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Win a Solo Exhibition this February. Juror: Harvey Stein
Win a Solo Exhibition this February. Juror: Harvey Stein
Morteza Nikoubazl
Morteza Nikoubazl
Morteza Nikoubazl

Morteza Nikoubazl

Country: Iran
Birth: 1974

I was born in Tehran, Iran in 1974 and studied art and photography there. I started work as a freelance photographer for Iranian daily and weekly newspapers. I began working with the Reuters team as Freelance photographer since 1999 till 2013. After Reuters I worked with the New York Times International magazine, Polaris Images, Zuma Press and SIPA PRESS photo agencies and now I am working with the NurPhoto press photo agency. I am also UNHCR trusted photographer in Iran.

Sense of death amid the COVID-19 outbreak in Iran
Today is about one year after Government announced officially the COVID-19 cases in Iran and death still is everywhere. I could see patients who were infected by the new coronavirus in COVID-19 wards of hospitals who were breathing and after two hours they were died. In fact, life seems gone, time were stoped and people were looking for an empty hospital bed for their relatives. Sense of death is covered the daily life of people who have to fight with a new invisible enemy, and it will be getting worse when a country is under International sanctions.

I was in the city of Bam for covering the earthquake in 2002-2003 and could see a U.S. Military cargo airplane landed after about 25 years since the Victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and I could see how the humanity could pass over the politic, but today I am witness how politic cover the humanity, sanctions still work and it pushed Iran to the end of the line of vaccine. People die left and right also medical personnel, But they hear about barriers to the import of the COVID-19 vaccines from western countries. When it comes to people's health, politics should be the last priority of countries, but it seems the politic is the first priority for the U.S., Iran and the European countries. On the other hand, Iranians cannot trust the China- Made, or Russian-Made vaccine and prefer the Iranian one, but they must wait until next year and try to be alive.
 

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All About Photo Awards 2026
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More Great Photographers To Discover

