A Glimpse of Burn Diary
BurnDiary has featured more than 100 photographers in more than two years.
Personal stories, details, places, landscapes… all through the eyes of the photographers during their daily life that week.
We have chosen photographers from every continent asking not to show their work but to share their days and moments, using BurnDiary as a personal diary.
So many images and visions that now we are glad to show every now and then as glimpsed author by author.
Diego Orlando
Gwen Coyne
I was working the week of my Burn Diary takeover, so focused mostly on the precious time I had outside of work each day with my daughter. At first, I was apprehensive about posting every day, but found that the experience pushed me to spontaneously document scenes from our daily life that would normally go unrecorded.
Juliette Mills
During my Burn Diary takeover I didn’t focus on anything in particular. I wanted to be true to the world ‘diary’ and I shot around my normal life. What I was doing anyway, each day, living where I live. It was a huge challenge for me, doing it in this way, live each day and not prepared or planned out, as other projects usually are. It was hard but I enjoyed it immensely.
Eric Mencher
During my Burn Diary takeover I tried each day to create a broad – but distinct – theme and also to create a group of images that would collectively convey the magic of daily life in San Miguel Allende, Mexico. Themes like “Traditions”, “Duets”, “The Power and the Glory”. Themes that matched not just what I was seeing and photographing, but themes that conveyed what I was feeling about what I saw.
Bio
Gwen Coyne:
Gwen Coyne is a photographer and graphic designer. She studied art and psychology at UCSC and manages a digital marketing team in San Francisco, California. In her spare time, she enjoys chronicling time spent with her six-year-old daughter and capturing sights from her cell. She has had her work published in Newsweek Japan, Black & White Magazine, Glamour Netherlands and Fotoritim, among others, and has had a selection of work exhibited at such places as the Denver International Airport in Colorado, USA, the Photo Center in Moscow, Russia and the Can Basté Centre in Barcelona, Spain. Recently, she contributed to “Out of the Phone”, the world’s first Instagram photo book, which garnered attention from The Guardian and L’Oeil de la Photographie, in addition to receiving CNN’s editor’s choice. She has also participated in “Finding Lost Time”—a book and exhibition traveling through Europe—that included artists and photographers from across the world.
Juliette Mills:
Mills is a British photographer based in Dartmoor, South West of England and has been taking pictures since the age of 12. She has worked in the travel and film industries, and it was whilst making her own wildlife film for National Geographic in Zimbabwe about an elephant that grew up with a herd of buffaloes, and photographing the story, that she decided to focus on wildlife and travel photography and writing for magazines. She held her first solo exhibition in London in 2001 – a collection of wildlife portraits and has exhibited since in local galleries in Devon. She has more recently studied with Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey in Mexico, and in October 2009 a selection of work about ‘The Day of the Dead’ traditional celebration was exhibited in the Centro Fotográfico Álvarez Bravo at The Graphic Arts Institute of Oaxaca, Mexico. She lives in Dartmoor National Park with her husband, two boys, dogs and cat, and loves horse riding, walking, cooking, open fires, books, gardens, and red wine.
Eric Mencher:
Mencher is a documentary photographer concentrating on long term projects and everyday street photography. Recent projects include life along the Lincoln Highway (the first cross-country road in the United States), contemporary life in the Maya villages of Lake Atitlan, Guatemala, religious traditions in Guatemala, and life around San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Mencher was the recipient of the Overseas Press Club Award for “Rwanda: Aftermath of Genocide” and has won other major awards, including prizes in the World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year, Best of Photojournalism and National Headliners competitions. He collaborates on projects with his wife, Kass Mencher, including the series “Duets” (a juxtaposition of their images) and the Lincoln Highway. They have both exhibited our work regionally, nationally and internationally.
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Niqce idea but the bios are not necessary it is about the diary not the photographer
I really like Erics shapes and tones and I like how Julliettes seems like an actual visual diary rather than a talent showcase (difficult to do as this is precisely what burn diary functions as for most people) and I like the dark B/W of gwen.
I would agree with Imants abut Bio if not for the fact that Burn Diary is first and foremost an exposure tool (no pun intended) for photographers, and most will want to maximise that exposure, and a link to other work and a short bio help that.
using burn to showcase ones images seems to be the archiles heal of the burn diary. I applaaud the brave like Julliette diary. There is that human spirit about the images and that little quirky humour crops up here and there.
I agree on both points
I also think you guys and girls at Burn should just get it over with and shut down comments. They are almost completely redundant here now.
Thanks for commenting. It was a very different and interesting process to a normal commission or focussed project. I didn’t care much about showcasing best work (which it really does not in my case) I just wanted to be true to the ‘real life diary’… un-meddled-with life, for myself as a challenge and because I thought that was what was intended with Burndiary. But strangely, it was quite hard not to interfere or go deep into something! Give me a commission any day!
Imants and John Gladdy you’re both totally right on all points. I think what is most poignant throughout the whole Burndiary tenure is the fact that the best have always been women. Kery Paine and Ekin Kucuk were both brilliant and managed to understand the concept just as much as Gwen Coyne and Juliette Mills. This just seems to confirms my suspicions that women are far more in tune emotionally with their life abd surroundings whilst generally most men stumble round and tend to latch on to the wrong end of the stick.