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Mital Patel
Mital Patel
Mital Patel

Mital Patel

Country: United States

Mital Patel is an internationally recognized nature and wildlife photographer who focuses on capturing beauty in all its forms—whether natural or manmade. From architecture and landscapes to the creatures of the wild, Patel has a distinct passion for capturing the most remarkable elements of life through his visual representation of movement, emotion and mood. From behind the lens, he strives to bring viewers his very unique view of nature, telling a story without words and conveying a feeling in the abstract. He challenges his audience to let their imaginations run free, taking the journey with him on his travels and opening their minds beyond the confines of static photography.

In each of his pieces, Patel hopes to offer his audience a way to view the world around them a bit differently – to appreciate the beauty of moments and places that are often overlooked. An intrepid traveler and lover of adventure, Patel’s passion for creative and imaginative photography is a great asset to his exploration of the world, which spans six out of the seven continents. His work is admired worldwide for its unique and artistic perspective.

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Websites

www.mitalpatelphotography.com

@mitalpatelphoto

 

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Saul Leiter
Saul Leiter
United States
1923 | † 2013
Saul Leiter was an American photographer and painter whose early work in the 1940s and 1950s was an important contribution to what came to be recognized as the New York school of photography. Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father was a well-known Talmud scholar and Saul studied to become a rabbi. His mother gave him his first camera at age 12. At age 23, he left theology school and moved to New York City to become an artist. He had developed an early interest in painting and was fortunate to meet the Abstract Expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart. Pousette-Dart and W. Eugene Smith encouraged Leiter to pursue photography and he was soon taking black and white pictures with a 35 mm Leica, which he acquired for a few Eugene Smith prints. In 1948, he started taking color photographs. He began associating with other contemporary photographers such as Robert Frank and Diane Arbus and helped form what Jane Livingston has termed the New York School of photographers during the 1940s and 1950s. Leiter worked as a fashion photographer for the next 20 years and was published in Show, Elle, British Vogue, Queen, and Nova. In the late 1950s the art director Henry Wolf published Leiter’s color fashion work in Esquire and later in Harper's Bazaar. Edward Steichen included Leiter’s black and white photographs in the exhibition Always the Young Stranger at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953. Leiter’s work is featured prominently in Jane Livingston’s book The New York School (1992) and in Martin Harrison’s Appearances: Fashion Photography since 1945 (1991). In 2008, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris mounted Leiter's first museum exhibition in Europe with an accompanying catalog. Leiter is the subject of a 2012 feature-length documentary In No Great Hurry - 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter, directed and produced by Tomas Leach. Leiter is a featured subject, among others, in the documentary film Tracing Outlines (2015) by 2nd State Productions. Martin Harrison, editor and author of Early Color (2006), writes, "Leiter’s sensibility . . . placed him outside the visceral confrontations with urban anxiety associated with photographers such as Robert Frank or William Klein. Instead, for him the camera provided an alternate way of seeing, of framing events and interpreting reality. He sought out moments of quiet humanity in the Manhattan maelstrom, forging a unique urban pastoral from the most unlikely of circumstances." Leiter died on 26 November 2013 in New York City.Source: Wikipedia When we do not know why the photographer has taken a picture and when we do not know why we are looking at it, all of a sudden we discover something that we start seeing. I like this confusion. -- Saul Leiter Leiter’s first exhibition of color photography was held in the 1950s at the Artist's Club, a meeting place for many of the Abstract Expressionist painters of that time. Edward Steichen included twenty-three of Leiter's black and white photographs in the seminal 1953 exhibition Always the Young Stranger at the Museum of Modern Art; he also included twenty of Leiter’s color images in the 1957 MoMA conference Experimental Photography in Color. In the late 1950s, the art director Henry Wolf published Leiter's color fashion work in Esquire and later in Harper's Bazaar. However, over the next four decades, Leiter’s noncommercial work remained virtually unknown to the wider art world. He continued to work as a fashion photographer through the 1970s, contributing to such publications as in Show, Elle, British