All about photo.com: photo contests, photography exhibitions, galleries, photographers, books, schools and venues.
Win a Solo Exhibition in July 2026 + An Exclusive Interview!
Win a Solo Exhibition in July 2026 + An Exclusive Interview!
  1. Home
  2. All Photographers
  3. Modern Photographers
  4. Umberto Verdoliva
Umberto Verdoliva
Umberto Verdoliva
Umberto Verdoliva

Umberto Verdoliva

Country: Italy
Birth: 1961

I was born in 1961 in Castellammare di Stabia near to Naples.
I live in Treviso (Italy).
I immediately loved street photography, this awareness over time has pushed me to investigate my "daily" in depth, constantly seeking poetry and beauty in the humanity around me.
From 2010 to 2017, I was a member of the international collective "ViVo" and in 2013 I founded "SPONTANEA" an Italian collective dedicated to street photography dissolved in 2019
I like to convey my passion by curating workshops, exhibitions, portfolio readings, presentations, writing articles and insights on photography.
Many of my photos and photographic projects have been published in the main Italian and international photography magazines.

Websites

www.umbertoverdoliva.com

@uverdoliva

 

Inspiring Portfolios

Aleksander Rodchenko
© Aleksander Rodchenko
Fabien Dendiével
© Fabien Dendiével
Umberto Verdoliva
© Umberto Verdoliva
Call for Entries
AAP Magazine #59 Shapes
Publish your work in our printed magazine and win $1,000 cash prizes
© Barbara Hazen
 
Stay up-to-date  with call for entries, deadlines and other news about exhibitions, galleries, publications, & special events.

More Great Photographers To Discover

Guy Le Querrec
Guy Le Querrec
France
Guy Le Querrec (born 1941 in Paris, France) is a French photographer and filmmaker, noted for his documentary images of jazz musicians. He is a member of Magnum Photos. Le Querrec took his first photographs as a teenager using a basic Fex/Indo Ultra-Fex, buying second hand soon after another and more sophisticated bakelite 6 x 9 cm Photax camera, in 1955. He shot his first pictures of jazz musicians in London in the late 1950s. After having served in the army, he became a professional in 1967, and then worked as a picture editor and photographer for Jeune Afrique magazine, working in francophone Africa, including Chad, Cameroon, Niger, and the Central African Republic. In 1971 he gave his archives to Agence Vu, founded by Pierre de Fenoyl and then co-founded Viva (photo agency). In 1976, he left Viva and joined Magnum Photos. In the late 1970s he began directing films, working with Robert Bober. In 1983 at the Rencontres d'Arles he experimented with projecting images while a jazz quartet played. Besides having photographed numerous jazz festivals and African subjects, Le Querrec has traveled to China and documented American Indians. He has documented Villejuif, a suburb of Paris, as well as the Carnation Revolution in Portugal. He has also taught many photography workshops in France.Source: Wikipedia Le Querrec underlines the necessity of “being able to forget oneself,” to capture the magic instant, the unusual attitude of a subject, or the singular light of a moment. “I search every cranny, as did the Italian footballer Pippo Inzaghi,” he says, comparing himself to the legendary Juventus and AC Milan striker who scored 317 goals in his career. “He was an expert in the art of placement, a cunning ‘fox in the box’.” This approach is perhaps best illustrated by his iconic image of Miles Davis on stage in Pleyel on November 3, 1969. “I strove to anticipate his movements, which is how I found myself at the right place and time when he froze in a beam of light radiating from the floor, which illuminated him at low-angle and projected his shadow onto the curtains. That’s how Miles passed fluidly from the harsh and flat stage light to a sophisticated sculptural illumination, which accentuated his peculiar and fascinating beauty and highlighted the depth of his gaze – qualities that also describe his musicianship.” A jazz fan since his teens, Le Querrec, being the jocular wordsmith that he is, likes to recall that his passion for what he describes as “the most popular of erudite music” came to him in the discotheque of accordion-player Gus Viseur’s father – viseur being the French word for viewfinder… As the Italian saying goes, se non è vero è ben trovato! The fact is, he stays tuned into the music as he works. “I don’t cut out sound.” For that reason it has been said that his eye listens. “His indisputable success in the attempt to reveal the true intimacy of jazz is owed to his inordinate passion that borders on empathy,” points out Stéphane Ollivier in the preface to Jazz Comme Une Image, 10 Ans de Banlieues Bleues (Jazz as Image, 10 Years of Blue Banlieues), Scandéditions, 1993. Consulting the work that Guy Le Querrec produced over a decade during that major festival means finding the entire history of contemporary jazz, in action, on stage, in this part of the Seine Saint-Denis department. But it is also – and most importantly – like breaking into the backstage, the wings or the green rooms of the