tag magazine issue 3

tagPhotographic Collection

The Summer Issue

THEME SUMMER TIME- Michael Krauss 1

2 MASTERHEAD

5 INTRODUCTION

6 THEME PRESS PAUSE

16 WEST HAM BOY BOXING CLUB

32 SUMMER ON A SOLITARY BEACH

50 THEME CLOSER

66 THEME SUMMER TIME

82 PARKING

89 PRIPYAT

94 THEME CARNIVAL

111 CONTRIBUTORS

2 THEME CLOSER- Manny Zervos; Coloured Ring Drops

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Publisher_Tweak Art Media

Managing Editor & Design _Bryce Alexander

Copy Editor_Erika Phelan

Programming Developer_Sameer Borisager

Tag Magazine New York, NY USAwww.TagMagazine.com

Write to Tag!!! Tag@TagMagazine.comAdvertising Inquiries: Advertising@TagMagazine.com

Tag Magazine is always on the hunt for unpredictable photography and photography essays. Contribute at TagMagazine.com Photography_ Nadine Bengelsdorf

Title_ Lichttaucheneckert.nadinesophie@googlemail.com

ISSUE N0. 3

Keep this magazine, if not please recycle

Theme Summer Time- Darius Kuzmickas

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The themes of “Press Pause”, “Closer”, “Summertime” and “Carnival are all telescopic looks at the lives we all live but don’t see. The dedication to succeed... Freezing the moment to remember...analyzing up close and personal...hanging out and doing “whatever” and the treasured thrill moments of the alternate lifestyles of the circus family.

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PARKING

PRESS PAUSE WEST HAM BOYS SOLITARY BEACH

CARNIVAL CLOSER

PRIPYAT

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SUMMER TIME

6 THEME PRESS PAUSE- Dennis Yermoshin; Fist Fight

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PRESS PAUSE_________________________________________________Stopping a moment in time. A glance at yester-year, a movement flashed...click “pause” and reflect what you see.

6 THEME PRESS PAUSE- Dennis Yermoshin; Fist Fight

A fistfight between two friends in a driveway, just outside of a party. This was retribution for an act of betrayal that happened a week prior.

8 THEME PRESS PAUSE- Dennis Yermoshin; Untitled 27 from the My Fellow Americans series

Irina, seven months pregnant in the room where she grew up. Providence, RI - November 2006

10 THEME PRESS PAUSE- David Lazer; Tunnel of Light and Joy

THEME PRESS PAUSE- Rodolfo Benitez 13

14 THEME PRESS PAUSE- Jan Locus

THEME CROWD CONTROL- Martin Fisch 79

THE WEST HAM BOYS BOXING CLUB ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________David Brunetti

18 WEST HAM BOXING CLUB- David Brunetti

Boxing is seen as a gentleman’s sport. In Victorian England social reformers started setting up boxing clubs in East London as a remedy against the social ills of the working class. They wanted to bring public school ideals to poorer neighbourhoods. As a sport of gentlemen the reformers wanted to instil upper class values such as honour, honesty, habits or order and discipline. But instead of purging the working class from their unpleasant ailments it reaffirmed their identity. They made it their own. And even though it has been stylised as a cultured gentlemen’s sport, boxing is one of the most visceral of sports.

Boxing is powerful – it’s one of the oldest and most exciting of sports. For centuries it has permeated Western societies. Throughout sports history, boxers have enacted our anxieties about race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. Its bruising and bloody confrontations simplify everything. For the duration of a fight, boxing strips life of its frills. It’s about the winner and a loser. Good and evil. As the struggle of two bodies, boxing is a metaphor for opposition. It represents the struggles between opposing qualities and idealised values. In modern times boxing dramatised conflicts of nationality, race and religion. And throughout history painters, poets, novelists and photographers have been there to record and to make sense of the bruising and bloody confrontation.

Boxing holds a fascination that cannot denied, but it provokes a debate and divides opinion. It’s at once noble and savage – a choreography played out in the ring in which noses are broken and bloodied and brains shaken loose.

