Juliana Manara | The Work
Statement
Juliana Manara was born in Brazil in 1983 where she lived most of time but also spent part of her life in New Zealand, Germany and France. After a graduation in Social and Visual Communication she started a career working for Magazines as a documentary photographer. In 2009 she moved to Paris to improve her photography skills and joined the International Institute of Photography. It was during this time that she started to give her work an additional facet, turning towards fine arts. Together with her portraiture work, the international award-winning, produces Illustrations of an unreal world and creates
characters to be fit on transformed landscapes. Most of her work are based on surrealistic and contemporary inspiration and some pieces are already part of collections in New York, Berlin, Sao Paulo and Paris. Juliana lives and works in London.
" Photography became a tool that allow me to create imaginary scenes and not only to document some realities around. After years working and developing my photographic work I finally got the confidence with my new creations and to see photography as an art. I work in a team with Lisa Jacobovski who gives me all support and assistance that I need. First we make a drawn with all the ideas and inspirations then we search for a scenario or we build our own one. After the background is done, it is time to create and prepare the characters and all objects to be fit in. This can be made in studio or with peaces of object we find around us. Our equipments is also a contemporary style of using film, large format and digital cameras together, our art generation is able to have many modern tools to achieve their ideas and for us the most important is to be able to materialise our
creativities. We became a director who needs to control the lights and put everything in the correct places.I love to work with distortions of spaces and objects or to give it a bit of surrealism. The focus is about the existence and the main character is Little B, who has a date of birth and other characteristics as a normal human being. He can be seen in interesting black and white situations as walking in electric cable or lost in a dreamy
valley. Born in 2010 he continuously represents good or bad feelings of living in a society and all exigencies of being alive can provide to us.The scenes invite us to a philosophy about the meaning of life and one image can represent thousands of different experiences. Respecting all spaces, the subjects and other details occupy a small part in the composition giving the image's background a strong importance. I believe the environment we live can also be responsible for some of our attitudes.
The existence subject can also be seen in another recent work in parallel with Little B. Those are a new group of photographic illustrations that I named as " A very Important World ". In those images we produce scenes about world problems that we are all facing now or we are going to face in the future. We join the ideology for a green and peaceful life. We show water waste, pollution, war, deforestation and many others. With the same
techniques plus colours, we try to simulate some facts because it can catch attention even of the children (owners of the future) and it causes a lot of discussions. World problems already took people and animal's life. There is a humour in the work but the theme is very serious. Please note, it doesn't mean that our expression is right or wrong, it is just about sharing our feelings with art lovers"
CV
2011 - Friese - Greene Gallery - Group Exhibition, Brighton, UK
2011 - The Other Art Fair - Bargehouse SouthBank - London UK
2011 - The Foundry Gallery- Group Exhibition, Lewes, UK
2011 - PAF - Group Exhibition, London, UK
2011 - Open Studios -Group Exhibition, London, UK
2011 - Somerset House and London Fashion Weekend - Group Exhibition, London, UK
2011 - London Photographic Association Awards - Group Exhibition, London, UK
2010 - Coline de Chaillot - Theatre de Chaillot - Group Exhibition - Paris, France
2010 - Speos Institute - Graduation Group Exhibition - Paris, France
2010 - Galeria 11.16 - Solo Exhibition, Campinas, Brazil
2009 - Espace Beurapaire - Group Exhibition, Paris, France
HONOURS / AWARDS
2011 - Essential Italy Art Prize
2011 - London Photographic Association Prize
2010 - Sony World Photography Awards : Commendation Prize
2010 - Imaginez Maintenant: First Prize in Paris, France
PUBLICATIONS / PRESS
2011 - The Culture Edit - Vogue UK
2011 - Photo Magazine Brazil
2011 - London Photographic Association Awards Book
2010 - Sony World Photography Awards Book
2009 - Editora Abril Magazines, São Paulo , Brazil
2008 - Smithsonian Magazine, USA
2006 - Ganga: self-published, limited edition - Varanasi, India/ São Paulo, Brazil
COMMISSIONS
Helen Green Design - London
Charisma Yatch - Croatia
Private Collections - London
Private Collection - New York