Praxinoscope
A bimonthly storytelling by OPE Magazine where photography is the language.
“Praxinoscope” is an invitation by Ope Magazine, addressed to photographers to create a story through four images. Every two weeks of the month, one visual story will be presented on Ope Magazine's web site and Instagram profile - @opemagazine -, followed by the title of the story-images and the author’s biography.
Additionally, more of the photographer's work will be presented in a profile created on Ope Magazine website - www.opemagazine.com, as well as a brief explanation of the creation process.
“A Land (all the way home)” by Albin Brassart
"I'm talking to you about a country that doesn't exist..."
A Land, both diary and road book, exploration notebook and photo album.
A Land, a poetic journey, a journey of images, a journey in the images, a journey in the assembly of the images themselves.
Where the intimate rubs shoulders with the real, the very near rubs shoulders with the distant, the known mingles with the unknown.
A Land, a series that relates my search for an acceptable place, a place to live, a place that I would recognize as mine. From a fantasy country, from an ideal place, from my ideal place.
A set of micro-fictions, pieces of scattered puzzles to reconstitute a geographical map and a great story that mixes intimacy, ethnography, architecture as well as sociology.
A Land, a cinematic variation of photography like fragments of a life reimagined from the window of a moving train. The images intersect and signal to each other, we go from the second-hand shop to the laboratory of the archaeologist, from the exploration of the real to that of the imaginary, and from the past to the future.
As I walked, as I wandered here and there, I would be happy that the reader-visitor also walks in this series as in his personal cartography where his memories and his experiences would find an echo there.
TECHNICAL NOTES: My approach and my artistic work are sensitively on the side of the intimate, of the human link with nature and its environment, of reality and fiction intertwined, and of the dialogue between images in the form of visual collages.
I also allow myself to change cameras according to my desire of the moment, be it film or digital, Holga, Horizon 202, Mamiya C330, Lubitel, Canon EOS 60D, Minox 35 GT, Polaroid SX-70, Pinhole camera, Lomo LC-A.
Rather than privileging the individual image, I am very interested in playing with images. Through diptychs and triptychs, I seek an escape to a reinterpreted territory, a suspended time, a space where your memories and experiences would find an echo. My approach to the places and people I photograph is instinctive.
I let myself be carried away, I try in any case to achieve this state of mind and openness of gaze towards the other. To allow myself to wander here and there, to let myself be carried away by the wind, the ardor, by an indefinable sensation, a hazardous impression or even a revelation.
And my images are often steeped in melancholy, loneliness, and feelings of restlessness and loss.
For me, photography is the synthesis between the representation of reality and the ability to transcend it. It's going back again and again to the same places like a sort of detective and looking for proof, evidence of one's own involvement in this great fresco that is existence.
HOW MANY BIRDS ARE WE MADE OF? BY ANA CICHOWICZ
Our galaxy is called the Milky Way in English, a name that evokes a symbolic image shared across many languages. This imagery traces back to a Greek myth in which Zeus placed his mortal-born son, Heracles, at the breast of the goddess Hera while she slept, hoping the child would nurse and become immortal. When Hera awoke to find an unknown baby feeding from her, she pushed him away, and drops of milk spilled across the sky, forming the Milky Way.
In Finnish, however, our galaxy is called Linnunrata—the “path of the birds.” Birds also appear in the origin stories of the Finno-Ugric languages. One such myth tells of our world being born from the breaking of an egg laid by a waterfowl on an island in the primordial sea. From what was held within that egg, our world took shape.
And then I wonder: How many birds are we made of?
TECHNICAL NOTES: All the photos were taken in Berlin in May 2025 with a Ricoh GR III. The bird-like hands belong to my eldest son; the boy with skin like eggshells is my youngest. I enjoy including my children in my photographic projects. For this one, we immersed ourselves in myths about our universe, speaking at length about the influence of Greco-Roman mythology on Western thought, and about how, despite being so well known, these are far from the only stories. There are countless ways to tell a story — whether about the world, or about the things of the world — through words or through images.