musicians, of Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Charles, Ornette Coleman, Nina Simone, Henri Texier, Michel Portal…. It’s not about voyeurism, but rather about witnessing the complicity and bond that generated the spontaneous expression we call jazz. Le Querrec explains, “What impels me to shoot is my curiosity for their idiosyncrasies, their ways of being, their behaviors, their stories: their dialogue with life.” Deeply concentrated with his trusty and silent Leica, he tenaciously takes “a fragment of reality from the passage of time.” He acknowledges that “photography is like fishing: it’s usually when you are about to take off that the fish takes the bait.” That’s when it becomes necessary to seize chances. “We try so much to look for chance that it escapes us.” In this sense, Le Querrec considers his work in the world of jazz as presenting similarities to much of the work he has created at Magnum, since joining in 1976: in his work with Breton families, indigenous communities in North America or even his photographs of François Mitterrand posing for a sculpture in the Elysée Palace in Paris. “I have never tried to separate subjects when I move amongst them, and I ask my eye to do the same. I want my photography to carry a scent – the scent of people.” This is an attitude, or rather, a philosophy that brings the musician Louis Sclavis, a clarinetist, saxophonist, and long-time friend to define Le Querrec as follows: “He is not a photographer of jazz, he is a jazz photographer.”Source: Magnum Photos
Pieter Hugo
Pieter Hugo
South Africa
1976
Pieter Hugo was born 1976 and grew up in Cape Town, South Africa. He is a South African photographer who primarily works in portraiture and whose work engages with both documentary and art traditions with a focus on African communities. Hugo is self-taught, having picked up a camera aged 10. He remembers the first image he printed, which was a homeless person in Johannes. After working in the film industry in Cape Town, Pieter Hugo spent a two-year Residency at Fabrica, Treviso, Italy. Hugo has called himself a political-with-a-small-p photographer... it's hard not to be as soon as you pick up a camera in South Africa'. He believes that "the power of photography is inherently voyeuristic but I want that desire to look to be confronted." He also states that he is "deeply suspicious of the power of photography." Early on in his career he noticed that, "he often found himself being critically scrutinized by the subject he was photographing. It was then that he decided to switch to a larger and more cumbersome format of photography, one that would require negotiating consent and dialogue with the person being photographed - a more sedate and contemplative approach." He is known to use a Hasselblad camera and regularly shoots in the 4x5 format. His influences range from South African photojournalist David Goldblatt to Boris Mikhailov. However, his work reacts against 'the culture of realism that defined South African photography in the struggle years.' Hugo's first major photo collection Looking Aside consisted of a collection of portraits of people "whose appearance makes us look aside", his subjects including the blind, people with albinism, the aged, his family and himself. Explaining his interest in the marginal he has said, "My homeland is Africa, but I'm white. I feel African, whatever that means, but if you ask anyone in South Africa if I'm African, they will almost certainly say no. I don't fit into the social topography of my country and that certainly fuelled why I became a photographer." This was followed by Rwanda 2004: Vestiges of a Genocide which the Rwanda Genocide Institute describes as offering "a forensic view of some of the sites of mass execution and graves that stand as lingering memorials to the many thousands of people slaughtered." His most recognized work is the series called The Hyena & Other Men and which was published as a monograph. It has received a great deal of attention. Hugo won first prize in the Portraits section of the World Press Photo 2005 for a portrait of a man with a hyena. In 2007, Hugo received the Standard Bank Young Artist Award 07. Hugo was also working on a series of photographs called Messina/Mussina that were taken in the town of Musina on the border between Zimbabwe and South Africa and which was published as a monograph. At the time Colors magazine asked Hugo to work on an AIDS story and he was fascinated by the marginal aspect of the town. This was followed by a return to Nigeria with Nollywood, which consists of pictures of the Nigerian film industry. Permanent Error followed in 2011 where Hugo photographed the people and landscape of an expansive dump of obsolete technology in Ghana. Sean O'Toole writes "if Nollywood was playfully over-the-top, a smart riposte to accusations of freakishness and racism leveled at his photography..., Permanent Error marks Hugo’s return to a less self-reflexive mode of practice." In 2011 Hugo collaborated with Michel Cleary and co-directed the video of South African producer/DJ Spoek Mathambo's cover version of Joy Division's