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Win a Solo Exhibition this February. Juror: Harvey Stein
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Elaine Mayes
Elaine Mayes

Elaine Mayes

Country: United States
Birth: 1936

Elaine Mayes has been an active visual artist since 1960. A main focus and emphasis for her work has been investigations of ‘seeing’ and documentary forms in photography. This interest led to a number of projects and seeking out various close at hand situations in the world as subject material for her photographs.

Elaine majored in painting and art history at Stanford University and then studied at the San Francisco Art Institute with John Collier, Jr. Paul Hassel, Minor White, Nathan Oliviera and Richard Diebenkorn.

Between 1961 and 1968 she was an independent photojournalist working in San Francisco for magazines and graphic designers. During 1967 and 1968 she was a rock and roll photographer and photographed the ‘Summer of Love’ and scene in the Haight Ashbury District of San Francisco. One of her assignments was to photograph the Monterey Pop Festival. This work was published in her book called, It Happened In Monterey.

Elaine taught photography for thirty-five years, beginning at the University of Minnesota in 1968. Then she taught at Hampshire College from 1971 to 1981, at Bard College during 1982 and 1983, and at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts from 1983 until 2001. Elaine was Chair of the Tisch Photography Department from 1997 until her retirement from teaching. Currently, she is Professor Emeritus and is living in the Catskill Mountains of New York actively continuing her work.

Elaine’s photography has been exhibited extensively, with recent exhibitions connected with The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Summer of Love and The Monterey Pop Festival and includes the de Young Museum, The California Historical Society, The SFO Museums United Airlines Terminal, The Monterey Art Museum, The Grammy Musuem, Spazio Gerra - Comune di Reggio Emilia, Italy and the Joseph Bellows Gallery in La Jolla.

Elaine has received a number of awards including three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She also was awarded funding from The Atherton Foundation for her Hawaiian images and book production for a limited edition handmade book called, Ki i ‘no Hawai’i. Her newest publication is, Recently, Daylight Press, 2013.

Elaine is affiliated with Getty Images, Joseph Bellows Gallery, Morrison Hotel Galleries, and Liberal Arts Roxbury.

Source: www.elainemayesphoto.com


Selected Books on Available on Amazon
Elaine Mayes: Haight-Ashbury: Portraits 1967-1968
Elaine Mayes: Haight-Ashbury: Portraits 1967-1968
Elaine Mayes, Kevin Moore

Galleries

Joseph Bellows Gallery

Morrison Hotel Gallery

Liberal Arts Roxbury

Website

www.elainemayesphoto.com

 

Selected Books

Elaine Mayes: Haight-Ashbury: Portraits 1967-1968
Elaine Mayes: Haight-Ashbury: Portraits 1967-1968
Elaine Mayes, Kevin Moore

Inspiring Portfolios

Marijn Fidder
© Marijn Fidder
Julien Chatelin
© Julien Chatelin
Marcus Yam
© Marcus Yam
Call for Entries
All About Photo Awards 2026
$5,000 Cash Prizes! Juror: Steve McCurry
© Patrick Enssler
 
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More Great Photographers To Discover

