All about photo.com: photo contests, photography exhibitions, galleries, photographers, books, schools and venues.
Win a Solo Exhibition this October, Open Theme. Juror Aline Smithson.
Win a Solo Exhibition this October, Open Theme. Juror Aline Smithson.
Lydia Panas
Lydia Panas
Lydia Panas

Lydia Panas

Country: United States
Birth: 1958

Lydia Panas works with photography and video. Working primarily with women, her images are attentive to the psyche and what lies below the surface investigating questions about who we are and what we want to become. Panas’ work has been exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally and has appeared in many periodicals including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, PDN, Rain Taxi Review of Books, and Hyperallergic among others. Her photographs are represented in numerous public collections including the Brooklyn Museum; Bronx Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Palm Springs Art Museum; Allentown Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Museum of Photographic Arts San Diego; and Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai. She published three monographs, “The Mark of Abel” (Kehrer Verlag, 2012), “Falling from Grace” (Conveyor Arts, 2016), and “Sleeping Beauty” (MW Editions, 2021). She divides her time between her farm in Kutztown, Pennsylvania and New York City.

Statement
The series “Hidden Forest” explores the relationship between the artist, the audience, and the gaze. I investigate photographic looking as a way to understand identity, family secrets, and love. Art is a way to make sense of disorder and reveal truths.

Article

Sleeping Beauty
 

Lydia Panas's Video

Selected Books

Inspiring Portfolios

Call for Entries
AAP Magazine #52: Street
Publish your work in AAP Magazine and win $1,000 Cash Prizes
 
Stay up-to-date  with call for entries, deadlines and other news about exhibitions, galleries, publications, & special events.

