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Win a Solo Exhibition in June 2026 + An Exclusive Interview!
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Philipp Bolthausen
Philipp Bolthausen
Philipp Bolthausen

Philipp Bolthausen

Country: United States

Akzidenz currently living and working between Paris and New York. His education focused around art and communication studies in Paris and New York, where he lived and worked for many years before returning to Paris. He presently works as an art director for some of the mosthigh-end luxury brands worldwide.
This background has a rooted presence in his work - in that he is less interested in the representational qualities of the photograph, focusing more on the exploration of the fringes of each terrain. This focus stems from the will to not use photography as a traditional means of representation of reality but creating a platform for discourse and thought. In order to achieve this dais, he tries to invent his own visual language, using multi-exposures, superposition, juxtaposition and ‘sequentiality’ to interpret, rewrite and therefore, relate to manufactured experiences which are being created on a daily basis by mass media.
In short his photography can be summed into Objects, which create an intrinsic world of their own, or in his own words: “My works aren’t pictures of something, but objects about something.”
Akzidenz purposefully chooses to use the 20th century medium of film allowing him to see, and therefore place the present into perspective. The choice of black & white and grain become the signifiers that depict and foster the equivalence of life and shape within his work. The single ‘effects’ of contemporary post-processing are not important to his work, to the point that he refuses to use such ‘effects’ - anything beyond the traditional workflow of the darkroom is prohibited in his work.
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Anders Petersen
Sweden
1944
Anders Petersen was born 1944 in Stockholm, Sweden. 14 years old his family moved to Karlstad in Värmland, where he met the artists ?Karin Bodland and Lars Sjögren.In 1961 he stayed for some time in Hamburg in order to learn German and trying to write and paint. He didn’t take any pictures. Five years later he met Christer Strömholm and became a student at his School of Photography in Stockholm. Strömholm was not just his teacher but also a close friend. Their friendship influenced him for life. In 1967 he starts photographing a bar called Café Lehmitz in Hamburg, close to Zeughausmarkt. He was photographing there for a period of almost three years and in 1970 he had his first soloexhibition over the bar in Café Lehmitz with 350 photographs nailed to the wall. In 1973 he published his first book ”Gröna Lund”, about people in an amusementpark in Stockholm. In 1974 he graduated from the Swedish Filmschool,Dramatiska Institutet, in Stockholm. In 1978 he published ”Café Lehmitz ” in Germany. In 1984 the first book in a trilogy about locked instituations was published. The three books were about people in a prison, a nursing house, and a mental hospital. After photographing the mental hospital for three years he oriented himself towards a more free approach in a kind of diarylike photography. During 2003 and 2004 Anders Petersen was appointed Professor of Photography in the School of Photography and Film at the University of Göteborg, Sweden. He regularly has workshops and exhibitions throughout Europe, Asia and in the USA. He has received numerous grants and rewards since the seventies. In 2003 Anders Petersen was elected the ”Photographer of the Year” by the International Photofestival in Arles.In 2006 he was shortlisted as one of four for the ”Deutsche Börse Photography Prize”. In 2007 he received the ”Special Prize of the Jury” for his exhibition ”Exaltation of Humanity” by the third International Photofestival in Lianzhou, China. In 2008 he received the ”Dr. Erich Salomon Award” by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie, Germany. ”The Arles Contemporary Book Award for 2009? went to JH Engström and ?Anders Petersen’s collaborative book ”From Back Home” by Max Ström.?The book was nominated to ”The Best Photographic Book in Sweden, ?year 2009? and also Winner of Design Bronze Lion in Cannes. In 2010, he was in the jury for the BMW Prize at Paris Photo. In 2012, nominated to the Swedish Photo Book Prize in Stockholm for ”SOHO”, and PhotoBook of the Year award for "City Diary" Paris Photo and the Aperture Foundation. Anders Petersen has his darkroom in Stockholm, Sweden. Source: www.anderspetersen.se Anders Petersen, one of Sweden’s most influential auteur photographers, sensitively blurs the boundaries between madness and normality in his artwork “Mental Hospital”. Petersen, who won international renown with his Hamburg Café Lehmitz series (1967-1970), spent several years photographing patients at a psychiatric hospital just south of Stockholm. His gaze is one of raw tenderness, conveying naked emotions with insightful poetry. Carried by a deep integrity, he takes the viewer to the limits of normality. "It is the naked encounter, the raw, piercing confrontation with the Other and therefore with myself," Petersen said, describing his intention. "I photograph people with whom I can identify and I feel attracted by people who live outside society. In all my photographs, I try, essentially, to create self-portraits." He is neither sentimental nor sensational. Instead, his images show a great respect for that which is enigmatic in people, for that which is hidden under the surface. Petersen’s works have marked the history of photography. In 2003, he won the award “Photographer of the Year” at the festival "Rencontres de la Photographie" in Arles, and he was honored with the German Photography Society’s Dr.-Erich-Salomon prize in 2008 for his life’s work. Source: Grundemark Nilsson Gallery
