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Matthew Steaffens
Matthew Steaffens
Matthew Steaffens

Matthew Steaffens

Country: United States
Birth: 1985

Matthew Steaffens is a photographer based in Denver & Washington DC , whose contemporary practice explores themes of connection, relationship, and moments. His images are rooted in the tradition of street photography and photojournalistic projects.

As a graphic designer, Steaffens navigates the intersection of creativity and authenticity in both urban landscapes. This dual role allows him to bridge the worlds of dynamic compositions and genuine moments, creating a visual narrative that reflects the pulse of everyday life. Through his lens, Steaffens invites viewers to engage with the subtle poetry found in the ordinary, highlighting the beauty inherent in the ebb and flow of human connections. Accolades include a Communication Arts 2018 Photo Annual Award of Excellence. His work as been featured in Leica UK, and Leica Fotographie International. His work has been selected best in show in the Exposed DC Exhibition Summer 2023.

Websites

www.matthewsteaffens.com

@matthew.steaffens

 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Taisuke Sato
Taisuke Sato
Japan
1969
Taisuke was born in Nagoya, Japan in 1969. After graduating from the Department of Sociology at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan, he worked in housing sales and management for a major Japanese housing company. When he turned 50, he chose to spend his life exploring arts, photography and its philosophy, then turned to be a photographer. He takes pictures in the style of street photography. They have some feelings, lonely, surreal, and humorous. He also has a unique sensitivity to the distance between society and people, and the perspective from which he views them. This is because when he was a boy, he moved every three years due to his father's job transfer. As a result, he learned how to blend in quickly and get along with the existing community by observing closely and understanding the distance and atmosphere between people. This is because in Japan's collectivist and relationship-oriented society, it is difficult to join an existing group. In addition, the fact that he himself is an existence that "Appears one day and disappears the next" has given him a subjective and objective perspective and thinking, but even so, in Japanese society dominated by the exclusivity of the community and "the Atmosphere of the place", his identity without a hometown or geographical ties is very uncertain and unstable. For this reason, his works are photographed with a unique sensibility, and their atmosphere reflects his worldview. His main theme is the relationship between himself, people, and society. In his work, he presents a methodology that takes a multifaceted view of human life and society and transforms it into a "Acceptance of impermanence". And more, he has deep insights into social behavioral psychology, social science, mental health, social class, Japanese organizational philosophies, housing and family, which are largely reflected in his work.
Marco Gualazzini
Marco Gualazzini
Italy
1976
Born in Parma in 1976, Marco Gualazzini began his career as a photographer in 2004, with his home town's local daily, La Gazzetta di Parma. His works include reportage photography on microfinance in India, on the freedom of expression in Myanmar, on the discrimination of minorities in Pakistan. For the last few years he has been covering Africa extensively. He devised and took part in the creation of a documentary for the Italian national TV network RAI on the caste system in India, which has been selected at IDFA- The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, and has been awarded with the Best Camera Work Award at the Aljazeera International Documentary Film Festival 2014. Gualazzini published in national and international titles and he has received numerous accolades, including the Getty Images Grant for Editorial Photography, the PDN and the World Press Photo. Represented by CONTRASTO Agency Resilient is his first book and it's published by ContrastoBooks PUBLICATION: The New York Times, GEO, Al-Jazeera, Paris Match, LIGHTBOX- TIME magazine, Courrier International, L'Express, 6Mois, Internazionale, L'Espresso, InsideOver, CNN, M (Le Monde), Der Spiegel, The Sunday Times Magazine, Newsweek Japan, and Vanity Fair. AWARDS: Nomination award HPA2011- the Humanity photo awards 2011 Finalist CGAP 2011- Microfinance Photograpy contest Short-Listed, premio internacional de fotografia humanitaria Luis ValtueÑa 2011 Short-Listed 3rd Lumix Festival for Young Photojournalism, Hannover 2012 Silver Medal, category press-war, Prix de la Photographie 2013 Premio giornalistico Marco Luchetta- Miran Hrovatin 2013, 1st Prize Getty Images Grants for Editorial Photography Recipient 2013 Short Listed Premio giornalistico Internazionale Marco Luchetta - Miran Hrovatin 2014 Lucie Fondation, Photo Taken Scholarship Recipient 2015 Winner in PDN Photo Annual photo contest 2016 Final 100 to The Other Hundred Educators, The