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Michal Korta
Michal Korta
Michal Korta
Michal Korta

Michal Korta

Country: Poland
Birth: 1975

Michał Korta, born and raised in Poland, is an award-winning portrait and documentary photographer based near Kraków. He studied Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków and German Literature at Jagiellonian University.

Korta’s work spans collaborations with press, publishers, and agencies, alongside personal projects across Central Asia, the United States, Israel, the Balkans, and Africa. His photography explores themes of identity, social dynamics, and the layers of history within landscapes and people. He has published three photography books, including Balkan Playground, nominated as one of Poland’s best photo books in 2018.

His photographs have been exhibited across Europe and beyond, and he lectures on photography in Poland and Switzerland. Recently, Korta has focused on portraiture and long-term personal projects, continuing to merge intimate storytelling with striking visual narratives.

Statement
"For years, I have been irresistibly drawn to the art of capturing the essence of creators—artists, musicians, writers, painters, composers, directors, and actors. Through my lens, I strive to craft portraits that are both unadorned and striking, each frame a vivid testament to their singular personality and unyielding spirit. I believe in the power of simplicity and the devotion to craft—the delicate art of feeling the sitter's energy, observing and shaping the light to honor presence. I’a a worshiper of natural light. Even if sometimes I have to modify it according to needs. Light is god."

