Diana, an 18 years old teenager from Targu Mures, hitchhiked to Vama Veche, a small Romanian village on the coastline of the Black Sea with no money in her pockets. Her plan was to earn money by offering hugs for 1 LEU so she could have fun for a few days.

There she met Victor. Victor was from the same town, and he was also offering hugs for 1 LEU. Little by little, they started spending all the time together: making money, sharing their food, the drinks, the fun and one tent.

In my latest project, ‘Mothers and Daughters” I portray the complex and sometimes challenging relationship between a mother and her daughter. It is both documentary and biographical in nature, as it also illustrates memories of me and my two sisters’ relationships with our mother, and even our mother’s relationship with her mother.

I chose to work with real mother and daughter pairs in their own environment, rather than with models or actors. I only needed to orchestrate the sitters moderately to show the essence of their emotional bond. They created their own small world together, at the same time, through the staging of the scene, reviving my memories of my own family’s relationships.

As the project grew in shape, form and content, I related to twenty different mother and daughter pairs, with their very varied, sometimes

ultra-sensitive relationships, and realised again how much the fragility and vulnerability of the female is exposed fully in the mother-daughter relationship.

Over passage of time it changes significantly. The babe-in-arms is fully dependent on the mother, but at the other end of the age scale, the mother often becomes dependent on her daughter to satisfy her emotional needs.

In the adult relationship the intimacy of the bond is established by the love, struggle and rivalry of a shared lifetime, leading to a mature understanding and acceptance of each other. Between childhood and adulthood, the full spectrum of emotions is played out. My images try to capture all of these very different stages in this extremely special and complicated relationship.

More images from this series and other projects on Julia Fullerton-Batten’s website. You can also follow her updates on juliafullertonbatten.tumblr.com.

Julia was born in Bremen, Germany, her mother German, her father English. She spent her childhood in Germany and in the USA before moving to the UK in 1986. At school-leaving age she decided to enter a career in photography. She has not looked back since. After graduating from the Berkshire College of Art and Design, she assisted for five years, where she learned her craft the hard way and began to develop her own unique photographic style.

Among the photographic projects, Julia has a video section on her website. This one is truly wonderful!

Breast Cancer Care Awareness, 2012 from Julia Fullerton-Batten on Vimeo.

Tellaks, belly dancers and zennes portrayed in this series are characters familiar to the orientalist gaze. Subjects are asked to take the stage and pose. However, these large format portraits are carefully designed to transcend mere portrayals of their subjects’ vocations.

To this end illusory moments from the past of an orientalist gaze are cleverly referenced in these scenes while the illusory constructs of such scenes are daringly revealed in quirky details. For example, in that gorgeous bath house where a certain tellak lies you suddenly notice the

plastic Made in China blue slippers he is wearing, or you cannot help but notice that ‘far-out’ tattoo on some belly dancer’s leg who strikes a pose in her workplace that looks like a jewelry box lined with velvet.

These photographs that live and breath between two worlds are much more than the reflection of a memory frozen in time. Ultimately then they are about the uneasy confrontation of a postmodern and conservative society with nudity and eroticism.

More images and other interesting projects on Ahmet Sel’s website.

Ahmet Sel is born in Turkey in 1956 and he explores the field of documentary photography. He settled in France in 1981. Between 1990 and 2000, he lived in Russia where he was a correspondent and bureau chief for Sipa Press.

In 2005-2006, Sel has been the chief editor for Sipa Press in Paris. Ahmet Sel is lecturer at the Media and Communication Systems departement of Istanbul Bilgi University and Bahcesehir University.

His photographs, distributed by Sipa Press, Fedephoto and Opale, are published in major international newspapers and magazines.

He won the “Fujifilm Press Photo Award France” in the portrait category, in 2003, and the Gold Award of National Magazine Awards Foundation (Canada) in the “Words & Pictures” category, in 2004. Ahmet Sel is represented by Pi Artworks gallery in Istanbul.

He also has been featured in Love Issue #5 with the Gens de Moscou project.

“Isabel M. Martinez is interested in the phenomenological aspects of human experience. Perception is a recurring theme within her practice, and has become a foundation for her to explore the possibilities and limitations of photography. She approaches the medium as a means of visual transcription for ideas reflecting on the notions of time, space,

simultaneity, and duration. In doing so, experimentation and process have come to the forefront of much of her work. Non-linear narratives, superpositions and juxtapositions are often employed in the creation of her images; spatio-temporal relations are predominant subjects.”

According to quantum mechanics we have forty conscious moments per second, and our brains connect this sequence of nows to create the illusion of the flow of time. So, what would things look like if that itermittence was made visible? This body of work explores that hiccup, that blink, that ubiquitous fissure in the falling-into-place of things.

In my work I attempt to articulate something in between the freezing of time – that so often characterizes photography – and its relentless passing. I hint towards temporalities that are fluid, speculative, and somewhat loose. I am looking for the line that divides the finite (probability) from the infinite (possibility). If time is a succession of

instants, I want to see what lies in between them. I am after the gaps between instants of consciousness.

The photographs in Quantum Blink are composed of two exposures taken instants apart. The striped pattern is the result of masks placed in-camera, this feature allows me to blend two images together and at the same time keep them from fully fusing onto one another. Visually, these works appear to shift and change depending on the distance and the angle from which they are seen; an illusion of volume may become apparent, while other times it may seem as though there are three images at play.