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Send your best project to Ed Kashi ans WIN A Solo Exhibition this December!
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Misa Ato
Misa Ato
Misa Ato

Misa Ato

Country: France
Birth: 1964

The reasons that guided me to start in the field of photography are partly enigmatic. But from the moment I had a camera in my hands, I never left it. Very quickly the possibilities offered by this reflex were there to satisfy my creativity.

Architect by training, I stopped my liberal activity in 2018 to devote myself to photography. Self-taught in photography, I spend enough time documenting myself and discovering what touches me in the photographs of great photographers. The rest of the time I photograph. Despite the little perspective that I have on my work, I manage to perceive intentions, creativity, expression that allow to make visible what my feelings and my eyes perceive.
Finally, through travel, travel, meetings, the notion of sharing remains the culmination of my work.

Black and white has established itself as a reference for my projects, knowing by a pictorial approach the color, I was too wary of the impact of color on a photo which all too often attracts the eye at the expense of the subject or the background. Black and white allows me to geometrically compose my subject which is enriched with light and an infinite range of shades of gray. I often look for a model, a subject, refined, simple, often abandoned places, vacant stripped of activities and person, not to erase them, more to suggest them and strengthen their presence by their absence.
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Tianhu Yuan
China
1986
Tianhu Yuan (Tales Yuan) is a self-taught Chinese visual artist based in Chengdu and Chongqing. He has a long-standing interest in ACG-related generalized Nijigen subcultural community, and aims to build a dialogue between mainstream society and subculture through his work. He also focuses on the progress of society to explore the relationship between current technology and future developments. His work has been exhibited at China 29th National Photographic Art Exhibition, RPS IPE165, Galerie Huit Arles, PHOTO IS:RAEL International Photo Festival, Jakarta International Photo Festival, PhEST Festival, Head On Photo Festival and Lishui Art Museum. He was also awarded or shortlisted from Sony World Photography Awards, Fine Art Photography Awards, BJP OpenWalls Arles, BJP Portrait of Humanity, Lucie Foundation Scholarships, PhMuseum Photography Grant, the Meitar Award for Excellence in photography and Head On Photo Awards. Self Iterating of Chongqing A traditional neighbourhood is demolished to make way for bustling shopping districts. People are digging tunnels and building bridges to build railways, leaving behind the mountains and rivers that once defined the city's character. Citizens cope with the extremes of summer in the city known as the furnace of China. It is a city of tradition, but it is also a city looking to the future. In choosing to develop, human beings leave something behind and gain something new. People believe in moving towards a better future at the moment of choice. By capturing these moments of transition and transformation, I aim to highlight the complexities of urban development and the challenges that societies face when balancing progress with environmental preservation. I try to contemplate the role of human beings in shaping our cities and the environment, and to consider the choices we make as we look towards the future.
Andre Cypriano
Brazil
1964
A native of Brazil, André Cypriano was born in 1964 and educated in São Paulo with a university degree in business administration. Concerned with environmental issues, he contributed time and effort as the administrator of "Salva Mar" Save the Sea - a Brazilian organization dedicated to save the whales in North Brazil.In 1990, one year after relocating to the U.S., André began to study photography in San Francisco. He has since completed several projects which have been exhibited in several galleries and museums in Brazil and the USA.André has been a recipient of the first place award in San Francisco City College's Photography Department of Scholarship (July 1992), first runner-up in the World Image Award Competition promoted by Photo District News in N.Y. (Dec. 1992), first place in New Works Awards - promoted by En Foco in N.Y. (July 1998), as well as first place in the Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography (Oct. 1998). As part of a long term project, Cypriano began to document traditional lifestyles and practices of lesser known societies in remote corners of the world with a slant toward the unique and unusual. Thus far, he has photographed the people of Nias, an island off the northwest coast of Sumatra (Nias: Jumping Stones), the dogs of Bali (Spiritual Quest), the infamous penitentiary of Candido Mendes, in Rio de Janeiro (The Devil's Caldron), as well as the largest shanty town in Latin America, Rio de Janeiro (Rocinha - An Orphan Town). His ongoing projects have been used in educational workshops.Currently, André Cypriano works as a free-lance photographer in New York and continues to be involved in social and cultural activities.
Sonia Melnikova-Raich
Russia/United States
1947
Sonia Melnikova-Raich was born in Moscow in 1947 and has been living in San Francisco since 1987. She was trained as an artist and architect, with a Master's degree from the prestigious Moscow Architectural Institute. Her approach to photography is shaped by her background in painting and architecture. Influenced by the vision of Russian Constructivists of the 1920s and the photography of the Bauhaus movement, she is interested in exploring the abstract in the material world, drawing the viewer's attention to the inner geometry of the photograph and its compositional structure. Her Light+Shadows series, which revolves around the mystery of perspective and geometry created by light and darkness in the architectural image, was inspired by the words of the famous American architect Louis Kahn: "The sun never knew how great it was until it hit the side of a building." Distinct from her high-contrast architectural photography, many of Sonia's other works (Within My Sight, Råbjerg Mile Dunes, Waking Dreams, and other series) explore the poetry and mystique of low-light environments, capturing fleeting moments, barely visible, ambiguous or disappearing things. She feels a strong affinity with the Japanese philosophy and aesthetic of wabi sabi, with its reverence for the subtle beauty in old and simple things, and focus on transience and impermanence. She believes that photography is the best medium to express these concepts, as each photograph is inherently an image of disappearance, a reflective connection to the past forever stamped by time. Since 2005, Sonia's photography has been exhibited locally, nationally, and internationally. In addition to three solo gallery shows in San Francisco, her photographs have been exhibited at LoosenArt Gallery in Rome, Fotogalerie Friedrichshain in Berlin, and various venues in the USA, with some of her works in the permanent collection of the Lafayette Public Library in California. She has been among the winners in many juried competitions, had her works featured in professional photography journals, and was listed in 100 Hot Photographers of 2022 and 2023 by YourDailyPhotograph.com, the project by Duncan Miller Gallery in Los Angeles, an internationally recognized gallery specializing in 20th and 21st Century fine art photography. Winner AAP Magazine #30 Shadows