Vogue, Queen, and Nova. Leiter is now held to be a pioneer of early color photography, and is noted as one of the outstanding figures in post-war photography. After several exhibitions at Howard Greenberg Gallery throughout the 1990s, Leiter’s work experienced a surge of popularity after a monograph, Early Color, was published by Steidl in 2006. Early Color was followed by a series of monographs and international exhibitions highlighting the depth and scope of his work in photography and painting, beginning with In Living Color (2006), his first major retrospective at the Milwaukee Museum of Art. Leiter was the subject of several solo shows thereafter, including the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris; the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam; Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne; and Diechtorhallen, Hamburg.Source: Howard Greenberg Gallery Some photographers think that by taking pictures of human misery, they are addressing a serious problem. I do not think that misery is more profound than happiness. -- Saul Leiter
Vivian Maier
Vivian Maier
United States
1926 | † 2009
Vivian Dorothea Maier was an American amateur street photographer, who was born in New York City but grew up in France. After returning to the United States, she worked for about forty years as a nanny in Chicago, IL. During those years, she took about 100,000 photographs, primarily of people and cityscapes in Chicago, although she traveled and photographed worldwide. Her photographs remained unknown and mostly undeveloped until they were discovered by a local Chicago historian and collector, John Maloof, in 2007. Following Maier's death, her work began to receive critical acclaim. Her photographs have been exhibited in the US, England, Germany, Denmark, and Norway, and have appeared in newspapers and magazines in the US, England, Germany, Italy, France and other countries. A book of her photography titled Vivian Maier: Street Photographer was published in 2011. Many of the details of Maier's life are still being uncovered. Initial impressions about her life indicated that she was born in France, but further researching revealed that she was born in New York, the daughter of Maria Jaussaud and Charles Maier, French and Austrian respectively. Vivian moved between the U.S. and France several times during her childhood, although where in France she lived is unknown. Her father seems to have left the family for unknown reasons by 1930. In the census that year, the head of the household was listed as award-winning portrait photographer Jeanne Bertrand, who knew the founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1951, at 25, Maier moved from France to New York, where she worked for some time in a sweatshop. She made her way to the Chicago area's North Shore in 1956 and became a nanny on and off for about 40 years, staying with one family for 14 of them. She was, in the accounts of the families for whom she worked, very private, spending her days off walking the streets of Chicago and taking photographs, most often with a Rolleiflex camera. John Maloof, curator of Maier's collection of photographs, summarizes the way the children she nannied would later describe her: "She was a Socialist, a Feminist, a movie critic, and a tell-it-like-it-is type of person. She learned English by going to theaters, which she loved. She wore a men's jacket, men's shoes and a large hat most of the time. She was constantly taking pictures, which she didn't show anyone." Between 1959 and 1960, Maier traveled to and photographed in Los Angeles, Manila, Bangkok, Beijing, Egypt, Italy and the American Southwest. The trip was probably financed by the sale of a family farm in Alsace. For a brief period in the 1970s, Maier worked as a nanny for Phil Donahue's children. As she got older, she collected more boxes of belongings, taking them with her to each new post. At one employer's house, she stored 200 boxes of materials. Most were photographs or negatives, but Maier collected other objects, such as newspapers, and sometimes recorded audiotapes of conversations she had with people she photographed. Toward the end of her life, Maier may have been homeless for some time. She lived on Social Security and may have had another source of income, but the children she had taken care of in the early 1950s bought her an apartment in the Rogers Park area of Chicago and paid her bills. In 2008, she slipped on ice and hit her head. She did not fully recover and died in 2009, at 83.Source: Wikipedia Sometime in 1949, while still in France, Maier began making her first photographs with a modest Kodak Brownie– an amateur camera with only one shutter speed, no focus control, and no aperture dial. In 1951, she returned from France alone and purchased a Rolleiflex camera the following year. In 1956, she moved to the North Shore suburbs of Chicago, where a family employed her as a nanny for their three boys. She enjoyed the luxury of a darkroom as well as a private bathroom, enabling her to process prints and develop her own rolls of black and white film. As