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Michael Ernest Sweet
Michael Ernest Sweet
Michael Ernest Sweet

Michael Ernest Sweet

Country: Canada

Michael Ernest Sweet is a Canadian photographer and arts writer. He is the author of two photography monographs, The Human Fragment and Michael Sweet's Coney Island, both from Brooklyn Arts Press in New York. Michael is best known for his gritty black and white images of people composed at odd angles, which often omit people's faces. His work has been praised by such master photographers as Roger Ballen, Martin Parr, and Jay Maisel. A recipient of many awards, Michael holds both a Prime Minister's Award and a Queen Elizabeth II Medal from Canada for significant contributions to education and the arts. In 2018, Michael appeared in the film, Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable, and again in 2021 in the film, Fill The Frame. Michael is a senior contributing writer for Photo Life Magazine and a former writer for HuffPost. He holds several degrees including a Master of Liberal Arts from The Johns Hopkins University. Michael lives and teaches in New York City.

Statement:
My photography is about pleasing myself. I do not photograph for an audience. Quite frankly, that would be too hard for me. I make photographs of things that interest me. I like weird angles and odd compositions because they tend to tell a better story. As a writer, I look for the story, not just the image. Photographs need to be able to be read from left to right, all across the frame, just like a good book. Everything in the frame matters. Everything that is not in the frame matters. Most people don't get my work. They don't try hard enough. My photos cannot be consumed in 10 seconds on an iPhone. Those who put in the effort get to see what I saw, get to feel what I felt, and, most importantly get to enjoy the moment as I did when I made the image. For me, a photo that is easy to look at and quick to understand is a boring, pedestrian photograph. I am not here to photograph aunt Betty's Birthday party.
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Simon Roberts
United Kingdom
1974
Simon Roberts is a British photographic artist based in Brighton, UK. Often employing expansive landscape photographs, his approach is one of creating wide-ranging surveys of our time, which communicate on important social, economic and political issues. Roberts has been exhibited widely with We English touring to over thirty national and international venues. He’s had solo shows at the National Media Museum, Bradford, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, and been included in numerous group exhibitions. Recent shows include Observers: British Photography and the British Scene (From the 1920s to Now) at Galeria de Arte SESI, Brazil, and Landmark: The Fields of Photography at Somerset House, London. His photographs reside in major public and private collections, including the George Eastman House, Deutsche Börse Art Collection and Wilson Centre for Photography. In recognition for his work, Roberts has received several awards including the Vic Odden Award (2007) - offered for a notable achievement in the art of photography by a British photographer, along with bursaries from the National Media Museum (2007), John Kobal Foundation (2008) and grants from Arts Council England (2007, 2010, 2011, 2014). He was commissioned as the official Election Artist by the House of Commons Works of Art Committee to produce a record of the 2010 General Election on behalf of the UK Parliament. In 2012 he was granted access by the International Olympic Committee to photograph the London Olympics and most recently was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, UK (2013). He has published three critically acclaimed monographs, Motherland (Chris Boot, 2007), We English (Chris Boot, 2009) - voted by Martin Parr as one of the best photography books of the past decade - and Pierdom (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2013). One commentator has described his photographs as “subtle in their discovery and representation of forms of cultural character, which, upon closer inspection, reveal a richness of detail and meaning. They exhibit a disciplined compositional restraint, a richness of palette, and a wealth of narrative incident. Also represented by MC2 Gallery
Meg McKenzie Ryan
United States
Los Angeles resident Meg McKenzie Ryan married young, before graduating from college. Her husband's job involved flying to Hong Kong, so one day Meg surprised him by flying there. Asking friends what she should shop for there, buying a camera was the unanimous suggestion. So that's what happened. She didn't know how to use it, so she enrolled in a not-for-credit class at the University of California, Los Angeles. Jerry McMillan was her instructor there and later at California State University, Northridge where she earned her Bachelor in photography. In the early 70s, McMillan was active in the Los Angeles art scene, and he was particularly interested (it seemed) in helping photography to be recognized as an art form. Non-traditional subjects and alternative presentations were encouraged. I was game. Then, Meg remarried and moved to Burkina Faso, a country in West Africa, and then to neighboring Lome, Togo where her daughter was born. The culture there was incredibly different than her Los Angeles home. Religion, work and working conditions, poverty, homes, clothing, food, etc. were all new. It was a lot to digest, and more than she was prepared to face with her camera. Next, the young family moved to Bloomington, Indiana where Meg was able to study for a Masters degree in photography. Jeff Wolin was her primary instructor, and he was shooting an 8" x 10" field camera, so Meg decided to acquire one. Mostly she shot landscapes at the time. Wolin, on the other hand, was shooting beautiful shots of the rock quarries around Bloomington, and later did a project on Holocaust survivors and later still on homelessness. Moving again to the lower desert of California (city of El Centro), Meg landed a full-time photography job at the local daily newspaper. It was excellent experience for the young and somewhat shy photographer because she learned to shoot pictures of people. And this was the start of her project featured here, The lives of others. Her home was just ten miles north of the Mexicali, Mexico border town and capital of the state of Baja California, Mexico. It was easy (at the time) to cross the border, find the poorer neighborhoods, and ask to shoot their pictures. It's no accident that her photography became more documentary-like at its heart. The newspaper work and living in such a foreign place as West Africa pulled her in that direction. And at some point she realized that photos of people interested her the most. The work was wonderful, rewarding, and rich with experience and learning. Meg hopes you'll take time to look at the photos here.
