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Win a Solo Exhibition this February. Juror: Harvey Stein
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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

Mariska Karto
Netherlands
Mariska Karto is an artist/ fine art-photographer born in Suriname (South-America) and raised in the Netherlands. In this age of rapidity and technical development, in which human is exposed to impersonal detachment of current technical era, Mariska Karto creates the vulnerable and intensive dimensions of human feelings and emotions. This all happens in the dreamworld she has created with her technique in which past and present have found their way to each other, in this era of transformation.She talks to you in a language without words using symbolism in a dreamworld of historic paintings atmosphere.Mystique, tragic and erotic are the keywords for her work. Her work are like old stories escaped from an old world of eternal dreams, eternal emotions and eternal feelings that existed for hundred of years but still repeats themselves as in a pattern of an earthy rite, in this new modern contemporary era.Her works are like poems and thoughts, restless ones but are also like whispers of thoughtless experiences, floating in a centuries long movement in time.Artist Statement"My work is based on a period in which photography did not exist, It was not until the end of the 18th century that it was invented. As a result of this, people thought that photography would make the art of painting disappear, especially in the post modern era, the traditional art had to make way for new technical developments. In my work I seek and found a respectful connection of technique and traditional craft through a striking contradiction. Painters in the Baroque/renaissance time were trying to paint as true-to-life with painting-techniques and color applications. What a camera does is portray the world in its realistic colors. That’s the contradiction in my work, it’s the other way around. I shoot realistic images and through an intensive transformation process, the work is changed, true-to-life in the characteristic Baroque colors and style of that time. Eventually, this says nothing about photography and technique, but more about the great masters of that gone era, they were able to be as realistic and accurate as possible with brush and paint the world in all its reality… That’s the great contradiction in my work, I’m leaving the visible reality of our current time, and bring the invisible realism of the past forward in my work. As a result of this, I pull away present time from its structure and then time appears to be just a definition, which slowly fades away, when current and past becomes interwoven with each other.” More background info: "I mix skills from different worlds together. It is a blend of skills of my (I'm originally a painter and sketcher, textiles - I was a textile artist some years ago, photography and image processing) that ultimately meets each other in this form of art. A main factor are also social emotional influences in my life which developed how I see, learn and finally understand things in an essential (psychological) way. All these (artistic) elements from different areas and personal influences come together in a work of mine."
Michael Knapstein
United States
1956
Michael Knapstein (born 1956, Stevens Point, Wisconsin, USA) is a fine-art photographer who has earned international recognition for his insightful and nuanced visual exploration of the American Midwest. He now lives in Middleton, Wisconsin. Michael's photographs began attracting national attention while still in high school. At the age of 17, his work earned its way into the permanent collection of the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY. After graduating from the College of Fine Arts and Communication at the University of Wisconsin, Knapstein began a 30+ year career in the world of advertising. He sold his ad agency in 2010 and returned to his first love of photography. Since this reemergence, Michael's work has been recognized with hundreds of awards in some of the world's most prestigious photography competitions. He is a four-time Critical Mass Finalist, Pollux Award Winner and was named International Landscape Photographer of the Year at the 5th Barcelona Foto Biennale in Barcelona, Spain. He was also named one of "14 Inspiring American Artists" by Skillshare and Feature Shoot. His work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. The Unforgotten My photographic series “The Unforgotten” was created to honor and preserve the rapidly disappearing family farm and the rural agricultural tradition that helped build the American Midwest. During my lifetime, we have lost more than 105,000 family farms just in my home state of Wisconsin. While these traditional small farms are falling victim to corporate agriculture and urbanization, their legacy is still honored with events that celebrate the proud agricultural heritage of the Midwest. Often, these gatherings include antique agricultural equipment, sometimes dating back to the days of steam power. I explored this world for several years by attending more than 50 small agricultural fairs and rural festivals across the Midwest. I was drawn to this subject matter because these people and their farm equipment – both once symbols of progress and innovation – now stand as relics of a bygone era. The resulting images speak to themes of rural identity, memory, loss, history, heritage, pride, family, community and sense of place. To express the timeless nature of this material, I approached this project from a “straight photography” perspective in the spirit of Group f/64. My approach was informed by the iconic work of WPA artists and mid-century modernist photographers such as Adams, Weston, White, Strand, Parks and Evans. My work was also influenced by the American Regionalism movement and the work of artists including Wood, Benton, Curry, Wyeth and Hopper. These proud people and their farm machines may eventually fade into the mist of time. But perhaps through my images, their stories may forever remain Unforgotten.
