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Maynard Switzer
Maynard Switzer
Maynard Switzer

Maynard Switzer

Country: Canada

Maynard Switzer was born in Los Angeles and is a professional freelance travel and documentary photographer. He is a graduate of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and a former assistant to legendary photographer Richard Avedon. He has taught at the International Center of Photography in New York City and has written many magazine articles about travel photography. His love of foreign cultures and their fascinating customs has been the main catalyst for Maynard’s photography around the globe. Maynard has had his photography published in National Geographic Traveler Magazine, Geo Magazine, Afar Magazine and the prestigious Fine Art Spanish Magazine Art Fotografico.



Statement
There are approximately 195 independent countries in the world and an estimated 6,800 different languages spoken, and often times there is a breakdown in communication. Some caused by language barriers, other times lost or inadequate translation and sometimes a woeful attempt at hand signals. However, images are universally understood. The cliché "a picture is worth a thousand words" certainly rings true. Pictures speak a thousand words to a thousand different people in a thousand different ways. This global understanding has been the main reason that I have been documenting various cultures around the world. Over the past 20+ years I have concentrated on photographing people and their various ways of life that seem to have been left behind by the world's rush to modernize. Certain aspects of these various cultures seem to be in a time warp, many within their own country. The photographs presented here are part of a long-term project photographing some of these people that live and work in challenging environments that time seems to have forgotten and whose way of life may never be seen again.

Websites

www.maynardswitzer.com

www.instagram.com/maynardswitzer

 

Inspiring Portfolios

Marijn Fidder
© Marijn Fidder
Julien Chatelin
© Julien Chatelin
Marcus Yam
© Marcus Yam
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More Great Photographers To Discover

Stefano Azario
Stefano Azario
Italy
1966
Born in Paris, July 31 1966, Stefano Azario is a photographer and director now living between Milan and New York. Stefano began taking photographs at the age of 11 in 1977, shortly after the loss of his father. His family moved from Italy to London in 1979, where he studied photography at the London College of Printing from 1984 to 1987. Having developed a reputation as one of the best-known commercial photographers of children and babies, Stefano is currently concentrating more in documentary and fine art photography. A turning point in Stefano's career came in 1992 when Vogue Bambini began commissioning him regularly until the magazine's demise in 2018. In 2013, Stefano was asked to plan and photograph an entire issue of the magazine. In 1994, Stefano started shooting Gap Kids and BabyGap global advertising campaigns and continued uninterrupted for over 25 years. Major publications, advertising agencies, and globally known brands have worked with him. Benetton, Uniqlo, and Armani are just a few of the brands he has collaborated with. In his photography, Stefano tries above all to lead from the heart. With the likes of Dorothea Lange, Irving Penn and Luigi Ghirri as inspiration, Stefano is nimble in his working ways; at home directing on large video sets or shooting solo. Whether accessing his intimate and tender vision of children and babies or shooting in the Indonesian forest, he enjoys using a whole gamut of different cameras, films and technology, constantly challenging his way of seeing. His last exhibition "In Cerca Della Retta Via" at the No Gallery in Pontremoli, was put together with the patronage of the Italian Ministry of Culture as part of the Lunigiana Land Art festival in 2022. Statement Through the viewfinder I aim to capture fleeting, heartfelt moments that tell compelling human stories. I seek to make order of the world around me, to share an intuitive perspective, in the hope that my images can evoke emotions and memories, connecting viewer and subject. Throughout my career I have been drawn to projects that explore themes of childhood and relationships, seeking to convey experiences that shape us in these formative years. More recently I have roamed other areas from landscape to portraiture to expand and challenge my photographic practice and storytelling ability. In Search of a Path
Lillian Bassman
Lillian Bassman
United States
1917 | † 2012