More Great Photographers To Discover

Marilyn Silverstone
United States
1929 | † 1999
Marilyn Silverstone, who has died of cancer in Kathmandu aged 70, was one of only five women members of the Magnum Photos co-operative. Yet after more than 20 years of freelancing for publications such as Life and Paris Match, she gave up the glamour of photo-journalism to become a Buddhist nun in Nepal.Source: The Guardian Marilyn Rita Silverstone (9 March 1929 – 28 September 1999) was the eldest daughter of Murray and Dorothy Silverstone was born in London. Her father, the son of Polish immigrants to America, rose to become managing director, and president, international, respectively, of United Artists and 20th-Century Fox, working with Charlie Chaplin and other early film stars in London. The family returned to America just before the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe. Silverstone grew up in Scarsdale, New York. After graduating from Wellesley College, she became an associate editor for Art News, Industrial Design and Interiors in the early 1950s. She moved to Italy to make documentary art films. Marilyn Silverstone became a working photojournalist in 1955, traveling and capturing the range of images that her vision led her to find in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. In 1956, she travelled to India on an assignment to photograph Ravi Shankar. She returned to the subcontinent in 1959; what was intended to be a short trip became the beginning of a fascination with India which lasted for the rest of her life. Her photographs of the arrival in India of the Dalai Lama, who was escaping from the Chinese invasion of Tibet, made the lead in Life. In that period, she met and fell in love with the journalist Frank Moraes. Moraes was then editor of The Indian Express. The couple lived together in New Delhi until 1973, socializing with politicians, journalists and intellectuals, and diplomats. A number of Moraes' editorials had earned the ire of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the situation deteriorated to the point that a retreat to London became the best course. Over the years, Silverstone's reputation as a photographer grew. In 1967, she joined Magnum Photos, in which she was only one of five women members. Silverstone's work for Magnum included photographing subjects ranging from Albert Schweitzer to the coronation of the Shah of Iran. Silverstone's conversion to Buddhist nun was said to have begun when she was a teenager suffering from the mumps. She later explained that during this conventional childhood illness, she read Secret Tibet by Fosco Maraini and she said the book provided a key she long carried in her subconscious. In the late 1960s, Marilyn Silverstone had worked on a photography assignment about a Tibetan Buddhist lama in Sikkim named Khanpo Rinpoche and, when the lama came to London for medical treatment in the 1970s, Rinpoche stayed with the couple. At this point, Silverstone decided to learn Tibetan in order to study Buddhism with him. After Moraes's death in 1974, Silverstone decided to join the entourage of another celebrated lama, Khentse Rinpoche, who left London for a remote monastery in Nepal. In 1977, she took vows as a Buddhist nun. Her Buddhist name was Bhikshuni Ngawang Chödrön, or Ani Marilyn to her close friends. In her new life in Kathmandu, she researched the vanishing customs of Rajasthan and the Himalayan kingdoms. In 1999, Ngawang Chödrön returned to the United States for cancer treatment and she learned that she was terminally ill. She was clear that she wanted to die in Nepal, her home for the past 25 years. However, no airline would carry a passenger in her fragile condition. She resolved the impasse by persuading a doctor on vacation to accompany her on the return to Kathmandu. The journey was fraught with difficulties. She was barely conscious during the trip and a stopover was necessary in Vienna. She died in 1999 in a Buddhist monastery near Katmandu where she had worked to establish and maintain. At the time of Silverstone's death, the preparation of an exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery featuring her work and that of other Magnum photographers was nearing completion. The University of St Andrews hosted a seminar in conjunction with this exhibition, and as Silverstone had just recently died, the seminar became an opportunity for her peers to celebrate her life and career. Source: Wikipedia Born in London in 1929, Marilyn Silverstone graduated from Wellesley College in Massachusetts, then worked as an associate editor for Art News, Industrial Design, and Interiors during the 1950s. She also served as an associate producer and historical researcher for an Academy Award-winning series of films on painters. In 1955 she began to photograph professionally as a freelancer with the Nancy Palmer Agency, New York, working in Asia, Africa, Europe, Central America and the Soviet Union. In 1959, she was sent on a three-month assignment to India, but ended up moving to New Delhi and was based there until 1973. During that time she produced the books Bala Child of India (1962) and Ghurkas and Ghosts (1964), and later The Black Hat Dances (1987), and Ocean of Life (1985), a journey of discovery that aims to take the reader to the heart of a complex and compassionate Buddhist culture. Kashmir in Winter, a film made from her photographs, won an award at the London Film Festival in 1971. Silverstone became an associate member of Magnum in 1964, a full member in 1967, and a contributor in 1975. Marilyn Silverstone, whose photographs have appeared in many major magazines, including Newsweek, Life, Look, Vogue and National Geographic, became an ordained Buddhist nun in 1977. She lived in Kathmandu, Nepal, where she practiced Buddhism and researched the vanishing customs of the Rajasthani and Himalayan kingdoms. She died in October 1999 at the Shechen monastery, near Kathmandu, which she had helped to finance. Silverstone’s photographic estate is managed by Magnum Photos under the direction of James A. Fox, a former Magnum Editor-in-Chief, and present Curator.Source: Magnum Photos