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@michal_korta

 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Kamil Vojnar
Kamil Vojnar
Czech Republic
1962
Kamil Vojnar was born in the former Czechoslovakia in 1962. He studied at the School of Graphic Arts in Prague and began his career as a Graphic Designer. He left the country illegally (still Communist at the time) and moved to Vienna, and then eventually became a US citizen and finished his studies at the Art Institute of Philadelphia. He continued his career in Graphic Design which later led to illustration and imagery based on photography, working mostly for book and music publishing houses in New York City. At the same time, he continued to make his own imagery. After meeting his partner and having children, going back and forth between France and New York, they finally settled in St. Remy de Provence in South France where Vojnar has concentrated on his own work since 2005. He opened up an Atelier in St. Remy and then one in Paris in 2009, both of which carry his own work.His work consists of images digitally layered from many different photographs and textures. They are mixed-media archival prints on fine art paper or mounted on canvas. Some of his images are layered pictures printed on semitransparent Thai paper. These unique photomontages are then varnished with oil and wax, and on occasion painted with oil paints. Kamil, as a painter, points out, “In a painting, you can paint anything you want. In the photographic [medium], it must, on some level, exist first. That tension between what exists and what is made up is what interests me.” Thus, his images are often subject to very different interpretations (Source: Verve Gallery) About ElsewhereWell, … why … why "e l s e w h e r e"…?Because, … not really here, because not there or … over there, because … somewhere else, … "e l s e w h e r e"!!!In thousand years old small town in south France, I have little studio, tiny Gallery, up on the main street.People from all around the world come to this town. They walk it's ancient streets. Some see my place, some walk in and look around.And they ask … why, … the sky outside is blue, … the buildings ochre yellow, the olive trees pale green, … why are those pictures musty, sepia, dark. Why is their soul heavy? What happened? What has happened to me!And I say … I don't know, … they come to me that way. They are not really from here, they are not so much from there. They arrive from ..."elsewhere". I am just a pair of hands making them happen.I didn't look for them, I didn't choose them. They came to me, … they choose me!Artist? No. … Common' I am no Artist! I just make those little pictures. Just because they happen to me.And because … I cannot do anything else. I cannot do anything else, at least, until every last of them is out, … done.Just a pair of hands I am. Always struggling to let the image out. Always behind in my ability to execute on the paper what pours from ..."elsewhere", via my mind, my heart.It feels like, … really I have no personal connection to those pictures. I am not guilty.Don't ask me what they are, … what they mean. I don't know.Like orphaned kids, I collect them, feed them to grow.They have to be done. They have to get out there.If not me, … then who?Some are easy. Impatiently they bursting out into the openOthers play hide and seek. They leave a hint, they take me all over wrong paths, all around. They let me sweat, they let me freeze. They drag me through dry, dusty deserts, soak me in deepest seas. My shirt is bloody. My face is wet. Sometimes … sometimes I cry. Pure impossibility overwhelms me. Impossibility to make them happen as they appear to me. In their translucent light, through the tears, I see them, … I almost see them.No, I am no Artist. I just … I am just trying to do, … what I … almost … see.Yes, it's true! … I am making one picture over and over again.The same sofa, the same dress, the same image of Jesus on the wall in the background, as I have had throughout my childhood.Wings? … Yes, sometimes, there are wings. But those who carry them, they are no angels.They just want to be free. Pair of wings is like a passport to get away. To get to … elsewhere.E l s e w h e r e, … they say, it's not the destination, it's the journey, that counts.Therefore my little pictures are the humble documentation of that journey.They are the journey!Journey to … e l s e w h e r e!
Amanuel Sileshi
Amanuel Sileshi
Ethiopia
Amanuel Sileshi is a photojournalist based in Ethiopia currently working for AFP. He loves documenting the change and the effect that humanity brings with conflicts, wars, political reforms. photojournalism is a tool in which we can tell realities in one singular photo.
Arthur Tress
Arthur Tress
United States
1940
Arthur Tress (born November 24, 1940) is an American photographer. He is known for his staged surrealism and exposition of the human body. Tress was born in Brooklyn, New York. The youngest of four children in a divorced family, Tress spent time in his early life with both his father, who remarried and lived in an upper-class neighborhood, and his mother, who remained single after the divorce and whose life was not nearly so luxurious. At age 12 he began to photograph circus freaks and dilapidated buildings around Coney Island in New York City, where he grew up. Tress studied at Abraham Lincoln High School in Coney Island, and gained a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. After graduating from Bard College in 1962, Tress moved to Paris, France to attend film school. While living in France, he traveled to Japan, Africa, Mexico, and throughout Europe. He observed many secluded tribes and cultures and was fascinated by the roles played by the shaman of the different groups of people. The cultures to which he was introduced would play a role in his later work. Tress spent the spring and summer of 1964 in San Francisco, documenting the Republican Convention that nominated Barry Goldwater, civil rights demonstrations at segregated car dealerships on Van Ness Avenue, and the Beatles launching their 1964 tour. Tress took over 900 photographs that were put away and re-discovered in 2009, and featured in a show at San Francisco's deYoung Museum. He currently resides in San Francisco, California. Source: Wikipedia Arthur Tress began his first camera work as a teenager in the surreal neighborhood of Coney Island where he spent hours exploring the decaying amusement parks. Later, during five years of world travel, mostly in Asia and Africa, he developed an interest in ethnographical photography that eventually led him to his first