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Maxine Helfman
Maxine Helfman
Maxine Helfman

Maxine Helfman

Country: United States
Birth: 1953

A self-taught, late bloomer, after spending years as a stylist and art director, the only way to truly realize her vision was to get behind the camera. She has since been shooting commercially for advertising and editorial clients while pursuing personal projects. Her work has been recognized by PX3, IPA, Foto Dc, Flash Forward Boston, Critical Mass, British Journal of Photography, Photo News as well as the permanent collection of Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Museum of Fine Art Houston.

Artist Statement: Inspired by Flemish painting, "Historical Correction" reinterprets these old masters from a more contemporary point of view. Our world and cultures are changing so quickly we are witnessing the collision of past and present. When you look at paintings from periods of art and history, the depiction of the population is defined and specific. As populations shift, our world has become so diverse that different cultures are visually harder to define. Although my photographs are "invented realities", they are about real issues. Populations shift, gender and race are redefined, past definitions are challenged, and the faces of cultures and customs change. My works depicts those changes.
 

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Matthew Portch
United Kingdom
1970
I was born and raised in Bristol, England through the '70s and '80s in a typical suburb. As a child, television and movies were my favourite distraction, especially anything from the United States. The backdrop of the North American scenery felt like an exotic antidote to the humdrum of the English city suburbs and countryside. I was a keen illustrator spending hours pouring over the minutia of the subject matter. I wanted my drawings to feel as close to reality as possible. This work saw me enrolled in college at a young age where I studied Photography and Graphic Design. Drawing on my childhood memories, the visuals of the American landscape remained a major influence on my photography. I became inspired by North American photographers of the '60s and '70s who were prevalent in using large format film. This laborious system of capture enhanced these seemingly ordinary looking street scenes and vistas with fastidious detail. I discovered a more modern process in the form of a technical camera, digital back, and precision optics, then proceeded to cast my own journey. I like my pictures to be aesthetically simple, clean and graphic, which resonates with my background in design. I prefer the images to retain an air of perplexity, so keeping them free of people and any notable present-day object helps suspend them in a moment in time. As with most large format photography techniques, when I photograph a scene I capture everything across the frame in complete focus. This can lend a heightened sense of reality. Given each picture is deliberately simple and mundane – the detail of the capture is just as important as the subject matter and becomes a character of the image in itself. I use the full size of the sensor and prefer not to crop. Restricting myself to this discipline is almost a digital reverence to large format film. My creative vision is to capture a calm and melancholic disposition in the landscape and create a scene of discernible simplicity to evoke an emotional and response from within. About Lost America Lost America examines a quiet stillness in a forgotten landscape that is, in a sense: 'on-pause'. Backwater towns and rural corners are juxtaposed with the ambiguity of detached suburbia. Places appear frozen in time, their inhabitants absent or long since departed. Ardently stagnant in their appearance, the images aim to unlock a moment of reflective contemplation and instil a melancholic feeling of familiarity. One might not notice or acknowledge these spaces, especially when viewed within the vast stretch of America's panorama. Yet, when framed as a single vignette, the places can appear to echo a moment of mournful reverie. Or, for some, they might behold an alluringly sombre, everlasting impression.
Miles Aldridge
United KIngdom
1964
Miles Aldridge rose to prominence in the mid-nineties with his arresting, highly stylised photographs with references to film noir, art history and pop culture. An acclaimed colourist, he renders elaborate mise-en-scènes in a palette of vibrant acidic hues. These glamorous, frequently eroticised images probe society's idealised notions of domestic bliss where sinister undercurrents swirl beneath a flawless surface. Aldridge has worked prolifically for more than twenty-five years, and today he remains one of the few photographers still shooting predominately on film. His creative output encompasses large-scale c-type prints, Polaroids, screenprints, photogravures and drawings. Born in London in 1964, the son of famed art director and illustrator Alan Aldridge, his interest in photography began at an early age when he was given a Nikon F camera by his father. He went on to study graphic design at Central Saint Martins, graduating with a BA in 1987. Aldridge initially worked as an illustrator and music video director, before turning his attention to photography. In 1996 he began working with Franca Sozzani, the legendary editor-in-chief of Vogue Italia, and their boundary-pushing collaboration would continue for twenty years. In addition to the many international editions of Vogue, Aldridge's images have featured regularly in prestigious titles including Harper's Bazaar, Numéro, W, The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker. Aldridge develops each new photographic narrative by rendering his initial thoughts in ink or pencil sketches with washes of watercolour and pastel. These drawings and storyboards are an essential early stage in his creative process. He believes that 'fiction and theatricality can be more truthful than documenting reality' and translates his sketches into meticulously arranged compositions to create images reminiscent of film stills: frames snatched from a broader story. Aldridge notes that many of his favourite moments in cinema are, as he describes, "closeups of a woman's face thinking", and he shares Hitchcock's ability to create powerful moments of suspense, turning viewers into voyeurs. In Aldridge's Chromo Thriller (2012) there is a palpable resonance with David Lynch's neo-noir mystery Blue Velvet, where immaculate façades hide darkly strange stories. As one author has noted: "Aldridge's female protagonists recall the glamour and splendour of Isabella Rossellini's character whilst at the same time remaining suggestive of something more sinister." Only rarely does he allow the real world to encroach upon the imagined realm. Through his lens, even