Dennis Stock
Dennis Stock
United States
1928 | † 2010
Dennis Stock (July 24, 1928 – January 11, 2010) was an American photojournalist and documentary photographer and a member of Magnum Photos. He was born in New York City and died in Sarasota, Florida. Stock served in the United States Army from 1947-1951. Following his discharge, he apprenticed under photographer Gjon Mili. In 1951, he won a first prize in a Life magazine competition for young photographers. That same year, he became an associate member of the photography agency Magnum. He became a full partner-member in 1954. In 1955, Stock met the actor James Dean and undertook a series of photos of the young star in Hollywood, Dean's hometown in Indiana and in New York City. He took a photograph of Dean in New York's Times Square in 1955 (the year Dean died) that became an iconic image of the young star. It appeared later in numerous galleries and on postcards and posters and was one of the most reproduced photographs of the post-war period. The black and white photograph shows the actor with a pulled up collar on a casual jacket and a cigarette in his mouth on a rain-soaked, gray day. From 1957 until the early 1960s, Stock aimed his lens at jazz musicians, photographing such people as Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Sidney Bechet, Gene Krupa and Duke Ellington. With this series of photographs he published the book Jazz Street. In 1962, he received the first prize at the International Photo Competition in Poland. In 1968, Stock left Magnum to start his own film company, Visual Objectives Inc., and made several documentaries, but he returned to the agency a year later, as vice president for new media and film. In the mid-1970s, he traveled to Japan and the Far East, and also produced numerous features series, such as photographs of contrasting regions, like Hawaii and Alaska. In the 1970s and 1980s he focused on color photography of nature and landscape, and returned to his urban roots in the 1990s focusing on architecture and modernism.(Source: en.wikipedia.org) Dennis Stock was born in 1928 in New York City. At the age of 17, he left home to join the United States Navy. In 1947 he became an apprentice to Life magazine photographer Gjon Mili and won first prize in Life's Young Photographers contest. He joined Magnum in 1951. Stock managed to evoke the spirit of America through his memorable and iconic portraits of Hollywood stars, most notably James Dean. From 1957 to 1960 Stock made lively portraits of jazz musicians, including Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Sidney Bechet, Gene Krupa and Duke Ellington for his book Jazz Street. In 1968 Stock took a leave of absence from Magnum to create Visual Objectives, a film production company, and he shot several documentaries. In the late 1960s he captured the attempts of California hippies to reshape society according to ideals of love and caring. Then throughout the 1970s and 1980s he worked on color books, emphasizing the beauty of nature through details and landscape. In the 1990s he went back to his urban origins, exploring the modern architecture of large cities. His recent work was mostly focused on the abstraction of flowers. Stock generated a book or an exhibition almost every year since the 1950s. He taught numerous workshops and exhibited his work widely in France, Germany, Italy, the United States and Japan. He worked as a writer, director and producer for television and film, and his photographs have been acquired by most major museum collections. He served as president of Magnum's film and new media division in 1969 and 1970.(Source: Magnum Photos)
Chris Killip
Chris Killip
United Kingdom
1946 | † 2020
Born in Douglas, Isle of Man in 1946, he left school at age sixteen and joined the only four star hotel on the Isle of Man as a trainee hotel manager. In June 1964 he decided to pursue photography full time and became a beach photographer in order to earn enough money to leave the Isle of Man. In October 1964 he was hired as the third assistant to the leading London advertising photographer Adrian Flowers. He then worked as a freelance assistant for various photographers in London from 1966-69. In 1969, after seeing his very first exhibition of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he decided to return to photograph in the Isle of Man. He worked in his father's pub at night returning to London on occasion to print his work. On a return visit to the USA in 1971, Lee Witkin, the New York gallery owner, commissioned a limited edition portfolio of the Isle of Man work, paying for it in advance so that Killip could continue to photograph. In 1972 he received a commission from The Arts Council of Great Britain to photograph Huddersfield and Bury St Edmunds for the exhibition Two Views - Two Cities. In 1975, he moved to live in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on a two year fellowship as the Northern Arts Photography Fellow. He was a founding member, exhibition curator and advisor of Side Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, as well as its director, from 1977-9. He continued to live in Newcastle and photographed throughout the North East of England, and from 1980-85 made occasional cover portraits for The London Review of Books. In 1989 he was commissioned by Pirelli UK to photograph the workforce at their tyre factory in Burton-on-Trent. In 1989 