Featured Photographer: Justine Sawicz

As well as featuring photographers from ESPY 2014, we will also be celebrating emerging photographers from all over the world. Justine Sawicz is our first, born in Canada and studying in Carmarthen, we are all big fans of her work and very excited to see her progress...

"Up until February 2014, I had never taken a photography class before in my life. Within a semester abroad to study art at Colleg Sir Gar in Carmarthen, Wales, I had gone from complete photographic ignorance to a greater understanding, appreciation and affinity to the medium.

My fascination with photography had been more of a tinkering effort to take good photos. It had been easy for me to gravitate to the camera and take "good" photos. But, I found my true calling with film photography when I tried it here in Wales. More specifically, I taught myself how to double expose on film and have made this my signature effect in this book. It is the unpredictability, surprise and challenge of taking double exposures that fuels my passion for it. All these photographs have been solely on 35 mm film. They include pictures of my friends that I have met during my exchange in Wales, self-portraits, nature, architecture and anything I've found to be unexplainably inspiring during my travels. I hope that they capture my fascination with the mystical spirit of the nature in Wales, the haunting and gothic beauty that I see in the landscape, ridden with legends, stories, and history as well as the beauty I find in the crippled, shrivelled, decayed, dying, resurrected, blossoming, and the impermanence of life.

I try to maintain a natural quality to my photographs, using only natural lighting for every image without any post-editing besides photo cropping and lightening the exposure.

Below are some photos I've included in a series called, Theomorphic (literally meaning being formed in the likeness or image of God), I am commenting on the fact that I create my life the same way I create these images, metaphorically speaking. The beauty that I create in my photographs, is the same beauty I can create in my life with my thoughts, actions and decisions.

It is coming to Wales to study art that has brought me to produce these photos. But it is coming to Wales that has also brought me to produce innumerable experiences, life long friends and memories that I will cherish and remember for a many lifetimes. I believe that my external world is God. I see God, the Universe, however you refer to it, in everyday life. In everything I see. Particularly in people, nature and our creations. And this is how I find the respect and beauty in life and approach it with a liveliness, vivaciousness and childish excitement every day."