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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

Tony Law
Tony Law
China
1963
Tony Law is a professional designer and photographer. He has a studio, mainly focussed on interior design, graphic design, architectural illustration and photography. He was born and raised in Guangzhou, China. He studied in Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. majoring in Industrial Design. In the early 1990s, he came to Australia for further study, settled in Sydney, and has been living there ever since. He was interested in art and photography when he was a child. After joining the "Chinese Photographic Society of Australia Inc." in 2011, he began his photography journey. Later in 2012, he and some local landscape photographers formed the "Australian Seascape Photography Group"". He has great interest in shooting a wide range of subjects, exploring different styles and techniques. In recent years, though, he has mainly focused on shooting sports, seascape and astrophotography. His works have been published in magazines and he has won many prominent international photography awards. His main achievements are: The Finalist of All About Photo Awards 2020. Top 101 International Landscape Photographs of the Year 2019 First Place in Astrophotography Category, Sony Alpha Awards 2019. First Place in Night Category, Australian Travel Photography Awards 2019. Sports Photographer of the Year, International Photography Awards 2019. 2nd Place in Nature, Astrophotography Category, International Photography Awards 2019. 2nd Award in Photojournalism Category, 2019 Xposure International Photography & Film Contest. 3th Place in People Category, The Mono Awards 2019. Top 3 in Editorial Category, Sony Alpha Awards 2018. Silver Award in Amateur Category, The EPSON International Pano Awards 2017. Runner Up Award in Theme Passion Category, 2017 Heritage Bank Photographic Awards. 2nd Place of 2017 GAILCK creates visual landscape photography award. Silver Award of 2016 The Real Australia Landscape Photo Awards Artist statement I am attracted by wild and brutal power of extreme sports; I am amazed by the magical power of nature. I often work tirelessly to explore and discover new places. The long coastline of Sydney is where I go for inspiration, finding the fine balance between light and shadow, from sunrise to sunset, watching the stars of the Milky Way emerge from the horizon. Photography makes me forget myself and brings me endless happiness, and it will always fascinate me.
Deborah Turbeville
Deborah Turbeville
United States
1938 | † 2013
Deborah Turbeville was born in 1938, in Boston. Summers were spent in Ogunquit, Maine. 'Beautiful Place by the Sea' is the oceanside township's motto. 'Very bleak, very stark, very beautiful,' was Turbeville's description of it. Life was comfortable - she went to private school. Yet her mother described her as a 'shy and scary child'. Which is as it should be. The uneasy shuffle of ambiguity is the essence of Turbeville and her work - which itself shuffles between fashion magazine and art gallery, never fully at peace in either place. Like her near contemporaries, Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin, she rethought and recast fashion photography in the 1970s. Perhaps even more than those two louche Europeans, though, she injected narrative and mystery into what is, after all, an unabashedly commercial process. Her pictures are as much riddles as they are images. Consciously damaged goods, they are blurry, grainy, tormented into painterly colours, scratched, marked, sellotaped - post-production work often done with her long-term assistant and collaborator Sharon Schuster. 'I destroy the image after I've made it,' said Turbeville. 'Obliterate it a little so you never have it completely there.' It's a quite un-American world, a view through the rear window, fascinated by the beaten, worn and forgotten. She has photographed her own house in Mexico as if she were a time-travelling visitor in her own intimate landscape, slightly drunk in exploration and contemplation of the rooms and their objects - tin retablos, wooden boxes, a painted carving of the Virgin Saint Maria Candelaria. She has photographed old Newport and the lost St Petersburg. One of her books was called 'Les Amoureuses du Temps Passe' - (female) lovers of times past. 'The idea of disintegration is really the core of my work.' When Jackie Onassis commissioned her to photograph the unseen Versailles, the late president's wife urged the photographer to 'evoke the feeling that there were ghosts and memories.' Turbeville began by researching the palace's 'mistresses and discarded mistresses', then photographed not just the palace's grand chambers and vistas but its store rooms and attics. She came to photography late. Arriving in New York at 19, with dreams of a stage career, she worked as a model and assistant to Claire McCardell - the fashion designer who brought wool jersey and denim to the catwalk. She joined Harper's Bazaar in 1963, working with its fashion editor, Marvin Israel, and his crew of photographers which included Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon and Hiro. She took her first pictures in Yugoslavia in 1966. They were blurry. She showed them to Avedon. He liked them, blurs and all. So he taught her technique. In 1972, she became a photographer. Like other adventurous photographers of the era, she worked for Nova magazine. She took some pictures for Vogue of girls in bikinis at a cement works. 