Collage

From the series I Do Miss Hospital Visit

Shwe Wutt Hmon

Students of Tsinghua University showing their prestige with an a4 white paper.

Xin Li

From the series POST, 2023

Sander Coers

From the series Blaze Orange / High Visibility

Jaclyn Wright

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Pink Ladies and Pear, 2012

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Wedding day from the series Las Flores mueren dos veces, 2022

Louis Vuitton Jeff Koons Rubens Bag, 2020

From the series Home Leaving One for Another

"Mohlokomedi wa Tora", Scene 2, 2018 

Killa from the series Madre

In a sandstone mine 1 from the series This isn't Divide and Conquer

Dialect, 2020

authenticity (2 CHAINZ) from the series BLACK SNAFU, 2022

Wait from the series We Didn't Choose to be Born Here, 2022

Foam Magazine

Opening of Tyler Mitchell, photo by Almicheal Fraay

About

 is the well-known Photoshop selection tool of the same name. For Xin Li, the tool is much more than a handy feature to edit images. It becomes a means to draw parallels with societal control and censorship during the COVID lockdowns in China.  

The magic wand tool selects areas of images based on colour and hue—allowing smart selection and quick manipulation of images. Enforced with machine learning, it nowadays easily predicts which objects a user would like to see selected. Xin Li uses the tool to distort images, obscuring their original meaning behind layers of other images, often of other artworks.  

For Xin Li, this process symbolises the mechanisms of hiding and revealing facts and fake news, regulating the flow of information and controlling the dominant narrative. Metaphorically captured in the overwhelming fusion of shapes and colours, the visually explosive works tempt the viewer to look what lies beneath the apparent chaos. 

Stuck at home during the COVID-19 lockdown, Shwe Wutt Hmon was unable to visit the hospital for her regular check-ups and scans, necessary because of a life-long health issue. Coming to terms with this limitation, she started scanning her body, as well as flowers and medical records, by herself with an ordinary at-home scanner, creating a variety of abstract self-portraits. 

 that emerged from these experiments, reveal a poetic and symbolic documentation of the ongoing assault of medical procedures and operations on her body. Hmon’s image-making practice strongly ties together process and concept: the withering flowers symbolise the decay of the body and dark colours reflect somber emotions experienced right before scheduled operations.  

Another dimension was added when she moved from Myanmar to Thailand in 2022. Printing her work on local Saa paper, the works received an almost skin-like texture. Again, restrictions–this time due to the delicate paper type–required her to improvise, causing her to print the works small scale at home. The final accumulated process turned out to present a healing capacity: by carefully printing, cutting and sewing her works together, Shwe ultimately was also mending herself.

How does a photograph shape our understanding of the past? 

 is a series of A.I.-generated images, combined with archival images, questioning the construction of memory and masculinity through our image culture. 

In an attempt to grasp the full story of his deceased grandfather and his Indonesian heritage, Sander Coers turned to the artificial intelligence programme 

Feeding archival family photos into its system, he asked the programme to describe them, specifically listing their technical details such as dominant colour tones and type of camera, film and lens. Altering these descriptions allowed Sander to prompt the programme to create new images, yet maintain the exact visual look and feel of the family snapshots. Finally, by blending multiple A.I.-generated images together with the originals, he created a surprisingly intimate, genuine, yet completely fictional family album. 

The way the photos are cropped stands out. Coers used an element of collaging when assembling the final images, in order to emphasise the constructed nature of the photographs, and ultimately, the constructed nature of one’s memory, too. 

 alludes to the ‘afterlife’ of his grandfather, through the photo albums he left behind, as well as to the realm of post-photography: a space where images can be generated without the use of a camera.  

Adobe Stock image

Image from the series POST, 2023

From the series POST

The West Desert, located on the western shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah (USA), is the ancestral home of the indigenous Goshute people. Though officially public lands, managed by the Bureau of Land Management, this area is largely used for various privatised or military purposes, ranging from mining operations, testing grounds for weapons and improvised gun ranges.  

, Jaclyn Wright visited these cluttered sites, full of discarded targets and shattered clay pigeons. The bullet-holed remains, which she collected, photographed and filmed, are pieced together into performative installations, that reflect on the colonisation of ancient lands by bureaucratic systems.  

By inserting herself into the scene, wearing a skintight bodysuit made out of orange clay pigeons, Wright comments on the hyper-masculine culture of land dominance and cowboy fantasies. The synthetic orange colour becomes symbolic: used to enhance visibility, it signifies the strong opposition and rejection of its natural environment. 

