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Hossein Fardinfard
Hossein Fardinfard
Hossein Fardinfard

Hossein Fardinfard

Country: Iran
Birth: 1985

Netherlands-based Iranian documentary photographer Hossein Fardinfard (born 1985) took an unconventional path to his profession. After majoring in cartography, geomorphology, and IT, ultimately he discovered his aptitude for visual storytelling at the age of 30.

Fardinfard came to see photography as a means for observing society more intimately, and for knowing himself more deeply in turn. He has thus come to specialize in photography that explores social observation, human rights, and identity.

"I like storytelling not only as a process of documenting but also as a means for exerting a constructive influence on society, something like what Lewis Hine, the pioneer of photojournalism, did in his era in the USA. My relationships with photography subjects enhance my understanding of concepts like human rights. To understand this keyword, I need to know people first. Through knowing them, my spiritual investment in human rights has grown remarkably."

In the second phase of Fardinfard's artistic life -- at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague -- he had the chance to reflect more intently on the meaning and philosophies of photography and the pictorial arts. This experience also equipped him with principles of psychology and sociology that he readily applied to his photographic gaze. "It's more thrilling when I can find a scientific explanation of the social behaviors and interactions I'm capturing. I believe we can talk about Human Rights in scientific terms. There should be a point where the hard and soft sciences meet. I try to connect them and then visualize that point."
 

