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Parisa Azadi
Parisa Azadi
Parisa Azadi

Parisa Azadi

Country: Iran/Canada
Birth: 1986

Parisa Azadi is an Iranian-Canadian visual journalist whose work is grounded in themes of systematic violence, social injustice, and radical resistance within historically oppressed communities. Parisa has reported across the Middle East, South Asia, Africa, and Canada, covering civil unrest and state repression—including the Syrian refugee crisis in Jordan, missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada, and religious extremism in Bangladesh. Since 2017, Parisa has been working in Iran, examining the nuanced dynamics of communities living in the aftermath of political violence.

Parisa’s work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions across Europe and the U.S., including Cortona On The Move, Belfast Festival, the American Center For Photographers, Melike Bilir Gallery, among others. Her work has been recognized by the World Press Photo 6×6 Global Talent Program and the Chris Hondros Fund Award. In 2023, Parisa was named one of the British Journal of Photography’s Ones to Watch, received the Magnum Foundation Mobility Grant, and joined the South Asia Incubator Program. Her photographs have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Courrier International, Annabelle Magazine, among others.

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Giandomenico Veneziani
My name is Giandomenico Veneziani. I am an Italian photographer. I approached photography from a young age. I have learned over time the techniques and the infinite possibilities of artistic creation. Photographic experimentation finds ample expression during my travels. I was inspired by people, their stories, faces, emotions. Photography for me is an important means of sharing feelings and stories of the people I photograph. I take inspiration mainly from painting, books and films. I also studied the most important photographers who made the history of photography. I really like portraits and fashion photography. I try to make unique and unconventional shots giving my portraits a cinematic vision. Bringing my point of view to the public eye is my main goal. Getting someone into my inner world is something extraordinary just as photography is extraordinary. In every shot there is my person, my fragility, my emotions. I love photographing people and interacting with them drawing their essence through the photographic medium. My greatest gratification is being told "I feel beautiful because I am just like that". These shots represent me and also the photographed subject. Portrait photography is the testimony of an encounter, in fact the photographer's task is to guide the person so that she is able to bring out herself. Establishing a relationship of trust between the artist and the photographed subject leads to the creation of a connection that enriches both, since in the realization of a photographic project the fundamental element is to create a path whose journey is carried out side by side between photographer and model. I really like using artificial lights to create the right atmosphere. I take great pleasure in presenting my projects that deviate from a usual reality, which everyone sees. Sometimes it is very distorted, I represent parallel and imaginary visions and worlds belonging to a dystopian future. I like it for this because it is different and the different is beautiful because it is unique.
Michael Joseph
United States
1977
Michael Joseph is a street portrait and documentary photographer. Raised just outside of New York City, his inspirations are drawn from interactions with strangers on city streets and aims to afford his audience the same experience through his photographs. His portraits are made on the street, unplanned and up close to allow the viewer to explore the immediate and unseen. Michael's project “Lost and Found” has been featured on CNN.com, AllAboutPhoto.com and published in magazines internationally. He has been exhibited nationally, notably at Daniel Cooney Fine Art (New York, NY), the Aperture Gallery (New York, NY), Project Basho Gallery (Philadelphia, PA) as well as the Rayko Gallery (San Francisco, CA). He has lectured for Amy Arbus at the International Center of Photography (New York, NY) in portraiture classes at the New England School of Photography (Boston, MA) and taught at the Light Factory (Charlotte, NC). His portraits are held in the permanent collection at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Indiana and private collections. He is a 2016 Photolucida Top 50 winner, LensCulture Portrait Award Finalist and a recipient of the fellowship in photography from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Statement about the "Lost and Found" "We have secrets about traveling you wouldn't believe and we share with no one but ourselves."Huck Lost and Found is a portrait series that examines the individual souls of lost youth who abandon home to travel around the country by hitchhiking and freight train hopping. Within their personal journey driven by wanderlust, escapism or a search for transient jobs, they find a new family in their traveling friends. They are photographed on public streets using natural light, in the space in which they are found. Like graffiti on the walls of the city streets they inhabit and the trains they ride, their bodies and faces become the visual storybook of their lives. Their clothing is often a mismatch of found items. Jackets, pants and vests are self-made like a patchwork quilt, using fabric pieces of a fellow traveler's clothing embellished by metal bottle caps, buttons, safety pins, lighter parts, syringe caps, and patches. The high of freedom however, does not come without consequence. Their lifestyle is physically risky and rampant with substance abuse. Each traveler's story is different, but they are bound by a sense of community. Often unseen and mistaken by their appearances, they are some of the kindest people one might meet. Their souls are open and their gift is time. As one states, “They will give you their time because time is all they have.” And in some cases, in the family they have lost, they have found each other. Find out more about Michael Joseph in this article
Judi Iranyi
Hungary/United States