Ruvén Afanador
Colombia
1959
Ruvén Afanador is an internationally renowned photographer of limitless imagination, powerful vision and profound sense of self. He was born in Colombia, and his proud Latin American heritage has inspired his extensive body of work creating an intensely personal language characterized by the balance of bold emotion and delicate nuance. The expressive images in his six books: Torero, Sombra, Mil Besos, Ángel Gitano, Yo seré tu espejo and Hijas del Agua, and his portraiture and fashion editorials, reveal extravagant dreamlike sequences that seem to emerge from Afanador’s original imagination already full grown, always splendid sometimes mischievous, often decadent, all steeped in classic formality. Ruven’s work has appeared in countless publications including New York Magazine, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, The New York Times Magazine, numerous Vogue editions, Tatler, Elle, and The New Yorker. His personal projects have been exhibited in Galleries and Museums in Spain, Italy, Colombia, Argentina, Japan and the United States. His most recent exhibition was at the National Museum of Colombia in Bogota this past winter and spring 2021 and it comprised 60 large format photographs from his Hijas del Agua book project paying homage to the indigenous cultures that have inhabited Colombia for thousands of years. He lives in New York City from where he continues his career photographing the emblematic figures of contemporary fashion, music and film, as well as his personal book projects, always challenging the conventional definitions of gender and beauty. Source: Sarah Laird & Good Company Ruven Afanador was born in Colombia, in the sixteenth century city of Bucaramanga, La Ciudad de los Parques high in the scenic plateau above the Rio de Oro. He lived there until adolescence, surrounded by breathtaking mountains and immersed in old traditions and enchanting rituals that imbued everyday life with mystery and wonderment. Religious ceremonies involved the meticulous costuming of saints and marked every holiday, turning narrow colonial streets into rich visual feasts where ordinary objects acquired symbolic meaning; elaborate beauty pageants showcased glamorous women of deliberate beauty and intentional charm; and long hours were filled with the reading of adventure books or listening to the improbable tales of those coming back from journeys abroad, a peculiar form of imaginary traveling which nurtured an intense curiosity for faraway places. At fourteen, Afanador moved to the United States to attend school in the Midwest, right in the American heartland, a starkly different place from the magical world of his childhood, but one he saw as full of possibilities. And then, while studying art, he discovered photography. “From my first assignment I knew that photography would be my life’s passion”, says Afanador. With that passion, he would transform ordinary reality into captivating splendor. Or, as he himself puts it, “....into my way of seeing things.” After graduation Afanador spent two years in Washington, DC, gaining distinction as a fashion photographer of audacious taste, as well as a portraitist with an original and inventive eye. In 1987 he moved to Milan to broaden his vision, hone his technical skills and build a portfolio. Lack of studio space in the Italian city, forced him to develop techniques for photographing outdoors, in alleyways and streets, on the steps of churches and palazzos, incorporating backgrounds to frame images with texture and depth, a highly conceptual approach that Afanador uses to this day. While in Italy, he also discovered the type of model, that was to become his prototype: interesting rather than conventionally beautiful, of sculpted neck and arms, and the graceful long torso for centuries favored by painters----enigmatic and timeless. He returned from Italy in 1990 with an impressive portfolio, settling in New York and soon coming to the attention of editors at the major magazines. Since then, his distinct fashion editorials, signature advertisements and iconic portraits of the emblematic beauties and powerful male figures of the worlds of contemporary art, literature, music and film, have constantly appeared in the world’s leading fashion, celebrity and portrait magazines. His work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions and installations in galleries, museums and outdoor spaces in Latin America, Europe, Asia and the United States.Source: Fahey/Klein Gallery
Henry Horenstein
United States
1947
Born in Massachusetts in 1947, Henry Horenstein was on a path to becoming a historian when he discovered photography. Captivated by the work of Robert Frank and Danny Lyon, Horenstein entered the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) where he studied with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. After completing his MFA at RISD in 1973, Horenstein's first major project was a documentary survey of the people and character of country music. As a long-time fan, Horenstein recognized that the culture of country music was changing, losing the homey, down-to-earth character of "hillbilly" music, and adopting the slicker nature of contemporary country music. His goal was to preserve a vanishing culture by capturing it in photographs, and for nearly a decade, he traveled throughout the United States, documenting the artists and audiences at honky-tonk bars, outdoor festivals, and community dances. The body of work that Horenstein created (published in 2003 as Honky Tonk) is a remarkable portrait of a distinct period in American cultural history. Some of Horenstein's later work has followed a similar theme, creating documentary portraits of distinct American sub-cultures, such as the worlds of horse racing, boxing clubs, and baseball. In recent years, Horenstein has also developed an extensive body of work that combines elements of portraiture, abstraction, clinical documentation, and landscape photography. Working with animals as well as human subjects, Horenstein creates compelling and frequently ambiguous images that explore the patterns, textures and geography of skin, scales and hair. Mixing the exotic and the ordinary, and making it difficult to tell which is which, Horenstein causes the viewer to pause and look closely. In doing so, we are made to re-examine ourselves as well as the world around us. Horenstein's work has been exhibited in galleries and museums both nationally and internationally, including the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.; the International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Fabrik der Kunste, Hamburg, Germany. Photographs by Henry Horenstein can be found in many public and private collections including the Library of Congress, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. Horenstein is the author of over 30 books including several monographs and a series of highly successful photography textbooks that have been used by hundreds of thousands of students around the country. Horenstein currently lives in Boston and is a professor of photography at RISD. Henry Horenstein & Leslie Tucker: We Sort Of People
Philip-Lorca diCorcia
United States
1951