She's Lost Control, the fourth single from his album Mshini Wam. Commissioned by Italian luxury label Bottega Veneta, Hugo photographed models Amanda Murphy and Mark Cox for the brand’s spring/summer 2014 campaign, with the images shot in a wood in New Jersey. In the Spring of 2014, Hugo was commissioned by Creative Court to go to Rwanda and capture stories of forgiveness as a part of Creative Court's project Rwanda 20 Years: Portraits of Forgiveness. The project was displayed in The Hague in the Atrium of The Hague City Hall for the 20th commemoration of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. A selection of the photos have also been displayed in New York at the exhibition Post-Conflict which was curated by Bradley McCallum, Artist in Residence for the Coalition for the International Criminal Court. Flat Noodle Soup (2016) chronicles Hugo's lengthy engagement with the city of Beijing, exploring how concerns with expressing personal identity within societal norms and pressures are universal and transnational. La Cucaracha is a 2019 body of work made during four trips to Mexico over a two-year period. The photographic series explores Hugo's perception of the flamboyant and violent environment of Mexico with overt art historical references to the nation's visual canon of pre-colonial customs and revolutionary ideology.Source: Wikipedia Between 2006 and 2013, Pieter Hugo worked on a project that he called Kin. This deals with home, proximity, identification and a sense of belonging – something that, in South Africa, he has always experienced as being critical and riddled with conflict: How can one live in this country, which only shed its colonial heritage relatively recently, and which is plagued by racism and a growing chasm between rich and poor? Hugo shot photos at home, in townships and at historical sites, taking portraits of his pregnant wife, of domestic servants and of homeless people. The calm and clearly composed shots show beauty and ugliness, wealth and poverty, private and public, historical and topical. Without either idealising or dramatizing the subject matter, they paint a portrait of the complex society in South Africa today. This is because any notion of harmony in the “Rainbow Nation” is wishful thinking. Even twenty years after the end of apartheid, black and white South Africans are still very much divided. In the series of 94 platinum prints There Is A Place in Hell for Me and My Friends (2011-2012), Pieter Hugo explores the supposed differences between skin colours. To do so, he took portraits of himself and South African friends. The close-ups, generally in the form of frontal head and shoulder portraits, were digitally processed afterwards. The image manipulation, whereby the colour channels were translated into grey tones, emphasise the pigmentation of the skin, using UV irradiation to render visible skin damage and small blood vessels directly beneath the skin. The results are quite astounding: on these photographs, all people are coloured. There is no longer a difference between “white” and “black” skin, but rather a variety of individual shades. The portraits show the powerful presence of each individual and, at the same time, the fragility of all people and the softness and utter vulnerability of their outer shell. With his various photo series, Pieter Hugo has put together an impressive body of work in the space of just a few years. Through this intense perception of corporeality, he captures the complexity and inconsistency of society. Constants in his work include seriousness, neutrality and an underlying respect for his protagonists, whose dignity always remains intact. In this regard, his works are comparable with the monumental portrait works of August Sanders, who created a contemporary picture of the Weimar Republic with his large-scale cycle “Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts” (People of the 20th Century).Source: Priska Pasquer
Lauren Stewart
Lauren Stewart
United States
1983
Lauren Stewart is a self-taught American documentary & street photographer. She graduated from the College of Charleston in 2005 with a degree in English. From 2017 to 2019 she lived in and traveled through China, Nepal, India and Thailand where she covered South East Asia. Her work focuses on documenting people’s daily lives to make global cross-cultural connections between the viewer and the subject. Her work has appeared in numerous international publications such as Suitcase Magazine, Electrify Magazine, Matador Network, NR Magazine as well as others. She was selected to be a part of the inaugural Women Street Photographers exhibit in 2018 in New York City and was also a finalist in the WSP exhibitions in 2019 and 2024. Her work has also been included in the PHOS Street Photography Days Exhibition in Bulgaria in 2018 and most recently in PHOTO SC’s Feminism exhibition in Columbia, South Carolina in 2024. She currently lives in the United States with her family while working on both street photography as well as long-term documentary projects revolving around the culture of the American South.
