shashasha

The third issue of Shanghai-based publisher Same Paper’s photography magazine “Closing Ceremony” is titled the “Smile Issue” and explores the difficulties, perplexities and crises currently faced by people around the world with humor, irony, or outright mockery. Thanks to the participation of artists from diverse backgrounds (including Roe Ethridge, Feng Li, Masanao Hirayama, Karolina Wojtas, Paul Kooiker, Chris Maggio, Gaetano Pesce, Nigel Shafran, PZtoday, Peter de Potter, Fish Zhang, and Max Siedentopf), “Closing Ceremony 03” covers a wide variety of topics, genres and approaches. Interviews with selected artists (among them Roe Ethridge, David Brandon Geeting, Gaetano Pesce, and Chris Maggio) further explore the significance of the smile in contemporary photography.

“Closing Ceremony 3” also includes the zine “Amazine” featuring work by Alyssa Kazew, Thomas Albdorf, Jurgen Maelfeyt, Minh Ngoc-Nguyen, So Mitsuya, Trevor Hernandez, Yituo, Kyle Berger, and many more.

“As a common scene in popular photography, a photographer would always ask the sitter to “smile” and capture that transient moment of staged happiness. On the other hand, when we come across perplexities and difficulties, we are conditioned to tell ourselves: “Smile,” as if all the problems would be lifted after this simple facial expression. However, people tend to realize that a staged positivity isn’t always a solution, it can’t even numb ourselves anymore.”
― from the publisher’s description