Lillian Bassman (June 15, 1917 – February 13, 2012) was an American photographer and painter. Her parents were Jewish intellectuals who emigrated to the United States from Russia in 1905 and settled in Brooklyn, New York. She studied at the Textile High School in Manhattan with Alexey Brodovitch and graduated in 1933. While there, she met the photographer, Paul Himmel, and they were married in 1935; Himmel died in 2009 after 73 years of marriage. From the 1940s until the 1960s Bassman worked as a fashion photographer for Junior Bazaar and later at Harper's Bazaar where she promoted the careers of photographers such as Richard Avedon, Robert Frank, Louis Faurer and Arnold Newman. Under the guidance of the Russian emigrant, Alexey Brodovitch, she began to photograph her model subjects primarily in black and white. Her work was published for the most part in Harper’s Bazaar from 1950 to 1965. By the 1970s Bassman’s interest in pure form in her fashion photography was out of vogue. She turned to her own photo projects and abandoned fashion photography. In doing so she tossed out 40 years of negatives and prints - her life’s work. A forgotten bag filled with hundreds of images was discovered over 20 years later. Bassman’s fashion photographic work began to be re-appreciated in the 1990s. She worked with digital technology and abstract color photography into her 90s to create a new series of work. She used Photoshop for her image manipulation. The most notable qualities about her photographic work are the high contrasts between light and dark, the graininess of the finished photos, and the geometric placement and camera angles of the subjects. Bassman became one of the last great woman photographers in the world of fashion. Bassman died on February 13, 2012, at age 94. Source: Wikipedia Lillian Bassman was born in 1917 into an immigrant family of free-thinking intellectuals, and was brought up with a mindset that allowed her to live as an independent and unconventional woman.She worked as a textile designer and fashion illustrator before working at Harper's Bazaar with Alexey Brodovitch, and ultimately becoming a photographer. Bassman's fashion images are unique, and acheieve their effect through manipulation in the dark room. Appearing in Harper's Bazaar from the 1940's to the 1960's, her work was categorized by their elegance and grace.Bassman had transformed these photographs into original works of art through her darkroom techniques in which she blurs and bleaches the images, investing them with poetry, mystery, and glamour. Source: Staley-Wise Gallery Lillian Bassman is one of the great 20th century fashion photographers along with Irving Penn and Richard Avedon. She began her career not as a photographer but as a painter at the WPA and then took courses at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. In 1945, Bassman was appointed Art Director at Junior Bazaar, giving projects to photographers such as Richard Avedon, Robert Frank and Paul Himmel (her husband). Later in 1947, she became the Art Director at Harper’s Bazaar, and her work appeared in Harper’s Bazaar throughout the 1940’s and 50’s. Her work was nearly destroyed in the 70’s by a water leak in her studio, and it was not until the 1990’s that her work was revived. With this new spotlight, Bassman received the Agfa Life Time Achievement Award and the Dem Art Directors Club Award in 1996. During the same year, Bassman began photographing again when she was asked to photograph the Haute Couture collection for New York Times Magazine, the Autumn Collection for Neiman Marcus, as well as work for German Vogue. Her work has been exhibited worldwide. Source: Peter Fetterman Gallery
Mary Ellen Mark
Mary Ellen Mark
United States
1940 | † 2015
Mary Ellen Mark is an American photographer known for her photojournalism, portraiture, and advertising photography. She has had 16 collections of her work published and has been exhibited at galleries and museums worldwide. She has received numerous accolades, including three Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards and three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Mary Ellen Mark was born in suburban Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and began photographing with a Box Brownie camera at age nine. She attended Cheltenham High School, where she was head cheerleader and exhibited a knack for painting and drawing. She received a BFA degree in painting and art history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1962, and a Masters Degree in photojournalism from that university's Annenberg School for Communication in 1964. The following year, Mark received a Fulbright Scholarship to photograph in Turkey for a year. While there, she also traveled to photograph England, Germany, Greece, Italy, and Spain. In 1966 or 1967, she moved to New York City, where over the next several years she photographed Vietnam War demonstrations, the women's liberation movement, transvestite culture, and Times Square, developing