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Abhishek Basak
Abhishek Basak
Abhishek Basak

Abhishek Basak

Country: India

Abhishek Basak is a professional freelance photographer specializing in travel, people, and documentary photography. Based in India, he has been dedicated to capturing compelling images and sharing the art of photography for over seven years. His journey in this field has been one of continuous exploration, boundless learning, and an unwavering passion for storytelling through the lens. He has served as a photography teacher at a distinguished school in Kolkata and continues to mentor aspiring photographers in various aspects, including post-processing. He is also a co-mentor for AH Photography Expedition, where he organizes photography tours and workshops to inspire and guide budding talent. He has achieved prestigious distinctions such as EFIP (Excellence FIP) and EFIAP (Excellence FIAP). He has mentored two National Geographic photographers from Poland. He has judged many national and international photography competitions. His photographs have been exhibited in more than 130 countries worldwide. He has been honoured with the Best Photographer Award over 70 times in international competitions held in countries like France, Luxembourg, Serbia, Bulgaria, Belgium, Ukraine, South Africa, Slovenia, Italy, and more. In India, he has received this distinction over 100 times in national competitions, amassing a total of more than 3000 awards across national and international contests. Awards and Honors: · HIPA Finalist in both 2018 and 2023. · First Indian to win the One Eyeland Photography Award 2024. · Winner in 35 Awards 2022. · Winner in Agora Photography Competition. · Winner in Black & White Photo Award. · Winner in World Photography Club Competition. · Winner in FIP Monthly Photography Competition. · Winner in India Photography Summit 2024. · Winner in Photography Club of Assam photo contest. · Winner in NAP Photo contest, Dhanbad Camera Club. · First Indian to win an award from Taichung Photo Award. · Honourable Mention at the KAFF International Contest. · Finalist in the prestigious SIENA International Photo Awards. · Finalist in Urban Photo Awards & Vanguard Photo contest, and many more. · In 2022, he earned 2nd place nationally in the EISA International Photography Competition, a distinguished honour in the field of photography. Publications: · His photographs have been featured in globally acclaimed publications and platforms, including National Geographic, Getty Reportage, The Bangla Live, Chiiz, Asian Photography Magazine, Smart Photography Magazine, Travellers’ World, Viewfinder, The Guardian, and Uttarbanga Sangbad. His work has also been published in major Indian media outlets, including Anandabazar, Eisamay, Bartaman, Anandabahar, Uttarbanga Sangbad, and Outlook Traveller, among others.

Kulasai Dussehra:
Kulasai Dussehra, celebrated in Kulasekarapattinam, Tamil Nadu, is one of South India's most unique and vibrant festivals. Unlike the traditional Dussehra festivities across India, which often center on Lord Rama's victory over Ravana, Kulasai Dussehra is marked by grand processions and intense devotion to Goddess Mutharamman, who is believed to be an incarnation of Durga. Thousands of devotees dress in various forms of gods, goddesses, and mythical figures, bringing alive the region's deep-rooted cultural and religious traditions.This festival showcases one of the diverse ways Dussehra is celebrated. It represents the triumph of good over evil while highlighting local traditions, beliefs, and artistic expressions. My photos of this event, taken in a 24-hour cycle covering start to finish, capture the fervour, colours, and deep spirituality of the festival, making it a cultural experience that deserves wider recognition and appreciation. Understanding Kulasai Dussehra broadens our view of India's rich heritage.
 