Yael Martínez
Mexico
1984
Yael Martínez (born 1984) is a Mexican Photographer which became a Magnum Photos Nominee member in 2020. Martínez is based in Guerrero, Mexico. Martínez's work has explored the connections between, poverty, narcotrafic, organized crime, and how this affects on the communities in his native Guerrero in southern Mexico. He is trying to represent the relationship of absence and presence and this state of invisibility in a symbolic manner working with the concepts of pain, emptiness, absence, and forgetting. Yael Martínez received the Magnum Emergency Fund, Magnum On religión, and was named one of the PDN´s 30 new and emerging photographers to watch in 2017. In 2015 he was selected in the Joop Joop Swart Master Class Latinoamerica and was finalist in the Eugene Smith grant in 2015, 2016. He was nominated to the Foam Paul Huf Award, the Prix Pictet and the Infinity award of the International Center of Photography.Source: www.yaelmartinez.com Martínez’s work addresses fractured communities in his native Mexico. He often works symbolically to evoke a sense of emptiness, absence, and pain suffered by those affected by organized crime in the region. He is the recipient of the Eugene Smith Award 2019, was fellow of the Photography and Social Justice Program of The Magnum Foundation. He won the 2nd Prize of the World Press Photo contests 2019 in the category of long-term projects. Martínez was grantee of the Magnum Foundation in the grants: Emergency Fund and On Religion in 2016- 2017. His work has been featured in group shows in America, Europe, Africa and Asia. His work has been published by: The Wall Street Journal, Blomberg news, Lens NY times, Time, Vogue Italy, Vrij Nederland, Aperture.Source: Magnum Photos
Gail Albert Halaban
United States
1970
Gail Albert Halaban (born Gail Hilary Albert, 1970, in Washington, DC) is an American fine art and commercial photographer. She is noted for her large scale, color photographs of women and urban, voyeuristic landscapes. She earned her BA from Brown University and her MFA in photography from Yale University School of Art where she studied with Gregory Crewdson, Lois Conner, Richard Benson, Nan Goldin, and Tod Papageorge. She married Boaz Halaban on 8 June 1997. Albert Halaban's work has appeared in the The New York Times Magazine, New York magazine, TIME Magazine, M, World Magazine, Slate (magazine), and The Huffington Post. Her fine art photography has been internationally exhibited. Gail Albert Halaban was a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in 2019. Gail Albert Halaban received her BA from Brown University and earned her MFA in Photography from Yale University. The artist has three monographs of her work, including Out My Window (PowerHouse, 2012), Paris Views (Aperture, 2014) and Italian Views (Aperture, 2019). Her work is in the collections of the George Eastman Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, Nelson-Atkins Museum, Cape Ann Museum, and Wichita Art Museum. In 2018, The George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY presented a solo exhibition including Out My Window images taken all over the world, presented at Houk Gallery in 2019. The artist currently lives and works in New York City.Source: Wikipedia Gail Albert Halaban’s photographs peer through the windows of apartments and reveal the sometimes mundane, intimate, moments occurring in private life. Her urban exploration lies at the intersection of architectural photography and portraiture, presenting a holistic perspective of city life. Stylistically, the images go beyond realism, allowing the viewer to take in a full scene in focus unlike the natural ability of the human eye. This formal device emphasizes both public and private realms, balancing details of personal life with broader contexts. After moving to New York City from Los Angeles in 2007, Halaban anticipated feelings of isolation and loneliness, yet instead found an unlikely sense of community. In particular, the artist recognized the millions of windows throughout the city as a key bridge between strangers. On the day of her daughter’s first birthday party, she recalls receiving flowers and balloons — from someone she had never met, but who lived in the neighborhood and had observed the day’s celebration through her windows. This kind gesture led to Halaban’s curiosity about the anonymous proximity in which strangers coexist, prompting her to develop the series Out My Window (2007). This body of work transcends image-making as the artist works with her subjects as collaborators and establishes connections that deeply impact her work. Albert Halaban has described windows as metaphors for both boundaries and gateways. She awakens her viewers to consider the story behind each window, inserting humanity and compassion often overlooked in everyday life in dense metropolises. Out My Window indulges in the beauty of urban skylines and architecture. Although inspired by Halaban’s experiences in New York, the series has expanded to several locations beginning with a project called Paris Views (2012) commissioned by Le Monde. Halaban’s approach to this series shifts to capture the essence of each unique city she is photographing. Just as the New York series explores the distinctive neighborhoods and sights of Manhattan, Paris Views examines the quaint streets, romantic architecture, and quintessential views of Paris. Halaban chose to further develop this project, creating series in Buenos Aires, Istanbul, Venice, and other cities in Europe and the United States. Source: Edwynn Houk Gallery
Cyrus Cornut
France
1977
