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Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam

Marcus Yam

Country: Malaysia/United States
Birth: 1984

Marcus Yam is a roving Los Angeles Times foreign correspondent and staff photographer. Born and raised in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, he left a career in aerospace engineering to become a photographer. His goal: to take viewers to the frontlines of conflict, struggle and intimacy. His approach is deeply rooted in curiosity and persistence. In 2022, Yam won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography for images documenting the U.S. departure from Afghanistan that capture the human cost of the historic change in the country. In 2019, Yam was awarded the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Journalism Award for his unflinching body of work showing the everyday plight of Gazans during deadly clashes in the Gaza Strip. He was also part of two Pulitzer Prize-winning breaking news teams that covered the San Bernardino, Calif., terrorist attacks in 2015 for the Los Angeles Times and the deadly landslide in Oso, Wash. in 2014, for the Seattle Times. His previous work has also earned an Emmy Award for News and Documentary, World Press Photo Award, DART Award for Trauma Coverage, Scripps Howard Visual Journalism Award, Picture of the Year International's Newspaper Photographer of the Year Award, Society of Professional Journalists' Sigma Delta Chi Award, National Headliner Award and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award. When he's not working, Yam likes minimizing and organizing his life for efficiency for emergencies.

Websites

www.marcusyam.com

@yamphoto

 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Donald Graham
Donald Graham
United States
Donald Graham is an internationally recognized portrait, fashion and fine art photographer whose work is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the International Center of Photography. He has exhibited his photography in numerous exhibitions and his photographs are held by many collectors. He is well known for his work photographing everyday people, celebrities and fashion for magazine and advertising clients including Vogue, Vanity Fair, Sports Illustrated and Time. Donald began his career in Paris as a fashion photographer. He then moved to New York and Los Angeles where he broadened his work to include portraiture for the movie, music, editorial and advertising industries and began devoting significant time to his personal fine art work. During his career, Donald has photographed in more than forty countries, with extensive travels in India, Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe. A book of his portraits, entitled ONE OF A KIND, was published by Hatje Cantz in 2021. After 20 years in New York City, Donald is currently based in Los Angeles, California and Taos, New Mexico. Statement "My portraits are about honest moments that display qualities of the human character including wisdom and sensitivity, peace and vulnerability, both joy and tragedy. I seek to make portraits that are driven by one's inner dialog. I'm not interested in poses or performances for the benefit of the camera. I'm interested in what a person is like when they are their most authentic." Authenticity, honesty, and trust characterize Donald Graham's portraits. They are not simply photographic recordings. Looking at them is like seeing human beings in the flesh, revealed to us by Graham with his virtuoso technique and sensibilities. His exquisite, strongly contrasting black-and-white photographs are evidence of attitude, rather than studied gestures. Eyes and faces are not model-like masks; instead, they express the unique nature of those portrayed. Inevitably, viewers find themselves in a dialogue with the images. You wonder about the stories behind these faces; though unfamiliar, they are nevertheless an emotional experience. One of A Kind
Kai Moerk
Kai Moerk
Germany
1964
My nationality is German and I was born 1964. After graduating from the Adolf Lazi Academy near Stuttgart/Germany with a degree in media design and a job in a film studio, I tried something completely different: mountaineering, climbing and other outdoor activities. For a few years I lived completely isolated with my current wife in northern Italy. Without neighbours, TV, telephone, electricity and warm running water. The experiences and impressions in the peace and seclusion moved me deeply and taught me to observe my environment carefully. This was followed by a contrasting program. I got a job in Munich/Germany as a press photographer which I practiced for several years. Today I live and work without constraints and obligations as a Freelance Photographer, Fine-Art-Printer in Italy and Germany.
Wang Wusheng