he received the Henri Cartier Bresson Award and in 1991 was invited to be a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University. In 1994 he was made a tenured professor and was department chair from 1994-98. He retired from Harvard in December 2017 and continues to live in the USA. His work is featured in the permanent collections of major institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; George Eastman House; Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco; Museum Folkwang, Essen; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Source: chriskillip.com Skinningrove 1982 - 84 The village of Skinningrove lies on the North-East coast of England, halfway between Middlesbrough and Whitby. Hidden in a steep valley it veers away from the main road and faces out onto the North Sea. Like a lot of tight-knit fishing communities it could be hostile to strangers, especially one with a camera. "Now Then" is the standard greeting in Skinningrove; a challenging substitute for the more usual, "Hello". The place had a definite 'edge' and it took time for this stranger to be tolerated. My greatest ally in gaining acceptance was 'Leso' (Leslie Holliday), the most outgoing of the younger fishermen. Leso and I never talked about what I was doing there. but when someone questioned my presence, he would intercede and vouch for me with, 'He's OK'. This simple endorsement was enough. I last photographed in Skinningrove in 1984, and didn't return for twenty-six years. I was then shocked by how it had changed, as only one boat was still fishing. For me Skinningrove's sense of purpose was bound up in its collective obsession with the sea. Skinningrove fishermen believed that the sea in front of them was their private territory, theirs alone. Without the competitive energy that came from fishing, the place seemed like a pale reflection of its former self. Common Market and Health and Safety rules and regulations, coupled with increasing insurance costs, brought an end to the Skinningrove I'd known. When you're photographing you're caught up in the moment, trying to deal as best you can with what's in front of you. At that moment you're not thinking that a photograph is also, and inevitably, a record of a death foretold. A photograph's relationship to memory is complex. Can memory ever be made real or is a photograph sometimes the closest we can come to making our memories seem real. Chris Killip Remembering: Richard Noble (18) and David Coultas (34) drowned off Skinningrove on March 31 1984 Leslie Holliday - 'Leso' (26) and David Hinton (12) drowned off Skinningrove on July 29 1986 Source: Howard Yezerski Gallery
John Engstead
John Engstead
United States
1909 | † 1983
John Engstead (22 September 1909 in California - 15 April 1983 in West Hollywood, California) was an American photographer. Engstead began his career in 1926, when he was hired as an office boy by Paramount Pictures' head of studio publicity, Harold Harley. In 1927, Engstead pleased his boss by arranging a photo session for actress Clara Bow with photographer Otto Dyer using an outdoor setting which was unusual at that time. Engstead's creative direction of photographs of actress Louise Brooks led to a promotion to art supervisor, where he oversaw the production of Paramount's publicity stills. In 1932, due to a strike by photographers, Engstead assumed the position of studio portrait photographer, despite having never previously photographed anyone. Actor Cary Grant posed for his practice shots. He returned to his job as art supervisor after the strike was resolved. In 1941, Paramount Pictures fired Engstead, and Harper's Bazaar hired him for freelance advertising and portrait photography assignments. From 1941 to 1949, he took fashion photography assignments from numerous other magazines, including Collier's, Esquire, House Beautiful, Ladies Home Journal, Life, Look, Mademoiselle, McCall's, Vogue, and Women's Home Companion. In the 1940s, Engstead photographed many celebrities, including Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Maureen O'Hara and Shirley Temple. Unlike other photographers, he often shot his subjects at home or outdoors, and his portraits of a young Judy Garland in Carmel, California were particularly successful. During this decade, he built a studio in Los Angeles that became a gathering place for celebrities. Engstead continued to photograph movie stars and other celebrities through the 1950s (Marilyn Monroe) and 1960s. He produced promotional material for many television personalities, including Pat Boone, Carmel Quinn, Donna Reed, Ozzie and Harriet, Eve Arden, and Lucille Ball. He also shot cover photos for albums recorded by singers such as Peggy Lee and Connie Francis, as well as society portraits. His work extended into governmental figures in the 1950s, including then-Second Lady Pat Nixon. Engstead closed his studio in 1970 but continued to accept special portrait and television assignments until his death in 1984 at age 72. Engstead's images are represented by the Motion Picture and Television Photo Archive and can be viewed by the public at MPTV.net. Source: Wikipedia Engstead began his career in 1926, when he was hired as an office boy by Paramount Pictures’ head of studio publicity. Engstead impressed bosses and was promoted to art supervisor, where he oversaw the production of Paramount’s publicity stills. In 1932, Engstead assumed the position of studio portrait photographer, despite having never previously photographed anyone. By 1941, Engstead was working for various magazines, including Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, Life, Look and Vogue. Engstead built a studio in Los Angeles that became a gathering place for celebrities. Engstead continued to photograph movie stars and other celebrities through the 1950s and 1960s. Engstead closed his studio in 1970 but continued to accept special portrait and television assignments until his death.Source: Motion Picture and Television Photo Archive