Ralf Peters
Ralf Peters
Germany
1960
In the series "24 Hours" Peters reflects on the moment of simultaneousness. He dissolves the visual antagonism between the moment before and afterwards in each image. The works represent the light cycle of one day, starting from the left at night, passing daylight and ends again in the darkness of the night. The time states are not superimposed one upon the other but set side by side. In an extraordinary technique Ralf Peters obtains that the transition of the different daytimes is shown as in fast motion and is continued without any cuts, but can be noticed in the brightness and the illumination of the motif. Day and night are united in one image and at the same time, appearing invisible and visible. The variety of subjects going from exotic landscapes to cool architecture allows a reflection about our own world and foreign surroundings referring to a superior relationship of time and space. (Source: Diana Lowenstein Gallery) Ralf Peters is a conceptual photographer who creates visual studies of places and objects, often in thematic series. Playfully navigating between fantasy and reality, Peters manipulates digital images to challenge the viewer’s conception of traditional photography, raising the question as to whether something is a realistic rendering or a skillfully manipulated vision. Through the creation of portraits of everyday locations like supermarkets, gas stations, and swimming pools, Peters explores the possibilities for the photographic medium. Manipulating the focus, lighting, and composition of his images, Peters creates photographs that obscure the traditional notion of capturing an individual’s perspective on reality, favoring, instead, constructed works that comment on the aesthetic relationship we have to our surrounding environment. Peters’s works have been shown at notable institutions including the Hamburg Kunsthalle and Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo. (Source: Art Space) Represented by: Diana Lowenstein Gallery Galerie Kornfeld Galerie Bernhard Knaus Fine Art Galerie Martin Mertens Galerie Andres Thalmann
William Gottlieb
William Gottlieb
United States
1917 | † 2006
William Paul Gottlieb was an American photographer and newspaper columnist who is best known for his classic photographs of the leading performers of the Golden Age of American jazz in the 1930s and 1940s. Gottlieb's photographs are among the best-known and widely reproduced images of this era of jazz. Gottlieb made portraits of hundreds of prominent jazz musicians and personalities, typically while they were playing or singing at well-known New York City jazz clubs. William Gottlieb's subjects included Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Hines, Jo Stafford, Thelonious Monk, Stan Kenton, Ray McKinley, Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, Louis Jordan, Ella Fitzgerald, Toots Thielemans, and Benny Carter. Gottlieb was born on January 28, 1917, in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn, and grew up in Bound Brook, New Jersey, where his father was in the building and lumber business. He graduated from Lehigh University in 1938 with a degree in economics. While at Lehigh, Gottlieb wrote for the weekly campus newspaper and became editor-in-chief of The Lehigh Review. In his last year of college, he began writing a weekly jazz column for the Washington Post. While writing for the Post, Gottlieb taught economics at the University of Maryland. After the Post determined that it would not pay a photographer to accompany Gottlieb's visits to jazz clubs, Gottlieb borrowed a press camera and began taking pictures for his column. William P. Gottlieb was drafted into the Army Air Corps in 1943 and served as a photography and classifications officer. After World War II, Gottlieb moved to New York City to pursue a career in journalism. He worked as a writer-photographer for Down Beat magazine, and his work also appeared frequently in Record Changer, the Saturday Review, and Collier's. In 1948, Gottlieb retired from jazz journalism in order to spend more time with his wife, Delia, and children. After Gottlieb left Down Beat, he began working at Curriculum Films, an educational filmstrip company. He founded his own filmstrip company, which was later bought by McGraw Hill. Many of his filmstrips won awards from the Canadian Film Board and the Educational Film Librarians Association. Gottlieb also wrote and illustrated children's books, including several Golden Books such as The