Thomas Annan
Scotland
1829 | † 1887
Thomas Annan was a Scottish photographer, notable for being the first to record the bad housing conditions of the poor. Born in Dairsie, Fife he was one of seven children of John Annan, a flax spinner. After his initial apprenticeship as a lithographic writer and engraver at the Fife Herald in Cupar, he moved to Glasgow in 1849 and worked as a lithographer and engraver for Joseph Swan until 1855. He set up business with George Berwick at 40 Woodlands Road, Glasgow, listing in the 1855 - 56 Glasgow post office directory as calotypists, practitioners of this early form of photography. In 1855, he photographed the ship RMS Persia, under construction on the Clyde, which was probably a commission by engineer, Robert Napier. This photograph was part of a group of images sent to the Photographic Exhibition in connection with the British Association. After dissolving his previous partnership, he established himself in a photographic studio at 116 Sauchiehall Street during 1857. In 1859, the business moved to 200 Hope Street and he was also able to establish a printing works in Hamilton in 1863. First interested largely in architectural photography and then portraits, as well as photographing artworks and maps, in 1866 Annan photographed slum areas of the city. These images were used by Glasgow City Improvement Trust to document the overcrowded, unhygienic conditions ahead of extensive redevelopments. It was this series of photographs, created between 1868 and 1871, entitled Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow, that ensured his posterity. In 1869, Annan purchased the contents of Rock House, which belonged David Octavius Hill, which included many of Hill's photographs and negatives. These were eventually exhibited by Thomas' son, James Craig Annan, and reproduced in photogravure in Alfred Stieglitz's journal Camera Work. Annan's photographs of the Loch Katrine Waterworks were praised in the British Journal of Photography: "The views by Mr. Annan could scarcely fail to be attractive, for in a country so beautiful a clever artist is bound to produce results in keeping with the nature of the subject, and this Mr. Annan has done." Indeed, Annan's work was often praised not only for its aesthetics, but also for its technical virtuosity. Twenty years later, Annan's studio would be singled out by Baden Pritchard for its accomplishments in carbon printing and "beautiful pictures of exteriors and interiors of Scotch strongholds." Thomas Annan purchased the rights to the photogravure process in Britain from Karel Klíč of Vienna in 1883 after visiting the city with his second son, James Craig Annan. James was a noted photogravurist and associated with late nineteenth-century art photography continued in his father's profession, receiving a Royal Warrant as Photographers and Photographic Engravers to Her Majesty in Glasgow. Thomas Annan died on 14 December 1887 at his home in Lenzie. Before his death by suicide, he had experienced a month-long period of "mental aberration". The family business survives to the present day in the form of the Annan Fine Art Gallery, located on Woodlands Road in the West End of Glasgow. A selection of prints from the Glasgow Improvements act 1868 series were displayed in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery from 2011 to 2012. In 2017, the J. Paul Getty Museum curated an exhibition entitled Thomas Annan: Photographer of Glasgow, the first to survey his career and legacy as photographer and printer.Source: Wikipedia
Robert Bergman
United States
1944
Over more than 50 years, largely outside the mainstream, Robert Bergman has pursued a vision of advancing psychological and philosophical depth in photography and of transcending the boundaries between painting and photography. In Toni Morrison's words in her introduction to his classic 1998 book A Kind of Rapture, his color portraits are "... a master template of the singularity, the community, and the unextinguishable sacredness of the human race." In his Epilogue to that book, the pre-eminent art historian, Professor Meyer Schapiro, wrote, "... his recent color portraits ... have no forerunners in photography. ... he has introduced the processes of unification, as in painting, with the search for harmony, movement, variety and distinction within it, beyond what I have ever seen in a photograph.... His finest works bring to mind some of the greatest painted portraits. ... truly profound works of art." Placing Bergman in the context of other, better known master American photographers, John Yau, poet, critic, and author of The United States of Jasper Johns, has said, "Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, and William Eggleston. ...he is certainly in their league. ... One day Bergman will get credit for the richness of his photographs, the way they transcend image." Robert Bergman is currently producing a limited edition KEY SET of new master