Wang Wusheng
China
1945 | † 2018
Wang Wusheng was born in the city of Wuhu in China's Anhui Province and graduated from Anhui University's School of Physics. Beginning in 1973, Wusheng worked as a photographer for a news magazine in Anhui Province. He studied at the Art Institute of Nihon University in Japan beginning in 1983 and studied for three years at the Tokyo Arts University. Wusheng currently works as a fine art photographer in Tokyo. For more than three decades, Wang Wusheng has been captivated by the beauty of Mount Huangshan, also called Yellow Mountain. Located in the southern part of the Anhui province in northern China, Mount Huangshan has often been described as the world's most beautiful and enchanting mountain. Over many centuries, this mountain, with its seventy-two peaks, has been the subject of Chinese landscape painters, whose singular works are so haunting make it appear impossible for these mountains to exist in nature. Inspired by the legacy of these paintings, Wusheng has sought to portray Mount Huangshan in his own way, expressing his "inner worlds" through this scenic wonder. Wusheng captures mist-shrouded granite peaks emerging from an ever-changing veil of clouds, sculptural craggy rocks on lofty cliffs and weathered, oddly shaped pine trees. He records the appearance of Mount Huangshan in all seasons and at various times of day. As one critic says, "[Wusheng's] pictures are gorgeous, but their beauty does not come directly from the natural scenery. Rather, the mountain's natural wonders have been transformed into artistic spectacles through the artist's commitment to the medium of black-and-white photography, his insistent pursuit of dynamic movement and metamorphic images, and his deep emotional engagement with his subject. His mountain peaks are often densely dark-a kind of velvet darkness that seems full of color."Source: Robert Klein Gallery World-renowned photographer, writer, and broadcaster Tom Ang wrote in 2014 in his book Photography: The Definitive Visual History published by DK this text about Wang Wusheng's art works: Oriental perspectives The fusion of classical Chinese fine art with photography was not achieved until the 1940s. It resulted in a distinctive approach to landscape by combining classical forms with a challenge to the Western representation of space. Photography had reached China and Japan by the 1840s, but long remained an imported art form used primarily by foreigners. Fundamentally it was alien to the aesthetics of Asian fine art. The fine detail of a photograph was at odds with the eastern tradition of depicting a scene with just a few brushstrokes. And whereas Eastern art dealt with symbols-mountains representing wisdom, water standing for the flux of life and so on- photography seemed unremittingly literal and heavy-handed to Asian eyes. Eastern art was also fixedly monochrome: black was Heaven's hue, and too much considered bad for the eyes. Three dimensions in two A further element foreign to Asian minds was the handling of perspective-how three-dimensional space was represented on the flat surface of a print or painting. In Europe, 15th-century thinkers, such as the architect Filippo Brunelleschi, showed that a geometrically accurate way to represent objects in space was to depict parallel sides as if they converged toward a vanishing point on the horizon. Early photography reinforced the dominance of this linear perspective in Western art. Classical Asian art was based on different models of space. It showed space with receding planes, in which a nearer object overlaps and covers part of a further object. This was joined to aerial perspective, which exploits how contrast and clarity naturally diminish the further away things are to express receding space. Asian pictorials By the 20th century. even artists in he West were rebelling against geometrical perspective, most visibly in the Cubist movement, which spilled over to montage effects in modernist photography (see pp. 142-43 and Pp.330-31). Finally, in the 1940s, Long Chin-San (also transliterated Lang Jingshan) in Hong Kong marked the first successful fusion of Asian with European modes. Trained in Photography by a brush-and-ink artist, Long considered a traditional painting "as a composite Image of fragmentary visual memories". From this, Long derived composite photographs using subtle toning and multiple printing techniques to place traditional elements such as calligraphically expressive bamboo shoots, leafless branches, and craggy rocks against a plain ground, suspending his subjects In an indeterminate space. Relationships between elements were defined by aerial perspective and overlapping receding planes. Minimal and calligraphic expressions also came naturally to photographers such as Jiang Peng, but Long's best-known students