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Jason Langer
Jason Langer

Jason Langer

Country: United States
Birth: 1967

Jason Langer is a notable photographer, best known for his black and white film photography, capturing atmospheric and introspective images.

Langer was born in Tucson, Arizona and grew up in Ashland, Oregon. Langer studied photography at the University of Oregon from 1985 to 1989. After graduation, Langer moved to San Francisco and apprenticed with some of the Bay area's most well-renowned photographers including Ruth Bernhard, Arthur Tress, and Michael Kenna, who became his mentor and lifelong friend. During that time, Langer learned much from Michael Kenna and influences from Kenna remain present throughout Langer's two-decades of photographic work.

His photographs have been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums internationally, including solo exhibitions in cities such as New York, Paris, London, Tokyo, and Moscow. Langer's work has also been featured in various photography publications and books.

Many of Jason Langer's photographs have been praised for their poetic and evocative qualities. Langer shoots using film, meaning that he does not know exactly what photographs he has until the film is developed. He photographs in black and white and prefers to photograph at night. He avoids photographing human faces, which increases the mystery of his works.

Langer is also a sought-after photography mentor, having taught photography at the Academy of Art University for 12 years and Santa Fe Workshops since 2014. Langer is known as a mentor in photography, teaching students to use the medium for self-understanding. “Jason seems to have absorbed the entirety of photo history, particularly the so-called “New York School”, identified by historian Jane Livngstone in her book of that title from the early 1990’s: Arbus; Avedon; Brodovitch; Croner; Davidson; Donaghy; Faurer; Frank; Grossman; Klein; Leiter; Levinstein; Levitt; Model; Vestal and Weegee. Jason loved shooting the city and printing it very darkly. He is a classicist. He is contemporary guy who sees things though more modern eyes.”

He has received recognition and awards for his contributions to the field of photography. Langer's work continues to be exhibited and collected by art enthusiasts and collectors worldwide.

Selected Books on Available on Amazon
Jason Langer: Berlin
Jason Langer: Berlin
Jason Langer, Bill Kouwenhoven, Shelly Kupferberg
Jason Langer: Twenty Years
Jason Langer: Twenty Years
Jason Langer, Julia Dolan, John Hill

Galleries

ClampArt Gallery

Galerie Esther Woerdehoff

Gilman Contemporary

Website

www.jasonlanger.com

 

Jason Langer's Video

Selected Books

Jason Langer: Berlin
Jason Langer: Berlin
Jason Langer, Bill Kouwenhoven, Shelly Kupferberg
Jason Langer: Twenty Years
Jason Langer: Twenty Years
Jason Langer, Julia Dolan, John Hill

Inspiring Portfolios

Marjolein Martinot
© Marjolein Martinot
Jackson Patterson
© Jackson Patterson
Nanda Hagenaars
© Nanda Hagenaars
Call for Entries
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More Great Photographers To Discover