The West Ham Boys Boxing Club is located where London’s true heart really lies – the East End. East London today is rough. It’s working class. To live here you have to toughen up. You have to fight. Not only for respect or standing within the com-munities of East London but you also have to fight prejudices imposed on you by outsiders. In today’s economy and in today’s society, many young people find it difficult to find their place in society, especially if they’re from disadvantaged backgrounds. Unemployment is high – especially among young. They’re young. They are only just starting out, and they’ve already lost. The odds are stacked against them. Their youth is seen as problematic, dangerous, and violent. They’re not only fighting for a title, they are fighting for a place in this world. These are young men, who face the immediate challenge of the ring, are searching for a place in this world. They’re on the verge of adulthood, and are learning how to hold their ground in a hostile world the hard way. Their fight in the ring is emblematic. Boxing teaches young men discipline, honour and pride. It builds their character and keeps them off the streets. They box, they don’t fight. It gives them stamina and identity. It prepares them for a world that doesn’t give up anything without a fight.

David Brunetti is the photographer behind these images. He trusts the documental eye of the camera to reveal a universal struggle. His photographs show vulnerability, defeat and exhaustion. The young boys are marked with scars, bruises and cuts. Their jerseys are drenched in sweat. Their faces are tired and glisten, beads of sweat drip from their brows and hair. We can feel their tension, their exhilaration, their exhaustion, their pain, the victory and loss. We can emphathize with them and feel their pain. These images allow us to enter their world - take a peek.

20 WEST HAM BOXING CLUB- David Brunetti

26 WEST HAM BOXING CLUB- David Brunetti

WEST HAM BOXING CLUB- David Brunetti 29

30 WEST HAM BOXING CLUB- David Brunetti

SUMMER ON A SOLITARY BEACH__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Escapista

32 SUMMER ON A SOLITARY BEACH- Escapista

34 SUMMER ON A SOLITARY BEACH- Escapista

36 SUMMER ON A SOLITARY BEACH- Escapista

SUMMER ON A SOLITARY BEACH- Escapista 41

42 SUMMER ON A SOLITARY BEACH- Escapista

SUMMER ON A SOLITARY BEACH- Escapista 45

SUMMER ON A SOLITARY BEACH- Escapista 49

50 THEME CLOSER- Rafael Aguilera; Since The House Is On Fire Let Us Warm Ourselves

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______________________________CLOSERCloser and closer...till you are not even sure what you are looking at...really, what is it?

54 THEME Closer- Aki-Pekka Sinikoski

56 THEME CLOSER- Darius Kuzmickas Hester

58 THEME CLOSER- Darius Kuzmickas

60 THEME CLOSER- Russ Bain; Old Posters

62 THEME CLOSER- Darius Kuzmickas

64 THEME CLOSER- Darius Kuzmickas

SUMMER TIME_______________________________________________________

66 THEME SUMMER TIME- Javier Pierini

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“Summer Time” and the living is easy...no cares, no schedule just plain good times. When you have water and sun, what else do you need?

68 SUMMMER TIME- Michael Krauss

70 SUMMER TIME- Evelyn Pritt

72 SUMMER TIME- Martin Hunter; ‘Forth & Clyde Canal’

74 SUMMER TIME- Martin Hunter; ‘River Kelvin’

76 SUMMER TIME- Darius Kuzmickas

78 SUMMMER TIME- Elybeth

80 SUMMMER TIME- Michael Clements

PARKING____________________________________ Jeff Hollesen

82 PARKING- Jeff Hollesen

84 PARKING- Jeff Hollesen

86 PARKING- Jeff Hollesen

PRIPYAT ________________________________James B Willard

PRIPYAT- James B Willard 89

90 PRIPYAT- James B Willard

From the first moment that you set foot in a town like Pripyat, you feel a certain reverence, as if you’ve trespassed into both a sepulcher and a sanc-tuary. The abandoned city sits near the northernmost border of Ukraine and is a stark monument to the disastrous potential of mishandled nuclear technology. Residents evacuated the city almost 25 years ago when a catastrophic failure of the nearby Chernobyl reactor led to regional contami-nation by radioactive fallout, and the town has since been relinquished to vandals, nature, and ghosts.

One of the first things that you notice when you arrive is that there’s no background noise in Pripyat - no sound of traffic on a distant highway, no industrial din rumbling just below your threshold of perception, and even, strikingly, a notable lack of birdsongs. You hear these noises every day, especially if you’re living in a city; you filter them out, ignoring them as negligible and unimportant. The absence of all of these sounds forces you to consider in one of those can’t-put-your-finger-on-it sort of ways that something here is alien, and that things are not as they should be.

Of course, the entire town is crumbling in on itself as the nearby forests creep back in from the edges of the city. The years of neglect, the harsh winters, the warm summers, they’ve all contributed to the erosion of man’s footprint. It’s difficult to walk without stepping on the shattered parts of buildings and it seems that not a single window remains unbroken. Complexes of steel and concrete, once new and modern, stand like tombstones waiting to be documented and photographed so that they may serve as a message to posterity - This could happen to your town, too.

