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Rainer Elstermann
Rainer Elstermann

Rainer Elstermann

Country: Germany
Birth: 1965

Rainer Elstermann was born in West-Berlin in 1965. He took his first self-portrait-photographs when he was 17 years old. In 1983 when he was 18 he started working with the avantgarde experimental super-8 film production company Teufelsberg Produktion. In 1984 he began being seriously involved with photography after his uncle gave him a complete dark-room equipment. Further encouragment came by the way of famous fashion photographer Paolo Roversi who photographed Rainer Elstermann for Italien Vogue in 1985. After seeing his portfolio he insisted Rainer should be a fashion photographer in Paris. Instead Rainer Elstermann moved to London in 1988 where he remained until 1992, realizing little art projects and exploring photography. First assignements followed. In 1999 he started his studio as an advertising photographer. From 2006 Rainer Elstermann projects moved again towards Art photography and since 2009 he is exclusively concentrating on Art. Also in 2006 he met Andreas Stamm and they have been working together since.

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www.rainerelstermann.de

 

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Sirli Raitma
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Augusto De Luca
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Patrick Zachmann
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Patrick Zachmann (b. 1955) has been a freelance photographer since 1976. He joined Magnum in 1985 and became a member in 1990. Zachmann has dedicated himself to long-term projects on the cultural identity, memory, and immigration of different communities. In 1989, his story on the events of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square was widely published in the international press and his work was awarded the prestigious Prix Niepce. Zachmann’s published books include Enquête d’Identité ou Un Juif à la recherche de sa mémoire (1987) and W. ou L’Œil d’un Long Nez (1995). Zachmann’s directed films include the short film, La Mémoire de Mon Père (My Father’s Memory), and the feature-length films Allers-retour: Journal d’un Photographe (Round trip: diary of a photographer) and Bar Centre des AutocarsSource: The Eye of Photography For more than 40 years, Patrick Zachmann has produced acclaimed, long-term projects that use photography and film to explore themes of memory, identity and immigration. He has documented the Chinese Diaspora, Jewish identity and the plight of migrants in Marseilles, all the while pushing himself to subvert his ‘style’ by working with both analogue and digital, colour and black and white, and using multimedia formats. “I don’t want to repeat myself like many photographers do by developing a special style,” he says of his practice. Zachmann was born in 1955 in Choisy-le-Roi, France and became a freelance photographer in 1976. In 1982 he began an in-depth project on the Naples police and mafia, which resulted in his first monograph, Madonna! (1983), accompanied by a fictional novel inspired by his pictures. Following that he began a seven-year study of Jewish identity in France—finishing with his own family—which resulted in his second book, Enquête d’identité. Un Juif à la Recherche de sa Mémoire / Investigation of Identity. A Jew in Search of his Memory (1987). In 1989, his coverage of the events in Tiananmen Square, Beijing was widely published in the international press. In the same year, he was awarded the prestigious Prix Niépce for his work. To mark the twentieth anniversary of the events on Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989, Zachmann made a web-documentary Generation Tiananmen in 2009, shown on Le Monde, Der Spiegel and Al Jazeera’s websites. He is represented by Magnum Gallery, Clair Gallery (München) and Beaugeste Gallery (Shanghai).Source: Wikipedia
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Stefano Fristachi
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Ilse Bing
Ilse Bing
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Ilse Bing (23 March 1899 - 10 March 1998) was a German avant-garde and commercial photographer who produced pioneering monochrome images during the inter-war era. Bing was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Frankfurt, Germany in 1899. She was well-educated, with particular attention to the arts and music. Bing initially enrolled at the University of Frankfurt to study mathematics in 1920, but eventually moved to Vienna to study art history. In 1924, Bing began a doctoral program studying architecture. It was during her time as a doctoral student photographing buildings for her dissertation that Bing developed her lifelong interest in photography. In 1929, inspired by the work of Florence Henri, Bing moved to Paris to work with Henri and other Modernists. Her move from Frankfurt to the burgeoning avant-garde and surrealist scene in Paris in 1930 marked the start of the most notable period of her career. She produced images in the fields of photojournalism, architectural photography, advertising and fashion, and her work was published in magazines such as Le Monde Illustre, Harper's Bazaar, and Vogue. Respected for her use of daring perspectives, unconventional cropping, use of natural light, and geometries, she also discovered a type of solarisation for negatives independently of a similar process developed by the artist Man Ray. Her rapid success as a photographer and her position as the only professional in Paris to use an advanced Leica camera earned her the title "Queen of the Leica" from the critic and photographer Emmanuel Sougez. In 1936, her work was included in the first modern photography exhibition held at the Louvre, and in 1937 she traveled to New York City where her images were included in the landmark exhibition "Photography 1839-1937" at the Museum of Modern Art. She remained in Paris for ten years, but in 1940, when Paris was taken by the Germans during World War II, she and her husband who were both Jews, were expelled and interned in separate camps in the South of France. Bing spent six weeks in a camp in Gurs, in the Pyrenees, before rejoining her husband in Marseille, where they