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Jakub Wencek
Jakub Wencek
Jakub Wencek

Jakub Wencek

Country: Poland
Birth: 1981

My name is Jakub Wencek and I am forester and nature photographer. Nature photography is my passion since I remember. I love to take photographs of the forest and nature because in this particular moment I'm often in awe of all the secrets it has within it. Taking photos of nature I would like to invite you on a journey to my forest, which shows me its secrets very often... You can find stories closed in frames in my photos. You can see there the eternal fight between light and shadow. Every scene tells us about different story, which really happened. All my photos, which are placed here, are unique because they are a record of a very short, little moment which will never happen again.
 

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Lenka Klicperová
Czech Republic
1976
Journalist and photographer. She obtained a master's degree at the University of Hradec Králové and immediately after that started working as a journalist. From 2004 to 2018 she was the editor-in-chief of the leading Czech travel magazine Lidé a Země. Since 2018 she has been working as a freelance reporter and photographer focused on war zones. She has worked in a number of African countries, including conflict zones of Democratic Republic of Congo. She visited Afghanistan several times, as well as Somalia, plagued by several decades of war. Since 2014, she has focused on the issue of the war with the ISIS in Iraq and Syria. She is the co-author of several documentaries (Tears of the Congo, Latim – the Circumcised, Iraqui Women, Women in the Land of Taliban, Unbroken) and a number of television reports. She has won a number of prizes and nominations in the Czech Press Photo competition - both for photography and video. In 2020 she was included in the prestigious Women Photograph database, she was shortlisted for the International Women In Photo Association Award. She is the co-author of nine books about Africa and about the wars in the Middle East and Nagorno Karabakh. Her work from Syria resulted in two books entitled In Sight of the Islamic State I and In Sight of the Islamic State II, which were co-authored by Markéta Kutilová. Together with Kutilová she also wrote other books on the wars in Syria and Iraq: In the War (2018) and War is My Fate (2020). In 2019, a book called AK47 was published, which depicts the dramatic life of the world-famous Czech war photographer Antonín Kratochvíl. Klicperová wrote the text of the book based on Kratochvíl's narration. In September 2020, war broke out in Nagorno Karabakh. Lenka Klicperová and Markéta Kutilová quickly moved to the center of events. The war in the Caucasus was captured by both reporters in many reports, but also in a book The Last One Sets the Village on Fire (2021). Klicperová cooperates with a number of Czech media. She also lectures at the University of Hradec Králové. Statement Twelve years ago I first came to a war zone, to the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. My goal was to document the drastic effects of the protracted war on women. The local militias are committing mass rape of women and children; rape is a weapon of war. It was my first encounter with war. I understood that I wanted to bear witness to the injustices of this world, the way they fall on innocent victims who have nothing to do with them. I returned to the Congo several times and started working in Afghanistan. Then the war in Syria and Iraq started. I spent six years traveling to these areas watching and documenting how the Islamic State terrifies the world. And how it is gradually being defeated with the generous contribution of the Syrian Kurds. The city of Kobani, the center of the Kurds, has been indelibly engraved in my heart, defending itself against the enormous superiority of the Islamists. At the cost of high casualties. I have been on the front lines, in refugee camps, documenting the lives of the wives of ISIS fighters and their children. I managed to get in the prison where ISIS fighters who survived the fighting are being held. When the war broke out in Nagorno Karabakh, I knew I had to go there immediately. I followed the war to the end and documented the lives of civilians sentenced to live suddenly in a war zone. I saw their exodus. War zones have thus become a part of my life... Lost War
Jerry Takigawa
United States
1945
Jerry Takigawa studied photography with Don Worth at San Francisco State University and received a degree in art with an emphasis in painting. He has been the recipient of a variety of photographic honors and awards including the Imogen Cunningham Award (1982); nominated for the Santa Fe Prize (2007); nominated for the Prix Pictet (2013, 2016); Critical Mass Top 50 (2017, 2020); The Clarence John Laughlin Award (2017); LensCulture, Fine Art Photography Awards Finalist (2018); New York Center for Photographic Art, Humans, First Place (2018); CENTER Awards, Curator's Choice-First Place (2018); the Rhonda Wilson Award (2020); and the Foto Forum Santa Fe Award, Santa Fe NM (2021). Internationally exhibited, his work is included in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, and the Monterey Museum of Art. Takigawa lives and works in Carmel Valley, California. False Food False Food underscores a plastic pollution epidemic that we now know is universally