Dejan Mijović
Slovenia
1976
Slovenian freelance photography journalist Dejan Mijović, born on 18 September 1976 and based in Ljubljana, is assistant photo editor of the Delo.si web portal. Mijović has been involved in photography for the past 20 years, ever since undertaking studies of graphic technology at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Engineering. In 2010, Mijović sustained an injury and was left completely paralysed from the neck down. Through amazing luck, strong willpower and lengthy rehabilitation, and driven by his as yet unfulfilled desire to pursue photography, the tetraplegic was back in the saddle, and has since held several one-man shows and participated in a number of group exhibitions in Slovenia and abroad. Recently, he has been polishing his photography skills with Klavdij Sluban, a French photographer of Slovenian descent based in Paris. Developing his photographic idiom, Mijović first focused on the wide landscapes of the Caribbean and South America, the poetic Tuscany, the magical Lake Cerknica, and explored hidden gems in his immediate vicinity and further afield. Mijović's great flair for composition and light contrasts renders his portraits of random individuals far more than simply frozen moments in time but, rather, perceptive accounts of his life stories. His black-and-white photographs, a preoccupation of recent years, aim to capture diverse moods of his closest family and long-standing friends also in their most intimate moments. All photos in this project were taken after the injury. About 9 years 9 months "The greatest desire of most couples around the world is to start a family. Unfortunately, this is a big problem in developed countries today, as every sixth couple suffers from infertility. These data also apply to Slovenia. Our story began ten years ago when I became quadriplegic after falling on a slippery ramp which led to the sea and was overgrown with algae. After spinal surgery and a six-month recovery in the Rehabilitation Center Soča, I returned home on crutches. A good year after the accident, my wife and I began to think intensely about starting a family. Due to my medical condition (spastic quadriplegia, also known as spastic tetraplegia), we had to seek medical help. We decided for the infertility clinic in Postojna. This is where our nine-year odyssey began, full of ups and downs, joy, tears, mental distress, depression but most of all, getting to know each other and learning about life. Our relationship was put to the test for the entire period, but we realised time and time again that each painful experience created an even stronger bond between us and we were even more determined to succeed sooner or later. In Postojna, the first three attempts with IVF, better known as in vitro fertilization, were unsuccessful. This was a very painful experience for both of us. Naturally for women this is much more traumatic as all the processes take place in their body. Men can only support them, but in reality we do not experience the whole process as intensely as women do. In one phase, the procedure is also physically extremely painful for women (puncture of follicles or removal of eggs from the ovaries). After the doctor performs the artificial insemination (he usually inserts a five-day-old embryo into the uterus which developed in the laboratory under the watchful eye of an embryologist), a long fourteen-day wait begins before a pregnancy test can be done. When the moment of truth comes and you see a minus instead of a much desired plus, your heart breaks. It seems like a piece of you dies with every negative pregnancy test. The bad news was followed by a depressing break of several months, during which we decided to try our luck at an infertility clinic in Maribor. Each clinic has its own methods. They are basically the same, with minor differences. Despite eight embryo transfers, all attempts were unsuccessful here as well. We were especially crushed after the first pregnancy which unfortunately ended in miscarriage in the initial phase. When, after years of unsuccessful attempts, you finally see the desired plus on a pregnancy test, you instantly forget about all previous painful experiences. All of a sudden you are overwhelmed by positive energy and you come to life again, both emotionally and physically. But as the saying goes, life is not a box of chocolates. Suddenly, the joy was over and a time of great sorrow and crocodile tears came instead. Such events cut into your heart forever. Despite the pain, we did not give up and we tried to move on. In order to forget the past events, full of distress and failures, but also because a symbolic wedding had already been quietly planned all along, we decided to get married unofficially in Thailand. After a few more relaxed months, it was time for action again. But what could we do after having used all the six free procedures (multiple transfers are possible in each procedure, depending on the amount of embryos) provided by our healthcare system? We had no choice but to find an infertility clinic abroad on our own which is, among other things, also a big financial burden. However, which clinic to choose and where? A shorter period of research followed. In the Czech Republic alone, which is a very interesting and quite affordable destination for Slovenian couples, there are about 40 such clinics. We decided for an infertility clinic in Brno. After two more unsuccessful attempts and eight extremely exhausting years, my wife