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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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Dan Winters
United States
1962
Dan Winters (b. October 21, 1962) is an American photojournalist, illustrator, filmmaker and writer. He was born in Ventura County, California on October 21, 1962. He first studied photography and the darkroom process starting in 1971 while a member of his local 4-H club. In 1979, while still a high school senior, he began working full time in the motion picture special effects industry in the area of miniature construction and design. He went on to study photography at Moorpark College, in California. After receiving an associates arts degree there, he entered the documentary studies program at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany, focusing mainly on narrative photojournalism. In 1986, he began his career in photography as a photojournalist in his home town in Ventura County, at the Thousand Oaks News Chronicle. After winning several local awards for his work, he moved to New York City, where magazine assignments came rapidly. In 1991, he moved to Los Angeles and married Kathryn Fouts, who became his photo rep and studio manager. In 1993, his son Dylan was born in Los Angeles. In 2000, while maintaining a home in LA, he moved to Austin, Texas. There he set up a studio outside Austin in a historic building built in 1903, that had originally served as a general store, gas station and post office for nearly 100 years before he arrived. Known for the broad range of subject matter he is able to interpret, he is widely recognized for his iconic celebrity portraiture, his scientific photography, his photojournalistic stories and more recently his drawings and illustrations. He has created portraits of luminaries such as Bono, Neil Young, Barack Obama, Tupac Shakur, the Dalai Lama, Stephen Hawking, Leonardo DiCaprio, Helen Mirren, Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet, Angelina Jolie, Sandra Bullock, Brad Pitt, Steven Spielberg and Al Gore. He has won over one hundred national and international awards from American Photography, Communication Arts, The Society of Publication Designers, Photo District News, The Art Directors Club of New York and Life, among others. In 1998, he was awarded the prestigious Alfred Eisenstadt Award for Magazine Photography. In 2003, he won a 1st place World Press Photo Award in the portrait category. In 2003, he was also honored by Kodak as a photo "Icon" in their biographical "Legends" series. In addition to regular assignments for magazines such as Esquire, GQ, Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, New York, Texas Monthly, Wired, Fortune, Discover, Audubon Magazine, Details, Premiere, W, Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, Life, Newsweek, Time, Vibe and many other national and international publications, his clients for print and advertising include Nike, Microsoft, IBM, LG, Hewlett-Packard, Sony, Bose, Saturn, Sega, Fila, Cobra, ABC, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Dreamworks, Columbia TriStar and Twentieth Century Fox. Regular music clients include RCA, A&M, Sony BMG, Interscope, Warner Bros., Elektra Records and Epitaph. His work has appeared in four solo exhibitions in galleries in New York and Los Angeles. A book of his work entitled "Dan Winters: Periodical Photographs" was published in 2009 by Aperture. In addition, he has photos in permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery (United States), the Museum of Fine Art Houston, The Whitliff Collection at Texas State University and the Harry Ransom Center for Photography in Austin, Texas.[6]He currently has a solo exhibition at the Telfair Museum/Jepson Center in Savannah, GA entitled Dan Winters's AMERICA: Icons and Ingenuity. A catalogue was published to accompany the exhibition. His book Last Launch which chronicles the final launches of Discovery, Endeavour and Atlantis in 2011, signaling the end of an era in space travel, will be released October 22, 2012 by UT Press and available in bookstores everywhere. He currently lives in Austin, Los Angeles and Savannah, Georgia with his wife and son. Source: wikipedia
Jan Janssen
Netherlands
1963
As a social photographer, Jan Janssen captures the moments he recognises in his fellow human beings, especially those elsewhere in the world. In everyday moments, he finds the same needs, insecurities or pleasures that all people enjoy in their lives - albeit to different degrees. Travelling is inseparable from Janssen photographic practice. On the one hand, travelling is an opportunity to discover who you are yourself. By travelling to other places, Jan seeks precisely the things we have in common. In a world of polarisation and contrasts, sometimes even on one continent, Janssen settles geographical and symbolic boundaries by photographing people in a pure essence. He photographs the richness of our most basic human needs, like freedom, family and security - or, conversely, the absence of their