destructive and, tragically, man-made. False Food portrays pieces of plastic waste, recovered from the stomachs of dead albatross, placed in surprising and unfamiliar contexts. Presenting the problem in a different light can promote new ways to think about (and act on) it. Negative images trigger our reptilian brain where clear, ethical thinking is lacking. In this way, warnings about terror can become acts of terror themselves-amplifying fear and blinding us to answers. I believe aesthetically recontextualizing environmental threat opens the heart to not turn away. In this way I wanted to make something transformative-something that didn't terrorize consciousness, but elevated it. Balancing Cultures In Balancing Cultures, I am working with layers of meaning, memory, family, and- centrally-the actions and consequences of Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066. Issued in 1942, it caused the incarceration of 120,000 American citizens and legal residents of Japanese ancestry. My recent discovery of family photographs, taken in the WWII American concentration camps, compelled me to examine my family's unspoken feelings of shame and loss. I wanted to give voice to those feelings, which they had kept concealed for fear of retribution.
Debe Arlook
United States
Debe Arlook is an award-winning American artist working in photography. Since her first camera at 8 years old, she has been a curious observer of her surroundings. Degrees in filmmaking and psychology inform her narratives involving the landscape, relationships, personal growth, and existential inquiry. At the end of a 20-year marriage with three teenagers to raise, Arlook's spiritual awareness practice deepened. Still photography became an expressive outlet and tool for self-discovery. In addition to her studio practice, Arlook is an educator, contributing editor, and digital printer for fine art photographers. Based in Santa Monica, California, U.S.A., her work is exhibited and published globally Statement I've often described myself as having grown up from behind the lens. During my 40s and 50s, my role as a parent and spouse dwindled as my kids became teenagers and my marriage fell apart. As painful as these petites morts were, they were catalysts for self-discovery and rebirth. My mind quieted and the curious child I once was returned. My senses magnified and I could now see what had been overlooked. I became introspective and so did the work. It took time to understand the underlying messages each photograph held for me. I didn't realize they reflected my deep-seated thoughts and emotions. I had to step outside my ego in order to see I was photographing aspects of myself. And this was street photography! I had no idea each photograph is in some way a self-portrait and still, I often forget. Photography is the conduit in my attempt to understand human nature, my surroundings, and the big existential questions. With each project, I alter the visual language using diverse photographic processes specific to each narrative. In Foreseeable Cache, I create alternate worlds using sublime southwestern landscapes to evoke transcendent feelings of meditation. My latest body of work and first documentary, one, one thousand…, is a different kind of love story. It exposes the hidden impact a rare brain disorder has on the lives of a mother and son, focusing on their individual and shared experiences of life-long care. I continue to massage this work and watch it reveal itself to me, as my work does at some point. ARTICLES Exclusive Interview with Debe Arlook All About Photo Presents 'one, one thousand' by Debe Arlook
Byung-Hun Min
South Korea
1955
Byung-hun Min was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1955. Min started out as a musician and vocalist, then a student of electronic engineering, before finally discovering photography. He turned to study photography in his late 20’s at the Soon-tae Hong studio, from where he has pursued a successful career in photography. He has been awarded the Dong-A International Photography Salon’s silver medal (1984). Min's work has been widely exhibited and collected by institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Brookings Institution, Washington, DC; Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris; Seoul Art Center; and National Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwachon, Korea. Min's work was included in the Museum of Contemporary Photography exhibition Alienation and Assimilation: Contemporary Images and Installations from The Republic of Korea, presented April 4 through May 30, 1998. Byung-hun Min takes inspiration from the Korean landscape and culture; his photographs embody a blend of beauty, intricacy, and metaphor. Min's photographs of grasses were taken on repeated visits to the same site where weeds have grown up against vinyl greenhouses and dried to their surfaces. In these austere works, Min captures patterns that masterfully rephrase a delicacy and sensitivity to nature inherited from traditional Korean art.Source: Miyako Yoshinaga Min’s black-and-white photography often represents nature and the environment; and his pictures aim to capture the essence of the Korean landscape. His photographs also draw references to traditional Korean and East Asian art and culture, with a resemblance to ink scroll paintings, floral themes, and a focus on simplicity and minimalist compositions. His pictures are often attributed to being able to capture the delicacy and silence of nature. Min’s photographs also require effort on the part of the viewer. The subject of his pictures may be obscured, like the canvas of a greenhouse in his Weeds series, or obscured by light, like in the Snowland series. The subject may be in the distance beyond a fog-like veil, forcing the viewer to focus his attention persistently in order to have the subject of the picture revealed, as in the Trees and Flowers series. Min's poised and gentle approach to photography has granted him with a distinct, naturalistic style. Source: Peter Fetterman Gallery