Osama Elolemy
Osama Elolemy
Egypt
1979
I am Osama aka Gennie-in-a-Click and I don't know how the Universe has conspired for me to be a photographer, but I am loving it. There have been so many synchronicities which led me to the path I have taken. Slowly but surely, I have discovered my niche, and discovered that I love being a fine art photographer. I love people and, through my art, I like to discover and capture different portrays and facets of human nature. I have always been fascinated by the deep connection between humans and nature. As humans we associate images, taste, smell, sound with our emotions. As an artist I associate my art with my emotions at the time I took the photograph. Just by looking at a photograph that I have created I am taken back to the moment in time when it was shot. I can feel the smell, I can feel the light, I can feel the emotions I had that time, I can feel the wind, I cand hear the sounds around me. It is astonishing to be trans boarded in a second. I hope by giving background to the viewer about the way the photographs were shot, to help them feel the emotions that are associated with each piece of art. Statement: Happiness is found all around us, happiness is all little things that we ignore daily, happiness is a deep connection with Gaia.
Thomas Crauwels
Thomas Crauwels
Switzerland
1983
I live at the service of these impetuous guardians of the eternal snows. Watching their light, vibrating to the rhythm of their beauty has become second nature. I like to live these moments of contemplation of panoramas both frozen and changing, which feed me with their greatness. In these moments, I taste peace and melt into the landscape. When the clouds are absent, when my gaze goes on forever and I can let my inspiration flow freely. Without any particular goal. Just to live. To let myself be carried. At other times, I become a truth hunter. I look for the ephemeral moments. The coming storm. The elements colliding. The wind, the air, the rock, creating a chaos that engulfs me in intense and intoxicating sensations. These minutes where I hold my breath so much they are nimbered of a perfection which exceeds me and carries me in a different space. A space that my eye and its accomplice, my camera, know how to capture. Suddenly, everything calms down. Just after the fin of the world, the revelation of another world arrives. Before my amazed gaze, my senses on the alert, the clouds are torn apart like the curtain rises on a new show. The highest summits are adorned with another light, a new contrast. Nature creates before my eyes. Trembling with an inner joy, I try to capture impermanence. It is like a miracle always renewed. Just after the storm, when the first rays of sunlight illuminate the peaks with their royal light. My daily life is punctuated by the study of weather forecasts. Detecting the approach of the forces of nature. A subtle alliance between intuition and the rational study of the elements. I am at one with nature, who is the chief creative artist...and I the humble craftsman. Mixture of experience and naivety, dancing alchemy of summits and elements, fusion between nature and the human being that I am. Who am I in front of all this? A stardust, present, vibrating, panting in the heart of the mystery of life. I aspire to the mastery of the moment which however escapes... In the end, should I really try to control the moment? When I have everything in place with rigor and yet failure looms, I let my heart speak. And then, sometimes, the miracle happens. This miracle that floods me with joy. I am happy to share with you some of the nuggets I brought back from these journeys to the end of my dreams... My quest for an ever-renewed perfection, nature has offered it to me so that I can offer it to you in turn. I hope you will have as much pleasure in dreaming in front of these photos as I had in looking for the perfect moment, the right moment.
Margaret Watkins
Margaret Watkins
Canada
1884 | † 1969
Margaret Watkins (1884-1969) was born in Canada. Best known for art and advertising photography executed in New York in the 1920s, Watkins was active in the Clarence White school of photography and a participant in the shift from pictorialism to modernism. Her working life spanned a Victorian upbringing in Hamilton, Ontario, and the witnessing of the first Soviet Five-Year Plan. Watkins' modernism, which involved experimentation and a radical focus on form, transgressed boundaries of conventional, high-art subject matter. Her focus was daily life and her photographs, whether an exploration of the objects in her New York kitchen or the public and industrial spaces of Glasgow, Paris, Cologne, Moscow, and Leningrad in the 1930s, strike a balance between abstraction and an evocation of the everyday, offering a unique gendered