1943
Judi Iranyi was born in Hungary (1943). After World War II, she and her family lived in a displaced persons camp in Germany for a few years before emigrating to Venezuela, where she lived until she finished high school. She has also lived in Trinidad, Barbados, Germany, and Okinawa before moving to San Francisco in 1971. Ms. Iranyi became interested in photography in the sixties. She earned a BA degree in Art/Photography from San Francisco State University. Later she received an MA degree in Visual Design from U.C. Berkeley; completed a master!s level museum studies program at John F. Kennedy University; and an MSW Degree in Social Work at San Francisco State University. Ms. Iranyi has worked as a freelance photographer taking environmental portraits. She was also a staff photographer at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley and worked at the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums. She also worked as a California Licensed Clinical Social Worker until her retirement. After retirement, Ms Iranyi dedicated her time to photography. Her work includes portraits, travel photography, documentary, and street photography. Recently she has shifted her emphasis to botanicals and still life photography. Three of her life passions are traveling, literature, and photography, which have broadened her view of the world. Flowers for Klara On the 40th anniversary of my mother’s death, I decided to create a series of floral bouquets to honor her memory. She had a difficult life, living during WWII, living in displaced peoples’ camps and two emigrations one to Venezuela and then to Germany where she died in her mid fifties after a long illness. Exclusive Interview with Judi Iranyi and Remembering Michael
María Tuleda
Nurse by profession, I discovered photography by chance a little over a decade ago and since then I have dedicated part of my free time to taking photos. Self-taught, I conceive photography as an instrument to create, tell and transmit, but above all to feel. I do not follow norms or rules, and I confess to being more interested in suggesting than in the photographic technique itself. There's something nostalgic and beautiful about decadence, and maybe that's why almost all of my shots end up having a certain decadent feel to them. I have no idea why I make the images I make, I guess we look with a camera as we are, or one day we were. My photos are simply a visual diary, they show what I see, and how I felt. Photography allows me to return to that childlike curiosity, which makes me want to explore not only in the world, but within myself. When they ask me what I want to express with my photos or my way of creating them, the answer is simple: Provoke, simply provoke some sensation. A few years ago I decided to show my images on social networks, opening up a range of opportunities to disseminate my work, but if I have to choose a medium where I can express myself through photography, it is the photobook. Being able to create a visual narrative, with a set of photos between sheets of paper inside a book, has been a wonderful experience, yes, I confess, photobooks have me fascinated. On many occasions I don't know why some of the images I make exist. And honestly, I don't care to know. The birds What do birds represent in artistic photography? It is a simple filler in the composition, with the purpose of making it more attractive and attracting the viewer, or for the author, it has a meaning. The answer may be a little of both. It is easy to find the presence of symbols in creative or artistic photography, including birds. Jennifer Ackerman, a bird scholar, after spending time observing them, came to the conclusion that birds remember, think, feel, give gifts and love. And they also fly, and that is what makes them so special, that is what arouses so much interest and at the same time envy: the ability to fly. The author of the wonderful novel "Rebecca", Daphne du Maurier, is also the author of the story about "The Birds" in the Alfred Hitchcock film. Horror story where roles are exchanged, giving way to the revolution of the birds, and they are the ones who keep humans locked up, imprisoned and caged in their homes. Leonardo da Vinci's obsession with understanding the flight of birds led him to make a study and treatise on flight while painting the Mona Lisa. Some of the discoveries he made anticipated the foundations of modern aeronautics. Hundreds of birds fly over the Prado Museum of various species, a recent study reveals that there are nearly 700 paintings that illustrate frozen birds through the brushes of artists such as Rubens, Hieronymus Bosch or Goya. It is evident that birds have always aroused a lot of interest throughout history, and without a doubt they have been and are sources of inspiration, not only in art. But really, in artistic photography, what do they symbolize? The Mexican photographer and lady of symbols, Graciela Iturbide, is clear: "Birds are the eyes that help me fly." She claims that she loves them and for her they represent freedom. I share Graciela's considerations about the concepts she attributes to birds for her creations. I have no idea why they are so present in my work, why I go out into the world with my camera, sometimes, even with the sole intention of looking for them and photographing them. When they ask me what I want to express with their presence, I feel perplexed for not having a clear answer. I wish I could give you an exact answer about the important message behind this work. Birds, above all for me, are symbols of vision and freedom perfectly outlined in the process of the concept of creation, and at the same time, a metaphor alluding to an infinite number of things. My photos are simply a visual diary. They show what I see or what I saw, and how I felt. Photography allows me to return to that childlike curiosity, which makes me want to explore not only in the world, but within myself. On many occasions I don't know why some of the images I make exist. And honestly, I don't care to know. For others, the presence of birds perhaps blurs the composition, or they are representations that are too disturbing or tedious, and therefore contrary to what I intend to provoke, but perhaps that disparate vision that photography provokes is not part of its magic.