Four Seasons, Tigers Adventure, and Laddie the Superdog. He also wrote educational books such as Science Facts You Won't Believe and Space Flight. Apart from his photography career, William Gottlieb also played amateur tennis. Gottlieb and his son Steven were often ranked the number one father-and-son ream on the East Coast and were twice ranked among the top ten teams in the US. Gottlieb married the former Delia Potofsky, daughter of Jacob Potofsky. They had four children, Barbara, Steven, Richard, and Edward. Gottlieb died of complications of a stroke on April 23, 2006, in Great Neck, New York. In accord with Gottlieb's wishes, his photographs were placed in the public domain. Many of his pictures are used in Wikipedia and other public domain or freely licensed venues.Source: Wikipedia It was the love of music that brought the superlative photography of William P. Gottlieb to the world’s attention. Originally a writer and jazz columnist, William figured that columns accompanied with photographs might give him a better chance to be published. During the late 30’s he began photographing jazz musicians to illustrate articles he wrote for the Washington Post. His weekly feature “Swing Sessions” was probably the first jazz column in a major newspaper. He simultaneously had radio programs on WRC/NBC and on a local station WINX. At the age of 22 he was Washington’s “Mr.Jazz”. After WWII, he became the assistant editor of “Downbeat” where, again, he took photos to augment his writing. At both The Post and Downbeat he was only paid just for writing, not for pictures. In 1948, he left the jazz field for a career in publishing with Britannica and McGraw Hill and it wasn’t until his retirement that he resurrected his old jazz photos and in 1979, published The Golden Age of Jazz, now in its 12th edition of printing. In a review of the book, The New Yorker wrote, “Gottlieb stopped photographing jazz musicians in 1948… No one has surpassed him yet.” Today he is still regarded as one of the top jazz photographers of all time. Although he never resumed taking jazz photos, his photographs have become our most widely reproduced jazz illustrations, having four US postage stamps, 250 record album covers, and having appeared in over 160 exhibitions around the world. He is represented in the National Portrait Gallery, and his photos were an essential part of the PBS Jazz series by Ken Burns. In 1995, The Library of Congress purchased 1,600 of his jazz photos “for posterity” and in 1997 he became the first and only photographer to receive the Downbeat Lifetime Achievement award.Source: Gallery 270
William Gedney
William Gedney
United States
1932 | † 1989
William Gale Gedney (October 29, 1932 – June 23, 1989) was an American documentary and street photographer. It wasn't until after his death that his work gained momentum and is now widely recognized. He is best known for his series on rural Kentucky, and series on India, San Francisco, and New York shot in the 1960s and 1970s. William Gedney was born in Greenville, New York. He studied at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. In 1955 he graduated with a BFA in Graphic Design and began work with Condé Nast. During his lifetime, Gedney received several fellowships and grants, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship from 1966 to 1967, a Fulbright Fellowship for photography in India from 1969 to 1971, a New York State Creative Artists Public Service Program (C.A.P.S.) grant from 1972 to 1973; and a National Endowment for the Arts grant from 1975 to 1976. In a career spanning the late 1950s to the mid-1980s, he created a large body of work, including a series documenting local communities during his travels to India, San Francisco, Brooklyn, and New York shot in the 1960s and 1970s. He is also noted for night photography, principally of large structures, like the Brooklyn bridge and architecture, and architectural studies of neighborhoods quiet and empty, at the night. In 1969, he started teaching at Pratt Institute, though later in 1987, two years before his death, he was denied tenure. Gedney's work has been exhibited in numerous group shows, including Museum of Modern Art shows, Photography Current Report in 1968, Ben Schultz Memorial Collection in 1969, and Recent Acquisitions in 1971; as well as Vision and Expression,George Eastman House, and Rochester Institute of Technology, in 1972. However, he remained a recluse, had only one solo exhibition during his lifetime. Despite receiving