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Jon Kolkin
Jon Kolkin
Jon Kolkin

Jon Kolkin

Country: United States

Jon Kolkin has rapidly drawn the attention of the art world due to his ability to look at his subject matter from a very fresh, original and unique vantage point. He is known for his minimalist style, stripping away all distractions and focusing on the sole of his subject matter. Each body of work typically contains numerous plots and subplots, often with a socially relevant underlying theme. Like many artists before him, Jon has had a love affair with both the arts and the sciences. He was first introduced to photography as a young boy working in his father’s darkroom. He expanded his artistic horizons, becoming a nationally recognized clarinetist who toured Europe with the National Youth Symphony. These passions, combined with his fascination with the sciences, resulted in Jon’s decision to pursue a major in chemistry at Emory University with a minor in the Arts. After college he received a degree in Medicine. However, he never abandoned his love for the arts, taking photography courses at night while simultaneously completing his residency in Orthopedics. He is the only professional photographer from the Southeastern United States to serve on the faculty of both the Santa Fe and Maine Media Workshops. Jon is also a trained health coach who is nationally recognized as a guest speaker and educator on topics related to finding wisdom and a healthy balance within our lives.
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Guillermo Espinosa
Guillermo Espinosa is a Spanish photographer born in Madrid in 1985 and currently based in Berlin. He studied Graphic arts and wine making in Madrid. He started in photography around 7 years ago, making pictures in the streets of Madrid with an old reflex camera. Later on he moved to Germany to work as a waiter. It was then when he saw the potential of street photography as a way to grow personally and escape from the routine. Since then he has combined his job as a waiter with some jobs related to photography such as Cruiseship photographer or photographer for a german decoration shop. He is currently involved in a few ongoing street photography projects in the city of Berlin. Statement My artwork is about the relation between the human being and the public enviroment, searching for the insual in the usual or mundane. Trying to find candid moments in the dalily life using what the enviroment gives me, such a light, subjects, geometry, etc. Another distinguising feature is the friction created by the layers (physical or conceptual). I have been always attracted by the contrasts that happen in everyday life, the juxtaposition in any "normal" situation that can create many humoristic, visual or critic lectures. Even a frontal shot of a character on the street can be read in many different ways depending on the viewer, place or epoque. My main aproach is to create a connection with the viewer that can go beyond the aesthetics, making an image more than a 2D object that comfrontes the previous concept of the daily life
Emin Özmen
Turkey
1985
Emin Özmen (born 1985) is a Turkish photographer, photojournalist and film maker based in Istanbul. He has worked especially on Turkey, on refugees and in the wider Middle East, including Syria and Iraq. In 2013 he founded a photography cooperative named Agence Le Journal, which is based in Istanbul. In 2017, he became a nominee member of Magnum Photos. He currently lives in Istanbul.Source: Wikipedia In 2008, he published two photobooks, "Humans of Anatolia" and "Microcredit Stories in Turkey", a collection of stories on women who were able to access a microcredit in Turkey. That same year, he obtained a degree in media photography and documentary (photography) at the University of Art and Design in Linz, Austria. In 2011, his work on drought in Somalia was published in a book and he worked on the disaster of Tohoku Earthquake and economic protests in Greece. The following year, he covered the Syrian civil war and ISIS crises in Iraq. Since 2012, Emin Özmen is working on his longterm project "Limbo - Les Limbes" and has undertaken a long work of photographic documentation with the populations uprooted by the spiral of conflicts. He has traveled many times to Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Italy and France to meet people who were forced into becoming “refugees”.Source: www.eminozmen.com Emin Özmen is concerned with documenting human rights violations in his home country of Turkey and around the world. His deeply affecting work has brought attention to the suffering of those who are victim to natural disaster, civil unrest and corruption. Since a few years, he has been working on his two long-term projects: Limbo - Les Limbes, which documents the populations uprooted by the spiral of conflicts and Hidden War about the Kurdish conflict that has simmered for decades in Turkey. He worked in South Sudan in 2018 on the adversity and resilience of life in a Protection of Civilians camp and surrounding villages. In 2019 he travelled to Venezuela, where he covered the humanitarian crisis inflicting the country. His work has been published by TIME Magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Der Spiegel, Le Monde magazine M, Paris Match, Newsweek, among others. Özmen has won several awards, among them two World Press Photo awards and Public Prize of The Bayeux Calvados awards for war correspondents. He was a member of the jury of 2016 and 2018 World Press Photo Multimedia contests.Source: Magnum Photos
Michelle Sank
South Africa
Michelle Sank was born in South Africa and settled in the UK in 1987. She cites this background of growing up during Apartheid and being the child of immigrant parents as informing her interest in sub-cultures and the exploration of contemporary social issues and challenges. Her crafted portraits meld place and person creating sociological, visual and psychological landscapes and narratives. Known for her work on youth culture, her practice has expanded into long term projects documenting communities and cultures in depth. Sank undertook a BA Fine Art Degree at The Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town where her work was picked up by David Goldblatt who became a lifelong mentor. In leaving South Africa in the late 70’s she had a big gap in her career redefining her practice after many years when she completed her MA at De Montford University, Leicester in 2001. Her photographs have been exhibited and published extensively in the UK, Europe, Australia and Mexico, South Africa and the U.S.A. and her imagery is held in private and permanent collections worldwide to include Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, The Museum of Youth Culture, UK, Southeast Museum of Photography, Florida and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas. She