a sensibility, according to one writer, "away from mainstream society and toward its more interesting, often troubled fringes". As Mark explained in 1987, "I'm just interested in people on the edges. I feel an affinity for people who haven't had the best breaks in society. What I want to do more than anything is acknowledge their existence". Her shooting style ranges from a 2 ¼ inch format, 35 mm, and 4x5 inch view camera. She also uses a Leica 4 for most photographs and Nikons for long-range shooting. Mark loves shooting with a Hasselblad for square format and she shoots primarily in black-and-white, using classic Kodak Tri-X film. Source: Wikipedia Mary Ellen Mark achieved worldwide visibility through her numerous books, exhibitions and editorial magazine work. She published photo essays and portraits in such publications as Life, New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. For over five decades, she traveled extensively to make pictures that reflect a high degree of humanism. She is recognized as one of our most respected and influential photographers. Her images of our world's diverse cultures have become landmarks in the field of documentary photography. Her portrayals of Mother Teresa, Indian circuses, and brothels in Bombay were the product of many years of work in India. A photo essay on runaway children in Seattle became the basis of the academy award-nominated film Streetwise, directed and photographed by her husband, Martin Bell. Mary Ellen received the 2014 Lifetime Achievement in Photography Award from the George Eastman House as well as the Outstanding Contribution Photography Award from the World Photography Organisation. She has also received the Infinity Award for Journalism, an Erna & Victor Hasselblad Foundation Grant, and a Walter Annenberg Grant for her book and exhibition project on America. Among her other awards are the Cornell Capa Award from the International Center of Photography, the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Matrix Award for outstanding woman in the field of film/photography, and the Dr. Erich Salomon Award for outstanding merits in the field of journalistic photography. She was also presented with honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees from her Alma Mater, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of the Arts; three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts; the Photographer of the Year Award from the Friends of Photography; the World Press Award for Outstanding Body of Work Throughout the Years; the Victor Hasselblad Cover Award; two Robert F. Kennedy Awards; and the Creative Arts Award Citation for Photography at Brandeis University. She published twenty books including Passport (Lustrum Press, 1974), Ward 81 (Simon & Schuster, 1979), Falkland Road (Knopf, 1981), Mother Teresa's Mission of Charity in Calcutta (Friends of Photography, 1985), The Photo Essay: Photographers at work (A Smithsonian series), Streetwise (second printing, Aperture, 1992), Mary Ellen Mark: 25 Years (Bulfinch, 1991), Indian Circus (Chronicle, 1993 and Takarajimasha Inc., 1993), Portraits (Motta Fotografica, 1995 and Smithsonian, 1997), a Cry for Help (Simon & Schuster, 1996), Mary Ellen Mark: American Odyssey (Aperture, 1999), Mary Ellen Mark 55s (Phaidon, 2001), Photo Poche: Mary Ellen Mark (Nathan, 2002), Twins (Aperture, 2003), Exposure (Phaidon, 2005), Extraordinary Child (The National Museum of Iceland, 2007), Seen Behind the Scene (Phaidon, 2009), Prom (Getty, 2012,) Man and Beast (University of Texas Press, 2014,) Tiny: Streetwise revisited (Aperture, 2015,) and Mary Ellen Mark on the Portrait and the Moment (Aperture, 2015.) Mark's photographs have been exhibited worldwide. She also acted as the associate producer of the major motion picture, American Heart (1992), directed by, Martin Bell. Her last book Tiny: Streetwise Revisited is a culmination of 32 years documenting Erin Blackwell, who she first met in 1983 on assignment for Life Magazine. Erin was the subject of both the book and film Streetwise. Martin also made an updated film, Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell. Aside from her book and magazine work, Mark photographed advertising campaigns among which are Barnes and Noble, British Levis, Coach Bags, Eileen Fisher, Hasselblad, Heineken, Keds, Mass Mutual, Nissan, and Patek Philippe.Source: www.maryellenmark.com
Shinya Arimoto
Shinya Arimoto
Japan
1971