appreciation from noted photographers of the time, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and John Szarkowski, he remained an under-appreciated artist of the generation. He didn't manage to get any of his eight-book projects published. William Gedney died of complications from AIDS in 1989, aged 56, in New York City and is buried in Greenville, New York, a few short miles from his childhood home. He left his photographs and writings to his lifelong friend Lee Friedlander. In time, Friedlander's efforts, which had earlier led to the revival of E. J. Bellocq's works, chartered posthumous revival of Gedney's work. An extensive collection of his work, including large photographic prints, work prints, contact sheets, negatives, sketchbooks, notebooks and diaries, correspondence, and other files are housed at the Rubenstein Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.Source: Wikipedia
John Novis
John Novis
United Kingdom
1950
John Novis is photographer and story teller working on environmental issues, particularly climate change for the last 30 years. Climate Change is the biggest global threat ever known to mankind, yet it is the most challenging and difficult subject to visualize to any great effect. Any image presented, be it extreme weather events, scientific evidence or global protests can be argued against by a sceptic media, governments and industry. It is precisely this challenge that drives concerned photographers to push ever more creative photos into the image pool to drive home the importance of this emergency of our times. We are getting somewhere thanks to Greta Thunberg and Environmental groups such as Greenpeace, Extinction Rebellion etc. which provide scope for compelling pictures. Social media has also provided a valuable platform for citizen journalism reporting climate related events as they unfold in real time. How I got there I stared my career in photography in London during the 'swinging 60's 'years working with high profile photographers in Vogue, Apple Corp (Beatles), top Fashion and Industrial photo studios Adrian Ensor Labs up until 1977 when I enrolled on a 3 year 'Creative Photography' course in Nottingham University under the guidance of Thomas Joshua Cooper and Raymond Moore. In 1980 I received a grant from UK South East Arts to make a 30 minute, 16mm film called 'Our trip to the Zoo' analysing the family snapshot with the old Kodak slogan – 'to capture life'. Throughout most of the 80's I worked as a freelance commercial photographer and then in 1989 I joined Greenpeace as an in –house photographer where I was employed until 2015. Just before I joined Greenpeace, I was becoming disillusioned with photography as an instrument for advertising and generating profit. It was though Greenpeace I was able to employ my expertise in photography to produce images that would serve as a wake-up call to the critical state of our environment. As photography became more important to the organisation I became Head of Photography at the international headquarters in Amsterdam, directing major photo projects such as: - Ocean and whaling expeditions, Amazon – Illegal logging, Yunnan, China campaigning against the introduction of GMO rice to the rice growing communities, Climate in Crisis - Yellow River drying up, the Disappearing Glaciers on Everest, Climate and Poverty along the Silk Road in Gansu Province, China - Palm oil production in Riau, Indonesia and 'Forest Solutions' global communities living from the forest management towards a sustainable solution. In addition, I have also worked on numerous successful publications including the nuclear industry of Russia with Dutch photographer Robert Knoth, (Panos) and Bhopal – '' with Raghu Rai (Magnum). My professional services outside Greenpeace have included, organizing and hosting the Beijing Photo Master Classes with World Press Photo winners, member of the jury for the 2007 CHIPP (China International Press Photo Contest) and Member of the Jury and visiting lecturer to Fotopub, Slovenia July 2008. Directing a major exhibition and slide show at 1999 Perpignan, Visa Pour L'image with an interview with Jean Francois Leroy on stage. In 2012 I ran a photo workshop and curated a renewable energy exhibition at the Angkor Photo Festival in Siem Reap, Cambodia and was invited as guest speaker for Wild Photos at the Royal Geographic society in 2011. I am currently working on Climate Emergency events and supporting on line publications with consultancy and archive picture material.
