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Ayumi Tanaka
Ayumi Tanaka
Ayumi Tanaka

Ayumi Tanaka

Country: Japan

Ayumi Tanaka is a Japanese-born artist, living and working in New York City. Tanaka has been working on photography project by using found images from private snapshot and the Internet to explore theme of memories. She received a BFA from Osaka University of Arts in Japan in 2003 and studied at International Center of Photography in 2010.

Her work has been shown internationally at exhibitions including United Photo Industries Gallery in New York, Tokyo Institute of Photography in Tokyo Japan, 25 CPW Gallery in New York, Pictura Gallery, Dumbo Arts Festival 2011, LOOK3 festival of the Photographs 2012 and Athens Photo Festival 2015. Tanaka's work recently included in "Universal Nature Rediscovery of Kalevala" at Sezon Arts Gallery in Tokyo (supported by Embassy of Finland and Finish Institute of Japan and Kalevala Institute) and "Photography Now 2017" at The Center for Photography at Woodstock selected by William Ewing. Her work has been published numerous magazine including at New York Times, Blow Photo, PHat Photo, Lettre International, LensCulture, GUP Magazine, Feature Shoot and Juxtapose Magazine. Tanaka has been received International Center of Photography Director Fellowship in 2010, Grand prix at Tokyo International Photography Competition 2013 (Tokyo, New York), Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50, Feature Shoot Emerging Photography Award 2014, PDN's 30 New and Emerging Photographer to watch 2016 and New York Art Foundation Fellowship 2016.

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Marie-Laure Vareilles
Marie-Laure Vareilles
France
1966
- Testify to the variety of cultures on our planet.Education: Interior architect. I travelled on all continents, camera in hand, to testify of the diversity of countries on our planet. Over the years I have experienced different cultures, landscapes, encounters … The cultures of the entire world are in constant evolution. My work is to serve the memory of the people and their countries all around the world.- Creation of photo montage : imagine a universe of possibilities, elaborate the encounter of the unlikely. Mixing elements, transforming scale relations, rejecting logical constructions... Today I give a new life to the thousands of negatives taken, recreating imaginary worlds where poetry, dreams and surrealism alternate.- Permanent exhibition : Marseille : galerie Massalia; Vaison la Romaine, in the old town : atelier ANSATU & MAILOAll about Marie Laure Vareilles:AAP: When did you realize you wanted to be a photographer?It was not my dream.AAP:Do you have a mentor?I remember about the first exhibition I have visited : it was Salgado with beautiful works in black and white. The subject he had worked on was men working by hand, all over the world... Beautiful.AAP: How long have you been a photographer?I took my first photo in 1985, while traveling in Turquey. It was my first trip alone abroad and I wanted to share my impresion with my family. Taking photos seemed to be the best medium for sharing places I had visited, people I had met.AAP: What or who inspires you? Since I am travelling and taking photos, I have realised how fast our world is changing. Faster and faster. Shooting is a way to keep testimony from a time which doesn’t exist any more : the more I travel, the more I realise that our differences are less and less visible.AAP: How could you describe your style?I shoot what I see, very quickly. But as soon as light is changing I shoot again ! Landscape, architecture, sky, people... many subjects can be interesting for the montages I create when I come back in my studio.AAP: What kind of gear do you use? Camera, lens, digital, film?Since the begining, I am working with Nikon cameras. During the last few years, I have definitly adopted digital camera. My last one is the D-800.AAP: Do you spend a lot of time editing your images?Not enough : after shooting, I spend a lot of time creating montages. For this reason I keep each photo, just in case ! But it might be a problem in the futur with hardware !AAP: Favorite(s) photographer(s)?They are so many. Editing a list would be a nightmare. Especially if I forgot to mention some of them.AAP: Your best memory has a photographer?I will never forget my experience in Bangladesh. I had never seen so many people working by hand, what ever they do, transport, create, make… they do not use use any machine. They work hard in bad conditions but they keep smiling!AAP: Your worst souvenir has a photographer?I had a bad time in Guinea. Working for an editor who wanted me to take photos from the Niger river and the every day life. The problem is I had to deal with blackmail from the people who were supposed to help me.