reality appears artificial. In the series Capital Gains (2007) and Open Tour (2008) the cities of Washington DC and Paris look cleaner and sleeker than ever before. In The Last Range of Colours (2007), a lone figure in a children's playground evokes both the Technicolor splendour of The Wizard of Oz and the haunting dreamscape of a Giorgio de Chirico painting. A recurring theme throughout Aldridge's oeuvre is the false promise of luxury. Psychedelic interiors are furnished with the trappings of mid-century suburban comfort: gleaming kitchen appliances, candy-coloured telephones and well-groomed pets denote success. The work conflates historic and modern motifs and makes subtle reference to the art historical canon. The project Immaculée (2007) points to Catholic depictions of female saints in ecstasy, whilst his portraits of Lily Cole (2005) and Maisie Williams (2017) draw inspiration from Northern Renaissance masters such as Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein. Pop Art tropes feature predominantly: Coca-Cola logos (3D, 2010; A Family Portrait #14, 2011), soup cans and tomato ketchup bottles (A Drop of Red #2, 2001; First Impressions, 2006) all form a striking part of his visual lexicon. His fascination with art history led Aldridge to undertake projects with several significant contemporary artists including Maurizio Cattelan, Gilbert & George and Harland Miller. For the project (after Cattelan) (2016), he was invited by Cattelan to respond to the Italian artist's exhibition, Not Afraid of Love, in the grand neoclassical rooms of the Monnaie de Paris. The resulting series of c-type photographs depicts statuesque nudes dominating Cattelan's hyperreal sculptures in a series of absurdist tableaux. A second series, titled Love Always and Love All Ways after Gilbert & George (2016), was made with the British duo at their London townhouse. Drawing on the conventions of Victorian melodrama, Aldridge devised a series centred around the story of an enigmatic young visitor staying at the house for the weekend. In a further nod to Victoriana, the images were printed using the nineteenth-century photogravure process, whereby an etched copper plate produces highly detailed intaglio prints. The monotone prints were augmented with blocks of bold colour and hand-painted details to create a contemporary aesthetic. His most recent collaboration was with Harland Miller, known for his paintings of imaginary book covers that were partly inspired by Alan Aldridge's 1960s designs for Penguin paperbacks. In a satisfying symmetry, Aldridge transformed Miller's paintings into real books, used as props in his photoshoot. The resulting screenprints evoke the grainy colour supplements of Aldridge's youth and were published by Poligrafa, Barcelona's renowned fine art publisher, who launched them at the 2017 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach. Poligrafa went on to publish the subsequent screenprint series New Utopias, which they exhibited at the 2018 edition of Art Basel. Most recently, Tan Lines, one of Aldridge's largest screenprints to date, was unveiled by Poligrafa at the 2019 edition of The Armory Show, New York. Aldridge's major museum exhibitions include his upcoming retrospective Virgin Mary. Supermarkets. Popcorn. Photographs 1999 - 2020 at Fotografiska, New York, which opened 7th May 2021 having first appeared at Fotografiska Museum, Stockholm (2020-2021), solo shows at The Lumiere Brothers Photography Centre, Moscow (2019) and OCA, São Paulo (2015) and I Only Want You to Love Me at Somerset House, London (2013). In 2014, he was commissioned by Tate Britain to create a photographic installation in response to Mark Gertler's 1916 painting Merry-Go-Round. London's National Portrait Gallery houses a large collection of Aldridge's portraits and his work is held in prestigious museums and institutions around the world including the Victoria and Albert Museum and British Museum in London, the Fondation Carmignac and the Palais Galliera in Paris, the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Massachusetts and the International Center of Photography in New York. -- Susanna Brown Curator of Photography Victoria and Albert MuseumSource: milesaldridge.com
Andrea Reese
United States
Andrea Star Reese is a photojournalist/documentary photographer based in New York currently working in Indonesia.In 2013, Disorder, a documentary reportage on conditions faced by Indonesians suffering from mental illness and undiagnosed mental disorders was exhibited at Visa Pour L’Image Perpignan, and Angkor Photo Festival., Published on Lightbox.time.com. the essay followed men and women in homes, shelters, schools and hospitals.Previously, Urban Cave, a three-year project on long term unsheltered men and women living in makeshift housing in New York City was exhibited at Visa Pour L’Image 2010. Urban Cave received Best Social Documentary from The New York Photo Festival, was a finalist for POYI: World Understanding, a FotoEvidence book award finalist, and a 2010 Visa d’Or, Feature nominee. Most recently Urban Cave was exhibited at Theory of the Clouds Gallery, Kobe, Japan and at the 2013 Athens Photo Festival. Urban Cave has been published internationally. An ongoing update in preperation for a book is in progress.Ms. Reese first worked in Indonesia directing a feature documentary film made up of short stories collected during the 2003-2004 run up to the country’s first direct democratic presidential election. The film covered issues pertinent to the time. On staff at the International Center of Photography School, and a tutor at the 2013 Angkor Photo Festival Workshop, Andrea Star Reese is a 2010 fellow in Photography from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a reGeneration2 photographer.Grants/Awards2013 Finalist Fotoevidence Book Award2012 American Photography 28: Best pictures from 2011_ (Chasing Stigma, working title, work in progress)2011 Honorable Mention International Photo Awards_(Chasing Stigma,working title, as work in progress)2011 Honorable Mention International Photography Award_Merapi’s Breath2011 Finalist Picture of the Year World Understanding Urban Cave 2011 Included as part of AnthropoGraphia2010 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Photography2010 2nd place fotovisura award2010 Nominated Visa d’or Feature2010 Invited reGeneration2: Tomorrows Photographers Today2009 3 Hon. Mentions International Photo Awards Editorial/Other, Editorial/Essay Deeper Perspective2009 Finalist Magnum Expressions Award2009 Best Social Documentary New York Photo Awards2009 Honorable Mention Camera Club New York2008 Les Visas de L’ANI
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April 2024 Online Solo Exhibition
April 2024 Online Solo Exhibition
April 2024 Online Solo Exhibition

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