Fan Ho
Fan Ho
China
1931 | † 2016
Fan Ho’s (born in Shanghai in 1931) photographic career started at the early age of 14 when given his first Kodak Brownie from his father. Within the first year he won his first award in 1949 in Shanghai. At the age of 18, he acquired his twin lens Rolleiflex with which he captured all his famous work after he moved to Hong Kong with his parents and continued to purse his love for photography. Dubbed the “Cartier-Bresson of the East”, Fan Ho patiently waited for ‘the decisive moment’; very often a collision of the unexpected, framed against a very clever composed background of geometrical construction, patterns and texture. He often created drama and atmosphere with backlit effects or through the combination of smoke and light. His favorite locations were the streets, alleys and markets around dusk or life on the sea. What made his work so intensely human is his love for the common Hong Kong people: Coolies, vendors, hawkers selling fruits and vegetables, kids playing in the street or doing their homework, people crossing the street… He never intended to create a historic record of the city’s buildings and monuments; rather he aimed to capture the soul of Hong Kong, the hardship and resilience of its citizens. Fan Ho was most prolific in his teens and 20s and created his biggest body of work before he reached the tender age of 28. His work did not go by unnoticed at his time. He won close to 300 local and international awards and titles in his day through competing in the salons. His talent was also spotted by the film industry where he started out as an actor before moving to film directing until retiring at 65. Fan Ho is a Fellow of the Photographic Society and the Royal Society of Arts in England, and an Honorary Member of the Photographic societies of Singapore, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, France, Italy and Belgium. He most recently won a "Life-time Achievement Award, the 2nd Global Chinese International Photography Award, China, 2015" by the Chinese Photographic Society (Guangzhou). During his long career he has taught photography and film making at a dozen universities worldwide. His work is in many private and public collection of which most notable are: M+ Museum, Hong Kong, Heritage Museum, Hong Kong, Bibliothèque National de France, Paris, France, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, USA, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, USA and many more. Source: fanho-forgetmenot.com
Jo Ann Chaus
Jo Ann Chaus
United States
1954
Jo Ann Chaus is an American photographer from and based in the New York metro area She holds two certificates from the International Center of Photography in New York City. In 2016 Jo Ann self-published "Sweetie & Hansom", a 60-image book with original text exploring family, relationships and loss. Her current body of work, "Conversations with Myself", is a collection of performative self-portraiture that explores women's roles and identity, currently under edit for publishing. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and she holds special recognitions and awards: Critical Mass Top 200 2020, 2019, 15th Julia Margaret Cameron Award for Women Photographers Winner Self Portrait Series, 14th Julia Margaret Cameron Awards Honorable Mention, Winner 13th Pollux Awards non-professional category, Critical Mass 2019 Top 200, Klompching Fresh 2019 Finalist, PDN Emerging Photographer Fall 2019 Winner, , Candela Unbound8! and 9! juried exhibitions, Permanent Collection in the Center for Creative Photography Qualities of Light Exhibition, Juror's Choice South East Center for Photography Portrait Exhibition 2019. Statement Jo Ann's work is a visual record of her interactions with and with-in her environment, and her curiosity to explore and discover personal truths, whether found or assembled, as metaphors for her inner landscape. She expresses the joys and pathos of a life, as seen and felt by the young girl within who became the woman, the mother, and the wife. Her perspective is through the eyes of an elder in our society, contemplating the challenges and incongruities of her own will, desire and constraints within a historical context. Heightened and enhanced by the literal light of day, it is an examination of life's ambiguities: the close and the distant, the beauty and the grit, the singular and the plural, satisfaction and longing, together and apart… all relentlessly seeking to understand and witness herself, past, present and future. All About Photo Competitions All About Photo Awards 2020 AAP Magazine 23 Women AAP Magazine 39 Shadows
Advertisement
AAP Magazine #59 Shapes
Win a Solo Exhibition in July
AAP Magazine #59 Shapes

Latest Interviews

Exclusive Interview with Trevor Cole: Pastoral Peoples and Practices
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Trevor Cole: Pastoral Peoples and Practices
For this interview, we wanted to focus specifically on The Face of the Mundari and the wider Pastoral Peoples and Practices series. We spoke with Trevor about his long-term work among the Mundari, what continues to draw him back to their cattle camps, and the experience of documenting a culture whose identity remains deeply connected to livestock, tradition, and the natural environment.
Read the full interview
Exclusive Interview with Frank Meo
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Frank Meo
In our latest exclusive feature for All About Photo, I speak with veteran photography representative Frank Meo about what it truly takes to build a sustainable creative career today. Frank brings decades of experience working with Fortune 500 companies, major agencies, and documentary photographers to the table. We dive into the critical business skills often left out of art school curriculums, the power of mentorship, and the inspiring evolution of PROJECTIONS—his international salon platform for visual storytellers. It’s an essential read for anyone navigating the commercial or editorial photography landscape today.
Read the full interview
Exclusive Interview with Carolyn Moore
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Carolyn Moore
American photographer Carolyn Moore explores the inner landscape of emotion, memory, and personal transformation through a deeply intuitive photographic practice. Her work unfolds as a quiet dialogue between artist and viewer, where images become a space for reflection, vulnerability, and connection.