Arthur Tress
Arthur Tress
United States
1940
Arthur Tress (born November 24, 1940) is an American photographer. He is known for his staged surrealism and exposition of the human body. Tress was born in Brooklyn, New York. The youngest of four children in a divorced family, Tress spent time in his early life with both his father, who remarried and lived in an upper-class neighborhood, and his mother, who remained single after the divorce and whose life was not nearly so luxurious. At age 12 he began to photograph circus freaks and dilapidated buildings around Coney Island in New York City, where he grew up. Tress studied at Abraham Lincoln High School in Coney Island, and gained a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. After graduating from Bard College in 1962, Tress moved to Paris, France to attend film school. While living in France, he traveled to Japan, Africa, Mexico, and throughout Europe. He observed many secluded tribes and cultures and was fascinated by the roles played by the shaman of the different groups of people. The cultures to which he was introduced would play a role in his later work. Tress spent the spring and summer of 1964 in San Francisco, documenting the Republican Convention that nominated Barry Goldwater, civil rights demonstrations at segregated car dealerships on Van Ness Avenue, and the Beatles launching their 1964 tour. Tress took over 900 photographs that were put away and re-discovered in 2009, and featured in a show at San Francisco's deYoung Museum. He currently resides in San Francisco, California. Source: Wikipedia Arthur Tress began his first camera work as a teenager in the surreal neighborhood of Coney Island where he spent hours exploring the decaying amusement parks. Later, during five years of world travel, mostly in Asia and Africa, he developed an interest in ethnographical photography that eventually led him to his first professional assignment as a U.S. government photographer recording the endangered folk cultures of Appalachia. Seeing the destructive results of corporate resource extraction, Tress began to use his camera to raise environmental awareness about the economic and human costs of pollution. Focusing on New York City, he began to photograph the neglected fringes of the urban waterfront with a straight documentary approach. This gradually evolved into a more personal mode of “magic realism” combining improvised elements of actual life with stage fantasy that became his hallmark style of directorial fabrication. In the late 1960s Tress was inspired to do a series based upon children's dreams that combined his interests in ritual ceremony, Jungian archetypes, and social allegory. Later bodies of work dealing with the hidden dramas of adult relationships and the reenactments of male homosexual desire evolved from this primarily theatrical approach. Beginning in the early 1980s, Tress began shooting in color, creating room-sized painted sculptural installations out of found medical equipment in an abandoned hospital on New York's Welfare Island. This led to a smaller scale exploration of narrative still life within a children's toy theater and a portable nineteenth-century aquarium. Around 2002, Tress returned to gelatin silver, exploring more formalist themes in the style of mid- century modernism, often combining a spontaneous shooting style with a constructivist's sense of architectural composition and abstract shape. In addition to images of California skateboard parks, his recent work includes the round images of the series Planets and the diamond-shaped images of Pointers. Source: www.arthurtress.com
David Octavius Hill
David Octavius Hill
Scotland
1802 | † 1870
David Octavius Hill was a Scottish painter, photographer and arts activist. He formed Hill & Adamson studio with the engineer and photographer Robert Adamson between 1843 and 1847 to pioneer many aspects of photography in Scotland. Hill was born in 1802 in Perth. His father, a bookseller and publisher, helped to re-establish Perth Academy and David was educated there as were his brothers. When his older brother Alexander joined the publishers Blackwood's in Edinburgh, Hill went there to study at the School of Design. He learned lithography and produced Sketches of Scenery in Perthshire which was published as an album of views. His landscape paintings were shown in the Institution for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Scotland, and he was among the artists dissatisfied with the Institution who established a separate Scottish Academy in 1829 with the assistance of his close friend Henry Cockburn. A year later Hill took on unpaid secretarial duties. He sought commissions in book illustration, with four sketches being used to illustrate The Glasgow and Garnkirk Railway Prospectus in 1832, and went on to provide illustrations for editions of Walter Scott and Robert Burns. In the 1830s he is listed as living at 24 Queen Street, in Edinburgh's New Town. In 1836 the Royal Scottish Academy began to pay him a salary as secretary, and with this security he married his fiancée Ann Macdonald the following year. After the birth of their daughter, Charlotte Hill, Ann was invalided, and died on 5 October 1841, aged 36, and was buried with her family in Greyfriars Churchyard in Perth. Charlotte Hill went on to marry the author Walter Scott Dalgleish