Chuck Close
United States
1940 | † 2021
Chuck Close is an American artist known for his monumental photorealist portraits. Close received his B.A. from the University of Washington in 1962 and his M.F.A from Yale University in 1964. Upon graduation, he was chosen for the Fulbright Program grant, which he used to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Upon his return to the U.S., Close worked as an art teacher at the University of Massachusetts. In 1967, he moved to New York and began his work in SoHo. He was given his first solo exhibition in New York later that same year, followed by an exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. In kindergarten, Close learned that he suffered from prosopagnosia, commonly known as face blindness. He chose portraiture as a way to remember the significant people in his life. With his inability to recognize faces, Close uses a grid system to piece together his portraits. He said, “If you impose a limit to not do something you've done before, it will push you to where you've never gone before." Close suffered from a spinal artery collapse in 1988 that left half of his body paralyzed. Though many thought his artistic career was over, he re-taught himself to paint using a splint. He methodically paints in color or grey scale in low-resolution grid squares across the canvas. Close up his work looks like no more than blocks of color, but the colors combine to create a photorealistic image as you back away. Close is not only influential in the art world, but his early airbrush techniques also inspired the development of the ink jet printer. His portraits of famous artists are his most sought after works, and his work John (1971-1972) sold with Sotheby's for $4.8 million in 2005. Chuck Close has work featured in the permanent collections at the Albright-Knox Gallery in New York, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Georgia, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the MCA Chicago, the LACMA, the MFA Houston, the MFA Boston and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Related Categories: Close-Up, Photorealistic, Hyperrealism, Photographic Source, Post-War American Art, Pixelated, Visual Perception, Drawing, Black-and-white Photography, Work on Paper Source: www.casterlinegoodman.com
Sam Heydt
United States
1986
Sam Heydt (born April 20, 1986) is an American social practice and recycled media artist born/raised in New York City. She has lived/worked in Paris, Venice, Amsterdam, Athens, Buenos Aires, Sydney, Reykjavík, Udaipur and Vienna [current]. As a published author, producer and lifelong social activist and environmentalist, Heydt has undertaken a range of altruistic, non­-profit work and anchors her practice in advocacy. Through her unique manner of expression, she illustrates a world exploited beyond use and increasingly reduced to a bottom line. Esteemed as one of the pioneers of the recycled media movement, she works across different media- film, video, installation, photography, sculpture, sound and text and employs a range of materials, often reinventing and trespassing their associative use. Marrying images of destruction with portrayals of the American Dream, her work confronts the disillusionment of our time with the ecological and existential nightmare it is responsible for. Heydt's work has been shown in galleries, museums, art fairs and film festivals worldwide. Statement The edge is closer than we think, but illusion won't free us from reality, even as the sustained narrative of tabloids becomes history and the myth of progress continues to perpetuate inequality. As the natural world is liquidated and substituted with an artificial one, public discourse is being defined by even narrower bandwidths Our time is marked by mass extinction, product fetishism, diminishing resources, and patented seeds. The skeletons of old factories serve as caveats for a world exploited beyond use, a world increasingly reduced to a bottom line. Dissidence is drowned out by the white noise of the media, which holds the social psyche captive in with the empty promises it proposes for the future it truncates. Working across different media- film, video, installation, photography, sculpture, sound and text, Heydt presents an abstract proposition for a world on the periphery of history, one that not only appears haunted by the ghosts of the past, but built on it. Conflating time and place, her layered imagery collides, merges and disrupts logical relationships between occurrences. Through adding and subtracting meaning by combining images of destruction with portrayals of the virtues born from the American Dream, Heydt confronts the disillusionment of our time with the ecological and existential nightmare it is responsible for.