was Don Hong Qai. Modern interpretation China's Huangshan (Yellow Mountains) is a glaciated mountain range much venerated for its exquisite scenery of 72 steep peaks, often shrouded in mist. The Huangshan inspired its own school of painting, which made extensive use of aerial perspective, Wang Wusheng is a leading modern exponent of the style. Wang was working as a news photographer when he turned his attention to the Huangshan in 1973 In his photographs, he exploited the ultrafine grain of Kodak Technical Pan film to create a modern interpretation of inky-black silhouettes are grouped against the smoothly shifting swathes of mist, their softening tones deftly defining distance. This image is part of the Celestial Realm series, published in book form in 2005. In wang's contemporary interpretation of traditional Chinese black-ink painted landscapes, mist separates the deep velvety darkness of the sharply silhouetted rocks and trees in the foreground from the progressively fuzzier bands of trees and rocks.
Yasser Alaa Mobarak
Yasser Alaa Mobarak
Egypt
1993
Yasser Alaa Mobarak is a 24-year-old, Egyptian award-winning photographer based in Delhi, India. He has won photography prizes from National Geographic Traveler India, National Geographic Egypt, International Federation of Photographic Art, Photographic Society of America and Prix De La Photographie Paris. Yasser's works have been featured in Digital Camera World Magazine, Amateur Photographer Magazine, Smart Photography Magazine, Silvershotz Magazine, Adobe Blog, PBS NewsHour and Xinhua News Agency. He is holder of AFIAP distinction from the International Federation of Photographic Art and holder of Associateship from Image Colleague Society International. He was judge at Adobe Youth Voices Awards, Romania's National Creativity Contest and The Photographic Angle.
Rena Effendi
Rena Effendi
Azerbaijan
1977
Rena Effendi's early work focused on oil industry's effects on people's lives. As a result, she followed a 1,700 km oil pipeline through Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey, collecting stories along the way. This work was published in 2009 in her first book: "Pipe Dreams A chronicle of lives along the pipeline". In 2013, Rena Effendi published her second monograph "Liquid Land" where her images are paired with photographs of perished butterflies hunted by her father, a Soviet entomologist, who collected more than 30,000 butterflies in Soviet Union. Liquid Land punctuates the theme of fragility and environmental decay of Baku, the city where Effendi was born and grew up. Effendi has received many international awards including the Alexia 2018 Professional Grant, the Prince Claus Fund Award for Culture and Development, World Press Photo (for observed portraits in 2014), SONY World Photography Award (fine art category), Getty Images Editorial Grant and was short-listed for the Prix Pictet Award in Photography and Sustainability. Rena Effendi is represented by National Geographic Creative agency and ILEX Gallery. Rena Effendi's work has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide including at the Saatchi Gallery, Miami Art Basel, Istanbul Modern, and the 52nd Venice Biennial. She has worked on editorial assignments for the National Geographic, The New Yorker, Newsweek, TIME, The New York Times magazine, Vogue, Marie Claire, The Sunday Times, GEO and others.
Chuck Fishman
Chuck Fishman
United States
1953
In his 40-year career, freelance photographer Chuck Fishman has focused on social and political issues with a strong humanistic concern. His work has been extensively published, exhibited, and collected worldwide, and has earned him the prestigious World Press Photo Foundation Medal four times. His photographs have appeared on the covers of Time, Life, Fortune, Newsweek, The London Sunday Times, The Economist and numerous others, and have been selected for publication in the American Photography and Communication Arts juried annuals. Chuck's work is included in the collections of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Center for Creative Photography, the United Nations, as well as private and corporate collections. Chuck's first monograph, Polish Jews: The Final Chapter, was published in 1977 in the United States. He has worked on book projects for publishers worldwide, from France to Singapore to Papua New Guinea. Exhibitions of his work include one-man shows in the United States and Europe, and in influential group exhibitions globally, including the International Center of Photography and the Pingyao International Photography Festival, among many others.v Chuck was named the "Project Ambassador" in photography for POLIN: The Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. He lives in New York with his wife Susan. "My work is a personal approach to reportage photography. I strive to find the human in humanity, showing our wonderful gestures, secrets, flaws and desires."
