmetic products she creates temporary, ephemeral images which she captures by means of photography just before they are about to dissolve.

The enlargements of these images make plastic microparticles visible that partially end up staying in the cycle of the oceans. Colors and shapes in the images are inspired by the deep sea, which serves as a symbol for unattainability and the fascination for the diversity of life with regard to the anthropogenic impact.

What I like about this series is that Carolin deals with the subject of environmental pollution in a very fascinating experimental way that addresses both the viewer’s imagination and intellect.

Carolin lives in Berlin where she works as a freelance photographer and artist.

You can find out more about her work here

In my first post I’d like to introduce Berlin based spanish photographer Mar Martín.

I like Mar’s cinematographic approach to photography a lot and the way her images stimulate the viewer’s imagination. Her aesthetics are surreal and futuristic and create a sense of coldness and uncertainty. She produces mental places with her pictures where reality and fantasy co-exist.

The images shown here are from the series she is currently working on called »Lyuba«, in which she investigates the Pleistocene, migration and extinction of species like mammoths. Lyuba means love in Russian and is actually the name of a female mammoth who died over 40.000 years ago and was found in Russia in 2007. She is the best preserved mammoth mummy in the world. The most southern place where remains of mammoths were found was in southern Spain, very near to where Mar was raised. Mammoths had to migrate from Siberia to the south in order to survive. With this project Mar wants to explore the traces of the Pleistocene that still surround us, connect north and south and create a relation between the past and today, as she explains in her own words:

„I compare it to what’s happening nowadays. By transporting us to a distant past, I try to make us think about our human condition and realise that our existence as humans is not more significant than that of other species.”

You can find out more about Mar’s work here