Alessandra Sanguinetti
United States
1968
Alessandra Sanguinetti is an American photographer. A number of her works have been published and she is a member of Magnum Photos. She has received multiple awards and grants, including the esteemed Guggenheim Fellowship. Her first solo show in the United States was in 2005 at Yossi Milo. Born in New York City, Sanguinetti moved to Argentina at the age of two and lived there until 2003. Currently, she lives in San Francisco, California. Her main bodies of work are The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of their dreams twenty + years long documentary photography project about two cousins—Guillermina and Belinda—as they grow up in the countryside of Buenos Aires; On the Sixth Day which explores the cycle of life and death as through farm animals lives; Sorry Welcome, a meditative journal on her family life; Le Gendarme sur la Colline, documenting a road trip through France in 2018. She has been a member of Magnum Photos since 2007 and is a Magnum Workshop teacher.Source: Wikipedia An ICP graduate, she began a series of works in 1999 about the relationship between two nine-year-old cousins, Belinda and Guille, who live on a farm outside of Buenos Aries. Sanguinetti photographed them for ten years, charting their evolution from girls to young women. The girls collaborated with Sanguinetti on the series, The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of their Dreams, to construct images that evoke the fantasies and fears that accompany the physical and psychological transition from childhood to adulthood. The photographs use costumes and props, as well as references to art and literature, to explore the diffuse boundary between fantasy and reality. As the girls age, the photographs become more meditative as they start exploring their adult lives. Sanguinetti is a member of Magnum Photos, and her photographs are held in museums including the Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts Houston; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.Source: International Center of Photography "I was born in NYC in 1968. Two years after that, my family and I moved to Buenos Aires, where I grew up, worked and lived until 2002. I'm based in California now. I've been a photographer since I'm ten years old and made half of my work in a small area 200 km south of Buenos Aires. I've also made and are making work in many other parts of the world. To do so, I've had the support of the Guggenheim Foundation, The Hasselblad Foundation, the National Fund for the Arts of Argentina, the Harvard Peabody Museum/Robert Gardner Foundation, the Aperture/Hermes Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the John Gutman, Alicia Paterson and the Magnum Foundation."
Randall Romano
Canada
1957
Randall has been making photographs for over 45 years, initially in the nature/landscape genre, eventually evolving to run a commercial photography business focused on interior and exterior architectural clients. Since 2015, after closing the business, he focused solely on photographing subjects and projects that are of personal interest. These consist largely of street and documentary subjects. He has also been active in lecturing about photography, to a wide variety of Ontario camera groups. These presentations sought to stir up and challenge traditional notions on photography, bringing to light the work and importance of master photographers. A recent book publication: Reaching a Higher Level in Photography (2023) has come out of these presentations. I believe the camera’s strength is its ability to capture fleeting moments, to stop time and create a sense of curiosity in the viewer. If a still image is to be successful it has to illustrate something missed and something fleeting. Chasing this fleeting moment of uniqueness allows me to better saviour life. A father of four children, Randall and his wife Catherine live on a rural property near Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. Statement Photography represents much more to me than only exploring the world. It is the ability to capture a moment of time, to rip a unique page from the book of life. Photographs at their best tell a story or reveal a penetrating statement, not only through an individual picture but also through groups of photographs. The camera provides a means to document and freeze a passing juncture, perhaps capturing an important instant, a blink of vision that without the camera would be gone forever. The simple act of making a photograph encourages the photographer to stop and carefully look at the complexity of life. This uncomplicated act opens up details of the world lost to others. At its true essence, the camera is a persistent companion documenting a unique view of the world and travelling along through our life journeys. The techniques I use to capture these moments of life and narratives are not based on technological prowess, because to me the camera is only a tool to be harnessed. Photographs reflect and document the real world and are a contemplation of things as they are. Technology is only a means to capture this reality. The ultimate success of the process is the strength and validity of the final product, and the need it creates in the viewer to linger and explore. Winner AAP Magazine #30 Shadows
Herbert List
Germany
1903 | † 1975