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Diana Markosian
Russia
1989
Diana Markosian is an American and Russian artist of Armenian descent, working as a documentary photographer, writer, and filmmaker. She is known for her photo essays, including Inventing My Father, about her relationship with her father, and 1915, about the Armenian genocide. Markosian was born in Moscow. In 1996, she moved to California with her mother and her brother, while her father remained in Russia. She had no contact with him until 23, when she found her father in Armenia, after 15 years of being apart. Markosian graduated summa cum laude from the University of Oregon with a bachelor of arts in history and international studies in 2008, and earned a Master of Science from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism in 2010 at the age of 20. In 2011, Markosian was sent to Azerbaijan as a photojournalist for Bloomberg News, but she was denied entrance to the country, which was at war with Armenia at the time. Markosian is of Armenian descent but not a citizen of Armenia. The authorities said they couldn't provide her with the "security" she would need because of her Armenian last name. Markosian began her career at 20. Her editorial and personal work has taken her to some of the most remote corners of the world. She worked on assignments for publications including National Geographic Magazine, The New Yorker and The New York Times. For her first assignment for National Geographic Magazine in 2015, she was commissioned to explore the power and legacy of the Virgin Mary. This ability to photograph "things that are no longer there" has become a signature of her work. Her images have since been published by the Financial Times, World Policy Journal, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Times, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, amongst other publications. She won the Columbia School of Journalism's annual photography prize, and was chosen as a duPont Fellow. She was selected for the Joop Swart Masterclass from World Press Photo and was the winner of the Magnum Emerging Photographer Fund in 2013. In 2015, she was selected as the first recipient of the Chris Hondros Emerging Photographer Award. The same year, the British Journal of Photography selected her in its global survey of "Ones to Watch". In 2016, Markosian became a nominee member of Magnum Photos. In 2018, she was awarded the Elliott Erwitt Fellowship to travel to Cuba, where she documented the coming of age of young girls in Havana. The work she created was exhibited as a solo show at the Grand Palais in Paris Photo and Photo Espana. She was awarded 1st Place in Contemporary Issues from World Press Photo for an image of Pura, a young girl who was diagnosed with a brain tumor as a child, and was photographed celebrating her quinceanera. Source: Wikipedia About 1915 "Holding a cane in his right hand, Movses Haneshyan, 105, slowly approaches a life-size landscape. He pauses, looks at the image, and begins to sing, 'My home... My Armenia.' It's the first time Movses is seeing his home in 98 years. A century ago, the Ottomans initiated a policy of deportations, mass murder and rape to destroy the Armenian presence in the Ottoman Empire. By the war's end, more than a million people, from what is now modern-day Turkey, were eliminated. It was one of first genocides of the 20th century, one that Turkish authorities deny to this day. Movses and his father survived. I traveled to Armenia to meet Movses and other survivors to ask them about their last memories of their early home. I then retraced their steps in Turkey to retrieve a piece of their lost homeland. One hundred years after having fled his birthplace, Movses caresses its image, as if by holding it close he will be taken back to the place he called home many years ago. This is his story, and those of other survivors. A story of home - everything they had, everything they lost. And what they have found again." -- Diana Markosian
Angelika Kollin
Estonia
1976
Angelika Kollin (b. 1976) is an Estonian fine art and documentary photographer based in Tampa, Florida. Her work is rooted in a lifelong desire to understand human experience: the search for belonging, the weight of faith, the quiet strength that lives inside ordinary people. She works primarily in portraiture and long-term documentary projects, drawn to relationships with her subjects that unfold slowly and demand patience. Over eight years living in Ghana, Namibia, and South Africa, her practice deepened through daily encounters with people who carried both hardship and grace with equal measure, and her work since has been an attempt to bring that presence through to the viewer. She enters the creative space intuitively, without armor and without a fixed destination, allowing what is true to surface. Her ongoing bodies of work include Song of Psalms, Parenthood, Mary's Children, and Maps of Grief, among others. Her photography has been recognized by the Sony Photography Award (2024), CPOY 78, the Julia Margaret Cameron Award (2024), LensCulture, and FMoPA, and has appeared in CNN, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Scientific American, and F-Stop Magazine. Her work has been exhibited internationally at the Helsinki Foto Festival, Photo London, FotoNostrum in Barcelona, the OFF Foto Festival in Bratislava, and in New York, Seoul, Berlin, Tallinn, and Cape Town. Statement: My main project for the year 2020 became You are my Mother that subsequently expanded into You are my Father. As the covid pandemic rolled over the world, many of us found ourself going back to basics and spending more times with our families. I started photographing my project in April, while we were still in complete lockdown in Cape Town,South Africa. Initially I only wanted to document an act of acceptance and joining I witnessed between a mother and her adult daughter. Afterwards I continued to explore same "story" in other mother/child connections, examining the impact it has on my own family life and on my audience. There is no groundbreaking story occurring in my project, and yet, at least for myself, I am learning to understand the significance and value of connection to our family and how it shapes us for the rest of our life.
Carmen Winant
United States
1983
