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FINAL DAYS TO WIN A SOLO EXHIBITION IN MAY 2026
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Sylwia Makris
Sylwia Makris
Sylwia Makris

Sylwia Makris

Country: Poland
Birth: 1973

There is a spark within everything. A living light in the eyes of a person, a memory that flares up, the glow of a passion that was never declared. A face always tells more than it knows, wich is why photography is never a mere reproduction of what is. A good photo tells what was, why might have been or what is waiting painfully beneath the surface.

Sylwia Makris has been in pursuit of these sparks since she first held a camera. Her quest produces images that may delight or disturb but always move the beholder. She photographs people. People who are strong or delicate, broken or dynamic. She photographs faces of our time-and in doing so gives a face to our time. Nakedness is the most natural state. And in our day the most intrusive and common-every-where naked bodies are used to tempt, advertise and sell. Nakedness can only say as much as it is allowed to say. Sylwia Makris respects the nude body as part of a story that must be told. As part of a story that tels of people, nakedness regains its original magic, its archaic power and its complexity of expression in Makris' photos.

Until the viewer sometimes feels more naked than the model in the image. Sylwia Makris was born in 1973 in Gdynia, Poland. She worked as a sculptor before finding her way to photography in 2007. Today she lives in Munich as freelance photographer.

Websites

sylwiamakris.com

@sylwiamakris

 