Herbert List was a German photographer, who worked for magazines, including Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and Life, and was associated with Magnum Photos. His austere, classically posed black-and-white compositions, particularly his homoerotic male nudes, taken in Italy and Greece being influential in modern photography and contemporary fashion photography. He was born on 7 October 1903 to a prosperous business family in Hamburg, the son of Luise and Felix List. He attended the Johanneum Gymnasium, and afterwards studied literature 1921–23 at the University of Heidelberg. While still a student he became apprenticed in the family company, Landfried Coffee. In 1923, after two years in Heidelberg learning about the coffee trade and attending lectures at the university on Greek art and literature, List traveled for the family business Kaffee-Import Firma List & Heineken, Hamburg. Between 1925 and 1928 he visited plantations and contacts in Guatemala, Costa Rica, San Salvador, Brazil (where he stayed for six months) and San Francisco. During this time he began taking photographs. In 1929 he met Andreas Feininger who inspired his greater interest in photography and gave him a Rolleiflex camera. From 1930 he began taking portraits of friends and shooting still life; was influenced by the Bauhaus and artists of the surrealist movements, Man Ray, Giorgio De Chirico and Max Ernst; and created a surrealist photograph titled Metaphysique in a style he called fotografia metafisica in homage to De Chirico, his most important influence during this period. List used male models, draped fabric, masks and double-exposures to depict dream states and fantastic imagery. He has explained that his photos were "composed visions where [my] arrangements try to capture the magical essence inhabiting and animating the world of appearances." While there are surface similarities to Nazi imagery of the athletic male body—that of Leni Riefenstahl for example—unlike them, List's pictures of friends are portraits as much as they are nudes, nor did List endorse Nazi ideas, nor did his work influence National Socialist photography. He never published his male nudes in his own lifetime, and kept them hidden in his mother's house in a sack he called his poison bag". He was however influenced in his depiction of romantic paganism by the Jugendbewegung youth and physical health movement, though he did not join any of its associations, and some of the ideals of the Jugendbewegung were co-opted by the Nazis (though they later denounced the movement) and influenced their idealizing Romantic realism. List in his own notes uses a pun—"Das Objektiv ist nicht objectiv,"—to emphasize his creative, non-realist, application of photography. The lens is not objective. Otherwise photography would be useless as an artistic medium. -- Herbert List In 1936, in response to the danger of Gestapo attention to his openly gay lifestyle and his Jewish heritage, List left Germany for Paris, where he met George Hoyningen-Huene with whom he travelled to Greece, deciding then to become a photographer. In 1937 he worked in a studio in London and held his first one-man show at Galerie du Chasseur d'Images in Paris. Hoyningen-Huene referred him to Harper's Bazaar magazine, and 1936–39 he worked for Arts et Metiers Graphiques, Verve, Vogue, Photographie, and Life. List was unsatisfied with fashion photography. He turned back to still-life imagery, continuing in his fotografia metafisica style. From 1937 to 1939 List traveled in Greece and took photographs of ancient temples, ruins, sculptures, and the landscape for his book Licht über Hellas. In the meantime he supported himself with work for magazines Neue Linie, Die Dame and for the press from 1940 to 1943, and with portraits which he continued to make until 1950. In List's work the revolutionary tactics of surrealist art and a metaphysical staging of irony and reverie had been honed in on the fashion industry that relied on illusion and spectacle which after World War II returned to a classical fixation on ruins, broken male statuary and antiquity. In 1941, during World War II, he was forced to return to Germany; but because one of his grandparents was Jewish he was not allowed to publish or work professionally. In 1944 he was drafted into the German military, despite being of partly Jewish ancestry. He served in Norway as a map designer. A trip to Paris allowed him to take portraits of Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Christian Bérard, Georges Braque, Jean Arp, Joan Miró, and others. After the war, he photographed the ruins of Munich where he continued to live until 1960, working mainly for the Swiss magazine Du, with freelance photo essays for Heute, Epoca, Look, Harper's Bazaar, Flair, and Picture Post. He was made art editor of Heute magazine, published by the Allied occupying forces, in 1948. In 1951, List met Robert Capa, who invited him to work as a contributor to Magnum, but he rarely accepted assignments. For the next decade he produced copious work in Italy. During this time he also started using a 35 mm film camera and a telephoto lens. He was influenced by his Magnum colleague Henri Cartier-Bresson as well as the Italian neorealist film movement. In the 1950s he also shot portraits of Marino Marini, Paul Bowles, W. H. Auden, and Marlene Dietrich in 1960. Over the period 1949–62 he visited Italy, Greece, Spain, France, Mexico, and the Caribbean. List's 1950 