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João Coelho
João Coelho
João Coelho

João Coelho

Country: Angola/Portugal
Birth: 1964

I was born in Angola, but the upheavals that preceded and followed the country's independence process forced my family to emigrate to Portugal, where I lived until about 15 years ago. My passion for photography was born in his teenage years, with a focus on landscapes and portraits. When I returned to Angola to work on social development projects, I had to live with people and scenes in very precarious conditions on a daily basis, which radically changed the way I was and how he saw the world. Gradually, I developed a strong desire to visually tell the stories of these people's survival, to give them a voice they had lost in society, and to try to arouse emotions and an awareness that something must be done to change the world for the better. Documentary photography came naturally to me as a tool to study the human condition, especially the enormous resilience of people in the face of the fragility of their lives and the greatest adversities they can face. My photography always aims to denounce the injustices that asymmetries and inequalities cause in societies. Currently, my work focuses more on projects, as they allow him to build more structured and solid narratives that can have a more transformative power in society.

Artist Statement:
I have always been fascinated by the human condition and its study has been a major driving force in my work. More than an aesthetic purpose, I want my photography to evoke feelings, emotions, and convey messages by telling stories that depict suffering or joy, despair or mutual aid, strength or disappointment, or simply resilience in the face of adversity and uncertainty about the future.

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More Great Photographers To Discover

B Jane Levine
United States
B Jane Levine was raised in the suburbs of New Jersey, a short bus ride from New York City. She has a PhD in Biochemistry from Columbia University, but left the field of molecular biology research to raise her family. After leaving research, she took an interest in photography and began taking classes at ICP and other online platforms. She further honed her skills through many photography trips all over the world. Her photography spans many genres including street photography, landscape photography, and long exposure cityscapes. Currently, her focus is a series of candid portraits of strangers captured on the streets of New York City. Statement I prefer to capture moments on the street without the knowledge of the subject so that the expression, gesture and/or movement are authentic. Sometimes I get caught and a subject will give me that nod of recognition at the moment of the shot or after I press the shutter. I often go out with no expectations of subject matter other than looking for a moment, which elicits some emotion that I respond to with the subject, it is mainly driven by an internal signal that connects me to the subject or situation. Experimentation keeps me in the moment. I try to respect the subjects that I photograph. People show themselves on the street the way they want others to perceive them. I take an image of a moment, which I observe with no other intent other than to memorialize the moment, which I recognize is real for the subject as well as myself. The people in the photographs all possess a characteristic, gesture, or physical trait that I identifies as part of my own story. The series is a composite of pieces of my life – a self-portrait.
Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky
Russia
1863 | † 1944
Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky (Russian, August 30, 1863 Russian Empire – September 27, 1944) was a Russian chemist and photographer. He is best known for his pioneering work in color photography of early 20th-century Russia.Prokudin-Gorsky was born in the ancestral estate of Funikova Gora, in what is now Kirzhachsky District, Vladimir Oblast. His parents were of the Russian nobility, and the family had a long military history. They moved to Saint Petersburg, where Prokudin-Gorsky enrolled in Saint Petersburg State Institute of Technology to study chemistry under Dmitri Mendeleev. He also studied music and painting at the Imperial Academy of Arts. In 1890, Prokudin-Gorsky married Anna Aleksandrovna Lavrova, and later the couple had two sons, Mikhail and Dmitri, and a daughter, Ekaterina. Anna was the daughter of the Russian industrialist Aleksandr Stepanovich Lavrov, an active member in the Imperial Russian Technical Society (IRTS). Prokudin-Gorsky subsequently became the director of the executive board of Lavrov's metal works near Saint Petersburg and remained so until the October Revolution. He also joined Russia's oldest photographic society, the photography section of the IRTS, presenting papers and lecturing on the science of photography. In 1901, he established a photography studio and laboratory in Saint Petersburg. In 1902, he traveled to Berlin and spent