This week, our readers picks #239 are two photographers who love to travel. One likes great spaces, while the other prefers meditative places.
Benjamin Visserot
Benjamin Visserot, 26, is a photographer and an engraver. Although he works and lives in the Paris region, he is fascinated by nature, traveling and great spaces. “I spent most of my childhood in my grand-parents’ farm, in the Loir-et-Cher region. I would explore the woods and fields around me. This playground has stimulated my imagination.” During a trip to the Austrian Tyrol, he took his first pictures. “I came back with more than 300 images recounting three days of hitchhiking in the mountains. I haven’t let go of my camera ever since. Those pictures completed my travel notebooks and my engravings”, he remembers. Benjamin Visserot needs to escape reality. He works with expired films, and travels to bizarre and wild places. “I am fascinated by the Great North. There, the storms are violent, the climate is harsh and time seems to stand still”, he adds. A poetic and cinematic notebook produced somewhere between Austria, Norway, Iceland, the United States and even Greenland.
© Benjamin Visserot
Lisa Boostani
Lisa Boostani is a Hispano-Iranian photographer and director based in Paris. “My current work is influenced by an interdisciplinary experience, situated between visual arts, media and performance. Enriched by my personal experimentations around the body and the states of modified consciousness, such as meditation, trance and dream. My research explores two themes of predilection: The Sacred and the Profane”, she tells us. Lisa Boostani likes to introduce herself as “an observer of the contemporary world’s symptoms”. Thus, through documentary imagery of daily life, she questions the effects of standardisation on landscapes. Between 2016 and 2018, she travelled to India, the United States, Switzerland and Greece. “My long and silent walks have helped me become more available and take a meditative and innocent look at the world. I was moved by the power of nature, its wild force, the arrangement of matters, colours and lights, which universally answer each other, moving beyond cultures”, she explains.
© Lisa Boostani
Cover picture © Benjamin Visserot