Erik Hijweege
Erik Hijweege
The Netherlands
1963
Erik Hijweege (1963) is fascinated with the overwhelming power of nature. He started chasing big weather and tornadoes in 2006. During his first years of stormchasing Hijweege chose an alter ego for this body of work in the making. Kevin Erskine a farmer from Valentine Nebraska was born. This resulted for Erskine (a.k.a Hijweege) in his first international solo show in New York and the Supercell book. Sequel to Supercell are his Sublime Nature series focusing on the beauty of nature that is grand and dangerous. Following his 19th century inspired longing for remote places and distant shores he travels the world working on his long-term Uncharted and waterfalls projects. Capturing landscapes on tintype and using old copper lenses, he shows us the world as seen through the eyes of early explorers. The multiple threats of our natural surroundings triggered Hijweege to start a second line in his work focusing on endangered species. Based on the Red List of the IUCN he photographed 23 endangered animals preserved in ice. Being a fragile subject matter Hijweege used the 19th century wetplate collodion process to capture these frozen animals on ambrotype. His Endangered series was exhibited at the Dutch Natural History Museum in Rotterdam raising awareness for this important matter. The Endangered book was published in 2014. In succession of this series Hijweege is currently working on 'New Habitat'. This series is about relocating endangered species to safer grounds. New Habitat is exhibited in the Dutch Natural History Museum during the first three months of 2020.
Jeff Dunas
Jeff Dunas
United States
1954
Jeff Dunas is an American Photographer whose work spans five decades. His work has appeared in hundreds of magazines, album covers, books and calendars. Dunas' principal areas of work have included Nudes, Documentary, Celebrity & Portrait and Street Photography. He is the author is 8 monographs and 5 museum catalogues. As an entrepreneur, he founded Melrose Publishing Company, Collector's Editions, Ltd., launched, Edited and Published Collectors Photography magazine, published Darkroom Photography (later Camera & Darkroom). Dunas founded the Palm Springs Photo Festival in 2006 and the Official Portfolio Review at PhotoPlus Expo in 2010. In 2014, he produced & directed PhotoSynthesis, a photography & music festival in Los Angeles for the Annenberg Foundation. He work has been shown in twelve, one-person museum exhibitions and over 50 gallery exhibitions. Dunas has lived between Los Angeles and Paris, France since 1974.
Simon Johansson
Simon Johansson
Sweden
Simon Johansson is a self-taught freelance photographer and journalist/writer based in Stockholm, Sweden. Member of The Swedish Union of Journalists (SJF). Simon has been working as a freelance photographer since 2000. He takes both editorial and commercial assignments. 2016 he released his first photo book "Across the Bridge" (Journal) about everyday life on the Swedish island Öland. In 2018 his second photo book, "A Familiar Place" (Journal), was released and this time it's about everyday life in Stockholm. In November 2019 his third book "The Young Ones" (Journal) will be released. Simon works in a classic documentary black and white tradition and he rarely takes a photo if it's not a human being in the frame. Simon wants his photos to be timeless, therefore he avoids modern references and time markers.