'The most revolutionary pictures of the time,' said Conde Nast's editorial director Alexander Liberman. The work that made her name was the 'bathhouse' series she took for American Vogue in 1975 - fashion photographs of barely dressed women, wet and languid, almost kitsch. The oddest thing, though, is the sense that the women are prisoners - of what is not clear, of course. It's been said they look like they're in gas chambers. 'I go into a women's private world, where you never go,' Turbeville said. 'It's a moment frozen in time. I like to hear a clock ticking in my pictures.' If one of photography's most honourable impulses is to subvert - or flee from - the medium's inherent voyeurism, Turbeville collapses this paradox by succumbing to it. Victorian academic paintings presented unclothed women in bathing pools as if the painter were not there - the illusion of pornography. Turbeville's naked, wet women are under no such illusion. They know the photographer is there. They acknowledge her presence. They maybe even watch us, the viewer. The bathouse pictures were collected, with others, in her 1978 book 'Wallflower' - arrestingly and sympathetically designed by her mentor, Israel. In it are all the essentials of her work: a feeling that you are somewhere in the past; a languid, barely sexual sexuality; white, willowy women; distressed prints; a luminous quality; a sense of a narrative interrupted. Yet she's a jobbing photographer, too. She's worked for American Vogue and its British, French, Italian, and Russian counterparts. She's done ads for Ungaro, editorial photographic essays for Harper's Bazaar and portraits of Julia Roberts for the New York Times Magazine. She wears black, mostly. She has reddish hair. She has homes in Mexico, New York and Russia. She teaches in Russia. She's been married at least once. When she lived in Paris, at the turn of the 1980s, she'd rummage through the streets every evening, between 6 and 8 o'clock. 'I'm a voyeur,' she said. (Source: Pete Silverton - www.professionalphotographer.co.uk)
Lise Sarfati
Lise Sarfati
France
1958
Lise Sarfati has lived and worked in the United States since 2003. She has realized six important series of photographs there. They have been followed by exhibitions and publications. Each of her works makes clear the identity of an approach focused on the intensity of the rapport established with the person photographed, and of that person with the context. A vision in which the individual is environment, a map outlining a perilous cultural geography. The richness of perception is constructed without effects. The compositions are flawless in the simplicity and unity of the image – the style tends to be elementary and clean, avoiding all qualifications, but the traits of each thing and each person trace a hundred thousand folds. The dimension of the interplay of postures is that of a solemn immaturity: the scenery formed by the people and places is the silent crumpling of a dream in which each risks his or her skin. A feminine seduction tinged with fateful coincidences; the beauty of the adolescents looks like a magic spell. Their solitude and strangeness in the world turn the image into an echo chamber inhabited by the photographer, her subject and the viewer. The earlier period of a photographic work carried out in Russia (continuously from 1989 to 1999) confirms the tendency of this research. She identifies a very precise and endless psychological spectrum. The projections, the ambitions associated with the immense space, the way in which they compose these figures, play an essential role: the supporting roles are incandescent. A determinism of the heroic, inevitably tragic figure, as if not even we really have another choice.
Manuela Thames
Manuela Thames
German
1975
Manuela Thames is a photographic artist based in Saint Paul, Minnesota where she lives with her husband and two children. Born and raised in Germany, she moved to the US in 2004 after marrying her American husband. Her background is in nursing and alternative health, but around 2008 she began to focus solely on photography after two life changing events happened within one year, the birth of her first son and the death of her brother. Manuela uses various photographic techniques to explore themes around loss and grief, her personal experience with generational trauma, as well as the notions of belonging, connection and what it means to be human. Within that she continues to explore human ways of coping, the strength that evolves out of suffering and our common desire for healing and journey towards wholeness. Much of her work consists of black and white, conceptual self-portraits. Manuela’s photography has been described as contemplative, evocative, and cinematic and has been widely exhibited nationally as well as internationally. Her “Trauma” series won 1st place conceptual series of the year in the Monovisions Award in 2019, and in the same year she won the 13th Julia Margaret Cameron Award in the Self-Portrait Category. In addition, her work has been published online and in print in such places as Black and White Magazine, Sun Magazine, Dohdo Magazine and Shots Magazine. She teaches workshops privately and through various places such as Santa Fe Workshops, LA Center of Photography, SE Center of Photography, and offers mentoring services as well.