professional assignment as a U.S. government photographer recording the endangered folk cultures of Appalachia. Seeing the destructive results of corporate resource extraction, Tress began to use his camera to raise environmental awareness about the economic and human costs of pollution. Focusing on New York City, he began to photograph the neglected fringes of the urban waterfront with a straight documentary approach. This gradually evolved into a more personal mode of “magic realism” combining improvised elements of actual life with stage fantasy that became his hallmark style of directorial fabrication. In the late 1960s Tress was inspired to do a series based upon children's dreams that combined his interests in ritual ceremony, Jungian archetypes, and social allegory. Later bodies of work dealing with the hidden dramas of adult relationships and the reenactments of male homosexual desire evolved from this primarily theatrical approach. Beginning in the early 1980s, Tress began shooting in color, creating room-sized painted sculptural installations out of found medical equipment in an abandoned hospital on New York's Welfare Island. This led to a smaller scale exploration of narrative still life within a children's toy theater and a portable nineteenth-century aquarium. Around 2002, Tress returned to gelatin silver, exploring more formalist themes in the style of mid- century modernism, often combining a spontaneous shooting style with a constructivist's sense of architectural composition and abstract shape. In addition to images of California skateboard parks, his recent work includes the round images of the series Planets and the diamond-shaped images of Pointers. Source: www.arthurtress.com
Marco Sanges
Marco Sanges
Italian
1970
SANGES is an imaginative and innovative photographer who has exhibited worldwide and published extensively. Clients and art projects include: Agent Provocateur, Cutler & Gross, Vogue, National Opera Munich,Dolce & Gabbana National Opera Stuttgart, Dario Argento, Stash Klossowski de Rola and Gunther Von Hagens' Body World. Academy of Art New York. Magazines include: Sunday Telegraph, Silver Shotz, Photo, All About Photos, Musee, Katalog, Lomography, Normal, Elle, Esquire, The Times, Independent, Fault , Aesthetica , Shoot, Harpers Bazar, L’œil De la Photographie. Wonderland Some of his short films include : Sugar, Meet me in Winter, Circumstances, Music Sound Machine, Sonnambula, Wunderkamera. His books include : Circumstances, Venus, Wild, and Erotic Photography, Love Lust Desire, Dolce & Gabbana Animal, National Opera Munich, The Cutting Room. Mefistofele Opera Stuttgart by Arrigo Boito. A multi-disciplinary artist, his film 'Circumstances' won Best Art Film at the Portobello Film Festival in London and Best Experimental Film at the Open Cinema Film Festival, St. Petersburg, Russia. Sanges' work is exhibited in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts permanent collection and at the Center for Creative Photography in Arizona - USA His distinctive photographs have been shown at major contemporary photography festivals including Helsinki Photo Festival and Batumi PhotoDays in Georgia and the Lodz Photofestiwal in Poland. One of his latest project 'Wunderkamera' has been exhibited at the Hospital Club in London and at the Chateau de Dampierre (France) and will be exhibited in the Gallerie de Buci in Paris February 2020.
Oliver Curtis
Oliver Curtis
United Kingdom
1963
Brought up in the Cotswolds, Curtis began his photographic education studying photography at the renowned course at Filton Technical College in Bristol. He went on to study film and television at the London College of Printing and has been balancing work in stills and moving image ever since. Curtis continues to produce stills portraiture for major broadcasters as well as generating his own projects for exhibition and publication. He sites as key influences William Eggleston, Saul Leiter and Paul Graham. He continues to plough a distinctly idiosyncratic path as Director of Photography on feature films as diverse as Clare Kilner's The Wedding Date, Frank Oz's Death At A Funeral and Joanna Hogg's Unrelated as well as experimental gallery-based installations such as Gideon Koppel's Borth. He remains in great demand worldwide shooting commercials for high profile clients such as Pantene, L'Oreal, La Perla, Ferragamo, Palmolive, Rimmel, Coca Cola, Sony, Guinness, Canon and Cadbury's. About Volte-Face: On visiting the Pyramids of Giza in Cairo in 2012, Oliver Curtis turned away and looked back in the direction he had come from. What he saw fascinated him so much that he has since made a point of turning his back on some of world's most photographed monuments and historic sites, looking at their counter-views and forgotten faces. Taken over a period of four years, Volte-face is an invitation to turn around and see a new aspect of the over-photographed sites of the world - to send our gaze elsewhere and to favour the incidental over the monumental... Curtis feels that despite the landmark not being present in the photograph, the images are still suffused with the aura of the construction. The camera lens effectively acts as a nodal point and, by giving the photograph the title of the unseen partner, this duality becomes a virtue. Volte-face will be published by Dewi Lewis featuring an essay by Geoff Dyer: https://www.dewilewis.com/collections/new-titles/products/volte-face The first exhibition of the Volte-face project was held at the Royal Geographical Society in London, Sept 2016. The collection has received a great deal of acclaim worldwide and has featured in the Financial Times Magazine (UK), NPR Radio New Hampshire (USA), Liberation (France) Wired.com and BBC World Update amongst many others.
Laurent Chéhère
Laurent Chéhère
France
This Parisian by birth is a former award-winning advertising for his campaign Road Safety. Audi or Nike. One day he decides to leave the advertising to go around the world. Upon his return he chose to live his two passions, travel and photography. From Shanghai to Valparaiso, frome Srinagar to Ushuais, from La Paz to Lhasa, from Bamako to Bogota. He will feed his imagination and give us his view of the world and others. He loves exploring the cities, suburbs, country, as he likes to explore all fields of photography from reportage to conceptual image. Its particular interest in architecture and offset ideas will be born the series of "Flying Houses". Real house? Imaginary house? He tries to show us their hidden beauty pulling them out of their anonymity and perhaps invites us to leave. Laurent Chéhère exposed the series "Flying Houses" at Dock en Seine City of Fashion and Design in June 2012 where he won the Prix Special. He is represented by the gallery "Paris-Beijing" where he will exibit this series in October 2012. The "Flying Houses" will be shown in China at the 2012 Pingyao Internation Photography Festival and the Internation Fair "Paris Photo 2012" Source www.parisbeijingphotogallery.com