Arimoto, who was born in Osaka in 1971, currently resides and works in Tokyo. Arimoto, a 1994 graduate of Visual Arts Osaka, won the 35th Taiyo Award in 1998 for his piece "Portrait of Tibet." He started the Totem Pole Photo Gallery in 2008. In 2016, Arimoto collaborated with Zen Foto Gallery to publish "Tokyo Circulation," and in 2017, she was honored with the Photographic Society of Japan's Lifetime Achievement Award and the 26th Tadahiko Hayashi Award. His other works include "TIBET" and "ariphoto selection" (Nos. 1–10, Totem Pole Photo Gallery) (Zen Foto Gallery, 2019). He actively exhibits his work both inside and outside of Japan. In 2017, he held a solo exhibition at Le Plac'Art Photo in Paris, and in 2019, he took part in the group show "Am Rand der Gesellschaft. Barlach, Springer, Arimoto" at Museum Bautzen in Germany. Statement In 1994, while still in my early 20’s and fresh out of photo school I went to India to photograph. Six months into my travels the backpack in which I was keeping my exposed film – over 150 rolls – was stolen. This incident cast a dark shadow over my youth and ultimately signified a turning point in my understanding about photography which continues to this day. Even though I went to India determined to make photographs this event was the trigger for me to realize that essentially I was there sightseeing and made me question why I was even in India in the first place. It made me aware of the ambiguity of my determination (…). Soon after this I went to Nepal. With no set destination I happened to end up in Kathmandu. There, I encountered a Tibetan family on the roadside (…). My relationship with this family grew as we shared meals and our living space. In between mantra carving, I looked after the children when they played. Our time together was short yet it was a time of happiness. As the days passed I picked up bits of their language and began to feel a strong desire to see their homeland with my own eyes (..). In 1996, I set foot in Tibet. I’ll never forget that thrill. Everything that had happened so far – every coincidence, incident, and tribulation, had brought me to this point. (…) Looking back I realize that most of my twenties were spent with Tibet. Having started out as an empty vessel, it was Tibet and my experiences there that made me full.
Mark Citret
Mark Citret
United States
1949
Mark Citret was born in 1949 in Buffalo, New York, and grew up in San Francisco. He began photographing seriously in 1968 and received both his BA and MA in Art from San Francisco State University. Most of Citret's work is not specific to any locale or subject matter. Still, he has worked on many photographic projects over the course of his career and continues to do so. From 1973 to 1975 he lived in and photographed Halcott Center, a farming valley in New York's Catskill Mountains. In the mid to late 1980s, he produced a large body of work with the working title of "Unnatural Wonders", which is his personal survey of architecture in the national parks. He spent four years, 1990 to 1993, photographing "Coastside Plant", a massive construction site in the southwest corner of San Francisco. Since he moved to his current home in 1986, he has been photographing the ever-changing play of ocean and sky from the cliff behind his house. Currently, he is in the midst of a multi-year commission from the University of California San Francisco, photographing the construction of their 43 acre Mission Bay life-sciences campus. He has taught photography at the University of California Berkeley Extension since 1982 and the University of California Santa Cruz Extension since 1988, and for organizations such as the Center for Photography at Woodstock, the Ansel Adams Gallery, and Santa Fe Workshops. His work is represented by prominent photography galleries in the United States, and is in many museums, corporate, and private collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the University of Arizona's Center for Creative Photography, and the Monterey Museum of Art. A monograph of his photographs, Along the Way, was published by Custom & Limited Editions, San Francisco, in 1999. He lives in Daly City, California. About Parallel Landscapes
Maciej Dakowicz
Maciej Dakowicz
Poland
1976
Maciej Dakowicz is a Polish street photographer, photojournalist, gallerist and educator based in Poland. He studied computer science in Poland (2000). He lived in Cardiff, Wales, between 2004 and 2012, where he worked and studied for his PhD at the University of Glamorgan (now the University of South Wales) where he also worked. He left work at the university in 2009 and completed his PhD in 2010. In 2010 he set up and ran Third Floor Gallery along with Joni Karanka and Bartosz Nowicki. He left Cardiff for London, and since 2013 has been based in Mumbai, photographing in Tunisia, Yemen, India and Bangladesh. Dakowicz is best known for his series of photographs of Cardiff nightlife titled Cardiff after Dark, also the name of his later book. Photographed over four years, photographs from the series have featured in magazines and been exhibited in galleries. Individual images from the series have also been used out of context and with misleading captions by the