Read the full interview
Exclusive Interview with Luca Desienna and Laura Estelle Barmwoldt
Interview
Publication
Exclusive Interview with Luca Desienna and Laura Estelle Barmwoldt
For over seven years, Of Lilies and Remains has explored the depths of the goth and darkwave underground, unfolding in Leipzig—a city long associated with a vibrant and enduring subcultural scene. Moving between iconic gatherings such as Wave-Gotik-Treffen and more intimate moments on the fringes, the project offers a rare and immersive glimpse into a world often misunderstood, yet rich in expression and community. Created by Luca in collaboration with Laura Estelle Barmwoldt, the work embraces a cinematic and deeply personal approach. Rather than documenting from a distance, it moves within the scene itself, capturing its atmosphere, its codes, and its quiet contradictions. The title Of Lilies and Remains hints at this duality—where beauty and darkness, fragility and strength coexist. As the book prepares for its release, we spoke with both artists about the origins of the project, their process, and what it means to document a subculture that continues to evolve while remaining true to its spirit.
Read the full interview
Exclusive Interview with Matthew Finley
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Matthew Finley
American photographer Matthew Finley turns inward, using photography as a way to explore identity, memory, and emotional truth. Based in Los Angeles, his practice moves between performance, gesture, and found imagery, creating a visual language that is both intimate and deeply personal
Read the full interview
Exclusive Interview with Jan Janssen
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Jan Janssen
Dutch photographer Jan Janssen explores universal human experiences through his long-term project It Matters, winner of the May 2025 Solo Exhibition. Begun in 2016, the series captures intimate moments of everyday life—love, loss, connection, and belonging—across Central and Eastern Europe. Working in countries such as Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, Janssen spends extended time within communities, building relationships based on trust and respect. His approach allows him to move beyond observation, revealing deeply human and authentic moments. Rooted in travel and personal discovery, It Matters reflects Janssen’s search for what connects us all in an increasingly divided world. The project is ongoing and will culminate in a photobook scheduled for publication in 2026.
Read the full interview
Exclusive Interview with Henk Kosche
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Henk Kosche
German photographer Henk Kosche turns his lens toward the streets of Halle an der Saale, capturing everyday life in the late years of the former German Democratic Republic. At the time, Kosche was studying design and exploring the city with his camera, drawn to the atmosphere of its industrial landscape and the quiet rhythms of daily life. His series Street Photography at the End of the 80s, selected as the Solo Exhibition for July 2025, revisits a body of work created just before a period of profound change. Rediscovered decades later in a small box of 35mm negatives, these photographs offer glimpses of a city and its people at a moment suspended between the familiar and the unknown.
Read the full interview
Exclusive Interview with Anastasia Samoylova
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Anastasia Samoylova
Anastasia Samoylova is an American artist whose photographic practice is shaped by close observation and a deep attentiveness to place. Working between documentary and formal exploration, she photographs landscapes, architecture, and everyday scenes with a sensitivity to light, structure, and atmosphere. Since relocating to Miami in 2016, her work has increasingly focused on how environments—both natural and built—carry social, cultural, and emotional traces. We asked her a few questions about her practice and her way of seeing, to better understand the thoughts and experiences that shape her work—while allowing the images themselves to remain open and speak in their own time.
Read the full interview
Exclusive Interview with Marijn Fidder
Interview
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.
Read the full interview
Call for Entries
Win A Solo Exhibition in July
Get International Exposure and Connect with Industry Insiders
©
Explore All About Photo
All About Photo
About Us
Contact Us
Link Back
Press
Blog
Newsletter
Terms of Use
Privacy Policy
Competitions
All About Photo Competitions
Our Jurors
All Photo Contests
Open Photo Contests
Amateur Photo Contests
Professional Photo Contests
Portfolio Reviews
Photo Competition News
Artists
Photographers A-Z
Masters of Photography
Modern Photographers
Rising Photographers
Articles
Interviews
Inspirational
Photography Exhibitions
Photography Festivals
Photo Fairs
Photo Museums
Galleries & Centers
Photographer Monographs
Technique Books
History of Photography
Miscellaneous
Paper Magazines
Online Magazines
Resources
Schools and Classes
Photography Agencies
Equipment Rentals
Studio Rentals
Photo Labs
Camera Repairs
Framing Stores
Photo Tips & Tools
Photo Gear
© 2026 © All-About-Photo.com, All Rights Reserved  •  Photographs © the Respective Artists, All Rights Reserved.