waited for nine months for the US visas. They were finally able to leave for America in June 1941. There, she had to re-establish her reputation, and although she got steady work in portraiture, she failed to receive important commissions as in Paris. When Bing and her husband fled Paris, she was unable to bring her prints and left them with a friend for safekeeping. Following the war, her friend shipped Bing's prints to her in New York, but Bing could not afford the custom fees to claim them all. Some of her original prints were lost when Bing had to choose which prints to keep. By 1947, Bing came to the realization that New York had revitalized her art. Her style was very different; the softness that characterized her work in the 1930s gave way to hard forms and clear lines, with a sense of harshness and isolation. This was indicative of how Bing's life and worldview had been changed by her move to New York and the war-related events of the 1940s. For a short time in the 1950s, Bing experimented with color, but soon gave up photography altogether. She felt the medium was no longer adequate for her, and seemed to have tired of it. In the mid-1970s, the Museum of Modern Art purchased and showed several of her photographs. This show sparked renewed interest in Bing's work, and subsequent exhibitions included a solo show at the Witkins Gallery in 1976, and a traveling retrospective entitled, ''Ilse Bing: Three Decades of Photography,'' organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art. In 1993, the National Arts Club awarded her the first gold medal for photography. In the last few decades of her life, she wrote poetry, made drawings and collages, and occasionally incorporated bits of photos. She was interested in combining mathematics, words, and images. When she gave up photography in the 1950s, Ilse Bing noted that she had said all she wanted to say with a camera. (Ref NY Times obituary - 1998)Source: Wikipedia
Erwin Blumenfeld
Erwin Blumenfeld
Germany/United States
1897 | † 1969
Born in Berlin in 1897 to Jewish parents, Erwin Blumenfeld began his career working as an apprentice dressmaker to Moses and Schlochauer in 1913. He opened his own company in Amsterdam in 1923, the 'Fox Leather Company', a leather goods store specialising in ladies handbags. After moving to new premises in 1932, Blumenfeld discovered a fully equipped dark room and began to photograph many of his -predominantly female- customers. The company went bankrupt in 1935, just as Blumenfeld's photographic career was beginning to take an upward turn. Following a move to Paris in 1936, Blumenfeld was commissioned to take the portraits of personalities including George Rouault and Henri Matisse and secured his first advertising work for Monsavon. Blumenfeld quickly captured the attention of photographer Cecil Beaton who helped him secure a contract with French Vogue. After World War II in 1941, Erwin Blumenfeld moved to New York where he was immediately put under contract by Harper's Bazaar and after three years, he began freelance work for American Vogue. Over the next fifteen years, Blumenfeld's work was featured on numerous Vogue covers and in a variety of publications including Seventeen, Glamour and House & Garden. During this period, he also worked a photographer for the Oval Room of the Dayton Department Store in Minneapolis and produced advertising campaign for cosmetics clients such as Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden and L'Oreal. In the late 50s, he also began to create motion pictures, hoping to use them commercially and began work on his biography and his book My One Hundred Best Photos which, despite being a renowned fashion photographer, only included four of his fashion images. Following Blumenfeld's death in 1969, numerous books on his work have been published, namely The Naked and the Veiled by his son, Yorick Blumenfeld, and his photographs have been exhibited at international galleries including the Pompidou Gallery in Paris, The Barbican in London and The Hague Museum of Photography in the Netherlands. In the 1960s, he worked on his autobiography which found no publisher because it was considered to be too ironic towards society, and was published only after his death.Source: Wikipedia Erwin Blumenfeld is considered to be one of the early pioneers of fashion photography alongside George Hoyningen-Huene, Cecil Beaton, and Horst P. Horst. It was not only his employment of experimental techniques in the darkroom, Dada and Surrealist influences, and groundbreaking street work, but Blumenfeld’s unique and masterful combination of elegance and eroticism that transformed fashion into high art and paved the way for Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Herb Ritts, and other photographers who enjoyed such prominence and recognition in the history of art. In addition to holding the record for the most covers of Vogue, Blumenfeld’s works were abundantly reproduced within the pages of Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar, Life and Vogue during the 1930s, '40s and '50s. Many of the images from these shoots will be featured in this exhibition and have since become icons of the history of fashion photography. Some have never been seen before. But all of the prints showcase not only Blumenfeld’s innovation as a photographer of fashion but also his spectacular skill as a printmaker. In his retrospective examination of Blumenfeld’s work, William Ewing writes, “His highly original and visionary work was a seamless blend of the negative and positive: taking the picture in the studio and making it in the darkroom.” In the studio, Blumenfeld often employed mirrors, glass, and backgrounds reproduced from paintings, images of cathedrals, or mosaics of magazine covers. He often used veils, which could distort or elongate the figure, confident that a woman partially concealed was more erotically charged that one seen fully nude. He also believed the printing of the image was as every bit as important as the process of capturing it, and like Man Ray, he was tirelessly inventive in the darkroom, deploying a variety of optical and chemical tricks, including multiple exposures, solarization and bleaching.Source: Edwynn Houk Gallery
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