Other Hundred 2016 Photographer of the year All About Photo Awards, 2017 Short Listed - Premio giornalistico Internazionale Marco Luchetta 2017 Wiki Loves Africa, 2nd Prize All About Photo Awards 2019, 4th Prize Wiki Loves Africa, 1st Prize World Press Photo 2019 Photo Contest, Environment, Stories, 1st Prize EXHIBITIONS & SCREENINGS: Palazzo Pigorini, Collettiva sulla città con i fotografi NEOS, Parma, Italy, 2009 Galleria d'arte Camera Sedici, Storie in tre scatti, Milano, Italy, 2010 FoFu Phot'arte, Festival internazionale fotografico, Fucecchio (FI), Italy, 2011 Medicos del Mundo, premio Luis ValtueÑa, Madrid, Spain, 2011 The Humanity photo awards, Memories of Mankind VII, con il patrocinio dell' UNESCO, Beijing, Cina, 2011 3rd Lumix Festival for Young Photojournalism, Hannover, Germany, 2012 Angkor Photo Festival, Angkor, Cambodia, 2013 Les Rencontres d'Arles, Screening, Arles, France, 2013 Visa pour L'image, Screening, Perpignan, France, 2013 'Italy. Another View' Vadehra Art Gallery, India Art Fair, NSIC Exhibition Grounds, New Delhi, India, 2014 One Day in Africa - Spazio Oberdan, Milan, Italy, 2014 "One World" - Photofestival Horizonte, Zingst, Germany, 2014 Angkor Photo Festival, Screening, Angkor, Cambodia, 2015 World Humanitarian Summit, Istanbul, Turkey, 2016 Pune Biennale, Pune, India, 2017 Visa pour l'image, Screening in Campo Santo, Perpignan, France, 2017 Spazio Forma Meravigli, solo exhibition , Milan, Italy, 2019 Palazzo Pigorini, solo exhibition , Parma, Italy, 2019 World Press Photo, World Wide, 2019 RESILIENTI2020 - Installation Art Città di Parma, Parma, 2020
Yuko Kamada
Yuko Kamada
Japan
1985
I was born in Fukushima, Japan in 1985. When I was 20 years old, until then, I had nothing ever touched a camera, and had never been particularly interested in the photography. However, when my mother passed away, I was looking for a way to fill the void of my grief. Then, by chance, I found a street photo book in a small bookstore. After, I became fascinated with the street photography and started as a self-taught. The subjects that interest me the most are the street. An old building nestled among the buildings, a quiet corner of an alleyway, the expressions of people, capturing with own subjectivity the stories hidden in those has been a form of expression for me.
Chad Ress
Chad Ress
United States
1972
Chad Ress, born (1972) in Louisville, Kentucky lives in Ojai, California His work has been recognized in Photo District News; American Photography; Communication Arts; ; The One Show; D&AD Awards; The Forward Thinking Museum; and the PH Museum. Recent clients include Harper's Magazine, The New York Times, Toyota, Liberty Mutual, Pirelli, and MIT Technology Review. Ress first became interested in photography under the influence of the extensive archive of FSA photographs in Louisville's Speed Museum. His project America Recovered - A Survey of the ARRA looks to reconsider that legacy in the context of the recent economic collapse and subsequent stimulus legislation. It was accepted at Center - Photo Santa Fe; awarded distinction by The Forward Thinking Museum; and published in Time Magazine's Lightbox, The Wall Street Journal and Harper's Magazine. Ress recently completed a fellowship with the Center for Social Cohesion and Arizona State University and in conjunction with the New America Foundation. The resulting archive of images documents where Americans go to find a sense of community and connection to place. A series on the California aqueduct was recently published in UCLA's BOOM Magazine and included in "After the Aqueduct," an exhibition at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA. America Recovered was featured at the 2015 Reyner Banham Symposium with a theme "The Aesthetics of Citizenship" at The University of Buffalo, Buffalo, NY. In 2020, America Recovered was published by Actar, with a foreward by Bonie Honig and essays by Miriam Paeslack and Jordan H. Carver. He currently lives in Ojai, California, with his partner and son. America Recovered In late 2009, in response to the financial crash of 2008, the Obama Administration passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The Administration advocated for an unprecedented level of transparency in the disbursement of stimulus spending and established Recovery.gov as a resource by which the public might track expenditures, which totaled over $800 billion. I used the text publicized on Recovery.gov, and related government websites, as a guide to photograph ARRA projects. The language accompanying the images has been transcribed verbatim from the original sources. The conceptual framework of this project is to reveal the point where abstract political processes manifest themselves in the physical world, thus providing an alternate means of experiencing the contemporary American landscape. The projects range in scale from fully realized housing projects to concrete drainage basins that could easily be overlooked. The projects are located in almost every community in the country, from remote and rural stretches of the American West to dense urban centers. The appropriated text, descriptions of the projects taken from various government databases, serve as very simple identifiers and are often written in dry bureaucratic prose. On the other hand, the images themselves contextualize the spending projects within the physical details of a specific place and moment.