LLD and is buried in Grange Cemetery. During this period he lived at 28 Inverleith Row in Edinburgh's northern suburbs and he continued to produce illustrations and to paint landscapes on commission. Hill was present at the Disruption Assembly in 1843 when over 450 ministers walked out of the Church of Scotland assembly and down to another assembly hall to found the Free Church of Scotland. He decided to record the dramatic scene with the encouragement of his friend Lord Cockburn and another spectator, the physicist Sir David Brewster who suggested using the new invention, photography, to get likenesses of all the ministers present. Brewster was himself experimenting with this technology which only dated back to 1839, and he introduced Hill to another enthusiast, Robert Adamson. Hill and Adamson took a series of photographs of those who had been present and of the setting. The 5 feet (1.5 m) x 11.4 feet (3.5 m) painting was eventually completed in 1866. Hill moved to "Calton Hill Stairs" in 1850. Their collaboration, with Hill providing skill in composition and lighting, and Adamson considerable sensitivity and dexterity in handling the camera, proved extremely successful, and they soon broadened their subject matter. Adamson's studio, "Rock House", on Calton Hill in Edinburgh became the centre of their photographic experiments. Using the calotype process, they produced a wide range of portraits depicting well-known Scottish luminaries of the time, including Hugh Miller, both in the studio and outdoors, often amongst the elaborate tombs in Greyfriars Kirkyard. They photographed local and Fife landscapes and urban scenes, including images of the Scott Monument under construction in Edinburgh. As well as the great and the good, they photographed ordinary working folk, particularly the fishermen of Newhaven, and the fishwives who carried the fish in creels the 3 miles (5 km) uphill to the city of Edinburgh to sell them round the doors, with their cry of "Caller herrin" (fresh herring). They produced several groundbreaking "action" photographs of soldiers and - perhaps their most famous photograph - two priests walking side by side. Their partnership produced around 3,000 prints, but was cut short after only four years due to the ill health and death of Adamson in 1848. The calotypes faded under sunlight, so had to be kept in albums, and though Hill continued the studio for some months, he became less active and abandoned the studio, though he continued to sell prints of the photographs and to use them as an aid for composing paintings. In 1862 he remarried, to the sculptor Amelia Robertson Paton, 20 years his junior, and around that time took up photography again, but the results were more static and less successful than his collaboration with Adamson. He was badly affected by the death of his daughter and his work slowed. In 1866 he finished the Disruption picture which received wide acclaim, though many of the participants had died by then. The photographer F.C. Annan produced fine reduced facsimiles of the painting for sale throughout the Free Church, and a group of subscribers raised £1,200 to buy the painting for the church. In 1869 illness forced him to give up his post as secretary to the RSA, and he died in May 1870. Hill is buried in Dean Cemetery, Edinburgh - one of the finest Victorian cemeteries in Scotland. He is portrayed in a bust sculpted by his second wife, Amelia, who is buried alongside him.Source: Wikipedia
Francesco Gioia
Francesco Gioia
Italy
1991
Francesco Gioia is an artist working with photography and collage based in London, United Kingdom. His approach is like an intimate dialogue, a wordless communion where images seem to breathe, revealing their surreal realities. His work draws from diverse influences, spanning avant-garde experiments, surrealistic expression, film, collage, and Bauhaus studies. This fusion of styles and techniques shapes a visual language that is both introspective and personal. A recipient of numerous international awards, his work has been published in The Guardian, The Washington Post, and other major publications. He has exhibited across the UK, USA, Africa, and Europe and has published a monograph, 57, with Parallel Editions.
Matthew Brandt
Matthew Brandt
United States
1982
Matthew Brandt (born 1958 in Los Angeles) is a American photographer and visual artist. Calling his approach "a little bit messy and experimental," Brandt produces large-scale photographs through labor-intensive processes recalling the 19th-century origins of photography, often incorporating the physical matter of the subject itself. Attuned to the history of his medium — and its resolute physicality — and inspired by classical American landscape photographs, Brandt traverses the West, photographing and collecting material samples from nature and cities. The reciprocal relationships that Matthew Brandt creates between his subjects and the materials used to represent them are always conceptually grounded, often in response to social and environmental issues. He is deeply inquisitive, even fearless, in his exploration of subjects, materials, and processes, reinvigorating the medium of photography with a sense of wonder.Source: The Lapis Press Matthew Brandt received his BFA from Cooper Union and MFA from UCLA. Brandt has been the subject of institutional solo