the children entered adulthood, Maier had to seek other employment, forcing her to abandon developing her own film. Moving from family to family thereafter, her rolls of undeveloped, unprinted work began to collect. It was around this time that Maier decided to switch to color photography. Her subject matter shifted away from people to found objects, newspapers, and graffiti. In the 1980s, financial stress and lack of stability once again put Maier’s processing on hold, and the undeveloped color rolls began to accumulate. Sometime between the late 1990s and the first years of the new millennium, Maier put down her camera and stored her belongings while she tried to stay afloat. She bounced from homelessness to a small studio apartment, which a family she used to work for helped pay the rent. With meager means, the photographs in storage became lost memories until 2007, when they were sold off due to non-payment of rent. In 2008, Maier’s health began to deteriorate after she fell on a patch of ice, forcing her into a nursing home. She never made a full recovery, leaving behind an immense archive of work when she died in 2009.Source: Howard Greenberg Gallery When John Maloof, a real-estate agent, amateur historian, and garage-sale obsessive, acquired a box of photographic materials and personal detritus at an auction in suburban Chicago in 2007, he quickly realized that he had stumbled upon an unknown master of street photography. But despite his vigorous snooping, he could find no record of Vivian Maier, the name scribbled on the scraps of paper that he found among the negatives, prints, and undeveloped rolls of film. He tracked down the rest of the boxes emptied from an abandoned storage garage, amassing a collection of hundreds of thousands of frames shot in New York, Chicago, France, South America, and Asia between the nineteen-fifties and the nineteen-seventies. Two years after he bought the first box, he Googled the name again and, to his surprise, found an obituary announcing that Vivian Maier had died only a few days before. The short text had just enough information for Maloof to deduce that Maier had worked as a nanny in suburban Chicago.Source: The New Yorker
Cecil Beaton
Cecil Beaton
United Kingdom
1904 | † 1980
Born in 1904 in London and coming of age at the peak of the 20's, Cecil Beaton was in love with the worlds of high society, theater, and glamour. Beauty in his hands was transformed into elegance, fantasy, romance, and charm. His inspired amateurism led to a following among fashionable debutantes and eventually a full fledged career as the foremost fashion and portrait photographer of his day. He was so attunded to the changes of fashion that his career maintained its momentum for five decades; from the Sitwells to the Rolling Stones. Beaton died in 1980.Source: Staley-Wise Gallery Sir Cecil Beaton, in full Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton, photographer known primarily for his portraits of celebrated persons, who also worked as an illustrator, a diarist, and an Academy Award-winning costume and set designer. Beaton’s interest in photography began when, as a young boy, he admired portraits of society women and actresses circulated on picture postcards and in Sunday supplements of newspapers. When he got his first camera at age 11, his nurse taught him how to use it and how to process negatives and prints. He costumed and posed his sisters in an attempt to re-create the popular portraits that he loved. In the 1920s Beaton became a staff photographer for Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines. He developed a style of portraiture in which the sitter became merely one element of an overall decorative pattern, which was dominated by backgrounds made of unusual materials such as aluminum foil or papier-mâché. The results, which combined art and artifice, were alternately exquisite, exotic, or bizarre, but always chic. Many of these portraits are gathered in his books The Book of Beauty (1930), Persona Grata (1953, with Kenneth Tynan), and It Gives Me Great Pleasure (1953). During World War II, Beaton served in the British Ministry of Information, covering the fighting in Africa and East Asia. His wartime photographs of the siege of Britain were published in the book Winged Squadrons (1942). After the war Beaton resumed portrait photography, but his style became much less flamboyant. He also broadened his activities, designing costumes and sets for theatre and film. He won Academy Awards for his costume design in Gigi (1958) and for both his costume design and his art direction in My Fair Lady (1964). Several volumes of his diaries, which appeared in the 1960s and ’70s, were summarized in Self Portrait with Friends: The Selected Diaries of Cecil Beaton, 1926–1974 (1979). Beaton was knighted in 1972.Source: www.britannica.com © All photographs wer scanned and released by the Imperial War Museum on the IWM Non Commercial Licence. The work was created by Cecil Beaton during his service for the Ministry of Information during the Second World War as an official photographer of the Home Front.