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Jack Savage
United Kingdom
1980
Jack Savage is a fine art photographer, digital and mixed media artist and gallery owner. Born in Northampton, England (1980) - He was educated at Nottingham University, where he carries an MA in American Studies and Film. Winner of over 100 international professional photography awards -he produces a unique brand of artworks using the varying mediums of studio portraiture, landscapes, street photography, mixed media photographic art, and digital psychedelic creations from what he labels "His Unconscious Soul". Savage's multi-faceted works have gained international recognition and acclaim - resulting in several prestigious international prizes, including most notably The Pangea Prize from Siena Photo Awards, Gold from the Shatto Gallery - Los Angeles, Photographer of the Year from The Spider Awards - Beverly Hills California and Gold in consecutive years from Tokyo Foto Awards. Over the last few years, he has exhibited his artworks internationally, in countries such as Italy, France, Greece, Hungary, Germany, USA and throughout the UK. Jack is currently represented by Singulart, Paris, The Zari Gallery, London, The Opulent Art Gallery, London, and ThePassePartout Gallery, Milan, Italy. In 2022 Jack became an influential gallerist, with the formation of The Influx Gallery, Notting Hill - London - showcasing the very best of contemporary art from around the world. Jack Savage is one of the UK’s most celebrated fine art photographers, acclaimed for his haunting black-and-white "Definitive Ambiguities" series. A certified Adobe Photoshop CC expert, Savage fuses classical film noir lighting with precise post-production to create images steeped in moral ambiguity, repressed desire, and an undercurrent of violence. Winner of the Pangea Prize at the Siena International Photo Awards, two consecutive Gold medals at the Tokyo International Foto Awards, Photographer of the Year at the Black & White Spider Awards (Los Angeles), and First Place at the Mono Awards, Savage draws heavily on the cinematic language of Otto Preminger and Orson Welles. His work echoes the words of historian Alain Silver, who described film noir as “a cinema of moral uncertainty and dangerous seduction,” and James Ursini, who noted its “dark urban poetry.” All portraits in this series feature residents from Savage’s hometown of Northampton, England, intensifying what Ursini might call the “claustrophobic menace” of the Midlands’ urban landscape. From shadow-draped alleys to the spectral “men in hats,” Savage’s noir vision transforms everyday streets into charged stages of human drama, where desire and danger meet in a single frame.
William Heick
United States
1916 | † 2012
William Heick (October 6, 1916 – September 13, 2012) was a San Francisco-based photographer and filmmaker. He is best known for his ethnographic photographs and documentary films of North American Indian cultures. W.R. Heick served as producer-director and chief cinematographer for the Anthropology Department of the University of California, Berkeley on their National Science Foundation supported American Indian Film Project. His photographs capture the life and culture of Native Americans from the Kwakiutl, Kashaya Pomo, Hupa, Navajo, Blackfoot and Sioux. He filmed a number of award winning films in this series along with the documentaries Pomo Shaman and Sucking Doctor, a Pomo doctoring ceremony considered by anthropologists to be one of the most complete and outstanding films of an aboriginal ceremony made to date. William Heick's career in photography began as a naval intelligence photographer during World War Two in the Pacific. After the war he studied photography at California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) under such notable teachers as Ansel Adams and Minor White. He became lifelong friends with Imogen Cunningham and Dorothea Lange and regards these two photographers as the primary influences on his photographic work. William Heick filmed two documentaries about Pacific Northwest Indian tribes, Blunden Harbour (1951) and Dances of the Kwakiutl (1951). W.R. Heick worked through most of the 1950s and 1960s as producer-director, assistant historian and cinematographer for the worldwide engineering firm of Bechtel Corporation. While with Bechtel he wrote and filmed documentaries of their major projects with special emphasis on ethnic and social consideration in remote areas of the Arctic, South America, Africa, Greenland, Europe, The Middle East, Australia, Indonesia and the islands of New Guinea and Bougainville. From 1956 to 1964 Heick was involved with C. Cameron Macauley in the American Indian Film Project, a project to document Native American cultures through film and sound recordings, working closely with Alfred Kroeber and Samuel Barrett. William Heick produced two documentaries for the Quakers. Beauty for Ashes documents the Quaker's project to rebuild 40 churches that had been burned by nightriders during Mississippi's racial strife in the turbulent 1960s. Voyage of the Phoenix documents the controversial voyage of the yacht Phoenix, which sailed through the American battle fleet during the Vietnam War to deliver medical supplies to North Vietnam when the bombing of that beleaguered country was at its peak. In the late 1960s and early 1970s W.R. Heick served as cinematographer on three feature films, all for the director/artist Fredric Hobbs: Troika (1969, co-directed by Gordon Mueller), Alabama's Ghost (1973), and The Godmonster of Indian Flat (1973). During the mid-1970s, working as an independent producer with Gordon Mueller, W.R. Heick produced the Indonesian Dance Series. This series, funded with grants from Caltex Pacific Indonesia and Pertamina, documents fourteen traditional dance performances from the islands of Java, Bali, Sumatra and Kalimantan. W.R. Heick's later films include The Other China, a four-part mini-series filmed on location in Taiwan in 1988 documenting the social and cultural fabric of Taiwan. His fine art photography has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, the de Young Museum, the Seattle Museum of Art, the Henry Gallery (University of Washington), the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and the University Art Gallery (Cal State at Chico) among others. His photographs have been selected for the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Smithsonian Institution, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art. In a published Art Scene review Monterey landscape artist and art critic Rick Deregon wrote: "The special qualities of W.R. Heick's images come from the simple relationship between the photographer and subject. With no agenda other than to capture the decisive inspirational moment and to illustrate the human parade Mr. Heick's work transcends straight journalism and aspires to an art of nobility and compassion."Source: Wikipedia William Heick was born October 6th, 1916. Spanning seven decades, Heick's career in photography and filmmaking has covered locations all over the world. Heick grew up in Kentucky and attended the University of Cincinnati. He married Jeanne Ridge in 1942, and served as a naval intelligence photographer in the Pacific during World War II. After the war, he continued his education at San Francisco State University. He also attended the California School of Fine Arts (now known as the San Francisco Art Institute), where he studied photography, painting, and sculpture under distinguished instructors such as Ansel Adams and Minor White. It was during this period that he met and made lifelong friends with photographers Imogen Cunningham and Dorothea Lange, both of whom he regards as primary influences on his photographic work. His fine art photography has been exhibited in institutions such as San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, DeYoung Museum, and Seattle Museum of Art, among many others. He has produced over 200 films and thousands of photographs. At the age of 94, when asked to sum up his prolific career, he simply stated, "it sure beats working!"Source: Peter Fetterman Gallery