shows at the Newark Museum, the Columbus Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art and SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah. Recent group exhibitions include works in New Territory: Landscape Photography Today at the Denver Art Museum, The Magic Medium at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Second Chances at the Aspen Art Museum; What is a Photograph? at the International Center of Photography, New York; and Land Marks at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Brandt was shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Pictet Award in 2015 and had his work showcased in an exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Guggenheim Collection, NY; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Art Gallery of South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; Cincinnati Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Royal Danish Library, National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; High Museum, Georgia; Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan; and the Columbus Museum of Art, among others. In 2014 a monograph devoted to Brandt’s work was published by Damiani. Matthew Brandt lives and works in Los Angeles.Source: matthewbrandt.com Matthew Brandt's photography conflates subject and material, incorporating physical elements from the sources he’s depicting to create unique compositions that are technically inventive and conceptually sly. For Lakes and Reservoirs, his landscapes were bathed in the water of their subjects; 2014’s Dust featured reproductions of historical photographs of demolished structures, rendered in pigments borne of debris collected from those buildings’ contemporary sites. For 1864, his first exhibition at Jackson Fine Art, Matthew Brandt again turns to the archives, reinterpreting George N. Barnard’s photographs of a post-Sherman Atlanta by making images of a shattered city into peach pie.Source: Jackson Fine Art
Kathleen Meier
Kathleen Meier
France
1992
Kathleen Meier is a french photographer based in Nancy. She is graduated to the artistic school Ecoles de Condé with a special mention from the jury for her work on the narrative potential in fine art photography. Her photographs are psychological. Through her subjects she reaches our mental activity, brings out our feelings, forces us to face our fears and desires. She appeals our imagination so that everyone have a full part to play in her work. In 2015, she releases her first book Hostilités sourdes at APR2 Publishing. Huis Clos The series Huis clos confronts us to a suggestive confinement. What happens to us when we are faced with a desperate situation? What do we feel when we have no longer a connection with the outside world? The disorientation and the contact loss with the outside put us into a physical and mental isolation and can lead us in a conscious or subconscious way to modify, perhaps to alter, our relationship with the external reality. This maze slowly conducts us into a mental illness.
Pam Connolly
Pam Connolly
United States
1959
Pam Connolly is a lens-based artist and book maker who has been investigating the theme of home for more than 30 years. Her photographs of tin dollhouses, domestic spaces, and family portraits look closely at the American dream, exploring childhood memory and the notion of home; the yearning between the imaginary and the real. Connolly’s photographs are held in the collections of Brown University and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Her recent artist book, Fly in Amber was acquired by the Hirsch Library, Houston, and the University of Michigan’s Art and Design Collection. Her previous book, Cabriole, belongs to the Beineke Library at Yale and the Museum of Fine Arts at Harvard. Connolly has exhibited her work nationally at the Ogden Museum in New Orleans, Foley Gallery in NYC, and Candela Gallery in Richmond, and internationally at the Kominek Gallery in Berlin and the National Portrait Gallery in London. Most recently Connolly has become the creator and curator of Landau Gallery, a miniature art space showcasing photo-based art in 1:12 scale. Connolly received an MFA in Photography from the Hartford Art School’s International Limited-Residency Program. She lives and works in New York’s Hudson Valley. AAP Magazine: AAP Magazine 48 Portrait Article: Salon Studies
Kevin Kinner
Kevin Kinner
United States
1953
I realized that the term ''emerging photographer'' applies to where I am at this stage. As a young man perhaps better to say teenager, I had the opportunity to work at Hiro Studios here in New York City as a summer intern. It was there that I learned my way around the dark room and was able to experience the glamor and excitement of a shoot. However, during l my free time I took to the streets with my Pentax. Walking through Central Park photographing people, their surroundings, anything that caught my eye. Little did I know at the time that what I was practicing was street photography. Later on my professional career was advertising production. Particularly print production. Although not photography, I worked in tandem with photographers and retouchers to create the best final images that were to appear on the page. When digital phased out print, I decided to get back to my true passion....photography. Here I am again on the streets of New York City. Enjoying the independence, the discovery and the people. Hopefully continuing to “emerge” as a photographer. Recently, I have shown at the Treviso Photography Festival, as well as the ArtBoxy exhibit in Soho. I received a Single Image Award in Black & White magazine’s special 2022 issue. I was an integral part and exhibitor with Art on the Ave NYC. An initiative conceived to display art and photography in the vast amount of vacant store fronts. Street facing windows on The Upper West Side of Manhattan, Greenwich Village and Downtown Manhattan were transformed into galleries that rejuvenated their respective neighborhoods.