Vincent Karcher
Vincent Karcher
France/Canada
1990
Vincent is a Portrait and Documentary Photographer. Nomad for the last decade, he settles sometimes and reflects on his journeys, at a base camp in the Rocky Mountains. Mostly continuously on a move. Educated in photography back in Montreal. He lives now with the sun most days, sometimes the moon too. His work of environmental portraits observe cultures and contemplate humans across the globe. Over the years he created an interesting archive of portraits, documenting and looking at different parts of the world on diverse themes and objects. Colors paint clearly the frame intentionally as black and white use to be his esquisses. He also looks partially at other subjects. Always work in progress.
Robb Johnson
Robb Johnson
United States
Robb Johnson creates haunting and mysterious black and white photographs reminiscent of the chiaroscuro style of the old Italian masters. The unusual atmospheric conditions he finds by photographing in the dark of night imbue his photographs with mystery. He sets a stage where the actors seem to have just stepped off or have yet to arrive for some unknown drama. Johnson’s photographs evoke a world where the viewer is free to explore with his or her own emotions and awareness – a drama unbeknownst but to them. Robb was a scholarship student at Art Center College of Design and earned a BFA in Photography. He worked in advertising photography for over 20 years, specializing in creating visual environments for national hotels with his wife Dale. He decided to turn his visual focus inward and pursue his art for himself. His work has been featured in B&W Magazine, Spotlight and B&W Single Image for 2006, 2007 and 2008 and his book, Robb Johnson Photographs was published by The French Press in 2008.
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
Kai Moerk
Kai Moerk
Germany
1964
My nationality is German and I was born 1964. After graduating from the Adolf Lazi Academy near Stuttgart/Germany with a degree in media design and a job in a film studio, I tried something completely different: mountaineering, climbing and other outdoor activities. For a few years I lived completely isolated with my current wife in northern Italy. Without neighbours, TV, telephone, electricity and warm running water. The experiences and impressions in the peace and seclusion moved me deeply and taught me to observe my environment carefully. This was followed by a contrasting program. I got a job in Munich/Germany as a press photographer which I practiced for several years. Today I live and work without constraints and obligations as a Freelance Photographer, Fine-Art-Printer in Italy and Germany.
Josef Sudek
Josef Sudek
Czech Republic
1896 | † 1976
Josef Sudek was a Czech photographer, best known for his photographs of Prague. Sudek was originally a bookbinder. During The First World War he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army in 1915 and served on the Italian Front until he was wounded in the right arm in 1916. Although he had no experience with photography and was one-handed due to his amputation, he was given a camera. After the war he studied photography for two years in Prague under Jaromir Funke. His Army disability pension gave him leeway to make art, and he worked during the 1920s in the romantic Pictorialist style. Always pushing at the boundaries, a local camera club expelled him for arguing about the need to move forwards from 'painterly' photography. Sudek then founded the progressive Czech Photographic Society in 1924. Despite only having one arm, he used large, bulky cameras with the aid of assistants. Sudek's photography is sometimes said to be modernist. But this is only true of a couple of years in the 1930s, during which he undertook commercial photography and thus worked "in the style of the times". Primarily, his personal photography is neo-romantic. Sudek's restored atelier in Prague – Újezd His early work included many series of light falling in the interior of St. Vitus cathederal. During and after World War II Sudek created haunting night-scapes and panoramas of Prague, photographed the wooded landscape of Bohemia, and the window-glass that led to his garden (the famous The Window of My Atelier series). He went on to photograph the crowded interior of his studio (the Labyrinths series). His first Western show was at George Eastman House in 1974 and he published 16 books during his life. Known as the "Poet of Prague", Sudek never married, and was a shy, retiring person. He never appeared at his exhibit openings and few people appear in his photographs. Despite the privations of the war and Communism, he kept a renowned record collection of classical music. (Source: en.wikipedia.org)
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