prints of 150-200 photographs that, together with the 51 A Kind of Rapture prints, will reveal the organic unity, the arc, of his creative journey: black & white street work of people and cityscapes; black & white portraits in nursing homes; black & white abstracts; hundreds of color portraits on the streets of American cities; and most recently, large-scale color abstracts. Bergman has had solo exhibitions at The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, MoMA/P.S.1 in New York, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Yossi Milo Gallery in New York, and Michael Hoppen Contemporary in London. Group shows include the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, MoMA, the Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and the "Come Together: Surviving Sandy" exhibition in Brooklyn, NY. In addition to the collections of the Hill Art Foundation and Agnes Gund, President Emerita, MoMA, and numerous other individual's collections, Robert Bergman's work is in the permanent collections of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, which recently acquired a vintage set of the 51 A Kind of Rapture color portraits, the Cleveland Museum, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The National Gallery of Art, the 21C Museum in Louisville, KY. His work has also been highlighted in books, magazines, and newspapers in the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany as well as on National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System. He received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2017.
Neşe Arı
Turkey
1980
Neşe Arı is an independent artist based in Istanbul, who has transformed photography into a powerful means of personal expression. Immersed in the world of photography for over fifteen years, Arı focuses on capturing the simple yet profound moments of everyday life. Working primarily in documentary, travel, and street photography, she draws attention to human stories, emotions, and the often unseen details of life. Her photographs invite the viewer to witness small but meaningful fragments of time. Her artistic approach is built on sincerity, simplicity, and a strong narrative voice. Particularly passionate about social responsibility projects, she gained recognition through her long-term project "Yaşamda Kal" ("Stay Alive"), which sheds light on the life journeys of individuals overcoming physical disabilities. Through this project, she aims to highlight the strength and resilience of people who reclaim life through sports. Neşe Arı’s work has been exhibited in numerous shows across Turkey and internationally, and has been published in renowned outlets such as The Times, The Daily Telegraph, and The Guardian. In 2016, she was awarded the EFIAP distinction by the International Federation of Photographic Art (FIAP). Her photographs have also been featured in major international projects such as "Women's Cry", "Changes", and "Open Doors", and her work has been showcased in exhibitions in the Vatican and many other countries. For Neşe Arı, every journey and every new face represents a story waiting to be told. She continues to use her camera as a tool to create photographs that touch lives, provoke thought, and evoke deep emotions. Artistic Vision: As Neşe Arı, I aim to make the simple yet profound moments of life visible. I use photography as a language to touch human stories, reveal emotions, and uncover the hidden beauty of everyday life. With each frame, I strive to create an impact that invites the viewer to reflect, feel, and connect with the essence of existence. By emphasizing sincerity, simplicity, and the strength of the human spirit, I seek to preserve and celebrate the diverse faces and stories of life.
Peter Ydeen
United States
1957
Peter Ydeen is a photographer and artist currently living in Easton, Pennsylvania, working in New York City, and frequently traveling abroad. He works within the now-established tenet of Urban Landscape Photography, celebrating the complexity and beauty of the mundane world. Although his work draws inspiration from New Topographics, his photographs depart from its stoic aesthetic, embracing the ethereal layering typical of a romantic. His work is introspective and pictorial in nature, and has found inspiration in the poetics of George Tice, the playful lyricism of Paul Klee, the readymades of Marcel Duchamp, and the eccentric energy of Charles Burchfield—elements that seem to bring the work together as if in the setting of an E.T.A. Hoffmann tale. The thrust of Ydeen’s work has been the night series Easton Nights; however, he has also created several other series, including Waiting for Palms, shot in Egypt and Morocco; Commuter Motions, a motion study of his commute from Easton to New York City; Black White and Gray, a more traditional monochrome series also shot along the Interstate 78 corridor from Easton to New York; Valley Days and its subset Valley Days Rondels, a series of daylight shots in the Lehigh Valley; and finally, the ongoing series Away, which studies urban landscapes Ydeen encounters on his travels. All of these works have found their way into many books and publications, as well as into numerous creative exhibitions. Ydeen received his BA in painting and sculpture at Virginia Tech under Ray Kass, and his MFA in painting and sculpture at Brooklyn College (Fellowship) under Robert Henry, Phillip Pearlstein, and Alan D’Arcangelo, followed by a scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and a fellowship to the Sculpture Center in