Madhur Dhingra
Madhur Dhingra
India
1958
I was born an only child to my parents, in Delhi, into a family torn apart by the aftermath of the India-Pakistan partition. Hailing from a affluent background in Pakistan my family was now struggling for survival in the walled city of Delhi totally penniless. Imbedded with deep insecurities and freshly bearing the scars of partition my family was now setting up trade in the walled city dealing in fabric. It is relevant for me to mention this background for these very insecurities I too inherited from my family and they remain with me till date even with the changed times and lifestyle. Things improved gradually financially, with the trade flourishing and much because of the sheer hard work of my grandfather, father& chachas(father's brothers).We settled in Delhi at the start as big joint family. I have grown up hearing tales of how we had started life selling fabric on the pavements of the walled city where we now own several properties. My father could never get over those scars of partition. I too was repeatedly made to realize that ( for better or for worse) even though I was born much later in Delhi. At the age of five I was put to school at St.Xavier's High School, Raj Niwas Marg, Delhi. That period was to become the most memorable part of my life. I remember enjoying that period thoroughly. I was always an above average student with a lot of love for extracurricular activities. In school I would love going hiking, camping, swimming & cycling with the boy scouts. From the very start I was naughty and mischievous and was a regular in getting in and out of trouble. After school I went to the Delhi University and took up English Hons as my subject. But nowhere was it in my mind to take up studies serious. Restless from the start I wanted to travel the world. I now join the Merchant Navy at the age of seventeen ,as a deck cadet leaving college in the first year itself. I loved this new experience and was good at learning navigation. Very soon I was promoted to become the navigating officer. For the first year I never came back home at all. I was fulfilling my desire to see the world thoroughly meeting different types of people and experiencing different kinds of cultures . Once while travelling in the city of Jeddah near Mecca during Ramadan I was amazed to see gold slabs and coins being sold on the pavements of the city. On the loudspeaker I then heard the azaan (prayer call) and to my utter astonishment I saw people leave all this gold unattended and enter the nearby mazjid for prayer. Such was the strictness of the prevailing law of the land that anybody caught stealing would have his hand chopped off. Nobody dared to steal. Now quite a different experience was when my ship first entered Thailand. To my utter surprise I saw hoards of women entering my ship. Their numbers must have been no less than a hundred odd. I was on duty and I objected to their entry and was immediately informed by my senior officer to back off as they were entering with the permission of the captain. These were prostitutes who stayed on my ship till the time it stayed there. Nobody was questioning the morality or the ethics. It was gala time for all officers, crew, and the Captain. This was the way of life for most sailors . One horrific incident I remember was when our Burmese radio officer died on the ship due to a liver problem. As we were still some days away from the next port,his body was put in the deep freezer of the ship, the same place where all vegetables and other eatables were stored. Life was going on as if nothing had happened and everybody was eating and drinking as any other day. In a ship life all relationships and friendships are very temporary and the moment a person gets off the ship all these are left behind and forgotten. My bag of experiences was filling up fast. The restlessness and void was again setting in fast. I was getting bored again after about five years of sailing. The novelty had worn off and my inherent nature and upbringing was not that of a sailor in any way .I finally decided to say quits and joined the family business which was waiting for me to return. My dad was overjoyed at this decision of mine. I had no problem settling into this environment as it just happened to be in my blood. I now decide to get married too. I get married and soon after become a father of two adorable children. My age at that period would have been early twenty or so. Time flew by fast earning bread and butter for my family. Nothing was more important than bringing up the kids properly and with a lot of love, something which I was deprived of badly during my childhood days. But now again the same