Jacque Rupp
Jacque Rupp
United States
Jacque Rupp is a humanist photographer residing in Silicon Valley. She picked up her first camera, a Rollei, in her teens, and immediately fell in love with the entire process- but especially how the camera connected her to others. Because she moved extensively as a child, Jacque learned quickly how to walk into new situations and build trust with people. She draws on these early experiences when creating a rapport with her photographic subjects. Jacque was an executive in the technology industry, responsible for recruiting top talent for many years. Interviewing and learning about people's stories fits directly into her style of photography. Jacque goes deep, looking to capture the human spirit by using layers, complexity, and emotion in her work. She received her MBA from Santa Clara University. She is on the Advisory Board for the United Nations Affiliated Film Festival at Stanford University and for the Weston Collective in Carmel. She has exhibited at the Center for Photographic Arts in Carmel, Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, The Daily Photograph and numerous on-line venues. Statement It's always about the people. Curiosity and connection. It's very personal for me. I'm drawn by intensity, intimacy and authenticity in my subjects. I am curious about different cultures, here and abroad, and search for stories about everyday people in everyday life. I look for a face that is lived in, a spirit I can connect with, a truth that is shared and a story to tell. I am seeking a sense of identity and place. When I engage with my subjects, this moment shared between us is an honor. In my photographs, I strive to show the humanity and universal spirit that binds all of us together. Spirit of India India, and especially its religious spirit, has always held a special place in my heart. My first visit was during a very vulnerable time in my life, my husband was terminally ill, and I found the calming spirit to be very healing. These images are a collection of my favorites over years. I love the spirit, the orderly chaos and the warmth of its people. As a visual artist, I see and very much appreciate the theatre and cast of characters.
Geert Broertjes
Geert Broertjes
The Netherlands
I try to look at the world as open and honestly as possible. No prejudices about people and not take things for granted. I'm a sensitive person, which means that I use my feelings as a guideline for everything I do. I think more with my heart than with my head. As a photographer I'm fascinated by the diversity of people. What are their motivations, on what do they base their choices in life and what is their purpose. This fascination began at an early age, when I was traveling with my parents through Europe. I used the old camera from my grandmother and I was immediately intrigued by this medium. After high school I studied Media & Information Management. But I soon realized that this was not for me and that my interest in photography was still there. So I began to study photography at the Photo Academy in Amsterdam where I graduated end of 2013. One of my strengths is that people quickly feel comfortable with me. This is because I have a sincere interest for the people I photograph and I'm open minded. This advantage I use in my photography. The photos I make are created from the feeling and trust that people have with me. They are personal, intimate and real. I'm not looking for the reality, because in my opinion, that doesn't exist. What I try to capture is a poetic, melancholic and romantic version of life. For my own projects I work with analogue cameras, because this expresses the mood I'm looking for. The magic of analog is that you never know for sure what the result will be. I encourage the viewer to use his or her own imagination. Since graduating I have been working as a freelance photographer for many different clients. I like the alternation between commercial assignments with a short span and my own long-term projects. About One Year In a very short space of time, Geert Broertttes lost the most important women in his life. His aunt, grandmother and mother passed away. He shared his grief with his girlfriend, who became a recurring theme in this series. But even this relationship ended, a couple of months after his mother passed. Broertttes photographed the process instinctively. It was only afterwards that he noticed the coherence of his work. It became a poetic story about love, loss and grief. The beautiful photographs, all shot analogue in raw black and white, reveal the dark feelings he experienced during this intense period in his life. All about One Year About Project K In March 2019 Geert had been suffering from abdominal pain for a while and it was getting worse. He had a rectal bleeding on the toilet and lost two liters of blood. After a few days in the hospital the doctor came with bad news. Geert had a tumor in his colon. They told him that he could not be saved anymore because the cancer had already spread to his lymph nodes, liver and lungs. After a second and third opinion in different hospitals the image was drastically adjusted. "It was all very strange and confusing, but after a few intense weeks the oncologists came with the message that I could get better." In April was the first operation, half of his colon was removed, then he underwent three chemotherapy treatments and in august he had another operation to remove pieces from his liver and gallbladder. His cancer is genetic. He got it because of the Lynch syndrome that his father was carrying, he past away last November. When Geert was diagnosed with colon cancer, Lotte asked him if she could make a portrait of Geert: "pure, without the presence of poisonous medicine in his body". That moment turned out to be the start of project 'K', in which we chose analogue photography to represent the three most common cancer treatments: chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery. Directly after his chemo, we used Geert's urine to soak the fim rolls with chemo. This way, we represented chemotherapy. To represent radiation, 4x5 inch film was irradiated in AMC hospital: the square in the middle of the film symbolizes Geerts' colon tumor which has the same size. Lastly, we partially burned some negatives to represent the surgery. With this series, we wanted to visualize the world you live in as a patient, and the huge contradiction in the treatments: it is made to make you better, but it breaks you down as