There’s a small amusement park erected in a courtyard near the center of town. A rusting Ferris Wheel stands over a fenced platform where mo-tionless, decrepit bumper cars sit unused, collecting rainwater or snow, depending on the season. The old canvas tent that was intended to provide shade for riders on the merry-go-round is now rotted away by time and the elements and hangs down from feeble arches in mildewed and mossy strips. No one ever used the attractions because the park was completed just days before the evacuation of Pripyat.

You can take in a view of the whole city from the roof of one of the higher buildings. The failed Chernobyl reactor stands a mere two kilometers away from town square, though you can probably see all the way to Belarus on a clear day. The only pollution in the air is invisible, but radiation levels are low enough that short trips are permitted with appropriate documentation and planning. There’s a 60 kilometer exclusion zone around Pripyat and government permission is required if you want to travel inside of this zone, but it’s relatively uncomplicated and affordable to do so.

Perhaps it’s because the city itself is so much larger than you may have experienced when you’ve traveled to other abandoned places (it once was home for almost 50,000 people) and therefore has more impact on you emotionally, but it seems that the old city center, the school library, the apartment complex, and the nursery are all connected by a somber lack of what once was - community, a home. People lived here, they worked here, they had loves and they had families. They had children here. Without the community present, the town truly is just a shell, a skeleton, a husk, abandoned. You’ve arrived in civilization’s cemetery, a three dimensional glimpse into a future without us. The relic looks you in the eyes, solemnly, forcing you to reflect on the impermanence of everything you know, patient in the knowledge that you will leave this place with both something more and something less than you had when you arrived. - James B Willard

PRIPYAT- James B Willard 93

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94 THEME CARNIVAL- Rodolfo Benitez; Clown Down

CARNIVALMemories of a different world from daring trapeze artists to the funny clown and the scary faces all under the tent of a single home town circus.

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96 THEME CANIVAL- Rodolfo Benitez; Pins

98 THEME CARNIVAL- Aki-Pekka Sinikoski; I Am Almost Always Alone

100 THEME CARNIVAL- Luis Montemayor; The little “Catrina”

102 THEME CANIVAL- Rodolfo Benitez; Tatttoo

104 THEME CANIVAL- Rodolfo Benitez; Hang On Loop

106 THEME CARNIVAL- Darius Kuzmickas; Theater

108 THEME CARNIVAL- Darius Kuzmickas; Red

Cover

1 68 111 114

2

4 56 62 76 106

6 8

10

12 94 102

14 15

16

32

50

54 98

66

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Nadine Bengelsdorfeckert.nadinesophie@googlemail.com

Michael Krausswww.michaelkrauss.cahttp://michaelkrauss.blogspot.com/

Manny Zervoszevmen@yahoo.com

Darius Kuzmickaswww.kudaphoto.comdarius@kudaphoto.com

Dennis Yermoshinwww.yermoshin.comdennis@yermoshin.comNew York, New York

David Lazerdvlazar@gmail.com

Rodolfo Benitezwww.rodolfobenitez.comrodolfobenitez@gmail.com

Jan Locusjan@janlocus.comhttp://www.janlocus.comhttp://www.nadaar.com

David Brunettiwww.davidbrunetti.comdavid@davidbrunetti.com

Escapistawww.escapista.netescapista@gmail.com

Rafael Aguilerawww.bellusphoto.comrafael@bellusphoto.com

Aki-Pekka Sinikoskiwww.korea.fipeki@korea.fi

Javier Pieriniwww.javierpierini.com javier@javierpierini.com

Evelyn Prittwww.evelynpritt.come13@evelynpritt.com

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82

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113 Back Cover

Martin Hunterwww.martinhunter.co.uk

Elybethelybeth_p@libero.itwww.flickr.com/photos/elybeth/www.tagmagazine.com/user/Elybeth

Michael ClementsMichaeldavidclements@yahoo.comwww.michaelclements.com.au

Jeff Hollesenwww.jeffhollesen.com

James B Willardbrokenkites@gmail.comwww.tagmagazine.com/user/eightysixwww.flickr.com/slumbernaut

Luis Montemayorwww.photographer.luismontemayor.comwww.flickr.com/people/luismontemayor/

Andre Wijayaand123_lab@yahoo.com

CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

Theme Summer Time- Michael Krauss

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112 THEME CLOSER- Andre Wijaya

Lights On Darkness

114 Michael Krauss