six weeks studying color sensitization and three-color photography with photochemistry professor Adolf Miethe, the most advanced practitioner in Germany at that time. Throughout the years, Prokudin-Gorsky's photographic work, publications and slide shows to other scientists and photographers in Russia, Germany and France earned him praise, and in 1906 he was elected the president of the IRTS photography section and editor of Russia's main photography journal, the Fotograf-Liubitel. Lithograph print of Leo Tolstoy in front of Prokudin-Gorsky's camera in Yasnaya Polyana, 1908. Perhaps Prokudin-Gorsky's best-known work during his lifetime was his color portrait of Leo Tolstoy,[6] which was reproduced in various publications, on postcards, and as larger prints for framing. The fame from this photo and his earlier photos of Russia's nature and monuments earned him invitations to show his work to the Russian Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich and Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna in 1908, and to Tsar Nicholas II and his family in 1909. The Tsar enjoyed the demonstration, and, with his blessing, Prokudin-Gorsky got the permission and funding to document Russia in color.[8] In the course of ten years, he was to make a collection of 10,000 photos. Prokudin-Gorsky considered the project his life's work and continued his photographic journeys through Russia until after the October Revolution. He was appointed to a new professorship under the new regime, but he left the country in August 1918. He still pursued scientific work in color photography, published papers in English photography journals and, together with his colleague S. O. Maksimovich, obtained patents in Germany, England, France and Italy.In 1920, Prokudin-Gorsky remarried and had a daughter with his assistant Maria Fedorovna née Schedrimo. The family finally settled in Paris in 1922, reuniting with his first wife and children. Prokudin-Gorsky set up a photo studio there together with his three adult children, naming it after his fourth child, Elka. In the 1930s, the elderly Prokudin-Gorsky continued with lectures showing his photographs of Russia to young Russians in France, but stopped commercial work and left the studio to his children, who named it Gorsky Frères. He died at Paris on September 27, 1944, and is buried in the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery.Documentary of the Russian EmpireAround 1905, Prokudin-Gorsky envisioned and formulated a plan to use the emerging technological advances that had been made in color photography to document the Russian Empire systematically. Through such an ambitious project, his ultimate goal was to educate the schoolchildren of Russia with his "optical color projections" of the vast and diverse history, culture, and modernization of the empire. Outfitted with a specially equipped railroad-car darkroom provided by Tsar Nicholas II and in possession of two permits that granted him access to restricted areas and cooperation from the empire's bureaucracy, Prokudin-Gorsky documented the Russian Empire around 1909 through 1915. He conducted many illustrated lectures of his work. His photographs offer a vivid portrait of a lost world—the Russian Empire on the eve of World War I and the coming Russian Revolution. His subjects ranged from the medieval churches and monasteries of old Russia, to the railroads and factories of an emerging industrial power, to the daily life and work of Russia's diverse population. It has been estimated from Prokudin-Gorsky's personal inventory that before leaving Russia, he had about 3500 negatives. Upon leaving the country and exporting all his photographic material, about half of the photos were confiscated by Russian authorities for containing material that seemed to be strategically sensitive for war-time Russia. According to Prokudin-Gorsky's notes, the photos left behind were not of interest to the general public. Some of Prokudin-Gorsky's negatives were given away, and some he hid on his departure. Outside the Library of Congress collection, none has yet been found.By Prokudin-Gorsky's death, the tsar and his family had long since been executed during the Russian Revolution, and Communist rule had been established over what was once the Russian Empire. The surviving boxes of photo albums and fragile glass plates the negatives were recorded on were finally stored in the basement of a Parisian apartment building, and the family was worried about them getting damaged. The United States Library of Congress purchased the material from Prokudin-Gorsky's heirs in 1948 for $3500–$5000 on the initiative of a researcher inquiring into their whereabouts. The library counted 1902 negatives and 710 album prints without corresponding negatives in the collection.(Source: en.wikipedia.org)
Ralf Peters
Germany
1960