well. Project "K" is about the fucked up reality in which strength and vulnerability play the lead role and hope is the constant factor. We are Geert Broertjes & Lotte Bronsgeest "Lotte explores the vulnerability of the body and the transience of life play an important role in her work, in which she always searches for the point where beauty meets confrontation. People are often quick in their judgement about each other, basing their opinions on the clothed body. Lotte is intrigued by discrepancies between opinions and reality." "Geert is fascinated by the diversity of people. What are their motivations, on what do they base their choices in life and what is their purpose. His work is a poetic, melancholic and romantic version of reality. He encourages the viewer to use his or her own imagination. His work is personal and emotional." We both graduated in 2013 from the Photo Academy in Amsterdam, that is where we met. We work as freelance photographers for different clients and create our own projects. Project K Website
Lauren Murphy
Lauren Murphy
United KIngdom
2000
Lauren is a still life photographer based in South East England, recently graduated from BA Photography at Middlesex University. A lot of her work stems from an interest in perception and how something recognisable or ordinary can be altered and viewed in a completely different way. She experiments with more abstract styles of working and is influenced by both colour and shape. Statement "Lockdown has felt very isolating. Being confined to our homes, normally places we know well, has felt increasingly surreal through over-familiarity. I have explored this concept by taking everyday, mundane objects from around the house and using them to construct something more abstract. I have specifically focussed on colour and shape to alter our perception of how they would normally be viewed. This body of work is made up of multiple mini-projects. Each one has used household materials to explore themes such as shape, geology, texture and abstraction." -- Lauren Murphy
Rinko Kawauchi
Rinko Kawauchi
Japan
1972
Rinko Kawauchi is a Japanese photographer. Her work is characterized by a serene, poetic style, depicting the ordinary moments in life. Since she began her photographic career, Kawauchi's photographs contained a unique aesthetic and mood, capturing intimate, poetic, and beautiful moments of the world around her. They often have brilliant and radiant light that gives them a dream-like quality. The sublimity of her photographs is further enhanced by her use of soft colors as well as her awareness of the beauty in even the most average moments. There is not one specific theme or concept that Kawauchi chooses to explore with her image creation; rather, she does it spontaneously, observing and reacting to everything that is around her before doing any sort of editing. She focuses on just shooting, and photographing everything that attracts her eyes before looking back and thinking about why she was interested in those subjects. Another subject that she explored in her book, Ametsuchi, was the practice of religious ceremonies and rituals that hinted at an earthly cycle involving the concepts of time and impermanence. In the book, she depicts Japan's Mount Aso, a sacred site for a Shinto ritual called yakihata, and its volcanic landscape. The ritual is a long-standing tradition dating back about 1,300 years in which farmland is burned yearly to maintain its sustainability for new crops as opposed to using chemicals, and the communities at Aso are among the few that continue this tradition. Ironically, witnessing essentially the rebirth of farmland take place, Kawauchi claims that she burned away her old self and was reborn herself. In her book Halo, she continues to explore that theme with different rituals at other locations. She traveled to Izumo, Japan to witness a ritual that involves the lighting of sacred flames to welcome the gods. She also went to the Hebei province of China to see new year celebrations, including a 500-year-old tradition of throwing molten iron at the city walls to make their own fireworks. Kawauchi became interested in photography while studying graphic design and photography at Seian University of Art and Design where she graduated in 1993. She first worked in commercial photography for an advertising agency for several years before embarking on a career as a fine art photographer. She has mentioned that she continues to work the advertising job. Her background and experience with design have influenced the edits and arrangements of photos in her series. Kawauchi often thinks about new ways to see her photographs, allowing her to continue to find new meaning and significance in her work. There is little known about her personal life and family, but through her photo book Cui Cui she portrays the memories of her family, which she has said to have been shooting for over a decade. The photos in the said book capture all the ordinaries and emotions of life, ranging from the happiness of childbirth to the heartbreak of death. At age 19, she began making prints of her first black-and-white photographs, and it wasn't until five years later that she started printing color photographs. After experimenting with different cameras, she decided to stay with the Rolleiflex, which she still uses. In 2001, three of her photo books were published: Hanako (a Japanese girl's name), Utatane ("catnap"), and Hanabi ("fireworks"). In the following years she won prizes for two of the books in Japan. In 2004 Kawauchi published Aila; in 2010, Murmuration, and in 2011 Illuminance. Kawauchi's art is rooted in Shinto, the ethnic religion of the people of Japan. According to Shinto, all things on earth have a spirit, hence no subject is too small or mundane for Kawauchi's work; she also photographs "small events glimpsed in passing," conveying a sense of the transient. Kawauchi sees her images as parts of series that allow the viewer to juxtapose images in the imagination, thereby making the photograph a work of art and allowing a whole to emerge at the end; she likes working in photo books because they allow the viewer to engage intimately with her images. Her photographs are mostly in 6×6 format. However, upon being invited to the Brighton Photo Biennial in 2010, Kawauchi first photographed digitally and began taking photos that were not square. Kawauchi also composes haiku poems. She lived for many years in Tokyo and in 2018 moved to the countryside on the outskirts of the city.