perspective on modernism and modernity. Watkins established a studio in Greenwich Village and in 1920 she accepted the position of editor of the annual publication Pictorial Photography in America. Clarence White asked Watkins to join the faculty of his school, where Watkins met other notable photographers, including Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand. She worked for Macy's department stores and for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, capturing simple domestic objects with a clarity of modernist vision rare in commercial photography at the time. Her landscapes, portraits, nudes, still lifes, and abstractions received praise and attracted controversy. Exhibitions were held in the United States and in Europe. In 1928, Watkins decided to visit her four elderly aunts in Glasgow, Scotland. She traveled throughout Europe, photographing extensively and producing a body of work documenting post-revolution Russia. Her aunts began to take ill, and Watkins remained in Glasgow to help care for them. She drifted from the spotlight of public recognition, and few photographs or negatives exist from this time. Watkins lived in Scotland in seclusion until her death in 1969.
Anna Grevenitis
Anna Grevenitis
France / United States
1974
French-born visual artist Anna Grevenitis found photography in a meandering way: her formative years were filled with the study and teaching of the English language and literature, but when her daughter was born--and a year later her son--her world naturally morphed into full-time mothering. Drawing on the experiences of the domestic to inform her daily practice, she uses her home as a stage and her body and the body of others in her familial sphere as characters to deliver, in her photographs, the essence of what she wants to express about family and the self. For her work, the act of performing is an essential step in image making. Nowadays she divides her time between research and creation, and she is interested in building long term projects in photography as an act of establishing visual memory and engaging in social visibility. Her photographs have been exhibited both in the United States and internationally. Statement REGARD /ʁə.ɡaʁ/ verb 1. To consider or think of (someone or something) in a specified way. When my daughter was born, I was told that she had the “physical markers” for Down syndrome. A few days later, the diagnosis of Trisomy 21 was confirmed with a simple blood test. Today, years later, Luigia is a lively teenager, yet these “markers” have grown with her, and her disability remains visible to the outside world. As we try to go about our ordinary lives in our community--getting ice cream after school, going grocery shopping or walking to the local library--I often catch people staring, gawking, or side-glancing at her, at us. Even though their gaze feels invasive, I perceive it as more questioning than judging, at least most of the time. With this on-going series REGARD, I am opening a window into our reality. To emphasize control over my message, these everyday scenes are meticulously set, lit up; they are staged and posed. The performers are my daughter and me. The double self-portraits are purposefully developed in black and white, for by refusing the decorative and emotionally evocative element of color, I aim to maintain a distance between us and them. The composition of the photographs expresses routine, domestic acts in which I address the viewers directly: look at us bathing; look at us grooming; here we are at bedtime; this is us on a random day at the beach. In each scene, the viewers are plunged into the outside perspective. At first glance, it may seem that I am offering us as vulnerable prey to their judgment, yet in fact I am guarding our lives, and the viewers are caught gawking--my direct gaze at the camera. My series is very basic in its concept: it shows a child, it shows a mother, it shows them living at home, performing familial acts. Because I believe in the connective power offered by the depiction of domesticity, I hope that REGARD helps the audience rethink some of their assumptions about people living with disabilities and with this, I hope my series finds a humble spot within the movement that helps people with disabilities gain visibility.
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
Charles Harbutt
Charles Harbutt
United States
1935 | † 2015
Charles Henry Harbutt (July 29, 1935 – June 30, 2015) was an American photographer, a former president of Magnum, and full-time Associate Professor of Photography at Parsons School of Design in New York. Harbutt was born in Camden, New Jersey, and raised in Teaneck, New Jersey, and learned much of his photography skills from the township's amateur camera club. He attended Regis High School in New York City where he took photographs for the school newspaper. He later graduated from Marquette University. Harbutt's work is deeply rooted in the modern photojournalist tradition. For the first twenty years of his career he contributed to major magazines in the United States, Europe and Japan. His work was often intrinsically political, exhibiting social and economic contingencies. In 1959, while working as a writer and photographer for the Catholic magazine Jubilee, he was invited by members of the Castro underground to document the Cuban Revolution on the strength of three photographs he had