In the series "24 Hours" Peters reflects on the moment of simultaneousness. He dissolves the visual antagonism between the moment before and afterwards in each image. The works represent the light cycle of one day, starting from the left at night, passing daylight and ends again in the darkness of the night. The time states are not superimposed one upon the other but set side by side. In an extraordinary technique Ralf Peters obtains that the transition of the different daytimes is shown as in fast motion and is continued without any cuts, but can be noticed in the brightness and the illumination of the motif. Day and night are united in one image and at the same time, appearing invisible and visible. The variety of subjects going from exotic landscapes to cool architecture allows a reflection about our own world and foreign surroundings referring to a superior relationship of time and space. (Source: Diana Lowenstein Gallery) Ralf Peters is a conceptual photographer who creates visual studies of places and objects, often in thematic series. Playfully navigating between fantasy and reality, Peters manipulates digital images to challenge the viewer’s conception of traditional photography, raising the question as to whether something is a realistic rendering or a skillfully manipulated vision. Through the creation of portraits of everyday locations like supermarkets, gas stations, and swimming pools, Peters explores the possibilities for the photographic medium. Manipulating the focus, lighting, and composition of his images, Peters creates photographs that obscure the traditional notion of capturing an individual’s perspective on reality, favoring, instead, constructed works that comment on the aesthetic relationship we have to our surrounding environment. Peters’s works have been shown at notable institutions including the Hamburg Kunsthalle and Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo. (Source: Art Space) Represented by: Diana Lowenstein Gallery Galerie Kornfeld Galerie Bernhard Knaus Fine Art Galerie Martin Mertens Galerie Andres Thalmann
 Izis
Lithuania
1911 | † 1980
Israëlis Bidermanas, who worked under the name of Izis, was a Lithuanian-Jewish photographer who worked in France and is best known for his photographs of French circuses and of Paris. Born in Marijampol, present-day Lithuania, Bidermanas arrived in France in 1930 to become a painter. In 1933 he directed a photographic studio in the 13th Arrondissement of Paris. During World War II, being a Jew, he had to leave occupied Paris. He went to Ambazac, in the Limousin, where he adopted the pseudonym Izis and where he was arrested and tortured by the Nazis. He was freed by the French Resistance and became an underground fighter. At that time he photographed his companions, including Colonel Georges Guingouin. The poet and underground fighter Robert Giraud was the first to write about Izis in the weekly magazine Unir, a magazine created by the Resistance. Upon the liberation of France at the end of World War II, Izis had a series of portraits of maquisards (rural resistance fighters who operated mainly in southern France) published to considerable acclaim. He returned to Paris where he became friends with French poet Jacques Prévert and other artists. Izis became a major figure in the mid-century French movement of humanist photography - also exemplified by Brassaï, Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau and Ronis - with "work that often displayed a wistfully poetic image of the city and its people." For his first book, Paris des rêves (Paris of Dreams), Izis asked writers and poets to contribute short texts to accompany his photographs, many of which showed Parisians and others apparently asleep or daydreaming. The book, which Izis designed, was a success. Izis joined Paris Match in 1950 and remained with it for twenty years, during which time he could choose his assignments. Meanwhile, his books continued to be popular with the public. Among the numerous books by Izis, Gerry Badger and Martin Parr have especial praise for Le Cirque d'Izis (The Circus of Izis), "published in 1965, but bearing the stamp of an earlier era". Shot mostly in Paris but also in Lyon, Marseille and Toulon, the photographs are "affectionate and nostalgic, but also deeply melancholic" with "a desolate undercurrent", forming a work that is "profound, moving and extraordinary". Source: Wikipedia
Randy Bacon
United States
Randy is an American photographer with an extensive history in portrait, commercial and documentary photography, both motion and still. Randy is also co-founder and artist behind all of the photography and cinematography of the nonprofit, people empowering story movement, 7 Billion Ones Randy has pursued photography professionally since 1984 and is in high demand with a client base extending worldwide. He travels to destinations across the United States, as well as numerous countries for projects. At the core of Randy's photography is the ability to present emotive visual stories with an underlying sense of narrative. His unique style reflects elements of influential film noir and old masters in painting and photography - Randy is especially influenced by photographers such as Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Diane Arbus, Ed