British tabloid media to support a single narrative about alcoholic excess. This tabloid practice has been criticized; for example, Jonathan Jones wrote in The Guardian that "Humour is the most obvious thing about his pictures, and their attraction lies in the way they balance grotesque abandon with poised, coolly beautiful lighting." Sean O'Hagan said in The Guardian that "it is not all outrageousness and vulgarity: Dakowicz also catches the sense of camaraderie and celebration in Cardiff on a Saturday night. He has an outsider's eye for telling detail, a way of showing us, in often brilliantly dramatic fashion and with a degree of gleeful humour, what is right under our noses." In March 2013 Dakowicz became a member of the In-Public street photography collective. His book Sonepur Mela (2021) contains photographs taken at Sonepur Cattle Fair in India between 2010 and 2017. Currently he is mainly occupied with teaching his popular street photography workshops in Asia and Eastern Europe.Source: Wikipedia
George Tice
George Tice
United States
1938 | † 2025
George A. Tice is an American photographer, best known for his meticulously crafted black and white prints in silver gelatin and platinum, as well as his books, which depict a broad range of American life, landscape, and urban environment, mostly photographed in his native New Jersey, where he has lived all his life, except for his service in the U. S. Navy, a brief period in California, a fellowship in the United Kingdom, and summer workshops in Maine, where he taught at the Maine Photographic Workshops, now the Maine Media Workshops. George A. Tice, born in Newark, New Jersey, October 13, 1938, was the son of a college-educated New Jerseyan, William S. Tice, and Margaret Robertson, a Traveller of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh stock with a fourth grade education. George was raised by his mother, maintaining regular visiting contact with his father, whose influence and advice he valued highly. His first contact with photography was in the albums of family photographs belonging to his father, and this gave him the desire to create images of his own. He began with a Kodak Brownie. In 1953, having bought a Kodak Pony, which gave him some control over exposure and focus, and a Kodak developing kit, he began to advance his craft. He also joined the Carteret Camera Club. George Tice's photographs of homeless men on the Bowery won second place in the black and white print competitions. He decided at this point to make photography his career. In 1955 he attended the Newark Vocational and Technical High School, where he briefly studied commercial photography under Harve Wobbe. When he turned sixteen, he quit school and took a job as a darkroom assistant for Classic Photo, a portrait studio in Newark. He also worked as a stock boy at Kreske's Department Store in Newark, then as an office boy in the circulation department of the Newark Evening News. It was at this job he learned about the death of the actor James Dean through a clipping about his death. Tice later adopted Dean as one of his subjects in Hometowns: An American Pilgrimage. In 1956 Tice enlisted in the United States Navy, in which he rose to the rank of Photographer's Mate Third Class. After boot camp and two years at Naval Air Station Memphis, he was transferred to sea duty aboard the aircraft carrier, USS Wasp (CV-18). One of the photographs he made on board, Explosion Aboard the U.S.S. Wasp, 1959, was published on the front page of the New York Times. Edward Steichen, then Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, was struck by the image and requested a print for the Museum collection. In that same year Tice received his honorable discharge.Source: Wikipedia George Tice is drawn to vestiges of American culture on the verge of extinction-from people in rural or small-town communities to suburban buildings and neighborhoods that are often in decline. Although he has photographed throughout the Northwestern United States, he is best known for pictures of his native New Jersey, and the impeccable quality of his black-and-white prints. In the 1960s, Tice shifted from smaller camera formats to larger ones, which enabled him to craft carefully toned and detailed prints. He portrayed traditional Amish and Shaker communities, as well as the hard lives of fishermen in Maine. In the 1970s, Tice began exploring his home state. Those photographs formed the beginnings of his Urban Landscapes series, which he worked on until the year 2000. His publications include: Fields of Peace: A Pennsylvania German Album (1970), Paterson, New Jersey (1972), Seacoast Maine: People and Places (1973), Urban Landscapes: A New Jersey Portrait (1975), and Hometowns: An American Pilgrimage (1988). Tice has taught at the Maine Photographic Workshops since 