Trained as an architect, the photographer's work primarily revolves around the city—its form, transformations, imprints, empty spaces, and the human behaviors it elicits. In 2006, his inaugural exploration of Chinese cities debuted at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles under the artistic direction of Raymond Depardon. He became a member of the Picturetank cooperative agency in 2007, remaining with them until its closure in 2017. In 2010, as part of the France 14 group, he presented "Travelling to the Outskirts," a project delving into the landscapes of mass housing in Île-de-France. Since 2011, his research has extended to the role of plants not only in the urban setting but also in rural landscapes. Presently, he is immersed in the creation of a 4x5 medium format collection, affording him a deliberate examination of urban transformations in both Asia and France. Additionally, he is engaged in a more artistic body of work, blending drawing, engraving, and photography. AWARDS and RESIDENCIES Winner Prix HSBC 2021 Shortlisted for the Camera Clara award, 2020 Mutation Residency. Transit/ Montpellier city 2019 ND Award 2018 1rst price. Shortlisted for the Camera Clara award, 2018 1rst price Singularlens 2018 Laureate of the « Albums du Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle » grant, 2014 Laureate visa de l’ANI 2012, Promenades Photographiques de Vendôme Shorlisted at the HSBC photography award, 2011 Laureate of the Visas de l’ANI, 2006 Villa Tamaris residency, Seyne sur Mer, 2006 CHONGQING, on the four shores of passing times Chongqing municipality, People’s Republic of China, population of 34 million. One of the world’s highest demographic and economic growth rates. The central urban area of 15 million souls is infused by almost 300 000 newcomers every year. Chongqing, the ''Mountain City,'' at the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialang Rivers, struggles to break through the fog that covers it all year long. Heir to the displaced from the Three Gorges dam and daughter to the Beijing authorities – who upgraded her to a municipality, raising her up to the same heights as her big sisters on the East coast – Chongqing has developed at a dizzying speed. Urban forms and infrastructure have sprung up, gravity-defying, embracing the shorelines of its four banks, each of them steeply carved out by the current of the water. The speed of urbanization has outperformed overtaken the slow rhythm of the fishermen, the erosion of the rivers, the powerful hatching of the mountains. The uninterrupted dance of the cranes and the excavators stack people ever higher in an unsettling quickness. No obstacle remains to stop the skyscrapers from surging up. They reproduce themselves almost identically, like metastases. The transport networks cross the water, pierce through the rock, and climb the hills, defiant of the power of the elements. The river has become the artery that the makes beat an economic heart that is resolutely turned towards the economic conquest of the West by way of the new silk road. Only the banks, almost wild, resist, remaining allied with the river and its caprices. People sitting on its embankments watch it meander, watch their sightlines get blocked out and its banks grow thicker. Here and there they still cultivate a few food-producing gardens while they wait fatalistically for the last bits of bare land to disappear.
El Lissitzky
Russia
1890 | † 1941
Lazar Markovich Lissitzky, known as El Lissitzky, was a Russian artist, designer, photographer, typographer, polemicist and architect. He was an important figure of the Russian avant-garde, helping develop suprematism with his mentor, Kazimir Malevich, and designing numerous exhibition displays and propaganda works for the Soviet Union. His work greatly influenced the Bauhaus and constructivist movements, and he experimented with production techniques and stylistic devices that would go on to dominate 20th-century graphic design. Lissitzky's entire career was laced with the belief that the artist could be an agent for change, later summarized with his edict, "das zielbewußte Schaffen" (goal-oriented creation). Lissitzky, of Lithuanian Jewish оrigin, began his career illustrating Yiddish children's books in an effort to promote Jewish culture in Russia. When only 15 he started teaching, a duty he would maintain for most of his life. Over the years, he taught in a variety of positions, schools, and artistic media, spreading and exchanging ideas. He took this ethic with him when he worked with Malevich in heading the suprematist art group UNOVIS, when he developed a variant suprematist series of his own, Proun, and further still in 1921, when he took up a job as the Russian cultural ambassador to Weimar Germany, working with and influencing important figures of the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements during his stay. In his remaining years he brought significant innovation and change to typography, exhibition design, photomontage, and book design, producing critically respected works and winning international acclaim for his exhibition design. This continued until his deathbed, where in 1941 he produced one of his last works – a Soviet propaganda poster rallying the people to construct more tanks for the fight against Nazi Germany. In 2014, the heirs of the artist, in collaboration with Van Abbemuseum and leading worldwide scholars on the subject, established the Lissitzky Foundation in order to preserve the artist's legacy and to prepare a catalogue raisonné of the artist's oeuvre.Source: Tate Margarita Tupitsyn included the essays by Ulrich Pohlmann and Mathew Drutt in her book Beyond the Abstract Cabinet (1999). This book was aimed at an audience with an interest in Russian photography and modernism. The essays in this book brought Lissitzky’s work to limelight. The essays mention various aspect of his work. From 1922 to 1925, Lissitzky experimented with photograph collage and photograms. While working on photograms, Lissitzky experimented with photomontage as well. He was able to achieve vibrant compositions using several printing exposures in order to utilize the effects of transparency. These experiments help him in many advertisements he produced starting from 1924 until 1925. Lissitzky was among the first avant-gardists to revive the photogram or cameraless photographic image, combining this technique with experiments in montage to generate fantastic portraits and design proposals. Largely using photography, Lissitzky also rethought the illustrated book as an architectural form, to be tabbed through, unfolded in all directions, and made into a fully three-dimensional object. These many ideas were deployed in the service of artists and arts organizations, as well as, above all, institutions of the Soviet state, on whose behalf Lissitzky was committed to “influencing the human psyche” collectively and in the public realm. He survived the reversals of fortune suffered by so many politically committed artists in the 1930s but had chronically poor health and died of tuberculosis.Source: The Art Institute of Chicago
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All About Photo Awards 2026
Win a Solo Exhibition in February
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Call for Entries
All About Photo Awards 2026
$5,000 Cash Prizes! Juror: Steve McCurry