August Sander
Germany
1876 | † 1964
August Sander was a German portrait and documentary photographer. Sander's first book Face of our Time (German: Antlitz der Zeit) was published in 1929. Sander has been described as "the most important German portrait photographer of the early twentieth century." Sander was born in Herdorf, the son of a carpenter working in the mining industry. While working at a local mine, Sander first learned about photography by assisting a photographer who was working for a mining company. With financial support from his uncle, he bought photographic equipment and set up his own darkroom. He spent his military service (1897-99) as a photographer's assistant and the next years wandering across Germany. In 1901, he started working for a photo studio in Linz, Austria, eventually becoming a partner (1902), and then its sole proprietor (1904). He left Linz at the end of 1909 and set up a new studio in Cologne. In 1911, Sander began with the first series of portraits for his work People of the 20th Century. In the early 1920s, he came in contact with the Group of Progressive Artists (Kölner Progressive) in Cologne, a group as Wieland Schmied put it, "sought to combine constructivism and objectivity, geometry and object, the general and the particular, avant-garde conviction and political engagement, and which perhaps approximated most to the forward looking of New Objectivity [...] ". In 1927, Sander and writer Ludwig Mathar travelled through Sardinia for three months, where he took around 500 photographs. However, a planned book detailing his travels was not completed. Pure photography allows us to create portraits which render their subjects with absolute truth, truth both physical and psychological. That is the principal which provided my starting point, once I had said to myself that if we can create portraits of subjects that are true, we thereby in effect create a mirror of the times in which those subjects live. -- August Sander Sander's Face of our Time was published in 1929. It contains a selection of 60 portraits from his series People of the 20th Century. Under the Nazi regime, his work and personal life were greatly constrained. His son Erich, who was a member of the left-wing Socialist Workers' Party (SAP), was arrested in 1934 and sentenced to 10 years in prison, where he died in 1944, shortly before the end of his sentence. Sander's book Face of our Time was seized in 1936 and the photographic plates were destroyed. Around 1942, during World War II, he left Cologne and moved to a rural area, allowing him to save most of his negatives. His studio was destroyed in a 1944 bombing raid. Sander died in Cologne in 1964. His work includes landscape, nature, architecture, and street photography, but he is best known for his portraits, as exemplified by his series People of the 20th Century. In this series, he aims to show a cross-section of society during the Weimar Republic. The series is divided into seven sections: The Farmer, The Skilled Tradesman, Woman, Classes and Professions, The Artists, The City, and The Last People (homeless persons, veterans, etc.). By 1945, Sander's archive included over 40,000 images. In 2002, the August Sander Archive and scholar Susanne Lange published a seven-volume collection comprising some 650 of Sander's photographs, August Sander: People of the 20th Century. In 2008, the Mercury crater Sander was named after him.Source: Wikipedia I never made a person look bad. They do that themselves. The portrait is your mirror. -- August Sander
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