published in Modern Photography. An editor at Jubilee while Harbutt was working there, Robert Lax, used photographs taken by Harbutt for the front and back cover of his first book of poetry, The Circus of the Sun. Harbutt joined Magnum Photos and was elected president of the organization twice, first in 1979. He left the group in 1981, citing its increasingly commercial ambitions and the desire to pursue more personal work. He taught photography workshops, exhibited in solo and group shows around the world, and joined the faculty of the Parsons School of Design at New School University as a full-time professor, in addition to serving as guest artist at MIT, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Rhode Island School of Design. Harbutt was a founding member of Archive Pictures Inc., an international documentary photographers' cooperative, and a member of the American Society of Magazine Photographers. His work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of American History, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the U.S. Library of Congress, George Eastman House, the Art Institute of Chicago, the International Center of Photography, the Center for Creative Photography, and at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Beaubourg, and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. In 1997, his negatives, master prints, and archives were acquired for the collection of the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona. He mounted a large exhibition of his work at the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City in December 2000 and received the medal of the City of Perpignan at a retrospective of his work there in 2004. He died in Monteagle, Tennessee, on June 30, 2015, at the age of 79. He had emphysema.Source: Wikipedia Charles Harbutt’s early fascination with magic and the elusive line between perception and reality steered him toward journalism and its documentary role, first as a writer. But he altered his course in 1959, when he was 23, after being invited by Cuban rebels to document the Castro revolution. Immersing himself in Havana’s convulsive and euphoric newfound freedom, he recalled, “I soon understood that I could get closer to the feel of things by taking pictures.” Mr. Harbutt went on to become an accomplished photojournalist for major magazines and the renowned agency Magnum Photos. “He and Burk Uzzle took photojournalism and pushed it in a direction away from literalism or classicism,” Jeff Jacobson, a former colleague, told The New York Times, referring to a contemporary whose pictures of the Woodstock music festival in 1969 gained wide attention, “away from certainly the European paradigm of Cartier-Bresson, and away from the narrative paradigm of Gene Smith to something very, very different, very involved with metaphor.” But Charles Harbutt became disillusioned with his craft, questioning the veracity of the events he was covering, particularly after witnessing undercover government agents provoke violence at a rally in New Haven in 1970 in support of jailed Black Panthers. “The kinds of stories I chose to do, I later realized, were mostly about American myths,” he wrote in his last book, Departures and Arrivals (2012). “I photographed small towns, immigrants, the barrio in New York, and then the enormous changes that came with the ’60s. I tried to be a witness as well as show my feelings about all of this. But maybe I had a sell-by time — expiration date — for being a witness,” he continued. “In the early ’70s, I started questioning this reportage for myself. A host of manipulators had so corrupted and warped public events, I could no longer trust the authenticity of what I was seeing. I realized that I was more interested in pajamas on a bed one Brooklyn morning, or a Dublin woman hauling groceries to her house, than I was in the machinations of politics and history ‘writ large.’ ” Mr. Harbutt experimented with surreal composition and juxtaposition of quotidian forms in a style he described as personal documentary and facetiously branded “superbanalisms.” Among his most famous black-and-white photographs was one of a blind boy, seemingly trying to transcend his sightlessness by reaching for a ribbon of light on a wall. In another, a bride in a flowing white gown poses pensively below exposed pipes and empty tables in a large basement before her wedding reception. Charles Harbutt’s own favorite, called “Mr. X-Ray Man,” was shot through a car window on the Rue du Départ near the Montparnasse train station in Paris, where fragments of the cityscape and even of the photographer himself can be seen reflected in the glass. What made it special was that it was unexpected, he explained in Arrivals and Departures. “What I like best,” he wrote, “is that however the picture is made, it’s a surprise to me when I see the photo come up in the developer.”Source: The New York Times
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Interview
Interview with Maureen Ruddy Burkhart