obviousness. To create his photographs, Janssen works on location for long periods of time. He often returns to the same place during subsequent trips. Here he builds a bond with the local people, a bond based on mutual respect and dignity. This photographing with a free heart allows him to get as close to people as possible. Only in this way can he penetrate to the essence of their being, and then capture it on camera. It Matters Pieces of Europe is a long-term photography project, started in 2016. In this series, I show the moments I recognise in my fellow human beings. Things that are common to our human existence, such as love, play, growing up, loss and need for contact. Things that are present everywhere in the world, in anyone. Several times a year, I travel to destinations in Central and Eastern Europe. For these photos, I travelled to Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, among others. Once arrived in the country, I work together with the locals to find entry into these communities. I find it very important that I approach them as an equal, and not as a western outsider just using them to take a photo. I build a bond with my portrayed people by following them for weeks, sometimes months. I may return regularly after my visit or stay in touch with my portraits online or remotely. Through this long-term contact, I get to know their traits and discover when they are at their most beautiful, their most vulnerable or their purest. It is at these moments that the most beautiful photos are created. The series is growing and will culminate in a book of the same name in 2026. Travelling is inseparable from my practice. It is an opportunity to discover who I am. By travelling to other places, I seek precisely the things we have in common. It is also a way for me to remind myself of the gratitude of a simple existence in places elsewhere in the world: things I take for granted in the West. Article Exclusive Interview
Graham Hobart
United States
1960
Graham Hobart grew up in a British colony in Africa. After living for a while in England, Hobart moved to the US and supported his family as a commercial photographer before deciding that he wanted to move from shooting to please a client to doing something that fulfilled his artistic passions. Hobart began exploring many different forms of expression from video to sculpting in bronze but settled on wildlife and nature photography. He chose infrared photography in particular because it allowed him to break away from the mundane and create a look that was uniquely his. Currently he is known for two very distinct styles that you may be able to differentiate when studying his images. One style, "In Search of White” allows as much of the paper to show through with a minimalistic approach akin to a pencil or ink sketch. The other style, darker and more ominous, is called “Out of Obscurity”. Before seeking commercial gallery representation Hobart established a firm foundation for his new career by having his work exhibited in major institutions like National Geographic, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the Booth Western Art Museum and other institutions. Now Hobart is represented in several galleries here in the US as well as abroad. Artist’s Statement : Regaining what has been lost. Some activist photographers use shock and guilt as tools to bring attention to the plight of the natural world. Equally dismaying are photos depicting pristine images of Nature at its most beautiful, which can leave the viewer with the mistaken notion that all is well. Harnessing the unique qualities of infrared photography, Hobart creates images reminiscent of old Victorian lithographs by explorers like Thomas Baines from the late nineteenth century. Hobart’s images evoke a haunting nostalgia for a bygone era by transporting us to a time to when animals roamed freely. His work challenges us to give the overly stressed wild areas the space to heal as we learn to reestablish our coexistence with the natural world. Hobart believes we never fully experience life without first getting close to nature. He implores us to tread lightly where we walk and listen carefully to all the plants and creatures around us. “Each of us must acknowledge that we must share this beautiful world with all its inhabitants or lose it.” — Graham Hobart AAP Magazine AAP Magazine 54 Nature
Buck Holzemer
United States