Ansel Adams
Ansel Adams
United States
1902 | † 1984
Ansel Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating "pure" photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph. He and Fred Archer developed an exacting system of image-making called the Zone System, a method of achieving a desired final print through a deeply technical understanding of how tonal range is recorded and developed during exposure, negative development, and printing. The resulting clarity and depth of such images characterized his photography. Adams was a life-long advocate for environmental conservation, and his photographic practice was deeply entwined with this advocacy. At age 12, he was given his first camera during his first visit to Yosemite National Park. He developed his early photographic work as a member of the Sierra Club. He was later contracted with the United States Department of the Interior to make photographs of national parks. For his work and his persistent advocacy, which helped expand the National Park system, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980. Adams was a key advisor in establishing the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, an important landmark in securing photography's institutional legitimacy. He helped to stage that department's first photography exhibition, helped found the photography magazine Aperture, and co-founded the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. In his autobiography, Adams expressed his concern about Americans' loss of connection to nature in the course of industrialization and the exploitation of the land's natural resources. He stated, "We all know the tragedy of the dustbowls, the cruel unforgivable erosions of the soil, the depletion of fish or game, and the shrinking of the noble forests. And we know that such catastrophes shrivel the spirit of the people... The wilderness is pushed back, man is everywhere. Solitude, so vital to the individual man, is almost nowhere."Source: Wikipedia To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces and record the qualities of nature and humanity which live or are latent in all things. -- Ansel Adams American photographer and environmentalist known for his black and white photographs of the American West in Sierra Nevada and in Yosemite National Park. Ansel Easton Adams was born in 1902 in an upper-class family. His family migrated from Ireland in the early 1700s. He was the only child of Charles and Olive Adams. His paternal grandfather founded a successful lumber business, which was later run by Ansel’s father. His mother’s family came from Baltimore. His maternal grandfather had a successful Freight-Hauling business, but squandered his wealth in numerous investment ventures. His nose was broken and scared during the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 as an aftershock threw him up against a wall. After the death of his grandfather the family business was hit by the bank crisis of 1907 and by 1912, his family’s standard of living had been dearly impacted. Ansel was a hyperactive child prone to sickness. After being expelled from several schools due to his restlessness, at age 12, his father decided to tutor him at home with the help of professors and Ansel’s aunt. He soon became interested in music and started learning the piano, but all changed when aged 14, his aunt gave him a copy of “In the Heart of the Sierras”. The photographs by Georges Fiske were a revelation and Ansel persuaded his parents to visit Yosemite National Park during the following vacations. Equiped with a Kodak Box Brownie n°1, Ansel Adams first visited Yosemite National Park in 1916. Amazed by the site and the light, he returned to Yosemite National Park the following year with better cameras and a tripod. He will return regularly to Yosemite National Park where he will even meet his future wife, Virginia Best. You don’t take a photograph, you make it. -- Ansel Adams At age 17, Adams joined the Sierra Club, a wildlife preservation group. He will remain a convinced environmentalist and a member of the Sierra Club his entire life. His work will promote the goals of the Sierra Club and bring environmental issues to light. In 1932, Adams founded the group f/64 with photographer friend Edward Weston, to promote their independent and modernist vision of photography. It is with Fred Archer that Adams will develop the Zone System (1939-40), a technique which allows photographers to define the proper exposure on negatives and adjust the contrasts on the prints. The depth and clarity of Ansel Adam’s photographs illustrate this technique. Initially, despite their size and weight, Ansel Adams used large format cameras as they offered a high resolution and a sharp image. The timeless photographs and the striking visual beauty clearly characterize Ansel Adams’ photographs. In 1952, he was also one of the founders of Aperture magazine. He died in 1984 from a cardio Vascular disease. Shortly after his death in 1984, the Minarets Wilderness in the Inyo National Forest was renamed the Ansel Adams Wilderness. In 1985, a peak in Sierra Nevada, was named Mount Ansel Adams. He was survived by his wife, two children and 5 grand children.Source: The Ansel Adams Gallery