has undertaken continuous commissions and residencies for prominent galleries and magazines in Europe and the USA and her work has won awards in numerous prestigious competitions to include the Taylor Wessing Prize, British Journal of Photography, Head on Foundation, IPA awards, Lens Culture and The Juliet Margaret Cameron award for Female Photographers. She was recently a winner in The Portrait of Britain and in 2024 she won the Open Portrait section in the Sony World Photography Awards. She has just been granted an Honorary Fellowship by The Royal Photographic Society. Sank has five published books to date her latest being “Burnthouse Lane” published by Dewi Lewis, 2024 – a celebratory account of an historic working class community in Exeter, Devon, UK. Burnthouse Lane The Burnthouse Lane estate was first dreamt up by Exeter City council in the idealistic 1920s in the UK to rehouse people from the West Quarter slum. Designed along garden city lines and purposely self-contained, it was a place for working-class families to live. The deprivation it was supposed to overcome has continued to haunt it, but the isolated nature of the estate and its intricate labyrinth of lanes have also made for positives, such as a close-knit community and a sense of solidarity among the residents. Ballade Ballade is a poetic homage to my birthplace, Cape Town. My strongest memories are of the Sea Point Promenade in Cape Town and its accompanying Pavilion swimming pool where I frequented the long walkway and its bordering vast grass areas through all of my formative years. I was born there, and my recall is one of tableaus transpiring through play, encounters and festivities. The pool, the walkway, the beaches and the green areas continue to serve as stage sets within which diverse performances unfold. Article Burnt House Lane
Roy Stryker
United Kingdom
1893 | † 1975
Roy Emerson Stryker was an American economist, government official, and photographer. He headed the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the Great Depression, and launched the documentary photography program of the FSA. It hired photographers to travel across the United States and document people in different areas and settings as part of showing the state of people in rural areas in those years. Specific projects were conceived to help assess effects of government programs. He later worked several years on a documentary project for Standard Oil, established the Pittsburgh Photographic Library (PPL), consulted with other companies, and taught photo-journalism at University of Missouri. In his later years he returned to the West, living at last in Colorado. After serving in the infantry in World War I, Stryker went to Columbia University, where he studied economics. He used photography to illustrate his economics texts and lectures. At Columbia, he worked with Rexford Tugwell. When Tugwell became part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Resettlement Administration, Stryker followed him. Tugwell and Stryker refocused the attention of the Resettlement Administration to document the problems of the heartland, and in 1935 Stryker became the head of the Historical Section (Information Division) of the RA. The RA was renamed as the Farm Security Administration, and Stryker set up the photo-documentary project. Stryker was a manager of the FSA's photographic project. The photographers involved attested to his skill in getting good work from them. He ensure that the photographers were well briefed on their assigned areas before being sent out, and that they were properly funded. However, Stryker has been criticized for his destructive editing, as he would sometimes physically deface negatives by punching holes in them. Stryker also made sure that mainstream publications had access to FSA photographs. This both helped focus public attention on the plight of the rural poor and set up the commercial careers of his photographers. Overall, from 164,000 developed negatives, some 77,000 different finished photographic prints were made for the press, plus 644 color images. Photographers hired by Stryker for the FSA included Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, John Vachon, Marion Post Wolcott, Russell Lee, Jack Delano, Gordon Parks, John Collier, Carl Mydans, and Edwin and Louise Rosskam. During World War II, the photographic unit of the FSA was reassigned to the Office of War Information. It was used to produce what was essentially propaganda and disbanded after a year. At the same time, the US Congress disbanded the FSA. The holdings of the FSA's photographic unit were transferred to the Library of Congress. Stryker resigned from the government. He worked for Standard Oil in its public relations documentary project from 1943 to 1950, hiring some of the photographers he had worked with at FSA. In selecting photographers for projects at Standard Oil (SO), Stryker sought those who possessed what he described as an "insatiable curiosity, the kind that can get to the core of an assignment, the kind that can comprehend what a truck driver, or a farmer, or a driller or a housewife thinks and feels and translate those thoughts and feelings into pictures that can be similarly comprehended by anyone." Photographers on the SO project included, among others: Berenice Abbott, Gordon Parks and Todd Webb; as well as Esther Bubley, Harold Corsini, Russell Lee, Arnold S. Eagle, Elliott Erwitt and Sol Libsohn, who would later follow Stryker to his next project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. After suggesting topics he wanted to be documented, Stryker gave his photographers the freedom to pursue their individual approaches to their subjects. As with all his projects, Stryker was adamant that his staff understand their subjects and their context before going out on an assignment. From 1950 to 1952, Stryker worked to establish the Pittsburgh Photographic Library (PPL). In 1960, the collection was transferred to the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. After leaving the PPL, Stryker directed a documentation project at Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation. Thereafter, he accepted consulting jobs on occasion and conducted seminars on photo-journalism at the Journalism School of University of Missouri. Stryker eventually returned to the West in the 1960s. He died in Grand Junction, Colorado. The Roy Stryker Papers, including manuscripts, correspondence, and vintage prints from the Stryker-directed projects: Farm Security Administration (FSA), the Standard Oil (New Jersey) Co. and Jones & Laughlin Steel, are held in Photographic Archives, Archives and Special Collections, University of Louisville.Source: Wikipedia
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Call for Entries
AAP Magazine #55 Women
Publish your work in our printed magazine and win $1,000 cash prizes