Mindaugas Gabrenas
Mindaugas Gabrenas
Lithuania
1977
Mindaugas Gabrenas, born in 1977, Kaunas, is an amateur photographer currently based in New York.His initial encounter with photography was in late 1990, when his parents gave him a first film camera Zenit. But those days this soviet masterpiece was not so appealing and more resembled a vacuum cleaner rather than a photo camera. Photography was really discovered in 2008, when Mindaugas Gabrenas lived in Spain. It was then when his first digital camera was acquired and great interest in digital photography was raised. After the first personal photo exhibition ‚Fantasma‘ in 2010, Mindaugas Gabrenas has became increasingly interested in film photography. Currently he focuses on 6×6 black&white photography and works with Kiev 88, Pentacon Six, Kodak Duaflex II, Holga and homemade cameras. Landscapes, waterscapes, cityscapes, even melancholic dreamscapes – are the main fields of interest. Source www.gabrenas.com
Eikoh Hosoe
Eikoh Hosoe
Japan
1933 | † 2024
Eikoh Hosoe studied at the Tokyo College of Photography. He made his first solo exhibition "American Girl in Tokyo" in 1956 at Konishiroku Photo Gallery. Between 1957 and 1959 he participated in the protest-exhibition of the new photographic movement "Juninno-Me" (The Eyes of the Ten) with photographers I. Narahara, S. Tomatsy, Y. Ishimito and the critic Tatsuo Fukushima. In 1959, six members of this group including Hosoe, Tomatsu and Narahara founded the Vivo Agency which is very important in the history of Japanese photography. He gained recognition with his work " Man and Woman" that was showed at the Konishiroku Photo Gallery in 1960 and published in 1961 by Camera Art, Tokyo. In 1962 Ordeal by Roses with the writter Yukio Mishima gained him international recognition as well as did Kamaitachi in 1969 featuring Tatsumi Hijikata (fonder of the Japanese contemporary dance called Buto). Hosoe has now published more than fifty books including monographs and essays. Hosoe is also a filmmaker.
Claudia Tombini
Claudia Tombini
Italy
1968
Born in Rome in 1968, after an initial artistic training, Claudia Tombini studied Architecture at La Sapienza University. After graduating, she followed a PhD in Architecture - Theories and Design at the DIAR department of the same University. Professionally active in her hometown since 2006, she carries out her work independently after a three-year collective experience with studio A4, winner of several mentions and awards. Specialized in architectural design, she has always combined research and design. Her latest work is the restoration of the Troisi Cinema in Trastevere. In 2016 she began her own photographic research, collaborating in some of Officine Fotografiche's activities. In 2019/20 she participates in "Human" curatorial workshop with Luigi Cecconi and Francesco Rombaldi, from Yogurt Magazine, during which she elaborates her own project MoveTo LineTo. Moveto Lineto "'Living is an art of spacing,' as Jean-Marc Besse teaches us, and living is mainly a question of geography. After a lifelong dedication to architecture I now discover, thanks to these words, that living is not about architecture or city planning, nor, more generally, about construction: living is geography. There is a human sense to architecture, which even preexists architecture, as we actually live our lives outside of it, in an unbroken series of passages, intersections, and places which all leave their own special resonance and memory inside us. As I move through these, without ever pausing in the gaps — sometimes more, sometimes less consciously — I find myself measuring out the distances I have covered. Not in terms of space, though, as when it comes to landscapes distance is actually temporal, and measuring it out in its complexity is no easy task. As Matteo Meschiari has said, what I am after is “an altered state of conscience in which the landscape is simultaneously medium and recipient, cause and effect, reactor and reaction”: it is a matter of sensorial dilation. I gaze back on these landscapes, “before” and “after”, I scrutinize them to reproduce them virtually, searching for the same old viewpoints, as if they were light years away. This is the effect any catastrophic event will have on us, namely making us believe that all linearity is forever lost, as if time actually flowed in a linear way. Knowledge will not do, knowing that history is all but linear is not enough: we won’t give up our linear idea of it, and we will feel lost when confronted with any interruption of it, with any interval, any blank gap, no matter how temporary. I have been ceaselessly trying to heal the wounds that the surface of things displays, because it is on the surface that we move, it is the surface we perceive, with its naked spaces, where only the absence or the lost track of what has happened is visible. Indeed, any figuration registers an appearance that is destined to vanish, and it is through imagination that we manage to value what is actually not there. It is through the abstraction of a virtual image, an image never completely resolved in its structure and its appearance, that I have been trying to turn the image itself into matter, and thereby restore to it a potential wholeness that I feel is unattainable to me today. This new matter will do, for the time being, to represent the times and places of our passages, and the gaps in between. Like a postscript file, it will be readable in its own right, by its own definition. " -- Claudia Tombini