García De Marina
García De Marina
Spain
1975
Born in Spain in 1975. Since the year 2012 uses the object like expression way. This Poet of the Prosaic made the leap from social networking to the galleries in a few months' time. His creativity has not gone unnoticed in Spain as well as the foreign media, having his work published in several countries in the world. He has made a number of individual exhibitions and taken part in different collective exhibits, in addition to diverse art fairs. His lens is profoundly irreverent with the real: it seeks to transform and stamp objects with new identities; it challenges the obvious, and pays heed to the grandeur of the everyday. The bareness of his photography endows objects with a leading role, while they are stripped of their essence to be reinvented. The artist does not carry out any photographic manipulation on the images. From the minimalist perspective, the inventiveness of his gaze lays claim to another reality. In 2015 the artist was one of the chosen ones, by the Spanish Embassy, to participate in the "Photo Week Washington D.C.". In 2017, the Contemporary Art Museum of Castilla León in Spain (MUSAC) selected three of his pieces for the "Constellations" exhibition, experimental poetry in Spain (1963-2016), where for the first time, the presence of visual and experimental poetry in Spain from the 1960s to the present is addressed. During last years the artist has participated in some Festivals of photography, in Spain and abroad as Photo Week D.C. in Washington (2015), Photo Romania Festival (2015), Photometria Festival in Greece (2016), Festival of the light in Argentina (2016), Bucharest Foto Week (2016), Addis Foto Fest in Ethiopia (2016), Uppsala Foto Festival in Sweden (2017) and Yangon Photo Festival in Myanmar (2018). In 2018 presented his exhibition "Diálo2" in the Barjola's Museum in Spain together with one the most important visual poets of the 20th century in Spain, Joan Brossa."
Bob Willoughby
Bob Willoughby
United States
1927 | † 2009
Bob Willoughby, whose photographs transformed the images of Hollywood’s biggest stars, is a true pioneer of 20th century photography. He was the first “outside” photographer hired by the major studios to create photographs for the magazines, and was the link between the filmmakers and major magazines of the time, such as Life and Look. Born June 30th, 1927 in Los Angeles, his parents were divorced by the time he was born and he was raised by his mother. Bob was given an Argus C-3 camera for his twelfth birthday, providing the catalyst for what would become the key to his future. After high school, he studied cinema at night at the USC Cinema Department and design with Saul Bass at the Kahn Institute of Art. At the same time he apprenticed with a number of Hollywood photographers; Wallace Seawell, Paul Hesse, and Glenn Embree, gleaning technical and business know-how. His first magazine assignments were for Harper's Bazaar in the early ’50s when famed art director Alexey Brodovitch became aware of his work. His career took off in 1954 when Warner Bros. asked him to photograph Judy Garland’s final scene on the set of A Star Is Born. His portrait of the freckle-faced star became his first Life cover. From then on his production was phenomenal. His images were in print literally every week for the next twenty years. As the first “special” he covered the making of over 100 films, including the 1960s movies The Graduate, My Fair Lady, Rosemary’s Baby and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. His body of work, documenting this historic era of filmmaking, is unsurpassed. He captured with wonderful perception the most famous actors and directors of the time on and off the set, in unguarded moments of repose, vulnerability and high drama. He had a unique ability to capture what was essential to each film. Bob also had a remarkable understanding of the needs of each individual magazine; he could be shooting for seven different publications and know exactly what each one needed in terms of editorial content and design layout. While Willoughby is most famous as the great chronicler of Hollywood, before he began covering film production he had already made an astonishing series of images of jazz musicians. Willoughby had a huge appreciation of jazz both in its technical aspects and its ability to raise the roof in performance. He had a masterful feel for the character of the artists, and he was able to convey it even in the difficult lighting conditions of recording studios and stage. He was responsible for a number of technical innovations, including the silent blimp for 35mm still cameras, which became common on film sets. He was the only photographer working on films at the time to use radio-controlled cameras, allowing him unprecedented coverage in otherwise impossible situations, and he had special brackets built to hold his still cameras on or over the Panavision cameras. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Hollywood honored Willoughby with a major retrospective exhibition of his work. He was awarded the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Still Photography in New York in 2004. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; the National Portrait Gallery, London; the National Museum of Photography, Bradford, UK; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; the Museum of Modern Art, Film Department, New York; the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Tate Gallery Collection, London; Théâtre de la Photographie et de l’Image, Nice; and Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi, Belgium. In December 2009, Bob passed away at his home in Vence in the South of France, surrounded by his wife Dorothy and four children.Source: willoughbyphotos.com