Buck Holzemer's photography career began at the young age of eight when he climbed onto a garage roof to capture images of his friends playing basketball below. This experience sparked a lifelong fascination with the magic little window of the camera. After an multi-year detour to study the unseen world through physics and mathematics, he returned to the “magic little window” in his late twenties and began a career in photography and soon expanded into filmmaking. Throughout his career, Buck has received numerous accolades, including the prestigious Clio award for television commercials, recognition in the Communication Arts Photography Annual, awards from Print magazine, and the Grand Prize for fine art work from PDN magazine. In 2013, he won a Best of Show award from the International Photography Awards, and in 2019, he received the People's Choice Award from National Geographic. Buck's versatility as an image maker is evident in his work across various photographic genres and his filmmaking projects in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, New York, Milan, and Guatemala. For the past decade, he has collaborated with producer Patti Petrich to create media for Common Hope, a St. Paul based non-profit organization that supports education for children in Guatemala. Through this partnership, he has produced numerous videos and portraits of over 800 Guatemalan children. In recent years, Buck has dedicated his time primarily to personal photographic projects. Awarded Photographer of the Week - Week 05
Lisa Kristine
United States
1965
Acclaimed humanitarian photographer Lisa Kristine specializes in images of remote indigenous peoples. Best known for her evocative and saturated use of color, her fine art prints are among the most sought after and collected in the world. Lisa has documented in over 100 countries on six continents, using a 19th century 4×5” field view camera for the majority of her work. Lisa Kristine was born in San Francisco, California, on September 2, 1965. She developed an early interest in anthropology and photography. Lisa was mentored in her youth in Silver Gelatin and Cibachrome printing. Following graduation from the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in San Francisco, Lisa photographed for nearly five years in Europe and Asia. Lisa has collaborated with international humanitarian organizations. When the State of the World Forum convened in San Francisco in 1999 and in New York in 2000, Lisa was asked to present her work to help inspire discussions on human rights, social change, and global security. Her work was auctioned by Christie’s New York to benefit the United Nations with Kofi Annan. She was also honored to be the sole exhibitor at the 2009 Vancouver Peace Summit with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Reverend Tutu and award winning Nobel Laureates. In 2010 Lisa collaborated with Free the Slaves documenting modern-day slavery. She traveled into the heart of broiling brick kilns, down rickety mine shafts, and into hidden lairs of sex slavery. She bore witness to the most horrific abuses imaginable and the astonishing glimpses of the indomitable human spirit. A groundbreaking photographic book entitled Slavery in which Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote the foreword was released in the fall of 2010. The sales of the book will help to end slavery. John C. Sweeney, Director of the United Nations, says of her work, “Lisa Kristine’s sensitive and beautiful portrayal of isolated and distant peoples helps us to better appreciate the diversity of the world. She captures the sheer beauty of the differences in people and places and allows us to comprehend the shared nature of the human condition: its hope, its joy and its complexity.” Her work is made distinctive by her passion and intuition and her intense interest in the humanity of her subjects. “I want a person to feel at ease with me, so that they remain who they are and are unchanged by a new, foreign element such as a stranger (myself) or a camera. In order for me to photograph a person in this unaffected environment of ‘self,’ there must be a firm trust between us. Without this, one might still create a beautiful image, but not a stirring one. I’m drawn to people who have been living closer to the earth, and who have very old traditions. People who have not, in any way, been altered by modernity.” “The saturation of color opens our eyes to those who are living in ways very different from our own,” says Paul Oppenheimer, a highly regarded philosopher and teacher. “Lisa invites each of us as humans to look into the eyes of those whom we cannot understand—in a setting that does not diminish our differences. In those differences, we find the roots of our unity.” The images, both inspiring and evocative, draw a connection between the viewer and the subject. Lisa Kristine’s art is her personal statement about the connection of humanity, and about the diversity, beauty, and hardship of our world. Published in 2003, Lisa’s limited edition hardcover monograph A Human Thread of 120 photographs sold out within a year. The accompanying short documentary film, A Human Thread, explores the process behind the photographs and includes interviews with Kristine as well as footage of her on location. Following on the success of her first book, Kristine published This Moment in 2007. This Moment won the bronze metal for the Independent Publisher Book Awards. The book consists of 62 full color plates showcasing her use of the large-format 4x5 field view camera. A second documentary film, Through the Lens, was produced in association with the book. The film illuminates her photographic and artistic process in using a 4x5 large-format view camera.