picture of a woman, her black dress spread about her, reclining at a respectable distance from an elderly man reading, with one leg of his trousers rolled above his socks and garter, both enjoying the spring sunshine on the front steps of the Glyptothek in Munich, was selected by curator Edward Steichen for the world-touring Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Family of Man, seen by 9 million visitors. In 1964 List was awarded the David Octavius Hill Prize of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Lichtbildner. Herbert List is best known for his book Junge Männer (1988) which contains more than seventy images of young men lounging in the sun, wrestling and innocently regarding the camera lens. It is introduced by Stephen Spender in whose autobiographical novel The Temple, written in 1929 but not published until 1988, List is fictionalized as Joachim Lenz. List gave up photography in the early 1960s to concentrate on his collection of Italian Old Master Drawings. He died in Munich on 4 April 1975, and his archive was absorbed in the Ratjen collection which was later acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington.Source: Wikipedia
Ernest Cole
South Africa
1940 | † 1990
Ernest Cole was born in South Africa’s Transvaal in 1940 and died in New York City in 1990. During his life he was known for only one book: House of Bondage – published in 1967. In 2011, the Hasselblad Foundation produced a follow-up: Ernest Cole: Photographer. Cole’s early work chronicled the horrors of apartheid and in 1966 he fled the Republic of South Africa becoming a ‘banned person’. He was briefly associated with Magnum Photographers and received funding from the Ford Foundation and Time-Life. In North America, he concentrated on street photography in primarily urban settings. Between 1969 and 1971, Cole spent an extensive amount of time on regular visits to Sweden where he became involved with the Tiofoto collective and exhibited his work. From 1972, Cole’s life fell into disarray and he ceased to work as a photographer, losing control of his archive and negatives in the process. Having experienced periods of homelessness, Cole died aged forty-nine of pancreatic cancer in 1990. In 2017, more than 60,000 of Cole’s negatives missing for more than forty years were discovered in a Stockholm bank vault. This work is now being examined and catalogued.Source: Magnum Photos Ernest Cole (1940–1990)—one of South Africa’s first black photo-journalists—created powerful photographs that revealed to the world what it meant to be black under apartheid. With imaginative daring, courage, and compassion, Cole portrayed the everyday lives of blacks as they negotiated apartheid’s racist laws and oppression. Apartheid, which means “apartness” in Afrikaans (the language of South Africa’s white minority of Dutch descent), was an often brutally enforced legal policy that separated people by race in all aspects of life, within a white supremacist hierarchy of power. Born in Eersterust, a black freehold township in Pretoria, Cole was forcibly relocated with his family to nearby Mamelodi in the late 1950s. While still a teenager, he began working as a darkroom assistant at Drum, a black lifestyle magazine in Johannesburg. There he mingled with young black South African photographers, journalists, jazz musicians, and leaders of the burgeoning anti-apartheid movement. Inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photo-essays, Cole embarked on a life mission to produce a book that would awaken the rest of the world to apartheid’s corrosive effects. House of Bondage was published in New York in 1967. Although it was immediately banned in South Africa, contraband copies spurred on the country’s emerging activist photographers. Cole’s images are hard-hitting and incendiary, yet often subtle and even elegant. He frequently worked clandestinely with a hidden camera to capture scenes he was forbidden to photograph, employing striking perspectives and framing. Many of the prints on view here are displayed for the first time uncropped, as he originally intended, and often accompanied by House of Bondage’s incisive captions. In 1966 Cole was arrested by the South African police. Fleeing to Europe, he took with him little more than the layouts for his book. He spent the remaining 23 years of his life in painful exile between Sweden and the United States; after 1975 he was often destitute, living on New York City streets and in the subway. In 1990 he died of cancer at the age of 49—one week after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. Nearly all his possessions were lost; fortunately, he had given some prints to Tio Fotografer, a Swedish photographers’ association, which later donated them to the Hasselblad Foundation. Bringing this remarkable artist’s works to the international stage, Ernest Cole Photographer commemorates his pioneering efforts to capture the complex truths of day-to-day, lived experiences during harrowing times. Critiquing institutionalized segregation and celebrating human resilience, Cole challenged the status quo, and his work continues to speak eloquently and forcefully to contemporary issues of poverty and racial inequality in the United States and worldwide.Source: Grey Art Gallery, NYU
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AAP Magazine #55 Women
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