Dmitry Ersler
Dmitry Ersler
Russia
1969
Dmitry Ersler is an award-winning fine art and advertising photographer with over two decades of experience. Born in Moscow, USSR and now based in Thailand, he began his artistic training under the guidance of his father. From 1976 to 1984, he studied at a Moscow public school, followed by public high school from 1984 to 1986. Between 1998 and 2004, he studied law at the Moscow Law University. Simultaneously, from 1999 to 2002, he pursued professional photography studies at the Moscow School of Art and Photography. Artist Statement: The artist's task is to awaken the viewer's imagination. My goal as a photographer is to evoke the viewer's imagination, trigger it, bring it to life. No one can create a picture better and brighter than the viewer's own imagination. It just needs a push, an impulse. My name is Dmitry, and I am a photographer. I create realistic-style photos depicting people in everyday life. However, most of my works are pictures with stories, with a narrative. The idea of creation such works is to photograph images with embedded stories and attempt to describe them using various techniques (interior details, clothing or props, lighting, model's pose, facial expressions, gestures, and so on). The people on these photographs are not just models; each of them is a participant in some events, a hero of their own story. And in each story, there was a past that happened just a moment before the viewer approached the photograph. There is also a present frozen while the viewer looks. And there is a future that will come as soon as the viewer steps away from the image. Each viewer has to examine the present himself, speculate about the past, and anticipate the future. What was in this imaginary past and what will be in the future entirely depends on the imagination of each viewer. The most important thing for me is that the viewer, flipping through a magazine or walking along the gallery wall, stops and looks at the image, freezes, and begins to ask themselves questions: What is happening here? Why is the protagonist of the picture doing this? What prompted him to do this? What will happen next? Making these questions arise is the essence of art.
Sergio Larrain
Sergio Larrain
Chile
1931 | † 1912
Sergio Larrain was born in 1931 in Santiago de Chile. He studied music before taking up photography in 1949, from which year until 1953 he studied forestry at the University of California at Berkeley. He then attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor before setting off to travel throughout Europe and the Middle East. Thus began Larrain's work as a freelance photographer. He became a staff photographer for the Brazilian magazine O Cruzeiro and in 1956, the Museum of Modern Art in New York bought two of his pictures. In 1958, Larrain was given a grant from the British Council that allowed him to produce a series of photographs of London. The same year Henri Cartier-Bresson saw his photographs of street children and suggested that he work for Magnum. Larrain spent two years in Paris, where he worked for international press titles. Larrain became a Magnum associate in 1959 and a full member in 1961. He returned to Chile in 1961 when the poet Pablo Neruda invited him to photograph his house. In 1968, he came into contact with Bolivian guru Óscar Ichazo and virtually gave up photography to pursue his study of Eastern culture and mysticism, adopting a lifestyle in keeping with his ideals. He has devoted himself to spreading knowledge of yoga, writing, painting in oils and occasionally taking the odd photograph.
Peikwen Cheng
Peikwen Cheng
China
1975
Peikwen Cheng studied product design at Stanford University, graduating in 1997. He is a self-taught photographer who has exhibited his work in Cambodia, Canada, China, Germany, Greece, Poland, Singapore, Sweden, Syria, United Kingdom and United States. Before turning his focus to art, he was a designer and was awarded with a United States Design Patent and an Industrial Design Excellence Award by the Industrial Design Society of America. Peikwen Cheng lives in Beijing. Peikwen Cheng is a Chinese-American artist based in New York and Shanghai. His work explores the process of change across cultures, time and place and seeks to discover magical moments in unexpected places. His art has been exhibited in Belgium, Cambodia, Canada, China, Luxembourg, Germany, Greece, Poland, Singapore, Sweden, Syria, United Kingdom and the United States; and his work has been featured by BBC, CNN, BBC, Financial Times, The Guardian, National Public Radio, The Sunday Times, and Vogue. He has been recognized by international awards including the Three Shadows Photography Award, National Geographic Award at the Eddie Adams Workshop, C/O Berlin Talents Award, Renaissance Photography Prize Category Winner, Flash Forward Selected Winner by the Magenta Foundation, Px3, and International Photography Awards. And as a designer, he was awarded with a United States Design Patent and an Industrial Design Excellence Award by the Industrial Design Society of America. He is a graduate of Stanford University, Tsinghua University and Insead. Source: Visura
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