Weston and others. Considering these influences, the connecting thread is the unending artistic mission to capture the art of people In their real, authentic, raw self. For Randy, this simple, yet complex, truth, "you were born an original", is still the creative seed that continues to grow his artistry for photography and film. In 2011, Randy expanded into the motion picture arena. Almost instantly he secured multiple commercial film projects. In 2012, his film career exploded with the release of his directorial and production debut, "The Last Days of Extraordinary Lives". The movie garnered a significant amount of coverage and awards, including having the film being broadcast on PBS to rave reviews. "The Last Days of Extraordinary Lives" ran the film festival circuit and accumulated an impressive fifteen film festival official selections and won fourteen awards, including Best Documentary, Best Picture and Best Director. Shortly thereafter, Randy released his second full-length documentary, "Man Up and Go" which received official selection to nine national/international film festivals. Both films are signed to Academy Award winning film company, Earthworks Films, and are distributed nationally by Filmrise. In 2015, Randy founded and launched the nonprofit humanitarian story movement, 7 Billion Ones, which documents lives, shares stories, connects community and empowers mankind. 7 Billion Ones is fully dedicated to using the art of photography, motion films, and written words to present people's unique stories in an artful, raw, impacting form, so that human transformation occurs exponentially. The story movement reaches a worldwide audience via sharing and connecting people through the enormous power of the world wide web. In consideration of Randycs ongoing work with 7 Billion Ones and other humanitarian projects, he was named as Presidential Social Change Artist in Residence at Saybrook University. In addition, Randy won the Award for Homeless Advocacy with the Alliance to End Homelessness. The Road I call Home For over 35 years I have explored the art of portraiture and I am still mesmerized by photography just like when I got my first camera at 15. It's a love affair that not only endured, but has grown as an essential part of my being. I am more in awe of photography as an art form each day. As a photographer and filmmaker, I have always been intrigued by the fact that each and every person is a one-of-a-kind original - a never before created miracle. This simple, yet complex truth, "we are ALL original miracles'' is the creative seed that flames my passion for photography and represents the connecting thread with all of my work. Over the years, I have photographed thousands upon thousands of people, across America and around the world, propelled by an infinite fascination and commitment as a photographic artist to capture the miracle of each person - the 'ones' on this planet of over 7 billion. I am finding that after all of these many years, of tending to my relationship between me and this thing called a camera that I am artistically driven more and more by people and their stories. With my photography, no matter the walk of life, I strive to present each 'one' in an authentic, no frills manner as to truly relay their inherent beauty, uniqueness and value. With the narratives, I provide the accepting, safe place, so each person can truthfully share their raw, unfiltered story. In the end, I hope the work will punch people in the heart and help create positive change, new understandings of humanity and connection within our world. This is my mission. The Road I Call Home is a powerfully direct extension of my mission - portraits that reveal their special qualities and dignity versus stereotypical attitudes and perceptions society commonly has of homelessness and often presented by the media. The impetus for this approach relates directly to my own life - I was guilty of being negative and uncompassionate towards the homeless. Yes, I judged the book by the cover; however as I opened the pages of each homeless person's life I saw the enlightening truth - homeless people are important 'ones' in this world of 7 billion and deserve love and compassion. The Road I Call Home represents my most ambitious single project to date. What began as a small idea to photograph a handful of homeless people now stands at over 170 homeless lives recorded via portraits, stories and short films. The Road I Call Home continues its path as we push forward chronicling more of our homeless friends' lives. The project has been exhibited at numerous museums and galleries, including several states, with more being planned. A corresponding coffee table art book for The Road I Call Home was published in 2021. Articles The Road I Call Home The Amazing Winning Images of AAP Magazine 17 Portrait
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All About Photo Awards 2026
Win a Solo Exhibition in February
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All About Photo Awards 2026
$5,000 Cash Prizes! Juror: Steve McCurry