NYC. Following his education, he made his way as a technician in a number of fields, including technical illustration, industrial set construction, display, architectural drafting, and model making. He was the Director of Joseph Zelvin Models, where he built finished models for many architects, including Philip Johnson, Michael Graves, and Robert Stern, and for several years ran the model shop for the visionary architect Emilio Ambasz, with many of Ydeen’s models being published and exhibited. This period of exacting craftsmanship later became an important foundation for his immersive three-dimensional photography installations and hand-built framing techniques applied to his many exhibits. After meeting his wife, the art dealer Mei Li Dong, and with the help of African art dealer and scholar Marc Leo Felix, they opened the gallery Arts du Monde Inc. in New York City, selling African, Chinese, and Tibetan art and presenting a number of important exhibitions. This experience furthered his knowledge of display, working with designers such as Joaquin Carter, as well as enabling him to handle a vast cross-section of art daily, providing a humbling lesson in the aesthetics and history of those traditions. Easton Nights Easton Nights is a story which grew from the unique and uncommon valley in which the city lies; and is told with the images of unpeopled landscapes taken at night. Here, in the small hours, the world we see as mundane, cascades into dream. Like a surreal scene from a Guillermo del Toro film, trash bins and Toyotas, stop signs and doorways; all become animated. They lean; they stretch, and emanate, all with umbrageous hues, which seem to exhale from the nights own personal color wheel. Scattered signs give the words, marking our place in time, while the geometries show our relentless effort to arrange our world in a box. These are our stages, with the houses our beehives, the machines our toys, and the doors our portals. Complete they are a mimesis of our daily life, as can only shown in the mystical emptiness of night. Then with the dawn comes the beginning, where we all wake, then act; all while these magical and romantic worlds return to sleep. WAITING FOR PALMS Waiting for Palms is a series of urban landscape photographs taken in two corners of North Africa—Morocco and Egypt—that reflect their contrasting peoples and places with a gestalt that is private and colorful, foreign yet familiar, and often fiercely guarded. The photographs capture a world brought inward only to reemerge through the landscapes' 'spirit of place,' where every corner is layered with an unusual elegance and underlying beauty—a waiting and wanting—all presented to us as if the seen world is built on top of a myriad of swallowed dreams. BLACK WHITE and GRAY Black White and Gray is a series of urban landscape photographs shot along the eighty mile I-78 corridor, beginning in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, traveling through a cross section of both desolate and urbanized New Jersey, and then landing in the core of New York City. These are Images living in the mid tones, which find their origins in the stoic tenets of New Topographics only to wander towards a more romantic embrace of the animism of our places; a quality so often unseen in our daily life. This is a Lewis Baltz industrial park with a Bertolucci perspective, or a Robert Adams trailer topped with a Fragonard Cloud. Here, geometry melds with movement, sometimes contorted. cluttered or even stretched like a rubber band, while still presenting a respect of the classic, formal and academic qualities of our built environment. There is an overlay of chimerical wonderment which reflects the dreams and concerns of the countless stream of unobservant passersby who traverse these spaces daily. Gray, both in tone and subject matter, this is a study built with tensions which then lay us down in an elegant romance, interacting with both the monumental shapes and structures which move from simplicity into the cacophony of our urban landscape. Commuter Motions Traveling from the industrial town of Easton, Pennsylvania, through sparsely populated western New Jersey, and into the cacophony of New York City, Commuter Motions is a photography series that develops from the experiential capture of an eighty-mile commute. By opposing the usual fixity of photography, the series attempts to capture the energy and movement of that commute using an almost Bergsonian approach, which, through time-lapse, builds images from segments of a continuous dynamic. These photographs are not about the specificity of a “decisive moment” but are more in line with the thoughts and theories of late 19th and early 20th-century artists, who were immersed in the concepts of perpetuity, fleeting moments, change, chance and dynamism. Time surfaces as a fourth verity, adding to Robert Adam’s three: geography, biography and metaphor. It is that fourth that which gives us not a moment in time, but instead, a cross-section of a continuum. The usually narrow focus of our memory is substituted with an accumulation of peripheral vision, which creates an image reflecting the gestalt of these movements, a gestalt we perceive and experience but do not visually remember. Through this unusual form of capture, Commuter Motions frames the labyrinth of oscillating movements of our highways, bridges, and cities into photographs that reflect the élan vital of our daily commute.
Advertisement
AAP Magazine #52 Street
Win a Solo Exhibition this October
AAP Magazine #52: Street