René Dissel
René Dissel
The Netherlands
Rene Dissel is a Dutch photographer and musician, known for his landscapes, portraits and abstract work. He created the series "Seascapes" and the book "Ontmoetingen met Amersfoorters". His photography focuses on nature, water and the human impact on the environment, and he wants to capture emotions and create awareness. Dissel started with a Kodak camera as a child and rediscovered photography during his music career. His work is influenced by Irving Penn, Sebastião Salgado and Gerhard Richter. He experiments with various techniques, but prefers black-and-white photography. His latest theme, "sMelt", explores the effects of climate change. In this series, he portrays people in ice, captured during the melting process. This shows the transition from hard to liquid, revealing how ice changes and reveals new layers and details. Dissel's work invites reflection on the vulnerability and transformation of human beings.
Morteza Nikoubazl
Morteza Nikoubazl
Iran
1974
I was born in Tehran, Iran in 1974 and studied art and photography there. I started work as a freelance photographer for Iranian daily and weekly newspapers. I began working with the Reuters team as Freelance photographer since 1999 till 2013. After Reuters I worked with the New York Times International magazine, Polaris Images, Zuma Press and SIPA PRESS photo agencies and now I am working with the NurPhoto press photo agency. I am also UNHCR trusted photographer in Iran. Sense of death amid the COVID-19 outbreak in Iran Today is about one year after Government announced officially the COVID-19 cases in Iran and death still is everywhere. I could see patients who were infected by the new coronavirus in COVID-19 wards of hospitals who were breathing and after two hours they were died. In fact, life seems gone, time were stoped and people were looking for an empty hospital bed for their relatives. Sense of death is covered the daily life of people who have to fight with a new invisible enemy, and it will be getting worse when a country is under International sanctions. I was in the city of Bam for covering the earthquake in 2002-2003 and could see a U.S. Military cargo airplane landed after about 25 years since the Victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and I could see how the humanity could pass over the politic, but today I am witness how politic cover the humanity, sanctions still work and it pushed Iran to the end of the line of vaccine. People die left and right also medical personnel, But they hear about barriers to the import of the COVID-19 vaccines from western countries. When it comes to people's health, politics should be the last priority of countries, but it seems the politic is the first priority for the U.S., Iran and the European countries. On the other hand, Iranians cannot trust the China- Made, or Russian-Made vaccine and prefer the Iranian one, but they must wait until next year and try to be alive.
David Plowden
David Plowden
United States
1932
David Plowden was a renowned American photographer known for his evocative and poignant images of America's vanishing landscapes. Plowden's work documented the changing face of the American landscape, particularly the decline of small towns, historic structures, and industrial sites, with a deep sense of reverence for the past. Plowden's interest in photography began at a young age, and he honed his skills while studying at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he was mentored by renowned photographer Harry Callahan. Plowden's work was influenced by the work of Edward Steichen and Walker Evans, and he developed a distinct style that combined technical precision with emotional depth that resonated with viewers. Plowden's photography focused on capturing the essence and character of a rapidly disappearing America throughout his career. His black-and-white photographs were hauntingly beautiful, providing a glimpse into the past while raising questions about progress and preservation. Plowden's documentation of small towns and rural landscapes is one of his most notable bodies of work. He sought out areas untouched by modern development, photographing the fading facades of main streets, weathered barns, and decaying structures. He revealed the stories etched into the architectural details through his lens, conveying a sense of nostalgia and longing for a simpler time. David Plowden’s work is sometimes compared to that of the great WPA photographers—Walker Evans, Bernice Abbot, Russell Lee, Dorothea Lange—but he’s been in the field decades longer than any of them were. What he has done is nothing less than capture a whole nation passing through fifty years of changes as momentous as those unleashed by the Industrial Revolution. -- Richard Snow (from the forward of Vanishing Point) Plowden also focused on America's disappearing industrial landscape. He chronicled the decline of once-thriving industries like steel mills, factories, and coal mines. His photographs captured the stark beauty and melancholy atmosphere of these abandoned spaces, conveying the human impact of industrial decline and its toll on communities. Plowden's work was not limited to photography. He was a successful author, having written a number of books that combined his stunning images with thoughtful narratives. His books, such as "Vanishing Point: Fifty Years of Photography," provided an extensive visual record of his lifelong investigation of disappearing landscapes. Plowden's work received critical acclaim and was shown in prestigious galleries and museums around the world throughout his career. He received numerous honors for his contributions to photography, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. David Plowden's photographs are a visual testament to the importance of preserving our common history and America's vanishing landscapes. His photographs convey a sense of loss, prompting viewers to consider the impact of progress and the fragility of our built environment. The legacy of Plowden as a master photographer lives on, inspiring future generations to document and appreciate the landscapes and structures that define our collective memory.
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