Shannon Taggart
United States
Shannon Taggart is an artist and author based in St. Paul, MN. In a past life, she contributed to printed publications including TIME, Newsweek, New York Times Magazine, Discover, New York, Wall Street Journal and Reader’s Digest. Her work has been exhibited internationally and recognized by PDN, Nikon, Magnum Photos + Inge Morath Foundation, American Photography, International Photography Awards and the Alexia Foundation for World Peace. Her first monograph, SÉANCE (Fulgur Press), was published in 2019. Currently, she is working on an illustrated book about The Society for Research on Rapport and Telekinesis (SORRAT), one of the most exotic cases within the history of psychical research.Source: www.shannontaggart.com As a teenager, photographer Shannon Taggart was introduced to the world of spiritualism after a medium told her cousin details about her grandfather’s death that proved to be true. The reading had taken place at the Lily Dale Assembly in New York, the world’s largest spiritualist community. Curious but with reservations, Taggart headed to Lily Dale to delve into the history of spiritualism thinking she would learn what all the tricks of the trade were, but she didn’t end up getting the explanations she thought she would. Instead, she discovered a mysterious world she began to document with her camera. She certainly wasn’t the first photographer to do this, as spiritualism and spiritualist photography have long been connected. Both surfaced in the mid-1800s in Rochester, N.Y.,—home of Kodak. At the time, spiritualists naturally gravitated toward this new technology in hopes of recording what they had been experiencing. One of the most well-known spiritualist portraits of this era purports to show the ghost of President Abraham Lincoln with his hand placed nonchalantly on the shoulder of his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln. When Taggart first began taking photos at Lily Dale, she remained an observer. After the first year, she became involved as a student and a participant while continuing her photography. Although at first she had a hard time understanding spiritualism, Taggart was curious and said she has since experienced numerous mysterious experiences that have helped her tap into her own creative process. One of these inexplicable events occurred during one of her first visits to the Lily Dale Museum. Taggart said that a large purple orb appeared on the shoulder of a woman she was photographing, but she wasn’t shooting into the sun. “When I brought a copy back for her, she calmly said, ‘Oh, that’s Bob,’ her deceased husband. She was thrilled with the picture,” Taggart said. Taggart was also interested in physical mediumship, which claims to involve perceptible manifestations—such as loud raps or voices—and is practiced outside the New York community. While at Lily Dale, she met a medium who suggested she visit England, where, along with other parts of the United Kingdom and Europe, a “new age of physical mediumship” was happening. Taggart said one of the strangest things she witnessed happened during the mediumship of Gordon Garforth, a deep trance and physical medium in Stansted, England. Garforth told Taggart that his hands enlarge during his séances. About 20 minutes into one, Garforth’s wife, who operates as his “spirit control,” said that the spirits were going to work with his hands. While seated under a dim red light, Garforth held out his hand to Taggart. “Unbelievably to me, it seemed to effortlessly stretch, and the entire hand became large, instantly. I gasped and yelled ‘Oh my God!’ ” Taggart remembered. She said that the 30 other people in the room also reacted with amazement; she worried the experience was merely “hypnotic” and that her camera, set to one-second exposures, wouldn’t capture the growth. “The photographs made seem to confirm a distorted large hand … I was able to sit with Gordon on two additional occasions and I saw the same thing,” Taggart said. While some of her experiences struck Taggart as downright supernatural, some of her images were more straightforward, including her photo of bent spoons. It may not come as a surprise to learn the spiritualists bend them with their hands as a sort of symbolic connection to what they believe to be possible. “It is taught as an exercise of the power of the mind, a physical example of our ability to do things that seem impossible,” said Taggart of her most asked-about image.Source: Slate
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