Untitled (BLM arrows I)

From the series High Visibility (Blaze Orange)

Antelope Island (Utah) Buffalo Hunt photograph collection, Digital MSSC782, No. 6, Altered

L. Clyde Anderson photograph collection (1910- 1959), P0158, Box 1, Folder 27, Altered

Charles James Neal photograph collection (1900 - 1920s), P0694, Box 1, Folder 4, Altered

The West Desert is located on the western side of the Great Salt Lake [UT, United States]. Historically, this area has been documented through photography and land surveys, supporting the violent exploitation of the landscape. 

Archives, II

Untitled (grid)

Nearly one-third of the West Desert's 7.7 million acres are used as biological and chemical weapons testing grounds. The remaining areas of the West Desert are open to various uses, including improvised gun ranges.

Collected Targets

Collected Targets, from the series High Visibility (Blaze Orange)

L. Clyde Anderson photograph collection (1910- 1959), P0158, Box 1, Folder 6, Altered

Stansbury Island, the second largest island in the Great Salt Lake, echoes with gunfire and is littered with bullet holes, clay pigeons and improvised targets. The Bureau of Land Management refers to this detritus as "trigger trash".

Found Clay Pigeons

Archives, V

After encountering the powerful texts of psychiatrist Frantz Fanon on the fight against colonial injustice, a series of questions emerged inside Issam Larkat’s mind. Who was Frantz Fanon and how did he become a crucial figure in the liberation of Algeria, as well as the broader movement of decolonialisation? How relevant are his words after seventy years? And, which questions would Fanon have asked in today’s society? 

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was an important figure in the global struggle against colonialism during the 1950s, also known under the adopted Islamic name Omar Ibrahim, and recognised for his publications 

(1961). Born on the Caribbean island Martinique, under French colonial rule, Fanon educated as a psychiatrist in France. After the Algerian Revolution in 1954, he joined the National Liberation Front and continued to fight for the freedom of many African nations, including Algeria, until his death in 1961.

Inspired by the profound legacy of Fanon’s visionary ideas, Issam Larkat’s series 

pays a tribute to his thinking by using a distinct style that combines photographs, archival images and hand-made drawings. Larkat cleverly translates his questions into critical collages that depart from his own experience in Algeria, yet simultaneously speak to the universal struggle against injustice and (neo-)colonialism, connecting the shared identities of Algerian, African and Arab people. 

From the series Frantz Fanon, Me, and The Questions

Issam Larkat

is a close observation of performance in everyday life. Which roles do we act out on a daily basis and how does that influence our identities? Using the metaphor of the theatre to separate private (

) spheres, Eleonora Agostini studies her mother’s behaviours, gestures and expressions in her job as a waitress. 

Puzzling together photographs, archival images, moving images and texts into various collages, Eleonora Agostini breaks down the layers of performance one by one, revealing the repetitiveness of gestures, habits and adopted mannerisms used in serving clients.  

The work is also a commentary on the feminist theory of the “gaze”. The restaurant becomes the space where her mother is both the observer and the observed, where parts of her public behaviour as a waitress bleed into her private behaviour of being an individual, woman, and mother. Through her project, Agostini examines this relationship between the female body and the different social roles it performs in different spaces. 

From the series A Study on Waitressing

Eleonora Agostini

Unidentified flying objects, ships floating above the water or identical strangers: the internet holds a vast collection of real-world ‘glitches’: errors or optical illusions that occur in the world around us but cannot be explained rationally. Inspired by movies like 

, these puzzling phenomena spark online discussion, often satirical, about whether we might exist in a simulation, rather than the real world.

, artist duo Andrea Orejarena and Caleb Stein look exactly at this blurry line between fact and fiction, fuelled by the overwhelming flow of images coming our way through our screens on a daily basis. The artists treat the internet as a collective subconscious where evidence for real-life glitches is constantly posted, shared, and reshared. 

The large collection of found internet footage that they built over the years inspired them to search for sites across the United States that reminded them of such glitches. The resulting series of serene yet uncanny landscape photography leave the viewer in an unsettling space, confused between what might be real and what might be fake.