1977.Source: The J. Paul Getty Museum By 1970, thanks in part to shows and sales of his work through Witkin, Tice was able to concentrate entirely on his own photography. The extended photographic essay is an important part of Tice’s work. The form and process of each project is an investigation leading to a book. Tice taught a master class at The New School, NYC and the Maine Media Workshop for over twenty-five years. Tice has had eighteen books published to date. His first book Fields of Peace, documented the life of Amish and Mennonite communities of Pennsylvania. In the late 1960’s, Tice began exploring his home state and those photographs formed the beginnings of two of his best-known books: Urban Landscapes, A New Jersey Portrait, (1975) and Paterson, (1972), with sequels, George Tice : Urban Landscapes in 2002, Common Mementos in 2005 and Paterson II in 2006. One of his most recent book Seldom Seen (2013) is a collection of previously unpublished photographs. James Rhem states in an article in Focus Magazine, “The stillness in what Tice himself describes as the “sad beauty” of his urban scenes has a different weight, the weight of history, not moments, but stories evolving.” His photographs have been exhibited internationally and are represented in the collections of many institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Whitney Museum of Art, Newark Museum and the The Bibliothèque nationale de France. He has received fellowships and commissions from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the National Media Museum, (UK). In 2003, he received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters degree from William Paterson University. Tice, a 10th generation New Jerseyan, makes his home on the Jersey Shore.Source: The Lucie Awards
Romain Laurendeau
Romain Laurendeau
France
Romain Laurendeau lives in Toulouse, France. He learned photography in High school and then went to the multimedia school of ETPA in Toulouse. His work was quickly noticed and won the Ilford contest. In 2003 he took photos of his grand-parents. The project "Papymamy" won the "coup de coeur" of Kodak's "Bouse du Talent". At the same time he did an introspective work about the night, taking photos of people drowning in their urban surroundings. This work was published and exhibited several times under the name "Urban loneliness". In 2008, he completed another body of work called "Anonymous", which was rented by the OPAC for one year in Marseille. In 2004 he spent 4 months with snowboarders. The photographs were published in the Magazine "Onboard". In 2009, Romain had surgery for a corneal transplantation to get over a long illness called "keratoconus". His eyesight was slowly decreasing and preventing him from living a normal life. From this experience he worked on the project "When Darkness is Falling". The end of his convalescence was a rebirth, a revival. After meeting a group of contemporary dancers, he started to follow them and made "Dance of the Soul" in 2011 after several artistic residences.
Alexey Brodovitch
Alexey Brodovitch
United States
1898 | † 1971
Alexey Brodovitch was a Russian-born American designer and photographer, known for his time as the art director of Harper’s Bazaar from 1934 to 1958. Brodovitch was born in Ogolichi, Оголичи Aholičy, Russian Empire (now Belarus) to a wealthy Polish family in 1898. His father, Cheslau or Vyacheslav Brodovitch, was a respected physician, psychiatrist and huntsman. His mother was an amateur painter. During the Russo-Japanese War, his family moved to Moscow, where his father worked in a hospital for Japanese prisoners. Alexey was sent to study at the Prince Tenisheff School, a prestigious institution in Saint Petersburg, with the intentions of eventually enrolling in the Imperial Art Academy. He had no formal training in art through his childhood, but often sketched noble profiles in the audience at concerts in the city. At the start of World War I at the young age of 16, Brodovitch abandoned his dream of entering the Imperial Art Academy and ran away from home to join the Russian army. Not long after, his father had him brought home and hired a private tutor to help Alexey finish school. Upon graduating, Brodovitch ran away again on several occasions. During the Russian Civil War, Brodovitch served with the White Army. While fighting against the Bolsheviks in Odessa, he was badly wounded and was hospitalized for a time in Kislovodsk, in the Caucasus. In 1918, the town was surrounded by the Bolsheviks, forcing Brodovitch into exile. It was during this retreat to the south through Caucasus and Turkey that he met his future wife, Nina. By good fortune, Alexey's brother Nicolas turned out to be one of the soldiers guarding the refugees in Novorossiysk. Not long after, their father, who had been imprisoned in Saint