James Houston
Australia
James Houston's background as a sculptor helped shape and influence his graphic photographic style. Australian born, Houston celebrates beauty and the human form, creating sensual iconic portraits and international campaigns for L'Oreal Paris, GAP, Donna Karan, Hugo Boss and Givenchy. New York based Houston balances his career with passion projects that make a difference in the community. Five award winning international books have been published on his work. Houston's book MOVE (PowerHouse Books), was created to benefit various HIV/AIDS charities and raised close to US$500,000 from sales and launch events. The book project, titled MOVE FOR AIDS was launched in 2006 with the support of Elton John, Hugh Jackman, Baz Luhrmann and Sarah Murdoch. While working on MOVE FOR AIDS, Houston was shocked to learn about American attitudes towards adolescent sexuality and the impact it has on U.S. teens. This discovery inspired Houston to raise over 1 million dollars to fund his first feature documentary titled, LET’S TALK ABOUT SEX (www.letstalkaboutsexthefilm.com). The Award winning film takes a revealing look at how American attitudes towards adolescent sexuality affect today’s teenagers. The film aired nationally on the TLC network in April, 2011 with the goal of helping parents and communities understand the importance of honest and open communication. For his latest photographic project, Natural Beauty, Houston turns his eye to nature for inspiration with the goal to raise awareness for the environment and funds for environmental non profit Global Green USA. In collaboration with MILK, Houston shot a series of striking portraits of some of the world’s leading models and celebrities. These captivating photographs, bring together two of Houston’s great passions – the human form and the natural world. Natural Beauty launched at MILK Gallery NYC April 2013. Houston also directed a web series on the 'making of' Natural Beauty as well as several film installations for the exhibition. Source: www.houstonphoto.com
Jacob Riis
Denmark/United States
1849 | † 1914
Jacob August Riis was a Danish-American social reformer, "muckraking" journalist, and social documentary photographer. He contributed significantly to the cause of urban reform in America at the turn of the twentieth century. He is known for using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the impoverished in New York City; those impoverished New Yorkers were the subject of most of his prolific writings and photography. He endorsed the implementation of "model tenements" in New York with the help of humanitarian Lawrence Veiller. Additionally, as one of the most famous proponents of the newly practicable casual photography, he is considered one of the fathers of photography due to his very early adoption of flash. While living in New York, Riis experienced poverty and became a police reporter writing about the quality of life in the slums. He attempted to alleviate the bad living conditions of poor people by exposing their living conditions to the middle and upper classes. Riis had for some time been wondering how to show the squalor of which he wrote more vividly than his words could express. He tried sketching but was incompetent at this. Camera lenses of the 1880s were slow as was the emulsion of photographic plates; photography thus did not seem to be of any use for reporting about conditions of life in dark interiors. In early 1887, however, Riis was startled to read that "a way had been discovered to take pictures by flashlight. The darkest corner might be photographed that way." The German innovation, by Adolf Miethe and Johannes Gaedicke, flash powder was a mixture of magnesium with potassium chlorate and some antimony sulfide for added stability; the powder was used in a pistol-like device that fired cartridges. This was the introduction of flash photography. Recognizing the potential of the flash, Riis informed a friend, Dr. John Nagle, chief of the Bureau of Vital Statistics in the City Health Department who was also a keen amateur photographer. Nagle found two more photographer friends, Henry Piffard and Richard Hoe Lawrence, and the four of them began to photograph the slums. Their first report was published in the New York newspaper The Sun on February 12, 1888; it was an unsigned article by Riis which described its author as "an