Emilie Arfeuil
Emilie Arfeuil
France
1983
Emilie Arfeuil is a visual artist and photographer, with a background in cinema at Sorbonne University. She questions the complexity of representation of identities and their perception, the transformation of the gaze from the invisible to the visible, and the relationship between nature and unnatural. Her artworks are mainly presented in the form of photographs and installations, multimedia and sound creations or objects. She has won the Prix SAIF Les Femmes s'exposent 2022 and the 2nd Prize Gomma Grant 2021 with her project « Hylé ». Her work has been exhibited at the Promenades Photographiques, Boutographies, Map Toulouse, Quinzaine Nantaise, Fictions documentaires, Focus Festival in Bombay, as well as in galleries and institutions in France, Berlin, London, Phnom Penh and Brussels. His photographs have been published in Libération, Muze and Néon. The film "Scars of Cambodia" (co-written with Alexe Liebert) has received 8 awards and has been selected in about 20 international festivals. She lives in the south of France.
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Interview
Exclusive Interview with Matthew Portch
UK-born photographer Matthew Portch brings a quietly cinematic eye to the overlooked landscapes of suburban and rural America. Now based in Arizona, his photographic journey reflects a long-standing fascination with the cultural imprint of mid-century America—filtered through a distinctly outsider’s perspective. His series Lost America, selected for the September 2024 Solo Exhibition, captures an eerie stillness in the built environments of the American West, where nostalgia, silence, and isolation converge.
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Exclusive Interview with Chris Yan
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Chris Yan
Chris Yan is a Beijing-based photographer and Creative Director whose work focuses on street and documentary photography. His series Beijing Story, which earned him a solo exhibition in October 2024, offers a nuanced look at daily life in the city. In this interview, he discusses his photographic approach, creative influences, and the ideas behind the project.
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Exclusive Interview with Meg McKenzie Ryan
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Meg McKenzie Ryan
California-based photographer Meg McKenzie Ryan has followed an unconventional and deeply personal path into the world of photography. From chance beginnings in Hong Kong to a life shaped by travel, education, and immersion in vastly different cultures, her work reflects a deep curiosity about the world—and the people who inhabit it. Her solo project, The Lives of Others, awarded the March 2024 Solo Exhibition, is rooted in a documentary approach that feels both intimate and unflinching.
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Exclusive Interview with Evan Murphy
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Evan Murphy
At just 25, Evan Murphy’s work immediately stood out for its depth and maturity. A self-taught photographer originally from Las Vegas and now based in New York City, Evan blends raw emotion with a strong visual voice shaped by years of creative exploration. His series I.D. earned him a solo exhibition in July 2024, marking an impressive early milestone in a career that promises to go far.
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Exclusive Interview with Lydia Panas
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Lydia Panas
Lydia Panas, winner of AAP Magazine #38: Women, is an American photographer, known for her powerful and introspective portraiture. With a background in visual arts and philosophy, she uses photography to explore identity, vulnerability, and human connection—often drawing from personal experience to create images that are both intimate and thought-provoking. Her work has been widely exhibited and published, and is part of numerous permanent collections. We asked her a few questions about her life and work.
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Exclusive Interview with Hana Hana Peskova
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Hana Hana Peskova
Hana Peskova is a passionate self-taught photographer whose journey began at Škola kreativní fotografie in Prague. In 2021, she was awarded the prestigious EFIAP distinction by the Fédération Internationale de l'Art Photographique, recognizing her artistic excellence. Based in Český Krumlov, Czech Republic, she explores the world through street and documentary photography, capturing the beauty of fleeting moments and untold stories. Drawn to forgotten places and lives lived on the margins, her work reflects both emotional depth and creative vision. In April 2024, she won a solo exhibition with her powerful series Child Labour, further cementing her commitment to socially engaged photography.
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