Anna Hayat and Slava Pirsky
Anna Hayat and Slava Pirsky
Israel
We are Anna Hayat (born 1974) and Slava Pirsky (born 1965), originally from the Soviet Union. Each of us decided to start a new life in Israel in the early 90s, in search of new horizons. Fate brought us to Jerusalem through different paths, where we lived for over 20 years and now find joy in a small town nearby. We met in 1999 and instantly felt a special connection, as if our shared passion for photography brought us closer. In 2000, we became proud parents of an exquisite daughter whom we started photographing from her very birth. Since then, we have become an inseparable team and partners in the world of photography and art. For over 20 years, we have actively collaborated on joint photography projects. Our creative process revolves around analog photography, primarily using old Polaroid large-format black and white negative plates. Despite the discontinuation of production of these films in 2008, we use expired films to create unique and emotive works of art. We capture images using both a large studio camera and small field Polaroid cameras. The slow shooting process is of utmost importance to us, as it imparts a special depth to our works. In a way, the negative itself becomes another partner in our process. We appreciate the unpredictability of old negatives, which gives our photographs a distinct character, a touch of poetry, and a timeless feeling that is crucial to our work. Our latest project reflects our emotions and pain caused by Russia's treacherous aggression. For this series, we ventured into a mixed technique for the first time, tearing and cutting our works, stitching them anew, adding patches and seams. The project was showcased at the Ramlah Museum and immediately after at the KyotoGraphie International Photography Festival in Japan.
Pascal Maitre
Pascal Maitre
France
1955
Born in Buzançais, France, in 1955, Pascal Maitre studied psychology before beginning a career in photojournalism in 1979. His numerous assignments have taken him all over the Earth, from Afghanistan to South America. His books, In the Heart of Africa and Madagascar: Travels in a World Apart, gather images from 15 years of work in Africa. His photographs have been published in publications around the world, including GEO, Le Figaro Magazine, Newsweek, Life, and many others. His photographs first appeared in National Geographic in a September 2005 article on oil in Africa. Maitre is based in Paris, France. Source: National Geographic After studying psychology, he starts his carrier as photojournalist with the Jeune Afrique press group. In 1984 he joins the Gamma staff and then in 1989, he cofounds the Odyssey Images agency. From 1994 to 2018, he was a member of Cosmos Agency. He is now represented by MYOP. He has worked with many prestigious international magazines including, the Figaro Magazine, Geo, Paris Match, Stern, Brigitt and the National Geographic. In 2000, he published My Africa, a book that compiles 15 years of his work on this continent, with Aperture in the USA and Geo in Germany. In September 2001, the French version is released by Vents de Sable editions. In 2012 he publishes Amazing Africa, a compilation of 30 years of his work on Africa, with edition Lammerhuber and Unesco. Pascal Maitre has worked in over 40 countries in Africa, while tackling many different aspects, men and their way of life, politics, conflicts, tradition or the environement. He received numerous awards, including some World Press Photo awards, the AFD/Polka Prize for the Best Photo Report Project, the VISA D’Or 'Honneur for Lifetime Achievement'. He had eight personal exhibitions at Visa pour l'Image in Perpignan, two personal exhibitions at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris and a personal exhibition about his work at The Arche de la Défense in Paris.Source: MYOP
Nihal Araptarlı
Nihal Araptarlı
Turkey
1959
Nihal Araptarlı is an expert clinical psychologist. She started taking photographs in her high school years but stayed away from photography during her intensive education and work life. She picked up her camera again 5 years ago and made photography the most enjoyable part of her life. Although she mostly does street photography with the advantage of living in Istanbul, which is a very rich photographic city, she continues to improve herself by shooting in every branch of photography and making new experiences. While she provides therapy to her clients with various methods, she also uses photography as a therapeutic treatment tool for herself. Statement: Photography is my therapy Awarded Photographer of the Week - Week 22
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