energetic gentleman, who combines in his person, though not in practice, the two dignities of deacon in a Long Island church and a police reporter in New York." The "pictures of Gotham's crime and misery by night and day" are described as "a foundation for a lecture called 'The Other Half: How It Lives and Dies in New York.' to give at church and Sunday school exhibitions, and the like." The article was illustrated by twelve-line drawings based on the photographs. Riis and his photographers were among the first Americans to use flash photography. Pistol lamps were dangerous and looked threatening, and would soon be replaced by another method for which Riis lit magnesium powder on a frying pan. The process involved removing the lens cap, igniting the flash powder, and replacing the lens cap; the time taken to ignite the flash powder sometimes allowed a visible image blurring created by the flash. Riis's first team soon tired of the late hours, and Riis had to find other help. Both his assistants were lazy and one was dishonest, selling plates for which Riis had paid. Riis sued him in court successfully. Nagle suggested that Riis should become self-sufficient, so in January 1888 Riis paid $25 for a 4×5 box camera, plate holders, a tripod and equipment for developing and printing. He took the equipment to the potter's field cemetery on Hart Island to practice, making two exposures. The result was seriously overexposed but successful. For three years, Riis combined his own photographs with others commissioned of professionals, donations by amateurs and purchased lantern slides, all of which formed the basis for his photographic archive. Because of the nighttime work, he was able to photograph the worst elements of the New York slums, the dark streets, tenement apartments, and "stale-beer" dives, and documented the hardships faced by the poor and criminal, especially in the vicinity of notorious Mulberry Street. A particularly important effort by Riis was his exposure of the condition of New York's water supply. His five-column story "Some Things We Drink", in the August 21, 1891, edition of the New York Evening Sun, included six photographs (later lost). Riis wrote: "I took my camera and went up in the watershed photographing my evidence wherever I found it. Populous towns sewered directly into our drinking water. I went to the doctors and asked how many days a vigorous cholera bacillus may live and multiply in running water. About seven, said they. My case was made." The story resulted in the purchase by New York City of areas around the New Croton Reservoir, and may well have saved New Yorkers from an epidemic of cholera. Riis tried hard to have the slums around Five Points demolished and replaced with a park. His writings resulted in the Drexel Committee's investigation of unsafe tenements; this resulted in the Small Park Act of 1887. Riis was not invited to the eventual opening of the park on June 15, 1897, but went all the same, together with Lincoln Steffens. In the last speech, the street cleaning commissioner credited Riis for the park and led the public in giving him three cheers of "Hooray, Jacob Riis!" Other parks also were created, and Riis was popularly credited with them as well.Source: Wikipedia
Bob Richardson
United States
1928 | † 2005
Robert George Richardson was an American fashion photographer. He was born in Long Island, New York, to an Irish Catholic family. Originally a graphic designer in New York City, Bob Richardson did not pick up a camera until age 35. His rise to fashion fame was swift, although not without some battle on his part: "I wanted to put reality in my photographs. Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. That's what was happening. And I was going to help make it happen. Boy they did not want that in America. Some of those editors were still wearing white gloves to couture." Richardson developed a reputation for being very difficult to work with. He brought his personal life, which was tumultuous, into his art. He battled with bouts of schizophrenia throughout his life. After making it to the top of the often catty and vicious world of fashion, getting paid up to $15,000 for a single image, he succumbed to his illness and ended up homeless on the streets of San Francisco. In 1989, an art historian researching fashion photography tracked Richardson down living in a flophouse, opening the door to Richardson's reestablishing contact with his son and eventually returning to New York City, where with the help of Richard Avedon and Steven Meisel, he was able to obtain teaching positions at International Center of Photography and the School of Visual Arts. Richardson restarted his career in his sixties, once again working for such magazines as Italian Vogue and British GQ. He was the father of photographer Terry Richardson and Margaret "Meg" Richardson (9/30/1957-5/8/2015).Source: Wikipedia Bob Richardson, a fashion photographer of the 1960's and 70's who transmitted the excitements and regrets of a generation of free spirits before disappearing into a shadow land of mental illness and homelessness, died on Dec. 5 at his home in Manhattan. He