Latest Interviews

Exclusive Interview with Guillaume Bonn
With his latest book Paradise, Inc., celebrated documentary photographer Guillaume Bonn takes us deep into the heart of East Africa, where the promises and failures of wildlife conservation collide. Far from offering a romanticized vision of nature, Bonn’s work confronts us with urgent realities: the tensions between local communities and conservation policies, the sacrifices of rangers on the frontlines, and the long-lasting impact of human activity on fragile ecosystems. Spanning more than two decades of fieldwork, the project blends powerful imagery with investigative depth, raising difficult but necessary questions about transparency, accountability, and the Western-led models that dominate conservation. Enriched by the voices of those too often left out of the conversation—including a preface by Maasai leader Ezekiel Ole Katato and an introduction by journalist Jon Lee Anderson—Paradise, Inc. is both a stunning visual journey and a call to action. In the following interview, Guillaume Bonn reflects on the making of Paradise, Inc., the ethical dilemmas at the heart of his work, and the urgent need to rethink our approach to conservation in East Africa and beyond.
Exclusive Interview with Sander Vos
Sander Vos is a fine art photographer based in London whose work seamlessly blends elements of Surrealism with portraiture. Drawing inspiration from his background in design, Vos embraces light and contrast to sculpt striking, graphic compositions. His photographs invite the viewer into a world where revelation and concealment coexist, leaving space for imagination and interpretation.
Exclusive Interview with Tomasz Trzebiatowski Editor-in-chief FRAMES Magazine
Founded in 2020 by photographer, publisher, and classical pianist Tomasz Trzebiatowski, FRAMES Magazine has quickly established itself as a thoughtful space for photography lovers who believe that powerful images deserve to live on paper. Known for its beautifully printed quarterly issues and dynamic international community, FRAMES bridges the gap between tradition and innovation in the photographic world. As editor-in-chief, Trzebiatowski has created not only a publication but a platform that celebrates diverse genres, nurtures dialogue, and champions the tactile experience of print in a digital age. In this interview, he reflects on the journey from founding FRAMES to building a global membership, the challenges of independent publishing, and the future of photography in both print and digital forms.
Exclusive Interview with Manuel Besse
French photographer Manuel Besse is known for his compelling black-and-white imagery, which blends portraiture, documentary, and poetic narrative into a singular visual voice. With a career spanning several decades and continents—from the gold mines of Serra Pelada to the Arctic Circle—his work reflects a deep commitment to authenticity, human connection, and the preservation of cultural and natural landscapes. His series Macadam, winner of AAP Magazine #41 B&W, offers a contemplative look at fleeting urban encounters, rendered in his signature monochrome style. We asked him a few questions about his life and work.
Exclusive Interview with Matthew Portch
UK-born photographer Matthew Portch brings a quietly cinematic eye to the overlooked landscapes of suburban and rural America. Now based in Arizona, his photographic journey reflects a long-standing fascination with the cultural imprint of mid-century America—filtered through a distinctly outsider’s perspective. His series Lost America, selected for the September 2024 Solo Exhibition, captures an eerie stillness in the built environments of the American West, where nostalgia, silence, and isolation converge.
Exclusive Interview with Chris Yan
Chris Yan is a Beijing-based photographer and Creative Director whose work focuses on street and documentary photography. His series Beijing Story, which earned him a solo exhibition in October 2024, offers a nuanced look at daily life in the city. In this interview, he discusses his photographic approach, creative influences, and the ideas behind the project.
Exclusive Interview with Meg McKenzie Ryan
California-based photographer Meg McKenzie Ryan has followed an unconventional and deeply personal path into the world of photography. From chance beginnings in Hong Kong to a life shaped by travel, education, and immersion in vastly different cultures, her work reflects a deep curiosity about the world—and the people who inhabit it. Her solo project, The Lives of Others, awarded the March 2024 Solo Exhibition, is rooted in a documentary approach that feels both intimate and unflinching.
Exclusive Interview with Evan Murphy
At just 25, Evan Murphy’s work immediately stood out for its depth and maturity. A self-taught photographer originally from Las Vegas and now based in New York City, Evan blends raw emotion with a strong visual voice shaped by years of creative exploration. His series I.D. earned him a solo exhibition in July 2024, marking an impressive early milestone in a career that promises to go far.
Exclusive Interview with Lydia Panas
Lydia Panas, winner of AAP Magazine #38: Women, is an American photographer, known for her powerful and introspective portraiture. With a background in visual arts and philosophy, she uses photography to explore identity, vulnerability, and human connection—often drawing from personal experience to create images that are both intimate and thought-provoking. Her work has been widely exhibited and published, and is part of numerous permanent collections. We asked her a few questions about her life and work.
Call for Entries
Win A Solo Exhibition in October
Get International Exposure and Connect with Industry Insiders