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Final Chance to Win a Solo Exhibition this March! Deadline: February 18, 2025
Final Chance to Win a Solo Exhibition this March! Deadline: February 18, 2025
Maryam Ashrafi
© Didier Bizos
Maryam Ashrafi
Maryam Ashrafi

Maryam Ashrafi

Country: Iran

Maryam Ashrafi is a Paris-based Iranian photographer. Born in Tehran during the Iran and Iraq war, Maryam is passionate about sociology which led her to focus her interest on social and political issues.

For several years, she worked on different subjects in Paris: from the mobilisation of the Kurdish and Iranian diasporas to riots following various social and political issues. Above all, as an independent freelance photographer who believes in long-term projects, she has covered the aftermath of wars from Kobani in Northern Syria to Sinjar in Iraqi Kurdistan from 2012 to 2018. Her work on Kurdish resistance movements has been the subject of several exhibitions and publications.

Her first book “Rising among ruins, Dancing amid bullets” , which has won the PrixHip and Lucie Photo Book prize documents the consequences of war and the lives of civilians returning to their homes in Northern Syria and the autonomous Kurdistan region of Northern Iraq.

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Rising among ruins, Dancing amid bullets
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More Great Photographers To Discover

Jay Maisel
United States
1931
Having studied painting and graphic design at Cooper Union and Yale, Jay Maisel embarked on his photographic career in 1954. While he boasts an impressive portfolio that includes iconic figures like Marilyn Monroe and Miles Davis, Maisel is renowned for his ability to capture the essence of light, color, and gesture in ordinary life. Among his noteworthy commercial achievements are five Sports Illustrated swimsuit covers, the inaugural two covers of New York Magazine, the cover of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue (the highest-selling jazz album of all time), twelve years of advertising collaboration with United Technologies, and accolades from esteemed organizations such as the International Center for Photography, American Society of Media Photographers, Art Directors Club, Professional Photographers of America, and The Cooper Union. Although he ceased commercial work in the late '90s, Jay has persistently dedicated himself to personal projects. His reputation as a generous and inspiring teacher has grown through extensive lectures and photography workshops across the country. Additionally, he continues to make prints available, which can be found in private, corporate, and museum collections. As people, we love pattern. But interrupted pattern is more interesting. – Jay Maisel Since he stopped taking on commercial work in 1995, Jay has continued to focus on his personal work. He has developed a reputation as a giving and inspiring teacher as a result of extensive lecturing and photography workshops throughout the country. He also hosted his own workshops at his residence at 190 Bowery in New York City, from 2008-2015, instructing more than 640 students over the eight-year period. In 2015, Jay sold his famous six-story building where he lived and worked for 50 years. Stephen Wilkes documented Jay’s epic move out of “the Bank” that was released as a feature-length film, Jay Myself, in the summer of 2019. Since 2015, Jay has committed himself to reviewing his last sixty years of shooting. The results can be seen on his website, jaymaisel.com. Jay continues to sell prints of his photographs, many of which can be found in private, corporate, and museum collections.Source: International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum
Monica Testa
Italy
1967
Shortly after my art studies, I started working as a fashion designer for a large company, which allowed me to deepen my knowledge and work in the world of graphics and style. It was a challenging and rewarding job, thanks to which I had the opportunity to travel a lot around the world, meeting people from various ethnic backgrounds, enriching myself enormously from a cultural and personal point of view. I had always been passionate about photography and to such an extent that I could no longer do without it. After taking several courses and studying the greatest photographers in history, I decided to enrol at the Italian Institute of Photography in Milan: a constructive experience that made me grow a lot, both on a technical and creative level. I truly enjoy observing people and also studying their psychological side. That's why I especially love working on portraits and telling the stories of those I meet, always keeping a careful and respectful eye, tiptoeing into situations that I find interesting. I delve into them, I make them my own. I use photography to express how I feel, how I see, how I perceive and absorb the flow of life around me. I transform my thoughts and my feelings into images, thus aiming to become a same part of the image I portray. The River Text from "Monica’s Diary (Benin 2019):" Today we reached a small village flooded by the abundant rains of recent days. The tribe that lives there is accustomed to this situation and in effect they live in real palafittes suspended on the water; and so we reached the village in the only way possible ... by canoe. We brought t-shirts for the children, eggs for snacks and, more importantly, mosquito nets which, given the area they live in, particularly humid and infested with mosquitoes, are essential. The landscape was spectacular and my eyes saw incredible realities... all so far from our daily life! The school was small and very crowded, obviously they had been warned of our arrival and especially the children were waiting for us with trepidation. Compared to other villages we had visited the previous days, the people who live here are quite aggressive. They were a little agitated, they all talked loudly, they pushed us constantly. The adults looked at us with curiosity and the children with shyness: it was noticeable that they were not used to seeing people of a different color in their village. For this we were escorted by the local police, in case the situation deteriorated. But everything went well and another day passed ... lived as if it were a whole life. Face to Face Form zero to one hundred This is an ambitious project, started in 2017 and not yet finished. The idea would be to photograph portraits of people of different ages, sex and ethnicity, who in some way fascinated me and consequently I asked them to pose for me. I would like to get to a hundred photos, a different one for each age from zero to one hundred years.