Clark James Mishler
Clark James Mishler
United States
1948
I was introduced to photography while studying Advertising Design at the Los Angeles Art Center. My life as a photographer has was supplemented by book design and photo editing, including two years as a layout editor for the National Geographic Magazine in Washington D.C. My work has appeared in national and international publications including: Entrepreneur, GEO, National Geographic, National Geographic Traveler, National Geographic World, National Geographic Books, Newsweek, Smithsonian Air & Space, Sunset, Time, and U.S. News and World Report. I am now semi-retired and devoting my time to personal work with emphasis on black and white documentary projects. AAP Competitions All About Photo Awards 2025 AAP Magazine 55 Women Articles: Documenting The Alaska State Fair Traveling Circus American Christmas
Brooke Shaden
Brooke Shaden
United States
1987
Brooke Shaden is a fine art photographer, mixed media artist, and writer specializing in conceptual imagery and self-portraiture. She grew up in Lancaster, PA and has two degrees in English Literature and Filmmaking. Brooke has always seen the world as a dark yet beautiful place. Inspired at a young age by mortality, she has always had a fear of death and a fascination with it. That intrigue morphed into a deep desire to portray grief in a positive way, and that north star has guided her work since 2009. Over the past fifteen years, Brooke has helped new artists to reflect the way they see the world in their art and to heal through the experience. She specializes in finding beauty and darkness and utilizing a gentle approach to bring others into that space. Community is at the forefront of Brooke’s life. She hosts an annual creativity conference called Promoting Passion which focuses on our purpose, legacy, and impact. Outside of her own convention, Brooke speaks to crowds of thousands throughout each year to inspire personal growth and reflection. Represented by five galleries and with work collected by museums, her art has made an indelible mark and has inspired hundreds of thousands of up-and-coming photographers. With sponsorship from companies like Sony and Microsoft, Brooke has made it her mission to share inspiration far and wide. She was named in the top 10 most influential photographers, photographer of the year, winner of Ron Howard’s Project Imagination, and received the distinguished alumni award from her high school in 2019. In 2026, she signed a 2-book deal with HarperCollins to publish her dark fantasy books. Brooke co-founded The Light Space, a photography program for those vulnerable to human trafficking, and was a foster parent from 2019 to 2023 to six children. When Brooke isn’t making visual art or traveling, she’s either reading or writing fiction. Statement Brooke Shaden’s work blends nature and grief in darkly surreal compositions. Her process is largely solitary self-portraiture, allowing herself to be the character and the creator at once. Inspired by a childhood of intense fears, and later by the hard-won lessons of learning to say goodbye to her foster children, Brooke creates works that elicit hope while never shying away from darkness. Many of Brooke’s images are created on location, as her passion is as much for the art as the process of being in nature and integrating her surroundings in Northern Arizona. Guided by the philosophy that embracing ephemera leads to a fuller life, much of Brooke’s imagery focuses on how we can find beauty in grief by learning to release our attachments. Brooke has been a full-time artist since 2010 and continues to push boundaries in her genre, inspiring thousands of new artists to express their purpose in innovative ways. Article Exclusive Interview All About Photo Awards All About Photo Awards 2020 All About Photo Awards 2026
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Latest Interviews

Exclusive Interview with Susan Anthony
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Susan Anthony
American photographer Susan Anthony brings a painter’s eye to documentary photography, creating nuanced portraits of people and places shaped by time, community, and tradition. Her work is rooted in observation, empathy, and a deep curiosity about the lives of others. Through long-term projects, she explores the relationship between individuals and the environments they inhabit, revealing the stories that connect people to a place and to one another.