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Barry Guthertz
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United States
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Barry Guthertz has been exhibiting his Fine Art photography throughout the Northeast for over 35 years. His award winning work has appeared in The Brooklyn Museum, The French Embassy, the General Electric and Union Carbide Corporate Galleries as well as in Silvermine Gallery in New Canaan,CT and The Flinn Gallery in Greenwich. He has had numerous solo exhibitions and participated in group shows in NYC, Portland, OR, London England, and throughout Fairfield County, CT where he lives. His b&w porfolios have been published twice in Lenswork Magazine, as well as on the cover in Shadow and Light Magazine, as the featured artist August 2018. Earth Rhythm The magnitude of nature's forces can both terrify and fascinate. Left in their wake is a mysterious beauty carved into the earth's landscape. These hypnotic shapes, forms and abstract patterns speak to my inner core. It's been a challenge to visually capture these breathtaking compositions as well as to share the extraordinary feelings that awaken inside me when I click the shutter.
Maria Kanevskaya
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Erik Hadife (b. 1998) is a Lebanese street photographer and filmmaker whose work explores the quiet strangeness of urban life at night. After studying at LSE and MIT, and working in strategy consulting in New York, he left the corporate world to focus fully on his practice. Hadife’s latest work responds to cities that move faster than our ability to notice them. In public spaces shaped by speed, his images slow the pace, drawing attention to fleeting interactions and unguarded moments caught in artificial light. His work has been exhibited internationally, including in New York, Venice, Athens, and Beirut. Statement Erik Hadife photographs cities at night, drawn to the quiet moments where something subtle shifts – where the ordinary starts to feel slightly off, and a glance or gesture reveals something beneath the surface. He works instinctively, following artificial light as it cuts through the dark, isolating people and briefly pulling them into focus before they disappear again. His work lingers on a tension at the heart of urban life: being surrounded, yet alone. These images hold on to fleeting encounters – where people cross paths without really meeting – and sit in that strange space between who we are and the environments we’ve built around us. Awarded Photographer of the Week - Week 14, 2026
Radosław Łowicki
Radosław Łowicki
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I got interested in photography as a teenager and it quickly became my greatest passion. In order to control the created images as much as possible, I started to develop my skills, learning the secrets of manual processing of photographic materials and darkroom work. Since the beginning, black and white photography has been in the center of my interests. Although I only use digital technology now. Reducing images to shades of gray allows me to emphasize the things and emotions that often escape in color photography.
Owen Deutsch
Owen Deutsch
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Owen Deutsch, a Chicago native, had a twenty-year career as a fashion photographer. He retired in 1986 to devote his time to a second business, Loft Development Corporation—a company with a rich history as an early pioneer in the practice of renovating old urban industrial warehouses and converting them into loft-style office spaces and other uses. In 2002, he was introduced to birding by a close friend who asked for some help with his bird photography. A whole new world opened up to him and he was hooked. He was back in the beauty business again, but this time it was birds, butterflies, and all the magnificent creatures of nature in front of his lens. Owen travels all over the world in pursuit of his passion, and his extensive website is a way of sharing his love of birds with friends. Chicago Tonight on WTTW-Chicago PBS aired a profile on his work ranging from his fashion career to his bird photography. Awarded Photographer of the Week - Week 29
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Edouard Fraipont
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Eli Reed
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Eli Reed, born Ellis Reed, is a photojournalist and photographer from the United States. Reed was Magnum Photos agency's first full-time black photographer and the author of several publications, including Black In America. Several pictures from that project have won awards in juried exhibits and exhibitions. Eli Reed was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University from 1982 to 1983 and is now a clinical professor of photojournalism at The University of Texas at Austin. In 1982, he was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography. Reed has received the World Press Award and the Overseas Press Club Award, as well as being a Sony Global Imaging Ambassador. He received a Lucie Foundation Award for Documentary Photography in 2011. Reed's photography was featured at the prestigious Visa pour l'image Festival Du Photoreportage in Perpignan, France, in 2015. Reed was asked to talk at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in October 2015 as part of their Visually Speaking series. He was a keynote speaker at National Geographic Magazine′s Photography Seminar in Washington, D.C. in January 2016. Stop talking theory... and do not over-think the image. Lose the ego and let the photograph find you. Observe the life moving like a river around you and realise that the images you make may become part of the collective history of the time that you are living in. -- Eli Reed Eli Reed grew up in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. At the age of ten, he took his first snapshot, of his mother near the Christmas tree. Self-taught in photography, he credits his direction to mentor Donald Greenhaus rather than formal education. He graduated in 1969 from the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts, where he studied illustration. Reed began working as a freelance photographer in 1970. His work from the Lebanon war (which he covered between 1983 and 1987), the 1986 Haiti coup against Baby Doc Duvalier, and the 1989 US military intervention in Panama attracted the attention of Magnum in 1982. Reed joined the agency as a full member in 1988. In the same year Reed photographed the effects of poverty on America's children for a film documentary called Poorest in the Land of Plenty, narrated by Maya Angelou. He went on to work as a stills and specials photographer for major motion pictures. His video documentary Getting Out was shown at the New York Film Festival in 1993 and honored by the 1996 Black Film-makers Hall of Fame International Film and Video Competition in the documentary category. Reed's special reports include a long-term study on Beirut (1983-87), which became his first, highly acclaimed book Beirut, City of Regrets, the ousting of Baby Doc Duvalier in Haiti (1986), US military action in Panama (1989), the Walled City in Hong Kong and, perhaps most notably, his documentation of African-American experience over more than twenty years. Spanning the 1970s through the end of the 1990s, his book Black in America includes images from the Crown Heights riots and the Million Man March. The main thing for me is that I'm happy that I've been able to work as a professional photographer. What is at the core of my work is, in essence, a mediation on being a human being. -- Eli Reed Reed began photographing movies and performers in 1992 and is a member of the Society of Motion Picture Still Photographers (SMPSP). Reed mostly shoots with the Olympus E-3, E-30, and EP-1 cameras. Eli Reed has taught at the Maine Photographic Workshop, the Wilson Hicks Symposium at Miami University in Florida, the Southeastern Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, Florida, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D. C., San Francisco State University, Harvard University, the Boston Institute of Art, the Academy of Fine Art in San Francisco, the University of Texas at Austin, Columbia University, Empire State College in New York, New York University, and the International Center of Photography.
John Kenny
John Kenny
