Photographer Julia Casesnoves is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. To see Julia’s body of work, click on any photograph.

Pond

“Pond” is a visual poem in seven scenes. Each image refers and complements the others, adding new nuances and sensations, thus exploring the possibilities and variations about the theme: the pond, the lilies, on a hot august day.

These series is fully framed my contemplative/photography practice, the practice of aesthetic attention and the “aesthetic ecology” (David Haskell), being these the main axes that make up my work.

Walk and be present in a state of deep connection with the environment, which gives way to a state of availability, that is, the cultivation of aesthetic attention in natural environments and specifically in city parks, lived as spaces of resistance to the economy of attention (Jenny Odell), and thus contribute, to reveal the beauty in the common and everyday places.

“August of another summer, and once again

I am drinking the sun,

and the lilies again are spread across the water.

I know now what they want is to touch each other.”

Mary Oliver

The Song of Trees

“The song of Trees” it’s an ongoing project composed of different series where trees are the main subject, and the city parks the perfect ordinary setting for develop my photographic practice that has become a contemplative practice over the years.

Trees rediscovered as the great Nature’s connectors, through a poetic glance and venturing myself into the practice of an Ecological Aesthetics, defined by David George Haskell as “the ability to perceive beauty in the relationship sustained and embodied within a concrete part of the community of life. A step towards belonging in all its dimensions”. The song of Trees speaks to us of a community of living beings, of a network of relationships, and of the experience of beauty as a forgetting of the self and a merging with the totality of which we are a part. To listen to trees is therefore, to learn to inhabit the relationships that give origin, substance and beauty to life.

The Soul Garden

“The Soul Garden “is about the rooted need to reencounter with the beauty, the silence, and the presence, the urgent need to reestablish an intimate relationship with Nature, and by analogy with the Nature that I am.

Nature as that sacred place of connection with the totality where borders fade away. Photography as the conscious act to slowing down that allows a contemplative gaze on the daily landscape, and a state of inner spaciousness.

The night becomes then the perfect holder and witness of that reencounter, and the camera through its sensitivity reveal hidden scenes, nuances, and colors, giving us an unusual perception of reality.

The Garden becomes then the symbol of representation of that lost paradise, that is regained during a night walk through the park.

Statement

“Holding a camera in front of your face or on your chest, framing, pressing the shutter release, are ways of encountering oneself and the world.”

Serge Tisseron.

“The mystery of the lucid camera”, photography and the unconscious.

This encounter that Tisseron speaks of is what I seek to achieve in my photographic practice. An encounter that starts from a contemplative attitude of the world around me, more specifically of the ordinary, everyday world, cultivating a state of dazzlement before the objects, spaces and scenes that are presented, thus opening the way to wonder, to find the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Vegetable motifs, flowers, plants, trees, become the main theme of my work in recent years and walking through parks, gardens and natural environments the means for all this to happen. Walking as an aesthetic experience and construction of the landscape understood as something that is created and recreated from the subjective experience… where I look, what I pay attention to, what moves me and moves me at the moment of framing and pressing the shutter, and how all these elements are organized to form an integrated whole fruit of that relationship of intimacy with the observed. This encounter is reencountered in the developing process, where the images obtained become sketches on which I work, thus beginning an analogous process of search and encounter with the final image through the reinterpretation of the original scenes, thus revealing the multiple realities that can unfold from a walk in the park.

Bio

Julia Casesnoves is an artist photographer based in Valencia. Diploma in Social Work from the University of Valencia and Masters in Professional Photography from the Efti School of Madrid.

From very early her practice is oriented towards experimentation and the search for a universe of her own. In 2017 she participates in the Parallax art fair of London with her work "Light comes through" piece that will mark the drift towards Nature as the main theme of her work.

Her artistic practice is the result of her own vital research in different interrelated fields. Poetry, philosophy, psychology, somatic, dance, ecology, and spirituality ... are some of the themes that underpin her artistic practice.

Currently in training in "Body, Science and Arts-based Research", at the Tae School from Barcelona.