Syntethic Street Collage

Found footage from the series American Glitch

Abraham Lincoln and Drone from the series American Glitch, 2021

Real Bird in Fake Tree, 2022. From the series American Glitch

Desert Facade 1, 2022. From the series American Glitch

Egg Glitch. From the series American Glitch

Very Large Array, New Mexico. From the series American Glitch

Life on Mars Training Simulation, 2021. From the series American Glitch

From the project American Glitch

Cloud Glitch, 2021. From the series American Glitch

Desert Firing Range, 2022. From the series American Glitch

Fake Training Battle in Replica Iraqi Village

From the series American Glitch

Herndon Climb, 2023. From the series American Glitch

California City Paper Roads, Aerial View 1 of 9, 2022. From the series American Glitch

Andrea Orejarena & Caleb Stein

Dine Dine Khasiya Paribe

 is a visual folktale, following the tunes of local songs from the Rajbanshi community in Assam and Bengal, India. Historically, this community has continuously been mis-identified and culturally erased through the crushing weight of colonial bureaucracy. The series documents Akshay Mahajan’s journey in search for what ‘identity’ truly is.

Growing up in Mumbai as a child of the Indian partition, without any knowledge of his own heritage, Akshay Mahajan attempted to construct a new identity: not by birth, but through love. Folksongs, sung by his wife, drew him to north-eastern India, to the Rajbanshi people—bringing back to live a cultural tradition on the brink of obscurity. 

The resulting works are an intuitive and associative exploration about the meaning of ‘identity’. The use of the collaging technique refers to the constructed nature of identity, as something that is continually challenged and reassembled. Mahajan explains: “We are all people of clay, our identities constantly changing, not chained by the borders we have inherited.”

Listen to "Dine Dine Khasiya Paribe" by clicking the play button at the bottom of the exhibition.

From the series People of Clay

Akshay Mahajan

Front cover: Faceless, 2023. Image from the series (Inter)Faces of Predictions

Foam Magazine is an international award-winning photography publication.

Foam Magazine #64 Extremes - The Environmental Issue. Cover: Abundance, 2023

Cover image: Sunil and Sulbha Dhiwar, with Tanmay, Tejasvi, Sourabh, Prachi and Vivek from the Goody family archive, 2002. Image from the series Eat with Great Delight

Cover image: Untitled / After Courbet (L’origine du monde), 2004. Colour photograph, 46x55cm. Photograph: David Rych.

Foam Magazine 61 Talent. Image: Paintings, Dreams and Love © Yushi Li

Foam Magazine #60 Glyphs – The Image + Text Issue

Image from the series EIGHTEEN NINETY 2020 installation detail from the exhibition In Plain Sight

Foam Magazine is published two times a year. Each issue is dedicated to a specific theme that is explored through work by both world-renowned image makers and newer, emerging talents. Accompanying essays, interviews and opinions by experts in the field come together to shape an in-depth and critical conversation.

Crafted with distinct editorial choices, Foam Magazine has been the recipient of several awards for its high-grade graphic design and quality of content.

Phone showing Foam magazine

Image from the series Playing with Visual Fragments

Title

Foam Magazine #59: Histories - The Archival Issue, 2021 

Image from the series After Hours

title

Image from the series Collection of Unjust Enrichment

Image from the series Where We ve Been, Where We re Going Why

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Magazine

 in 2009. Using c-print with an epoxy-layer as the medium, the artwork is displayed at 10 x 15 cm.

Waves from the Web, 2009

visible in

 is derived from the internet. Inspired by 'The Age of Aquarius,’ the astrological belief that the world has entered a new cycle in which love, light and humanity play an important role, the element of water is often used as a metaphor. De Vries has searched for the different ways that water has been represented in different cultures, from Japanese wood engravings to Bob Ross. De Vries brings the variety of collected images together by making collages and presenting them in a new way.

Waves from the Web

 in 2013. Using duratrans print in light box as the medium, the artwork is displayed at 100 x 55 x 5 cm.

22.12.2013, from the series All Year Round, 2013

Foam is supported by the VriendenLoterij, Foam Members, De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek, the VandenEnde Foundation and the City of Amsterdam.

In 2021 Foam receives additional support from the Mondriaan Fund and Kickstart Cultuurfonds

In 2013, the camera of Ola Lanko took 2,000 automated pictures of the IJ every day from the window of her apartment. These pictures were organised in chronological order, creating panoramic ribbons of the passage of time. The start and end of the day mark the frame of the image, producing what looks from a distance like strips of tone and colour that vary depending on the time of day. Close up, however, the details of what has passed before the camera become apparent. The works 22.06.2013 and 22.12.2013 from the overall project All Year Around include all photographs that Ola Lanko took on 22 June and 22 December 2013 - the longest and shortest day of the year.

22.06.2013, from the series All Year Round, 2013

22.12.2013

22.06.2013

, Bruno Zhu transformed the Foam 3h space, which is also a library, into another reading room – albeit a two-dimensional one.

Foam: 3h Bruno Zhu - New Arrivals, 2015

 He filled the area with photographs of carpets, bookshelves, lamps, and phonebooks. As no actual reading could be done, Zhu rendered the room into a symbolic space that referenced the idea of reading.