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In 2006 I developed my style of portrait photography within traditional communities, heavily influenced by the dramatic pictures of chiaroscuro artists. Chiaroscuro is an Italian term which literally means light-dark. Back then, at the very start of my Africa journey, I was buzzing with energy having met people of real magnetism just days into my trip. I was excited by extraordinary people and fascinating cultures and wondered how I could possibly communicate and express these feelings of excitement to friends and family back home.The solution, I imagined, would involve abstracting the remarkable from the not so remarkable: put simply, I felt that the vibrant and intense individuals that I had met in traditional communities would best show their magnetism on camera when they were removed from the (often) dull and dusty backgrounds of their immediate environment. 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And of course, you also need to find exceptional people!Falling in love with photography, and the origins of this series:I first fell in love with photography around 2003. I had not been fortunate enough to receive an art or photography education, but I knew back then, when I picked up my first SLR camera, that I had found the perfect way to express myself. Every time I had the camera in my hand I was looking to improve, needing to know what everything and anything looked like once it had been through the photographic process. It was a bit like a mad pursuit of alchemy - throwing everything into the mix to see if any magic came out of the other side. The process of photographic learning is very rarely a simple one, but to me it remains beautiful: discoveries, experimentation and seeing for the first time how a camera distorts and enhances the world.In Africa I seem to have made it my goal to travel through some of the remotest areas of the continent where the reaches of urbanisation and 21st century living are barely detectable. Looking back, this wasn’t my intention when I first arrived there in 2006, but somehow I keep returning to Africa to photograph because I'm fascinated to encounter societies that are able to survive in some of the most arid, isolated and difficult environments that people have settled in. If you haven’t visited these places then the reality of living is not nearly as romantic or idealised as one might imagine. Life takes place against a backdrop of very uncertain resources and enormous hardships, but traditions and hospitality towards outsiders remain intact.I specifically chose to photograph the individuals that you see in these galleries because I had a very real sense of wonder when I met them. Each one of these people had something that attracted me, sometimes a piercing intensity, or an uncommon beauty, that I felt compelled to try and capture. It’s true that I photograph for myself, first and foremost, but a close second is my desire to show others this magnetism that draws one into the eyes of these fascinating people.I have usually travelled alone or with a guide on these journeys, along the way walking and hopping onto overloaded vehicles of every kind to head to remote settlements. Often the destination is a transient, weekly market where hundreds of vibrant, colourful people assemble somewhat incongruously against a dull, dusty backdrop for a few hours. Later in the day they will all melt away with their animals and traded possessions, until the location is again a patch of bone-dry ground with almost nothing to separate it from the rest of the featureless land that typifies much of the African Sahel. It is fascinating to observe this process play out in almost exactly the same way across countless African countries, many of which are separated by hundreds or thousands of miles across this huge continent’s surface.My favourite tools are sharp prime lenses and cameras that let you capture the tiniest pieces of detail: whilst these details may be insignificant alone, when aggregated I feel they help paint the picture of the environment and how each person adapts to theirs.My favourite series of work remains the Northern Kenya series which involved 6 weeks of intense travelling with my guide, Mo, across remote areas without a vehicle and often without any semblance of an idea how to get to the next tiny settlement. The trip was full of unique encounters in locations that seemed to be famous, to me at least, as places where no transport seemed to be heading. On one particular occasion we came across a lone Moran (warrior) emerge into the dawn light, miles from anywhere. He seemed like a mirage: a vibrant vision in pink cloth and bright colourful jewellery, and more acutely so when set against the hazy yellow monotone of land that he emerged from. Even for Northern Kenya, I thought he seemed to be in a remote, featureless location: devoid of any water, and within an hour it would again be blistering hot. Despite these uncomfortable realities - which clearly weighed more heavily on my mind than his - the warrior seemed confident of his bearings and stopped for a moment to exchange pleasantries with Mo and I. A couple of minutes later, after sharing cigarette with my guide, he purposefully set off walking again, to God knows where. This place that looked barren and foreboding, to me at least, was clearly his home.
Ayanava Sil
Ayanava Sil
India
I am Ayanava Sil a resident of Kolkata, India. By education I hold a degree of Master Of Business Administration in Marketing. Photography to me is an exemption to see things differently. I am a Street and Documentary photographer, with an objective of documenting everyday life. The uncertainty and the suspense drives me the most towards these genres of Photography. Documenting people over the years has provided me with the invaluable opportunity to explore the unknown and to embrace the conglomerate realities of people. I am one of the administrators and curator of Streets Of Calcutta which is the oldest and the largest Street Photography archive of Kolkata. My works has been published and recognized by different platforms like National Geographic, National Geographic Traveller India, CNN America, Getty Images, Business Standard, World-Street-Photography Book 5, APF Street Photography Magazine, Better Photography India, Asian Photography, Chiiz Magazine etc. I have been awarded by The Andrei Stenin International Press Photo Awards, News Times, Eye Win Awards, Golden Orchid International Photography Awards etc. My works has also been exhibited in multiple photography exhibition, to name a few, Jaipur Art Summit 2016, Ariano International Film Festival 2017, Kolkata International Photography Festival 2019, Wlasnymi Slowami Film Festival 2019. Where I Bloom As the world combats with an invisible enemy, many of our lives have come to a standstill now. A month ago our lives were pretty foreseeable with simple daily conventional work that all of us were looking forward to. The coronavirus pandemic has changed the whole scenario, today countries are under locked down, schools and universities have been closed, events are cancelled and many people have been asked to work from home. We have seen the Government enforcing every preventive measure to slow the spread of the virus and flatten the curve. During this critical time, it is essential that everyone stays at home and helps to prevent the spread of this virus. In these tough times, photography is one of the major businesses that has been affected a lot by this pandemic. All studios have been shut down, weddings have been postponed, all the sports events have been cancelled and presently more than half of the world is locked down and there is no possibility of travelling. I am a photographer who loves to roam around the city unwearyingly to document life on the streets but due to the pandemic it is impossible to go out of my house to shoot now. So to keep myself in practice and to keep my sanity I chose to document my house but with a definite objective as this work of mine will have a different approach from the rest of my works. Also, I challenged myself to shoot everything through my phone only. So I started shooting every corner of my house from the ground floor to the terrace, through the windows and the doors, the plants in my house to the birds which flies above my terrace. I decide not to include any human subject and the only reason behind this decision is because we often feel like we are the most important species, but the fact is that we will fade away with time but we will leave behind a lot of things when we are gone. I tried to portray those moments keeping the photographs minimalist and graphical in form and ambiguous in nature. During all this time I had an interesting observation and I discovered that sunlight creates fascinating graphical shadow movements in different parts of my house during each phase of the day. I think that the only positive outlook amidst the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak is that nature has started healing. I do not remember when I last saw such timely Norwesters in the past few years. The Norwesters generally hit during the months of April and May. It mostly occurs late in the evening when thick, dark and black clouds start appearing in the sky. It generally moves from west to east bringing torrential rain often with strong wind and lasts only for a short period of time. The Norwesters are beneficial for cultivation purposes in West Bengal and Bangladesh. This year, the Norwesters bought different and beautiful cloud patterns and I tried to weave them within my work as well.
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