Photographer Maureen Ruddy Burkhart brings a quietly attentive and deeply human sensibility to her exploration of the world through images. Shaped by a life immersed in photography, film, and visual storytelling, her work is guided by intuition, observation, and an enduring interest in the emotional undercurrents of everyday life. With a practice rooted in both fine art traditions and documentary awareness, she approaches her subjects with sensitivity, allowing subtle moments to emerge naturally rather than be imposed. Her series Til Death, selected as the Solo Exhibition for February 2025, reflects this long-standing commitment to photography as a space for reflection rather than spectacle. Drawn to moments that exist just outside the expected frame, Burkhart’s images suggest narratives without resolving them, leaving room for ambiguity, humor, and quiet connection. We asked her a few questions about her life and work.
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Exclusive Interview with Peter Ydeen
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Peter Ydeen
Winner of AAP Magazine #45 Travels, his series reflects this unique vision—capturing the spirit of place through subtle layers of light, color, and emotion. Whether traveling abroad or observing the rhythms of his own surroundings, Ydeen creates images that feel both grounded and enchanted, inviting viewers into a world where reality and reverie meet.
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Exclusive Interview with Julie Wang
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Julie Wang
Chinese-born photographer Julie Wang brings a poetic, contemplative sensitivity to her visual exploration of the world. Having lived for nearly equal parts of her life in China, Europe, and the United States, she approaches her subjects with the nuanced perspective of someone shaped by many cultures. This blend of distance, curiosity, and emotional resonance infuses her work with a quiet depth, allowing her to reveal the fragile beauty and subtle tensions that often pass unnoticed.
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Exclusive Interview with Ghawam Kouchaki
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Ghawam Kouchaki
American photographer Ghawam Kouchaki brings a sharply observant and introspective gaze to the streets of Japan’s capital. Based in Los Angeles, he approaches Tokyo with the distance — and curiosity — of an outsider, allowing him to uncover the city’s subtle contradictions, quiet tensions, and fleeting gestures that often go unnoticed. His series Tokyo no no, selected as the Solo Exhibition for December 2024, explores the hidden undercurrents of urban life: the unspoken rules, the small ruptures in routine, the poetic strangeness found in everyday moments. Through muted tones, instinctive timing, and meticulous framing, Kouchaki reveals a Tokyo that exists somewhere between reality and imagination — both intimate and enigmatic. We asked him a few questions about his life and work.
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Exclusive Interview with Tommi Viitala
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Tommi Viitala
Tommi Viitala, winner of AAP Magazine #44: Street, is a Finnish photographer celebrated for his striking and cinematic street photography. With a keen eye for atmosphere and composition, he captures fleeting urban moments that reveal the poetry of everyday life. His work often explores the tension between solitude and connection within contemporary cityscapes, blending documentary realism with artistic sensibility. Viitala’s photographs have been exhibited internationally and recognized for their strong visual storytelling and emotional depth. We asked him a few questions about his life and work.
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Exclusive Interview with Robert Mack
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Robert Mack
Robert Mack is a California-based visual artist, photographer, and filmmaker. His fine art photography and films have been exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, with major shows at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Reiss-Engelhorn Museum in Mannheim, Germany. Both institutions hold his work in their permanent collections. Working across different media, Mack has built a career exploring the complexities of human presence and representation. In 1981, while living in Baltimore, he produced The Perkins Project: Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity, a rare photographic and film study inside Maryland’s hospital for the criminally insane. These stark yet compassionate black-and-white portraits remain one of his most powerful and controversial bodies of work.
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Exclusive Interview with Alan Schaller About Irys
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Alan Schaller About Irys
Alan Schaller is a London-based photographer best known for his striking black-and-white street photography and as co-founder of Street Photography International, one of the largest online communities dedicated to the genre. With years of experience both behind the camera and in building platforms that give visibility to photographers, Schaller has now turned his focus to creating a new digital space for photography itself. His latest venture, Irys, is a photography app designed by photographers, for photographers, with the aim of offering a dedicated platform where images are respected as works of art rather than treated as disposable content.
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Call for Entries
All About Photo Awards 2026
$5,000 Cash Prizes! Juror: Steve McCurry
© Fernando Morales Roca
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