Miana Jun Grafals
Miana Jun is a freelance commercial and fine art photographer based in Bucks County Pennsylvania. Her photographic work ranges from wedding photography, portraiture of all kinds, editorial assignments and artistic projects that involve nature and dance. In 2012 she was recognized as one of Rangefinder Magazine’s 30 Rising Stars of Wedding Photography Most recently she was awarded by Expertise.com as one of the top wedding photographers in Allentown, PA. One of her notable photography projects include “Cooking with Flowers” (Quirk Books) a cookbook by chef Miche Bacher that features recipes utilizing edible flowers. She is the co-creator and main photographer of “The Breast and the Sea Project” which is a project that began with writer and breast cancer survivor Rebecca Pine that empowers women with breast cancer through the photographic image and writing. Most recently she has exhibited her photography work at Soho Photo in NYC, The Natural History Museum in Prescott Arizona, Foto Foto in Long Island, New York and the Perez Museum in Miami. In May of this year, she will be presenting a body of photographic work alongside choreographer Dale Andree’s performance at The History Miami Museum.
Artist Statement
In 2015 and 2017 the dance group Aevium and myself were awarded the PLAYA Fellowship Residency in the Great Basin Region of Eastern Oregon to work on a collaborative project titled “Intimacy with Disappearance.” Ævium is a collaborative, time-based, female, multi-generational dance theater ensemble with a 23-year history of working together in various configurations. As a collective, we explored what it means to disappear, both internally and externally through movement and photographs. My interest as the photographer was to document these dances on the land and capture captivating human and nature relationships through the photographic image.
The landscape of the Great Basin ranges from high desert to rugged mountainous areas with a lake that dries up in the summer. Much of the land is covered with a beautiful repetition of hexagonal mud crack patterns. This vast and rugged environment became the platform where topics of disappearance were explored for the dancers and I. Sexism, ageism, cultural, political, spiritual and ecological degradation were addressed throughout the collective creative process. The dance examines the similarities between environmental degradation and the human aging process. The photographs magnify these relationships between each other, the environment and with oneself.