restlessness and void was setting in. I was in a dilemma, now trying out new ways to end this emptiness . I initially tried my hands at learning sculpture at Triveni Kala Sangam Mandi House, but I soon realized that medium was not meant for me. Destiny seemed to have other plans for me and it was during this period that I was gifted a SLR by someone, a Ricoh 500 as I now try to remember. The camera body had a dial with some numbers and also some numbers on the lens of which I had no clue. There were photography classes also being held in Triveni Kala Sangam and I joined these classes with sculpture classes I was already doing. It was here I met my photography teacher and now a lifelong friend Satyasri Ukil for the first time. The Basic course was about learning the techniques of Black & White photography. Satyasri was a dedicated, honest & straightforward teacher. His likes and dislikes purely dealt with the merits of the image and not with the person who had shot the image. I was learning fast with my association with Satyasri at Triveni where he was teaching then . A few of us guys(now renowned photographers), formed a sort of a team under the guidance of Ukil (as we address Satyasri,till date).We were shooting developing and printing the whole day long. Photography was now no longer a hobby but a frenzy. I soon set up my own darkroom in my house and would develop and print negatives all night long. I now start trekking again now with a new SLR in hand going to high altitudes and to very difficult locales. I remember showing my first serious work to Ukil and found him overjoyed. Soon my ambitions grew and I start shooting product for the advertising agencies. My first breakthrough as I clearly remember had come from the agency 0& M whose creative head then was Benoy Mitra, who was one day present at the colour lab called "MultiColour in Jhandewalan, when my portfolio prints were coming out of the lab. He saw my work and quietly handed over his card asking me to see him in the agency. I was overjoyed. This was breakthrough I needed desperately. I soon started getting assignments from most major agencies. But now I started getting bored again shooting mountains product and off and on some fashion. I still needed to express myself in a different way. I decide to work towards my first solo exhibition and I show my landscapes and mountain work to the management of INDIA INTERNATIONAL CENTRE. After seeing my work they agree to sponsor my show fixing the date to 28th November 1998.It is pertinent to mention here that I had then "only" shown them my beautiful landscapes and mountain TP's as I had nothing more at that time in my kitty. I started a new journey, first shooting Ladakh. I found immense peace and tranquility (acting as a balm for my troubled mind )in the monasteries I visited. The filtrations of light from the windows and doors into the dark interiors of the monasteries were indeed very beautiful, tranquil and peaceful. I would sit inside these monasteries for hours at a stretch calming my taut nerves. The prayer gong would echo inside the main hall and seep deep inside my soul. I have always equated light with God and have believed that the darkness of the human soul will ultimately come alive with the play of Light (God) on it. My next visit was to Banaras. Here I found people visiting the Ghats in very colorful attires. A activity on these ancient Ghats like the Dashashwamedh Ghat would start very early in the morning. People from all over India visit Banaras to perform various religious rituals, right from the birth of a child to the cremation of the dead and also later to perform rites for their safe and comfortable passage after death. The quality of light that I found in Banaras was very warm & golden and I wouldn't hesitate a moment to call it heavenly. Now a special reference to the Manikarnika Ghat " the ghat of the dead" is needed. People from all over India come to Kashi (ancient name of Banaras)to cremate their dead at Manikarnika.It is believed by Hindus that a cremation at Manikarnika Ghat gives the human soul an unhindered passage to heaven. Pyres are being lit here continuously without getting extinguished for the last 3000 years. But it was on this BURNING GHAT that my worst nightmare was to begin. I would visit this ghat daily looking at the activities. It was not very long before I realised that whenever a body of a poor person would come in, it would be cremated in a bizarre manner. It required two mun wood at the least (mun is an Indian measure of weight equivalent to 20 kgs) to cover a human body completely for cremation. But the person accompanying the dead body did not have that much money in his pocket. So only that much wood was purchased in which only the torso could be covered by wood. The legs and head were left hanging out and the pyre lit. The head would get burnt in a horrific manner with the head and feet falling away from the torso partially burnt. Then these torn away parts were picked up and put into the pyre or thrown into the Ganges. This whole sequence was so bizarre that I decided to get it on film and show it to the world. This I did manage to photograph secretly even after a lot of objections and hindrances from the people in charge at Manikarnika. Man really "was" meeting his God in Kashi, though in a very bizarre manner. So much