Petersburg by the Bolsheviks, managed to flee to Novorossiysk in hopes of finding his family. The three were once again together, and arranged for Brodovitch's mother and other relations to join them in Constantinople. Finally reunited, the Brodovitchs made their way to France. In Paris, he lived in poverty amidst the vibrant avant-garde scene of the era, working as a backdrop painter for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Brodovitch embraced technical developments from the spheres of industrial design, photography, and contemporary painting. His broad curiosity began to assimilate the most interesting aspects of all these fields into his work, eventually making them his own. He later instilled this same curiosity in his students, encouraging them to use new techniques like the airbrush, industrial lacquers, flexible steel needles, and surgical knives. By the age of 32, Brodovitch had dabbled in producing posters, china, jewelry, textiles, advertisements, and paintings. Eventually specializing in advertising and graphic design, he had become one of the most respected designers of commercial art in Paris. By 1930, however, Paris had lost its luster for Brodovitch. The once-flourishing spirit of adventure and experimentation was fading away. Although he was offered many design positions, Brodovitch turned them down, presumably looking for new locales to advance his designs. Brodovitch moved to the United States, accepting a post as a professor of advertising in Philadelphia. Only four years later, he was hired as the art director of Harper's Bazaar. During his tenure there, he fundamentally changed the magazine’s aesthetic, hiring a number of unique photographers to provide editorial content, including Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lisette Model, and Robert Frank. Brodovitch left the magazine in 1958, but continued to teach design until his death on April 15, 1971 in Le Thor, France. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.Source: Wikipedia
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Interview
Exclusive Interview with Ghawam Kouchaki
American photographer Ghawam Kouchaki brings a sharply observant and introspective gaze to the streets of Japan’s capital. Based in Los Angeles, he approaches Tokyo with the distance — and curiosity — of an outsider, allowing him to uncover the city’s subtle contradictions, quiet tensions, and fleeting gestures that often go unnoticed. His series Tokyo no no, selected as the Solo Exhibition for December 2024, explores the hidden undercurrents of urban life: the unspoken rules, the small ruptures in routine, the poetic strangeness found in everyday moments. Through muted tones, instinctive timing, and meticulous framing, Kouchaki reveals a Tokyo that exists somewhere between reality and imagination — both intimate and enigmatic. We asked him a few questions about his life and work.
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Exclusive Interview with Tommi Viitala
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Tommi Viitala
Tommi Viitala, winner of AAP Magazine #44: Street, is a Finnish photographer celebrated for his striking and cinematic street photography. With a keen eye for atmosphere and composition, he captures fleeting urban moments that reveal the poetry of everyday life. His work often explores the tension between solitude and connection within contemporary cityscapes, blending documentary realism with artistic sensibility. Viitala’s photographs have been exhibited internationally and recognized for their strong visual storytelling and emotional depth. We asked him a few questions about his life and work.
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Exclusive Interview with Robert Mack
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Robert Mack
Robert Mack is a California-based visual artist, photographer, and filmmaker. His fine art photography and films have been exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, with major shows at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Reiss-Engelhorn Museum in Mannheim, Germany. Both institutions hold his work in their permanent collections. Working across different media, Mack has built a career exploring the complexities of human presence and representation. In 1981, while living in Baltimore, he produced The Perkins Project: Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity, a rare photographic and film study inside Maryland’s hospital for the criminally insane. These stark yet compassionate black-and-white portraits remain one of his most powerful and controversial bodies of work.
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All About Photo Awards 2026
$5,000 Cash Prizes! Juror: Steve McCurry
© Fernando Morales Roca
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