gave up. She simply could no longer see the light at the end of the tunnel. We started thinking about adoption more and more intensely. However, this procedure also required a lot of energy and research. Above all, the social work center first had to obtain a certificate proving that we were a suitable candidates for adoption. At the same time we had to obtain a psychological assessment from a psychologist. It took more than ten hearings at the social work center and a visit from a social worker at our home to obtain the certificate. We also found out during the procedure that in most countries where adoptions take place, applicants are required to be officially together for at least ten years before they apply for adoption. In addition, they must be officially married. We therefore had to get married officially, this time in Slovenia. With all the papers we obtained and with the help of our acquaintances, a possibility arose to adopt a child in one of the African countries. We were the tenth on the waiting list. It would have taken at least a year before we could adopt a child. However, since we still had some frozen embryos in Brno, we decided to try our luck in Brno for the last time while waiting for the adopted child. We thought that we would only be able to get the desired child through adoption and that we would soon become parents in any case. Finally, the wheel of fortune was on our side. After nine long years our biggest wish came true. My dear wife got pregnant and despite a risky pregnancy and a long nine-month wait, our son was born and we named him Lev (Lion in English). He was born healthy in mid-March, during the coronavirus pandemic. We can proudly say that we are the happiest parents in the world. We wish to share the story with others to encourage all the couples who are facing a similar situation as we did last 9 years." -- Dejan Mijović
William Eugene Smith
United States
1918 | † 1978
William Eugene Smith was an American photojournalist known for his refusal to compromise professional standards and his brutally vivid World War II photographs. Smith graduated from Wichita North High School in 1936. He began his career by taking pictures for two local newspapers, The Wichita Eagle (morning circulation) and the Beacon (evening circulation). He moved to New York City and began work for Newsweek and became known for his incessant perfectionism and thorny personality. Smith was fired from Newsweek for refusing to use medium format cameras and joined Life Magazine in 1939 using a 35mm camera. In 1945 he was wounded while photographing battle conditions in the Pacific theater of World War II. As a correspondent for Ziff-Davis Publishing and then Life again, W. Eugene Smith entered World War II on the front lines of the island-hopping American offensive against Japan, photographing U.S. Marines and Japanese prisoners of war at Saipan, Guam, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. On Okinawa, Smith was hit by mortar fire. After recovering, he continued at Life and perfected the photo essay from 1947 to 1954. In 1950, he was sent to the United Kingdom to cover the General Election, in which the Labour Party, under Clement Attlee, was narrowly victorious. Life had taken an editorial stance against the Labour government. In the end, a limited number of Smith's photographs of working-class Britain were published, including three shots of the South Wales valleys. In a documentary made by BBC Wales, Professor Dai Smith traced a miner who described how he and two colleagues had met Smith on their way home from work at the pit and had been instructed on how to pose for one of the photos published in Life. Smith severed his ties with Life over the way in which the magazine used his photographs of Albert Schweitzer. Upon leaving Life, Smith joined the Magnum Photos agency in 1955. There he started his project to document Pittsburgh. This project was supposed to take him three weeks, but spanned three years and tens of thousands of negatives. It was too large ever to be shown, although a series of book-length photo essays were eventually produced. From 1957 to 1965 he took photographs and made recordings of jazz musicians at a Manhattan loft shared by David X. Young, Dick Cary and Hall Overton. In January 1972, William Eugene Smith was attacked by Chisso employees near Tokyo, in an attempt to stop him from further publicizing the Minamata disease to the world. Although Smith survived the attack, his sight in one eye deteriorated. Smith and his Japanese wife lived in the city of Minamata from 1971 to 1973 and took many photos as part of a photo essay detailing the effects of Minamata disease, which was caused by a Chisso factory discharging heavy metals into water sources around Minamata. One of his most famous works, Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath, taken in December 1971 and published a few months after the 1972 attack, drew worldwide attention to the effects of Minamata disease. Complications from his long-term consumption of drugs, notably amphetamines (taken to enable his workaholic tendencies), and alcohol led to a massive stroke, from which Eugene Smith died in 1978. He is buried in Crum Elbow Cemetery, Pleasant Valley, New York. Smith was perhaps the originator and arguably the master of the photo-essay. In addition to Pittsburgh, these works include Nurse Midwife, Minamata, Country Doctor, and Albert Schweitzer - A Man of Mercy. Today, Smith's legacy lives on through