for Kashi, our GATEWAY TO HEAVEN.I have posted only a few of those pictures on this website just to avoid unnecessary disturbance to people's minds. In the meantime the Purn Kumbh was being held at Hardwar. This again has become a very interesting event to relate. I was aghast to see completely naked so called Naga "sadhus" storming the streets of Hardwar. It was here I came to understand from the local inhabitants of Hardwar that this whole show was a complete farce. These so called ascetics only stormed the streets during the Khumb. Neither do they live in the remoteness of the Himalayas leading a renounced life, but on the contrary live in air conditioned lavishly furnished akharas in Hardwar itself. They were a weird sight. ( I have shown some photographs of them in my Black & White section). Here I saw them fight pitched battles with the police before the procession. DOWNRIGHT CRIMINALS TO THE VERY CORE, MOST OF THEM. On the day of the procession I got up early in the morning and positioned myself on roof top of a house near the Niranjani Akhara.This was very early in the morning and I was testing the auto focusing of my telephoto 300mm Canon lens when I saw a group of nagas in the akhara compound. I was taken aback when I saw one Naga fiddling with the genitals of the other Naga, "AND I TOOK THE SHOT".(later to appear on the first page of THE INDIAN EXPRESS). There were hutments built for sadhus by the kumbh authorities across the river bed. I would visit those and sit with some real sanyasis and listen to their discourses and hear them sing bhajans. This was a very nice and peaceful experience. The Kumbh ended and my exhibition date also was drawing near. The IIC Gallery wanted to see the final prints that I had decided to display. Nowhere in my final selection were those beautiful landscapes to be seen. Their place had been taken by naked sadhus with Trishuls and burning ghats & corpses. The Gallery management told me in no uncertain terms that they will not allow the show to go on unless these pictures were withdrawn. My dilemma was that my photo essay "Where Man Meets God'" was a story of a man's passage of life, his wanderings, his search for God. This essay was incomplete without these pictures. I told the management that I will show my work as it is and will not remove any picture from the list. Much courage to take this right stand was coming from Satyasri Ukil who stood by me all this while withstanding this massive ONSLOUGHT . IIC Management banned my exhibition. It was during this period that me and Satyasri Ukil were introduced to Suneet Chopra a reputed Art Critic. He later introduced us to Siddharth Tagore, a gallery owner at Art Consult Hauz Khas Village. Siddharth Tagore offered to hold my preview party at his gallery inviting respected artists like B.C.Sanyal, Jatin Das and many other artists of repute. The preview was a major success with all these stalwarts in their respective art fields giving their nod to my exhibition. Mr.Khushwant Singh the famous and a very respected writer too came up with an article on me in his column "Malice Towards One And All .Now IIC started shifting its stance and a compromise was reached. "That the images will be allowed to display but only facing towards the Gallery wall, whoever who wanted to see them could do so at his own discretion". Almost everybody saw those images.. Many reputed people visited the exhibition, some of them I mention in my TESTIMONIAL column. Eight major newspapers wrote elaborately on this exhibition. There was a TV interview also held by a channel also. The exhibition was a huge success on the whole. I am now planning another exhibition with a different theme and gearing up to hold another show in Milan. Life for me as a photographer continues...
Marc Riboud
Marc Riboud
France
1923 | † 2016
Marc Riboud was a French photographer best known for his extensive reports on the Far East, including The Three Banners of China, Face of North Vietnam, Visions of China, and In China. Photography cannot change the world, but it can show the world as it changes. -- Marc Riboud Riboud was born in Saint-Genis-Laval and attended Lyon's lycée. He photographed his first picture in 1937, using his father's Vest Pocket Kodak camera. From 1943 to 1945, he was a member of the French Resistance as a young man during WWII. From 1945 to 1948, he studied engineering at the École Centrale de Lyon after the war. Marc Riboud worked as an engineer in Lyon factories until 1951, when he took a week-long photography vacation that inspired him to become a photographer. He relocated to Paris, where he met the founders of Magnum Photos, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and David Seymour. He was a member of the organization by 1953. His ability to capture fleeting moments in life through powerful compositions was already apparent, and he would use this skill for decades to come. Eiffel Tower Painter, Paris, 1953© Marc Riboud Riboud traveled around the world for the next several decades. He was one of the first European photographers to visit China in 1957, and he documented North Vietnam in 1968, 1972, and 1976. Later in life, he traveled extensively throughout the world, primarily in Asia, Africa, the United States, and Japan. Marc Riboud has witnessed war atrocities (photographing from both the Vietnamese and American