Zhu light-heartedly explores his fascination for photography’s ambivalent nature as a symbol and an object in and of itself. One might be tempted to qualify Zhu’s work as post-digital, because of the influence of the technology and the Internet, but the artist insists not to be tied to one style. “Things are getting more awkward, more humorous, more visceral and more urgent, so why rely on a label to box all these things up?” His peculiar work invites the viewer into a world of brightness and positivity.

New Arrivals

 in 2010. Using c-print as the medium, the artwork is displayed at 60 x 40 cm.

Paper Girl 2, from the series World, 2010

A frail and twisted female body dissimulated behind pieces of paper: profoundly influenced by fashion and design, Ina Jang’s images are unconventional and light. She creates a complex and multidimensional world in which reality and fiction are intertwined using different surfaces and layers.

The base of Jang’s work is her experimental curiosity. Many of her images start with drawings or figures, which become obscured in surreal, hyper-stimulated environments. Jang’s goal is to find new perspectives in photography: "Coming up with something that completely breaks the boundaries might be impossible, but I think it’s always nice to try to break personal boundaries." With her conceptually and aesthetically playful approach to photography, Jang crafts her own visual language and creates light-hearted and poetic work.

Paper Girl 2

 in 2012. Using C-type as the medium, the artwork is displayed at 73,3 x 93,4 cm.

Daniel Gordon’s work displays a kaleidoscope of colours, forms, and textures. Gordon uses his own photographs alongside images that he finds on Internet to construct three-dimensional still lifes. Although familiar with Photoshop, he mostly physically cuts and pastes in the studio. Daniel Gordon does not hide the construction behind his work but rather emphasizes it. The paper structure of the fruit is distinctly visible. A drop of glue remains visible on the rim of the fruit bowl, a silent witness of his creative practice.

Pink Ladies and Pears

 in 2008. Using C-type as the medium, the artwork is displayed at 150 x 120 cm.

Bouquet V, 2008

 by Maurice Scheltens and Liesbeth Abbenes looks like a typical Dutch seventeenth-century still life. But like most floral still lifes from that time, this carefully arranged bouquet is far from realistic. Many seventeenth-century painters assembled bouquets in their paintings with an assortment of seasonal flowers, which could never flourish at the same time. Bouquet V is also an artistic construction: the duo cut all parts of the flower arrangement from books, magazines, and catalogs, which were accurately combined into a balanced composition. This two-dimensional construction was then photographed in a three-dimensional setting, distorting the viewers’ gaze and perception of reality. The still life we see is fake and real at the same time: although not quite what it seems, it is a true creation, not a digital tableau.

Bouquet V

In a four-part series led by acclaimed Polaroid artists Rhiannon Adams, Ellen Carey & John Reuter, and Marcel Veldman and Foam 3h alumnus Ece Gökalp, the participating students were able to use the recently launched Polaroid I-2 camera – the first advanced instant camera with built-in manual controls. Moreover, they had the chance to discuss their perspectives about the possibilities of storytelling and the enduring relevancy of this unique medium.

Students as well as young, self-made creatives approached the medium from various angles and shed light on its artistic, social, and technological significance by pushing the boundaries of what instant film can achieve. The results of their collective efforts are now on display as part of an exclusive online exhibition.

This programme is made possible with the support of Polaroid.

Foam is supported by the VriendenLoterij, Foam Members, the VandenEnde Foundation and the City of Amsterdam. 

PORTRAITURE
AND
THE PHYSICAL
PHOTOGRAPH

“Polaroid photo processes are completed in situ, there is no external hand involved. It’s pure – just me, the camera, the environment, and the film.” 

POLAROID 
AS AN
ARTISTIC MEDIUM

CAPTURING 
REAL 
               LIFE

“In between all the skateboard tricks and stuff, I like something contrasty. Instant film for me is the perfect way to do this. It gives you an example of the free life aside from the actual skateboard.”

collage

Collage

Shwe Wutt Hmon

Xin Li

Sander Coers

Jaclyn Wright

About

Xin Li

Shwe Wutt Hmon

Sander Coers

Jaclyn Wright

Issam Larkat

Eleonora Agostini

Andrea Orejarena & Caleb Stein

Akshay Mahajan

Magazine

Waves from the Web

22.12.2013

22.06.2013

New Arrivals

Paper Girl 2

Pink Ladies and Pears

Bouquet V

Polaroid Photography in Multiple Perspectives

Collection

Foam Talent 2024-2025

Artists shaping the future of photography