the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund to promote "humanistic photography." Since 1980, the fund has awarded photographers for exceptional accomplishments in the field.Source: Wikipedia Born and reared in Wichita, Kansas, W. Eugene Smith became interested in photography at the age of fourteen, and three years later had begun to photograph for local newspapers. He received a photography scholarship to the University of Notre Dame, but he left after a year for New York, where he joined the staff of Newsweek and freelanced for LIFE, Collier's, Harper's Bazaar, The New York Times, and other publications. Beginning in 1939, Smith began working sporadically as a staff photographer for LIFE, with which he had a tempestuous relationship throughout the rest of his career. During World War II he was a war correspondent in the Pacific theater for the Ziff-Davis publishing company and LIFE, for whom he was working when he was severely wounded in Okinawa in 1945. After a two-year recuperation, he returned to the magazine and produced many of his best photo essays, including Country Doctor, Spanish Village, and A Man of Mercy. In 1955, he joined Magnum, the international cooperative photography agency founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, George Rodger and Chim (David Seymour), and began work on a large photographic study of Pittsburgh, for which he received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1956 and 1957. Smith continued to freelance for LIFE, Pageant, and Sports Illustrated, among other periodicals, for the rest of his career. From 1959 to 1977, he worked for Hitachi in Japan and taught at the New School for Social Research and the School of Visual Arts in New York and the University of Arizona in Tucson. His last photo essay, Minamata, completed in the 1970s, depicted victims of mercury poisoning in a Japanese fishing village. Smith is credited with developing the photo essay to its ultimate form. He was an exacting printer, and the combination of innovation, integrity and technical mastery in his photography made his work the standard by which photojournalism was measured for many years. In recognition of his outstanding contribution to the development of photojournalism, the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund was established after his death to support the projects of photographers working in the tradition he established. Source: International Center of Photography
Rasel Chowdhury
Bangladesh
1988
Rasel Chowdhury is a documentary photographer. Rasel started photography without a conscious plan, eventually became addicted and decided to document spaces in and around his birth place, Bangladesh. He obtained his graduation in photography from Pathshala, South Asian Media Institute, and in due course, he found the changing landscapes and environmental issues as two extremely important subjects to document in his generation. Rasel started documenting a dyeing river Buriganga, a dying city Sonargaon and newly transformed spaces around Bangladesh railway to explore the change of the environment, unplanned urban structures and the new form of landscapes. During the same time, he started developing his own visual expression as a landscape photographer to address his subjects with a distinctive look.All about Rasel Chowdhury:AAP: When did you realize you wanted to be a photographer?In 2007, when I dropped my moot study (ACCA). Before that Photography was my hobby.AAP: Where did you study photography?I studied photography at Pathshala, South Asian Media Institute. AAP:Do you have a mentor or role model?Yes, Munem Wasif is my mentor who works in Agency VU. And Jemie Penney was my one of mentor from Getty Image when I was selected for the Getty Image Emerging Talent Award in 2012. AAP: Do you remember your first shot? What was it?Yes, I was 6-7 years old. I got a Yashick Auto camera from my father and I took my teacher’s photo by first click. Still I’ve that film in my archive.AAP: What or who inspires you?So many people specially my Family member and friends.AAP: How could you describe your style?I always like calm and quite frame with special faded tone and less contrast.AAP: Do you have a favorite photograph or series?Many, like The Ballad of Sexual Dependence by Nan Goldin, The Americans by Robert Frank and so on. AAP: What kind of gear do you use? Camera, lens, digital, film?Mostly, I shoot on 35mm film camera and then I crop as 6X7. AAP: Do you spend a lot of time editing your images? For what purpose?Not so much.AAP: What are your projects?Desperate Urbanization, Railway Longing, Life on Water and No Money, No Deal.AAP: Favorite(s) photographer(s)?Lot of photographers like Richard Avedon, Alec Soth, Nadav Kander, Dayanita Singh, Munem Wasif, Antoine D’Agata and so many.AAP: What advice would you give a young photographer?Find your strength and believe in it.AAP: What mistake should a young photographer avoid?Don’t be hurry. Be honest.AAP: An idea, a sentence, a project you would like to share?Desperate Urbanization- a story about dying river.AAP: Your best memory as a photographer?When I shot at Old People Home in Niort, France.AAP: Your favorite photo book?Lots of photo books like Under The Banyan Tree, Belongings, Anticrops and so on.AAP: Anything else you would like to share?Twelve significant photographs in any one-year is a good crop - Ansel Adams.
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AAP Magazine #55 Women
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