sides of the Vietnam War) as well as the apparent degeneration of a culture suppressed from within (China during Chairman Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution). In contrast, he has captured the graces of everyday life in sun-drenched corners of the world (Fès, Angkor, Acapulco, Niger, Bénarès, Shaanxi), as well as the lyricism of child's play in everyday Paris. In 1976 he becomes president of Magnum and resigns three years later. Riboud's photographs have appeared in a variety of publications, including Life, Geo, National Geographic, Paris Match, and Stern. He has received the Overseas Press Club Award twice, the Sony World Photography Awards Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009, and major retrospective exhibitions at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the International Center of Photography in New York. In 1998, Marc Riboud was named an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. The eye is made to see and not to think.... A good photograph is a surprise. How could we plan and foresee a surprise? We just have to be ready. -- Marc Riboud Eiffel Tower Painter, taken in Paris in 1953, is one of Riboud's most well-known photographs. It depicts a man painting the tower, posing like a dancer and perched between the tower's metal armature. Paris emerges from the photographic haze beneath him. Riboud's images frequently feature lone figures. In Ankara, a central figure is silhouetted against an industrial backdrop, whereas a man lies in a field in France. The vertical composition emphasizes the landscape, the trees, the sky, the water, and the blowing grass, which all surround but do not overpower the human element. The Ultimate Confrontation: The Flower and the Bayonet, Washington D. C, 21 Octobre 1967© Marc Riboud Riboud's photograph, The Ultimate Confrontation: The Flower and the Bayonet, taken on October 21, 1967, is one of the most famous anti-war images. The photograph was taken in Washington, D.C., where thousands of anti-war activists had gathered in front of the Pentagon to protest America's involvement in Vietnam. It shows a young girl, Jan Rose Kasmir, holding a flower and looking out at several rifle-wielding soldiers stationed to block the protesters. Marc Riboud stated about the photograph, "She was just talking, trying to catch the eye of the soldiers, maybe trying to have a dialogue with them. I had the feeling the soldiers were more afraid of her than she was of the bayonets." In contrast to the images in his photo essay A Journey to North Vietnam (1969), Riboud says in an accompanying interview, "My impression is that the country's leaders will not allow the slightest relaxation of the population at large [...] it is almost as if [...] they are anxious to forestall the great unknown - peace." He expanded on his observations of life in North Vietnam in the same Newsweek article: "I was astonished, for example, at the decidedly gay atmosphere in Hanoi's Reunification Park on a Sunday afternoon [...] I honestly did not have the impression they were discussing socialism or the 'American aggressors' [...] I saw quite a few patriotic posters crudely 'improved' with erotic graffiti and sketches." Vietnam, 1976© Marc Riboud There is a gap between what is photographed (or published) and what Riboud said in his interview. The author Geoffrey Wolff commented on this in 1970: "Riboud's photographs illustrate the proposition. The French photographer has been to North Vietnam twice [...] and he is most friendly, on the evidence of his pictures, to the people and the institutions he found there. His photographs are of happy faces,[...] An Air Force ace illustrates how he shot the American 'air pirates' from the sky [...] Who knows the truth about these places?" Rage Against the Machine, an American revolutionary political Rap Metal band, used two of Riboud's photographs for their second single Bullet in the Head. Both images convey strong political and social messages, but they are very different. The front cover depicts American schoolchildren pledging allegiance to the 'flag' (Stars and Stripes) in a classroom; the back cover depicts a young (probably Vietnamese) boy pointing a pistol, with soldiers on parade in the background. It's unclear who or what the boy is aiming at, or if the gun is real or a toy. Since the 1980’s Marc Riboud keeps travelling at his own tempo. He published many books, among which the most famous are The three banners of China, Journal, Huang Shan, Capital of Heaven , Angkor, the serenity of Buddhism, Marc Riboud in China. Riboud married the American sculptor Barbara Chase, who was living in Paris at the time, in 1961. They had two kids. Sally Hemings (1979), her debut novel, received critical acclaim and went on to become a best-seller. They divorced prior to 1981. He later married journalist and author Catherine Chaine. Riboud died on August 30, 2016, at the age of 93, in Paris. In 2004 his retrospective is exhibited at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris and visited by 100 000 people. Numerous museums trough Europe, as well as United States, China and Japan regularly show his work. He received many awards, among which two Overseas Press Club, the Time-Life Achievement, the Lucie Award and the ICP Infinity Award.
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