Flip Schulke
United States
1930 | † 2008
Flip Schulke was an American photographer, born Graeme Phillips Schulke. He grew up in New Ulm, Minnesota. Schulke's nickname "Flip" came about from his interest in gymnastics. He graduated from Macalester College, then moved to Miami. He taught briefly at the University of Miami, then began working as a freelance photographer. He worked for Life , and covered a variety of events, including the Cuban revolution. In 1962, he visited and photographed the Berlin Wall. Schulke began photographing the civil rights movement in the American south as early as 1956. He formed a bond with civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr. after an all-night conversation in 1958, and began photographing him. King invited Schulke to photograph secret planning meetings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, though not all of the activists trusted him being there. He also photographed the 1963 March on Washington and the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March. They traveled together until King's death in 1968, which upset Schulke so much that he stopped covering the civil rights movement and began to work on more commercial projects. In all, he took around 11,000 photographs of King, including some of his funeral. Schulke photographed Muhammad Ali, Jacques Cousteau, Fidel Castro and John F. Kennedy. He also was a photographer for the Environmental Protection Agency's Documerica program in the early 1970s. Schulke died on May 15, 2008 at age 77. The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin holds 300,000 of his photographs. His photographs are also held in a variety of museums, including the Harvard Art Museums, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Museum of American History, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Lehigh University Art Galleries.Source: Wikipedia My biggest problem with young photographers is that they don't think about context. They think about drama. You've got to know where to point your camera. -- Flip Schulke When the Berlin Wall came down, thousands of people from around the world converged to celebrate the end of over 40 years of a divided Europe. Among them was American photojournalist Flip Schulke, who had visited the wall many times since it was erected in 1961 in an attempt to document what he described as "man's physical ability to build a bastion between himself and his own dignity, if he tries hard enough". As he mingled with the crowd, he heard on their lips not a German protest song, but the famous American civil rights anthem "We shall overcome". It was a song he knew well. As a photojournalist in the 1950s and 1960s, Schulke captured many significant moments in the nation's struggle for civil rights in the 1960s, such as the marches to end segregation from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, and Martin Luther King's funeral in 1968. After the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, Schulke brought his civil rights experiences with him as he attempted to capture the wall's symbolic and physical power. "This is the wall that fear built," Schulke wrote in notes during his visit to the wall in 1962. "This was the wall where hate stood guard, and men stooped much lower than angels. On one side it was bright and clean from the sun of freedom. (On) the other dark and bitter - the rot of slavery." Comprised of bricks, mortar, steel wire and jagged glass fragments to deter climbers, the wall both appalled and shocked Schulke, who described it as having a "jerry built" look. "It just can't be real," he noted, adding that the wall was a "monument to human misery" that "splits the world in half like a melon". He recalled how on the western side German children played tag in the shadows of tank traps while on the other side children stood "dull-eyed and pinch-faced in darkened doorways - wondering how one learns to laugh". As East German guards looked at him through their binoculars, Schulke observed recent East German escapees in West Berlin standing near the wall and signaling to friends and relatives back in East Berlin or waiting for relatives to appear. "One woman waited five hours to see her mother who never turned up," Schulke wrote. "Another couple stood by the River Spree, the girl crying softly, trying to catch a glimpse of her mother across the river." During Schulke's early coverage of the civil rights movement, he had a relatively balanced journalistic outlook and tried to see both sides, says Gary Truman, a long-time friend and former colleague. "But that faded quickly because he said that sometimes there is no other reasonable opposite view, there was only right and wrong," Truman says. "I think his coverage of the Berlin Wall stated immediately: this simply is wrong." Schulke saw both the wall and the civil rights movement as part of "a greater conflict over universal human freedoms," says Truman, who became the archivist of Schulke's photo collection after the photographer's death in 2008. "Similarities always exist in the artist's eyes." Schulke was far from alone in seeing the parallels between division in America and in Berlin. Even before the famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech by President John F Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy came to Berlin as US Attorney General in February 1962. "For a hundred years, despite out protestations of equality, we had, as you know, a wall of our own - a wall of segregation erected against Negroes," Kennedy said. "That wall is coming down."Source: BBC
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AAP Magazine #53 Travels
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Call for Entries
AAP Magazine #53 Travels
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