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Exclusive Interview with Carole Mills Noronha
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Carole Mills Noronha
Carole Mills Noronha is an Australian photographer whose deeply personal work explores memory, family, loss, and the fragile nature of identity. Living with epilepsy and a lifelong sensitivity to light, she has developed a distinctive photographic language rooted in observation, empathy, and emotional connection. Her images are shaped by lived experience, revealing intimate stories with remarkable honesty and tenderness.
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Exclusive Interview with Trevor Cole: Pastoral Peoples and Practices
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Trevor Cole: Pastoral Peoples and Practices
For this interview, we wanted to focus specifically on The Face of the Mundari and the wider Pastoral Peoples and Practices series. We spoke with Trevor about his long-term work among the Mundari, what continues to draw him back to their cattle camps, and the experience of documenting a culture whose identity remains deeply connected to livestock, tradition, and the natural environment.
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Exclusive Interview with Frank Meo
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Frank Meo
In our latest exclusive feature for All About Photo, I speak with veteran photography representative Frank Meo about what it truly takes to build a sustainable creative career today. Frank brings decades of experience working with Fortune 500 companies, major agencies, and documentary photographers to the table. We dive into the critical business skills often left out of art school curriculums, the power of mentorship, and the inspiring evolution of PROJECTIONS—his international salon platform for visual storytellers. It’s an essential read for anyone navigating the commercial or editorial photography landscape today.
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Exclusive Interview with Carolyn Moore
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Carolyn Moore
American photographer Carolyn Moore explores the inner landscape of emotion, memory, and personal transformation through a deeply intuitive photographic practice. Her work unfolds as a quiet dialogue between artist and viewer, where images become a space for reflection, vulnerability, and connection.
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Exclusive Interview with Luca Desienna and Laura Estelle Barmwoldt
Interview
Publication
Exclusive Interview with Luca Desienna and Laura Estelle Barmwoldt
For over seven years, Of Lilies and Remains has explored the depths of the goth and darkwave underground, unfolding in Leipzig—a city long associated with a vibrant and enduring subcultural scene. Moving between iconic gatherings such as Wave-Gotik-Treffen and more intimate moments on the fringes, the project offers a rare and immersive glimpse into a world often misunderstood, yet rich in expression and community. Created by Luca in collaboration with Laura Estelle Barmwoldt, the work embraces a cinematic and deeply personal approach. Rather than documenting from a distance, it moves within the scene itself, capturing its atmosphere, its codes, and its quiet contradictions. The title Of Lilies and Remains hints at this duality—where beauty and darkness, fragility and strength coexist. As the book prepares for its release, we spoke with both artists about the origins of the project, their process, and what it means to document a subculture that continues to evolve while remaining true to its spirit.
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Exclusive Interview with Matthew Finley
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Matthew Finley
American photographer Matthew Finley turns inward, using photography as a way to explore identity, memory, and emotional truth. Based in Los Angeles, his practice moves between performance, gesture, and found imagery, creating a visual language that is both intimate and deeply personal
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Exclusive Interview with Jan Janssen
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Jan Janssen
Dutch photographer Jan Janssen explores universal human experiences through his long-term project It Matters, winner of the May 2025 Solo Exhibition. Begun in 2016, the series captures intimate moments of everyday life—love, loss, connection, and belonging—across Central and Eastern Europe. Working in countries such as Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, Janssen spends extended time within communities, building relationships based on trust and respect. His approach allows him to move beyond observation, revealing deeply human and authentic moments. Rooted in travel and personal discovery, It Matters reflects Janssen’s search for what connects us all in an increasingly divided world. The project is ongoing and will culminate in a photobook scheduled for publication in 2026.
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Exclusive Interview with Henk Kosche
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Henk Kosche
German photographer Henk Kosche turns his lens toward the streets of Halle an der Saale, capturing everyday life in the late years of the former German Democratic Republic. At the time, Kosche was studying design and exploring the city with his camera, drawn to the atmosphere of its industrial landscape and the quiet rhythms of daily life. His series Street Photography at the End of the 80s, selected as the Solo Exhibition for July 2025, revisits a body of work created just before a period of profound change. Rediscovered decades later in a small box of 35mm negatives, these photographs offer glimpses of a city and its people at a moment suspended between the familiar and the unknown.
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