Carmen Winant is a writer and visual artist who explores representations of women through collage, mixed media and installation. She is the Roy Lichtenstein Endowed Chair of Studio Art at The Ohio State University and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in photography. Winant utilizes installation and collage strategies to examine feminist modes of survival and revolt. Her recent projects have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Sculpture Center, The Columbus Museum of Art, and The Wexner Center of the Arts. Winant’s artist books — My Life as a Man and My Birth — were published by Horses Think Press, SPBH Editions, and ITI press; her forthcoming artist book will be published by Printed Matter Inc. Winant’s work has been written about in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BOMB, The Guardian, and Art in America. In 2019, Winant published with Printed Matter the book Notes on Fundamental Joy; seeking the elimination of oppression through the social and political transformation of the patriarchy that otherwise threatens to bury us. She lives in Columbus, OH, with her partner Luke Stettner and her two and four-year-old sons, Rafa and Carlo. About My Birth In the final spread of Carmen Winant’s book, My Birth—a moving interplay of collected photographs and personal writings on the confounding process of labor—a black-and-white image shows a new mother gazing into a hand mirror. On the opposite page Winant offers her own reflection: “By the time you are reading this, cracked open and flimsy, I will have birthed again. I am no closer to understanding who takes possession of this process, or locating the words to make it known.” The first part is true: Winant delivered her second son two months ago. But the rest? After a yearlong dive into the subject—combing for vintage pamphlets, sourcing materials from “OG midwives,” and reading Margaret Atwood, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and so many others—the artist seems to have come as close to grasping the unknowable as one can get, thanks to twin projects that have debuted this week. If the book skews intimate (snapshots of her mother’s own home deliveries weave in a rare thread of autobiography), Winant’s debut installation at the Museum of Modern Art is monumental. Part of “Being: New Photography 2018,” the collage, also titled My Birth, takes over two facing walls in a narrow 20-foot-long gallery. There, Winant has taped up more than 2,000 found images of women careening through the full, uncensored continuum of birth. “I’ve never been inside of a project in quite the same way,” Winant says by phone from Ohio, where she is an assistant professor at the Columbus College of Art & Design, referring to the way that real-life experience blurred with the flood of images taking over her studio: women weeping into pillows, collapsing into partners’ arms, submitting to medical devices (bane or blessing of modernity?), and bringing bodies out of their bodies.Source: Vogue
Hannah Villiger
Switzerland
1951 | † 1997
Capturing the essence of self, frequently in sensual sequences, Hannah Villiger employed her own body as both material and subject. She played a pivotal role in the artistic emancipation of women in the 1980s. Born in 1951 in Cham, near Zug, Villiger earned a diploma in sculpture from Lucerne’s Schule für Gestaltung at the age of twenty-three. Her early work swiftly garnered attention from critics, including Jean-Christophe Ammann, whose support catapulted her to recognition. Seeking her own artistic language, Villiger gradually transitioned to exclusive work in photography. Initially using a reflex camera and producing black-and-white images, her early work retained the influence of Land Art and Arte Povera. In 1980, she exclusively embraced Polaroid film, shaping her photography around a singular subject—her own body. Over a period of seventeen years, Villiger approached her body in a novel way, avoiding personal anecdotes and the allure of the flesh. Shamelessly and without narcissism, she focused solely on the volume and forms of her anatomy, manipulating and contorting it as one would with clay or a sculptor's chisel. The considerable size of these Polaroids, enlarged to be larger than life, imbued the images with a commanding physical presence. Yet, unlike some of her contemporaries associated with the Body Art movement, Villiger imposed no voyeurism on the viewer. In 1986, she settled in Paris, participating in the Venice Biennale in 1991 and the São Paulo Biennial in 1994, where she exhibited alongside Pipilotti Rist. Despite her premature death at the age of forty-six, Villiger left behind a bold and distinctive body of work, featured in public and private collections in Switzerland and abroad, notably in the United States. Institutional exhibitions featuring Hannah Villiger's work have been held at various venues, including the Centre culturel suisse, Paris (1986); Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (1988); Kunstverein Frankfurt (1991); and the 22nd Bienal de São Paulo (1994), where she showcased her art in the Swiss Pavilion alongside Pipilotti Rist. Posthumous solo exhibitions have been organized at Kunsthalle Basel (2001); Kunsthalle Bonn (2001); nGbK Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin (2002); MAMCO Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Geneva (2007); Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2008); and Centre culturel suisse, Paris (2012). Additionally, in 2020 and 2021, Villiger's work was featured in group exhibitions at Kolumba, Cologne, and the Museum zu Allerheiligen, Schaffhausen.
Sebastian Sardi
Sweden
1983
Sebastian Sardi was born in 1983 in Stockholm, Sweden. At the age of 22 he started taking classes in analog photography at the Peoples University in Stockholm. In 2009 he moved to Denmark to study photography at Fatamorgana the Danish school of art and photography. In 2011 he received a Bachelor’s degree in Art History and Visual Studies. He published his first photobook “A Cirkusz” in 2012. Sebastian began his work on photographing mines in 2008 after reading an article on how mining related injuries and deaths are systematically covered up by many authorities. 2019 his second book “Black Diamond” was published on Kehrer Verlag. Today Sebastian Sardi lives and works in Malmö and Copenhagen. Black Diamond It is an apocalyptic landscape. There are huge man-made craters everywhere that make up the visible landscape, the ground is burning, and a vast area is oozing with toxic gases, fire and smoke. Amongst all of this, there are men, woman and children digging in the soil with their bare hands. Coal is mined everywhere in Jharkhand, India, and large parts of it is sorted by hand. The locals call it; Kalaheera; or ”Black Diamond”.
Energy produced by the burning of coal is the single biggest contributor to the man-generated carbon dioxide emissions on this planet. Coal is a major part in the issue of global warming. In Jharkhand many people have been forced away from their lands when companies and authorities recognised the richness that hides in the ground. Underground fires force people to relocate. The mining companies claim they are unable to put out the fires, while the locals blame the companies for letting the fires burn so the coal can be reached and excavated from underneath their villages.