was 77. He died of natural causes, said his son, Terry. Robert George Richardson, born to Irish-Catholic parents on Long Island, was attracted to the messy, tempestuous, desolating quality of human relations. He was one of the first photographers to recognize that these emotions were not outside the world of 60's fashion but were in fact vital to it. In a 16-page spread in French Vogue in 1967, he evoked the sex idyll, the gloom and the sudden all-obliterating passions of two lovers on a Greek island. In one shot, the model Donna Mitchell is seen crying; in another she lies on a rocky shore, her face turned away, with her nude lover in the water before her. Mr. Richardson's pictures were radical because, more than showing youthful fashion in a liberated way, they sought to expose the life dramas that were then consuming young people. "Which were not about being applauded as you made your entrance to the opera," said Joan Juliet Buck, the writer and fashion editor, who first met Mr. Richardson in 1969 and later introduced him to her friend Anjelica Huston, with whom he had an intense four-year relationship. "They were about crying in your room, feeling lonely, hoping for sex." To photographers like Bruce Weber, Steven Meisel and Peter Lindbergh, Mr. Richardson was a pathfinder. As Mr. Weber said, describing his influence: "There's no textbook, no award, but there is this Bob Richardson school of photography. And it's an anti school. He was the first guy who said it was O.K. to underexpose the film, to not show the clothes." Mr. Weber added: "So many photographers when I first started out idolized Bob. He was sort of an underground figure." In a 1995 profile in The New Yorker, when Bob Richardson had resurfaced after more than a decade of drifting around Southern California and living in cheap motels or at times on the beach, he told the writer Ingrid Sischy: "I wanted to put reality in my photographs. Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll -- that's what was happening. And I was going to help make it happen. Boy, they did not want that in America. Some of those editors were still wearing white gloves to couture." Bob Richardson was as overbearing and opinionated as he was seductive and handsome. Terry Richardson said his father's schizophrenia was diagnosed in the 1960's. Years of drug and alcohol abuse added to his instability and increasing rootlessness, especially in the 80's, when he had mostly cut off ties with his family. Terry Richardson, also a photographer, said he first helped get his father off the streets in 1984, and by then he had been homeless for two years. "He had lost everything," his son said. After growing up in Rockville Centre, N.Y., Mr. Richardson studied art at the Parsons School of Design and Pratt Institute without graduating. His first marriage, to Barbara Mead, produced a daughter, Margaret, but soon collapsed; according to The New Yorker article, Mr. Richardson did not maintain contact with them. (Terry Richardson said he had not seen his half-sister in a decade and did not know her whereabouts. There are no other immediate survivors.) By the early 60's, Bob Richardson was taking fashion photographs and had resolved, he told Ms. Sischy, to "photograph my kind of woman." Harper's Bazaar gave him his first commission in 1963, and the magazine's art directors, Ruth Ansel and Bea Feitler, seemed especially attuned to his loose, unencumbered style. Around this time, he married an actress named Norma Kessler (from whom he was later divorced), and Terry, their only child, was born in 1965. Norma served as the assistant for the Greek island shoot two years later. "It was just my mom, Dad and me with a bag of clothes," Terry said. "They just went off together and did these pictures." By 1970, Richardson was deeply involved with Ms. Huston, who was 18 when they met, and together they would produce some of the most wistful portraits of the era. Certainly no photographer ever made Ms. Huston look more beautiful. Terry Richardson said the two last saw each other at an airport in 1973, when they went their separate ways. With much of Mr. Richardson's original work lost or buried in magazine archives, a number of individuals, including Mr. Meisel and the art historian Martin Harrison, tried to help restore at least his reputation as an groundbreaking photographer. And in the 90's he received some new assignments from magazines like Italian Vogue. But Mr. Richardson could be hardest on the people who loved him. "It was his way or the highway," his son said. Early this year, Bob Richardson, who had been living in Los Angeles, decided to return to New York, driving across the country in an old Mercedes with his dog, Mick, and taking pictures. He had a publishing deal to produce his first monograph, with Greybull, but through some orneriness, it fell through. Terry Richardson said he would do the book, which includes an autobiography. And in deference to his father's wishes, it will not have any color pictures: "My dad always said, 'I see the world in black and white.' "Source: The New York Times
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