Wiktoria Wojciechowska
Born 1991, Lublin, Poland, Wiktoria Wojciechowska lives and works in Lublin and Paris. Graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland, Wiktoria was the 2015 winner of the Oskar Barnack Leica Newcomer Award for Short Flashes, portraits of drenched cyclists captured on the streets of Chinese’s metropolis. Between 2014 and 2016 she worked on the series Sparks, a portrait of a contemporary war based on the stories of people living in the Ukrainian conflict. This series received several awards, such Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie New Discovery award’s public prize, Madame Figaro prize and the Prix pour la Photographie, Fondation des Treilles. Labirinto (2017-2019) Labirinto explores the architecture seen as a vector for an ideology, spreading in the inhabitants' thoughts. Architecture stays longer than its creators and might still smuggle fundamental ideas and atmosphere of passed days. Labirinto project is a starting point to discuss how the architecture influence inhabitants and if a city, structured as a symbol of fascist ideology, can become a dwelling for strangers. Wiktoria Wojciechowska works in the area of Agro Pontino in Italy: formerly marshes, which were, throughout centuries, a challenge for the authorities. The Romans, Popes and Napoleon have all tried to drain, recultivate it and build new settlements. The one who achieve the goal was Benito Mussolini, with the help of the hard work of World War I combatants. At the beginning of the '30s, the project of the foundation of the New Cities (Città nuove) started. The best Italian architects of these times were involved to draw the net of streets on the Pontine plain as on a blank page. They were to arrange the monuments and neighborhood buildings - following the current of rationalist architecture, adopted by the fascist as the official style of the ideology - of five cities: Littoria, Pontinia, Sabaudia, Aprilia and Pomezia. Designed in the model of "the rural city", they should serve as a renewal of civilization (Bonifica della cultura) and the so-called Mussolini's Arcadia for a "purified nation" of New Italians. This is how Littoria has been conceived, in 1932, from the mud and has been raised as the first of the five Mussolini's New Cities. Littoria was called the "jewel of Mussolini" and radiated by the combination of a stellate network of streets and curved ring roads, all converging towards the central square (Piazza del Littorio, now Piazza del Popolo). The labyrinth-like city was awaiting the new residents coming from the entire Italy to live in the empty buildings and appreciate the monumental solutions drawn upon the Roman Empire tradition. After World War II, the city was rebaptized to Latina to obliterate its fascist past and became a temporary asylum for displaced Italians and migrants. Between 1957 and 1991, 80 000 foreigners passed by the refugee camp. They were coming from Eastern Europe, fleeing the communist regimes, from Vietnam, Northern Africa, etc. Despite the official closing of the camp in 1991, migration is still an ongoing process. Today, the majority of newcomers originate from sub-Saharan Africa, Nigeria, Gambia, Ghana, Mali… The artist describes her work: In the middle of the day, during "the siesta", when the city is hot and stuffy, the streets become empty. The pale facades of the buildings reflect the sunlight like mirrors and hurt the eyes. As in De Chirico's paintings, the palisades are playing with lights and shades. The emptiness creates an illusion that we are back in the 30s. Only the scratches and colored patches on the walls unmask the timeworn city. From time to time, human figures flash by in the sun. These are those who get lost in this labyrinth, not knowing the rules of the city. They barely arrived there, but who gets into the labyrinth once, might not be able to wriggle out ever. Today in front of Palazzo M - built in the shape of the initial of Mussolini, a queue of immigrants is standing and waiting for their documents. Wiktoria Wojciechowska observes the city - silent witness of changing times - and recent immigrants, far from being integrated. During the conversations, they often mention the discrimination, preconceived ideas, and the fear of locals; their superiority coming from the colonial past, racism. They feel suspended, awaiting decisions and documents, trapped in the city space. The locals expect to move the immigrants out of the cities; they are not to be seen, as they "change the landscape", they should be invisible. The ideology, which sponsored the construction of the cities, is still lying under their foundation. Hidden but yet vivid, deep inside the consciousness. Looking further, Labirinto can be the metaphor of the current sociopolitical situation of all Europe, where newcomers from other continents are seeking asylum and acceptance. The fear of locals (who might have been migrants too) remains, and politics don't promote reconciliation. The policy of fear enables the authorities to seize control of the population's thoughts and define the enemy. The works of Wiktoria Wojciechowska are juxtaposing the fascist architecture - undefined corners of streets, scattered walls, and remains of fascist sculptural iconography - and the portraits of recently arrived migrants. As they wander through a temporarily deserted city, occupying the scene of a petrified ideology, the public space, they reveal a striking contrast with this ideology embodied in the architecture.
Joseph Podlesnik
United States
1959
Joseph Podlesnik holds a BFA in drawing and painting from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an MFA in drawing and painting from Cornell University. He currently serves as Adjunct Faculty (online) for the Stockton University Visual Arts Program and Facilitator Lead for the Digital Photography Cornell Certificate Program. Podlesnik exhibits his photographs singly and in group shows, nationally and internationally. He resides in Phoenix, AZ. For Podlesnik, the camera lens depicts perspective too easily, which is why he captures and makes photographs which often frustrate readable perspectival space. For him, the photographic image is not only a window through which to see the visible world, but also a maker of flat surfaces which stunt or block logical space. He sees photography and pictures not only as documentation, but as commenting on or reenacting perception itself. The Pain, Boredom and Euphoria of Looking For the “The Pain, Boredom and Euphoria of Looking” exhibition, my intent is to select color and black and white photographs which involve some personal physical discomfort (while capturing the photographs), degrees of boredom (tolerating, organizing, and capturing a world full of redundant visual information) and the thrill and euphoria I experience while capturing photographs and exploring their effects in post- processing. The intent is to arrive at formal order, unity, mood, complexity, ambiguity, and in many cases engage the viewer in frame edge-to-frame edge visual activity.
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