 There is a fragile balance between nature and mankind. A sense of discomfort is felt in the slow but seemingly unavoidable struggle towards the collapse of nature. The human inability to break patterns is painstakingly visible in these photographs, as we knowingly keep on extracting the ground beneath our own feet. Black Diamond is a close (self-)portrait of the people who work with extracting coal from the ground to supply the ever growing demands.


F. Bessma Rhea
United States
2002
F. Bessma Rhea is her father’s second-born daughter (first-born son), her mother’s last line of defense at the dinner table, and her sister’s favorite fun house mirror. She is the first person to speak in a crowded elevator and the last person to get a word in edgewise. Bessma has always been a big talker, but her preferred method of communication is using the visual language of photography. F. Bessma Rhea graduated from Montana State University in 2025, achieving a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Integrated Lens Based Media from the School of Film and Photography. Although Bessma spent the last four and a half years in Bozeman, Montana, Bessma was born, raised, and is now currently residing in San Diego, California. Her photographic journey has encompassed an exploration of various mediums, ranging from silver gelatin prints and digital flash photography, to alternative process and chromogenic printing in the color darkroom. From this exploration she learned to cultivate her aesthetic, her relationship to photography, and to refine and utilize her voice. In her own reflection, she sees herself as a detective and a scientist, but to the outside world, she is an artist and a photographer. With her camera she will continue to investigate and theorize about the world she’s a part of, and where she fits in. But in the moments she’s not photographing, she enjoys filthy explicit music – and classic literature. Gutter Dutchess: I organize my environment in the frame and listen to when the world tells me I am a woman. I consider questions like, “How do I photograph a homewrecker?” and “What is inherently aggressive about a haircut?”. I desperately follow curiosity like the north star. GUTTER DUCHESS is a punk portrait series represented by twenty color film images of friends, best friends, my sister, my mother, myself, and moments in between. From doctor’s appointments to dumpster diving, I comprehend a women’s world through a lens that is candid, impulsive, crude, jovial, contrite, and desperate to reject assimilation to any one characteristic. As I photograph, I find myself constantly fighting with my images because I am a pessimistic, hotheaded, angry little person. However, in these photographs, I am continuously confronted with an abundance of love from the women in my life, who are proof of the untamable female spirit. This work is messy, unglamorous, and a raw exploration of womanhood. Favoring emotional truth over aesthetic polish, my series sprinkles clues of the fallacy of attempting feminine definition. Artist Philosophy Photography is a method of comprehension, I want to understand what is here. I have always been intrigued by the surreal but perhaps that comes from a bigger desire to turn the psyche outward, to make the invisible visible. I am driven by the ability to push the boundaries of sensation through the uncanny, visceral, and provocative. Visual arts is my language to answer life’s biggest questions. Every series is a conversation and if photography is to speak then a camera is the tongue. I have completely fallen in love with the medium, and without the tongue there is no voice.
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