Philip-Lorca diCorcia (born 1951) is an American photographer. He studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Afterwards diCorcia attended Yale University where he received a Master of Fine Arts in Photography in 1979. He now lives and works in New York, and teaches at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. diCorcia's work has been exhibited in group shows in both the United States and Europe since 1977 , he participated in the traveling exhibition Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort, organized by New York's MOMA in 1991. His work was also featured in the 1997 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and, in the 2003 exposition Cruel and Tender at London's Tate Modern. The following year diCorcia’s work was included in Fashioning Fiction in Photography Since 1990 at the MOMA. His most recent series was seen in the Carnegie Museum of Art’s 54th Carnegie International exhibition in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He has also exhibited in Germany (Essen), Spain (Salamanca) and Sweden (Stockholm)[citation needed]. diCorcia received his first solo show in 1985 and from then on he has been featured in one-person exhibitions worldwide, including those at New York's Museum of Modern Art; Paris' Centre National de la Photographie; London's Whitechapel Art Gallery; Madrid's Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía; Tokyo's Art Space Ginza; and Hannover's Sprengel Museum. In March 2009, David Zwirner in New York held an exhibition of one thousand actual-size reproductions of diCorcia's Polaroids, entitled Thousand. Sprüth Magers London showed a series of Philip-Lorca diCorcia's Polaroids in 2011. DiCorcia alternates between informal snapshots and iconic quality staged compositions that often have a baroque theatricality. Using a carefully planned staging, he takes everyday occurrences beyond the realm of banality, trying to inspire in his picture's spectators an awareness of the psychology and emotion contained in real-life situations. His work could be described as documentary photography mixed with the fictional world of cinema and advertising, which creates a powerful link between reality, fantasy and desire. During the late 1970s, during diCorcia's early career, he used to situate his friends and family within fictional interior tableaus, that would make the viewer think that the pictures were spontaneous shots of someone's everyday life, when they were in fact carefully staged and planned in beforehand. He would later start photographing random people in urban spaces all around the world. When in Berlin, Calcutta, Hollywood, New York, Rome and Tokyo, he would often hide lights in the pavement, which would illuminate a random subject in a special way, often isolating them from the other people in the street. His photographs would then give a sense of heightened drama to the passers-by accidental poses, unintended movements and insignificant facial expressions. Even if sometimes the subject appears to be completely detached to the world around him, diCorcia has often used the city of the subject's name as the title of the photo, placing the passers-by back into the city's anonymity. Each of his series, Hustlers, Streetwork, Heads, A Storybook Life, and Lucky Thirteen, can be considered progressive explorations of diCorcia’s formal and conceptual fields of interest. Besides his family, associates and random people he has also photographed personas already theatrically enlarged by their life choices, such as the pole dancers in his latest series. His pictures have black humor within them, and have been described as "Rorschach-like", since they can have a different interpretation depending on the viewer. As they are planned beforehand, diCorcia often plants in his concepts issues like the marketing of reality, the commodification of identity, art, and morality. Source: Wikipedia Philip-Lorca diCorcia is among the most influential and innovative photographers of the past thirty years. Bringing together 125 photographs made from the late-1970s to the present, including selections from all of his distinct series, this exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of diCorcia's work in the United States. DiCorcia's images perch on the lines between fact and fiction, blending a documentary mode with techniques of staged photography. The viewer is often unsure whether a scene has been found or posed by diCorcia, which lends an uncanny quality to the typically mundane imagery the artist presents. Ultimately, his work asks viewers to question the assumed truth of a photograph and to consider alternative ways that images might speak to and represent reality. In the mid-1970s, DiCorcia (born 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut) attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, followed by a Masters of Fine Art in Photography at Yale University. From the very beginning, he pursued a middle ground between two major photographic modes of the period. A modernist documentary style influenced by Walker Evans, Garry Winogrand, and Diane Arbus is evident, but so too is an approach informed by conceptual art, which mobilizes images as cultural archetypes or signs. In all his work, diCorcia captures moments that seem arrested in the chaotic flux of the larger world. From the psychological tension of his staged tableaux to his portraits of pedestrians on city streets to his experimental narrative sequence A Storybook Life, the ultimate effect of diCorcia's photographs is a sense of reality hanging in a threshold, uncertain, unstable, and poetic. Source: www.icaboston.org
JP Terlizzi
United States
1962
JP Terlizzi is a New York City visual artist whose practice explores themes of memory, relationship, and identity. His images are rooted in the personal and heavily influenced around the notion of home, legacy, and family. He is curious how the past relates and intersects with the present and how that impacts and shapes one's identity. Born and raised in the farmlands of Central New Jersey, JP earned a BFA in Communication Design at Kutztown University of PA with a background in graphic design and advertising. He has studied photography at both the International Center of Photography in New York and Maine Media College in Rockport, ME. His work has been exhibited widely in galleries including shows at The Center for Fine Art Photography, Vicki Myhren Gallery at the University of Denver, The Griffin Museum, Tilt Gallery, Panopticon Gallery, Candela Gallery, The Los Angeles Center of Photography, University Gallery at Cal Poly, and The Berlin Foto Biennale, Berlin, Germany, among others. His solo exhibits include shows at the Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, Cameraworks Gallery in Portland, OR and Soho Photo Gallery in Manhattan. Awards and honors include: Critical Mass Top 50 (2019, 2018), Critical Mass Finalist (2016, 2015), Fresh Finalist (Klompching Gallery, 2019), First Look Winner (Panopticon Gallery, 2019) International Portfolio Competition Winner (Soho Photo Gallery, 2018). About The Good Dishes Eating is a physical need, but meals are a social ritual. Utilizing passed down heirlooms of friends and family, The Good Dishes celebrates the memory of family and togetherness by integrating legacy and inheritance. This series focuses on stylized rituals of formal tableware while drawing inspiration from classic still life paintings. Background textiles are individually designed and constructed to reflect patterns found in each table setting while presentation, etiquette and formality are disassociated by using food and fine china in unconventional ways as metaphors for the beauty and intimacy that are centered around meal and table. Discover JP Terlizzi's Interview Read more about JP terlizzi
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All About Photo Awards 2026
Win a Solo Exhibition in February
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Latest Interviews

Exclusive Interview with Marijn Fidder
Marijn Fidder is a Dutch documentary photographer whose work powerfully engages with current affairs and contemporary social issues. Driven by a deep sense of social justice, she uses photography to speak on behalf of the voiceless and to advocate for the rights of those who are most vulnerable. Her images have been widely published in major international outlets including National Geographic, CNN Style, NRC Handelsblad, Volkskrant, GUP New Talent, and ZEIT Magazin. Her long-term commitment to disability rights—particularly through years of work in Uganda—culminated in her acclaimed project Inclusive Nation, which earned her the title of Photographer of the Year 2025 at the All About Photo Awards. She is also the recipient of multiple prestigious honors, including awards from World Press Photo and the Global Peace Photo Award. We asked her a few questions about her life and work.
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Call for Entries
All About Photo Awards 2026
$5,000 Cash Prizes! Juror: Steve McCurry