Alice Boughton
United States
1866 | † 1943
Alice Boughton (14 May 1866 - 21 June 1943) was an early 20th-century American photographer known for her photographs of many literary and theatrical figures of her time. She was a Fellow of Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession, a circle of photographers whose artistic efforts succeeded in raising photography to a fine art form. Alice Boughton was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 14 May 1866. Her parents were Frances Ayres and William H. Boughton, a lawyer in New York. As educational opportunities were made more available in the 19th-century, women artists became part of professional enterprises, including founding their own art associations. Artwork made by women was considered to be inferior, and to help overcome that stereotype women became "increasingly vocal and confident" in promoting women's work, and thus became part of the emerging image of the educated, modern and freer "New Woman". Artists then, "played crucial roles in representing the New Woman, both by drawing images of the icon and exemplyfying this emerging type through their own lives." In the 1880s, Boughton began studying art and photography at the Pratt School of Art and Design. It was there that she met fellow student Gertrude Käsebier, with whom she later studied in Paris. Käsebier also employed her an assistant in her studio, most likely at the same time Boughton was studying at Pratt. In 1890, she opened her own portrait studio on East 23rd Street in New York, which she maintained for the next forty years. In 1904, she sent a letter to William Butler Yeats that listed a studio address on Madison Avenue, indicating that she established or used more than one studio for at least a brief period. Around 1901, Boughton studied art in Rome and photography in Paris, where she worked in Käsebier's summer studio. She won an honorable mention for her work at the Turin International Decorative and Fine Arts Exhibition in 1902. It is not known when she met Alfred Stieglitz, but it is clear he knew of and admired her work by 1902 when he included two of her works in the inaugural exhibition at his Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in New York City. Four years later, in 1906, Boughton was appointed by Stieglitz as a Fellow of the Photo-Secession. The following year Stieglitz gave her, along with fellow photographers C. Yarnall Abbot and William B. Dyer, an exhibition at the Little Galleries. In 1909 she had six of her photographs and an essay called "Photography, A Medium of Expression" published in Stieglitz's journal Camera Work (No 26, April, 1909). During this same period, her photographs were included in major exhibitions around the world, including shows in London, Paris, Vienna, The Hague and New York. Boughton became one of the most distinguished portrait photographers of New York, although she did many landscapes in this country and Europe including the famous Rockefeller estate Kykuit at Pocantico Hills, New York. She produced studies of children, as well as female nudes in allegorical or natural settings. Among her more famous works are portraits of Eugene O'Neill, Albert Pinkham Ryder, George Arliss and Robert Louis Stevenson. Her portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson was an inspiration for John Singer Sargent's own portrait of the writer. From at least 1920 until her death, Boughton shared her residences with artist and art teacher Ida C. Haskell (1861-1932). Haskell is known to have been an instructor at Pratt while Käsebier and Boughton studied there. When Boughton traveled to Europe in 1926, Haskell, her partner, accompanied her on the trip. In 1931, Boughton closed her studio and discarded thousands of prints. She moved permanently to the home in Brookhaven, Long Island, that she shared with Haskell. Boughton died of pneumonia on 21 June 1943. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British National Portrait Gallery, the U.S. National Portrait Gallery, the George Eastman House and other important museums.Source: Wikipedia
Jefferson Caine Lankford
United States
1993
Jefferson Caine Lankford is a photographer born and currently based in the United States. He uses a range of photographic techniques including alternative, analog, and digital practices. Jefferson earned a BFA in photography at East Carolina University in 2016 and also attended the Australian National University, located in Canberra, Australia - where he studied documentary photography. His work focuses on a variety of subjects, ranging from environmental concerns and foreign cultures to the various aspects of the American South, such as agriculture, poverty, and society. To Be, Rather Than to Seem The American South has an essence that sparingly reveals itself, thus requiring unprecedented determination and patience to photograph all its splendor. Nevertheless, and despite its elusiveness, this essence I am chasing - permeates; it lingers in the air of North Carolina, and when discovered, puts on a magnificent display. This essence appears in the eyes of a jet-black cat within an abandoned barn: it agonizes within the face of an elderly Amish man; it breathes deep within the shadow of a stray dog crossing a back road; it flourishes within the wings of starlings above a farm after heavy rain; it shines on a dilapidated door in the middle of nowhere, and it tirelessly works in the tobacco fields without complaint. Over the past three years, I have traveled throughout many impoverished towns and across countless acres of farmland to document and share an original story of existence - life and death as it occurs in rural North Carolina. The photographs within this ongoing project, To Be, Rather Than to Seem - provides a window for others to witness these fleeting moments for themselves and embrace the beautiful raw essence of my homeland.
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