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Final Chance to Win a Solo Exhibition this March! Deadline: February 18, 2025
Final Chance to Win a Solo Exhibition this March! Deadline: February 18, 2025
Simona Bonanno
Simona Bonanno
Simona Bonanno

Simona Bonanno

Country: Italy
Birth: 1974

Born in 1974, in Messina, Italy to a family involved in the arts. After obtaining the artistic High School degree in 1992 she studied in Paris, at the Atelier Peninghen, ESAG. She received a Bachelor of Arts, in 1999, at the School of Arts in Italy, where she started photographing with film.

Her photographs have been selected for several group exhibitions in Italy, USA, Canada, France, Australia, Argentina, Israel, Turkey and Denmark. In 2013 she had her first solo exhibition at the Galerie Focale, in Nyon, Switzerland.

A print of her piece from The Inner Invisible series has been auctioned at Snap! Toronto 2014. Two other prints are part of the photography collection of the Bibliothèque National de France.

In November 2013 she won the Grand Prix de Découverte, Abstract category. In 2011 she was the overall winner of the Julia Margaret Cameron Award and Amateur Photographer of the Year in United Kingdom. She was also finalist, shortlisted or first place category winner at several other international competitions.

Her photographs have been published in several magazines, such as CNN, Resource Magazine, Amateur Photographer, Fotografia Reflex, National Geographic, Digital Camera Bookazine Black&White vol. 2, and Drome Magazine.

She presently live in Messina. She works between Italy and Paris.
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Manjari Sharma
Manjari Sharma is a photographer born and raised in Mumbai, India and based in Brooklyn, New York. Rooted in the study of relationships and personal mythology, since it’s inception Manjari’s work has been recognized as walking the line of fine art and traditional portraiture. Manjari‘s work has been showcased in several group and solo exhibitions both in the US and internationally and she's been invited to speak at the School of Visual arts and the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City. Manjari was chosen as an honorable mention for the Santa Fe Prize in 2012, her work selected by Review Santa Fe and featured by the Critical mass top 50. Manjari has been featured in various magazines print and online. Her works have appeared with Forbes India Magazine, Vogue India, Geo Magazine, America Online. She has been commisioned to work with advertising agencies such as JWT and Contract, India and has had features and interviews with New York Times, lens blog, Wired Raw File Nikon Asia, NPR, Time, PDN, Huffington Post, CNBC, Mumbai, The Times of India group and Leica, China. Before moving to the U.S. in 2001 Manjari worked for the national news daily of her country, The Times of India. Manjari has also worked as a staff photojournalist with the leading south asian photography magazine, Better Photography. She holds a bachelors degree in Visual Communication from S.N.D.T University, Mumbai and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Still Photography from Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio.
Rajan Dosaj
United States
1958
Born and raised in the United States, I spent nearly 20 years in the theater world, first as a dancer and singer in Broadway musicals and later as an actor and director. Upon my retirement from theater, I settled into the business world but it wouldn't be long before I was in need of a creative outlet and the Sebastiao Salgado documentary, The Salt of the Earth, rekindled my brief high school interest in photography. Soon, the books of Alec Soth, Nancy Rexroth, Sally Mann, Joshua Jackson, and many more were on my selves and with a newly purchased camera in hand, I started out on my latest adventure. Naturally, I started with dance portraits and found it incredibly exciting and fulfilling but soon I ventured into other genres to improve my work. Whether it was wildlife, street, architecture, portrait, or fine art photography, I was either taking a class or teaching myself about the genre in order to become a better photographer. In my short time behind the camera, I have been fortunate enough to have some of my images appear in galleries across the country, including Photo Place Gallery, A Smith Gallery, Praxis Gallery, Black Box Gallery, SE Center for Photography, and the Decode Gallery. With my background in theater, I know that photography can be a frustrating art form where most of the time I end up kicking myself for the mistakes that I continuously make over and over. But every once in a while, those rare moments come along when my eyes through a camera are able to see and capture an extraordinary moment.
Fritz Liedtke
United States
Fritz began photographing as a teen, carrying his Kodak 110 Instamatic around on a US tour with his father at age 14, in their little blue Datsun B210. Twenty-five years later, he continues to explore the world, camera in hand. In the intervening years, Fritz acquired a BFA in Photography; won numerous awards and grants for his work; enjoyed artist residencies in various places; had photographs published, collected, and shown in galleries and museums; wrote articles and essays for various publications; lectured and taught workshops on photography and the artistic life; and balanced both commercial and fine art practices. He also loves to travel. He is constantly looking for new ways to approach the world through art. Portland, Oregon is his home, along with his wife and daughter and their bright orange house.About Astra Velum: April, a freckled woman in this series, told me a story from her childhood: One day after playing outside, her grandmother asked her to go wash up. She went to the bathroom and did so, but grandma wasn’t satisfied. “Your face isn’t clean! Go scrub it some more!” The young girl was distraught, for all that was left on her skin were her freckles, and no amount of scrubbing would make them go away. In a world that flaunts flawlessness as the ideal, can we find real beauty in the blemishes? More than once, while photographing for this series, women thanked me for making something beautiful out of what they often viewed as an imperfection. At its essence, Astra Velum explores the beauty of flawed human skin, with its freckles and scars, overlaid upon us like a thin veil of stars. This series is hand-printed by the artist as a limited edition set of photogravures.
Beth Galton
United States
Beth Galton is a photo-based artist, with an educational background in the natural sciences and three decades of experience as a professional photographer in the editorial and commercial arena. These elements of her history are the lens through which she explores the world. Her work has been recognized by organizations including Graphis, Communication Arts, the Tokyo International Foto Awards, Julia Margaret Cameron Award, IPA Awards, AAP, and the PDN Taste Awards. The Cut Food series was exhibited in Montpellier Contemporain, Aperture, and Beth Urdang Gallery. It was part of ‘The Fence’, a 7-city, traveling outdoor exhibition, it was published in the Washington Post, and covered by NPR. Both Lenscratch and Rfotofolio picked up the Memory of Absence series. Additionally, A Vita Plantae, and Memory of Absence have been exhibited at Wave Hill, Soho Photographic Gallery, The Center for Fine Art Photography (CO), The Center for Photographic Art (CA), The Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, Griffin Museum of Photography, Praxis Gallery, and SE Center for Photography. The Washington Post recently published Beth’s work from her series Covid Diary, a document of her time in confinement. About Cut Food "What started as a ubiquitous burrito shot, turned into an exploration of iconic food through a fresh perspective. We chose subjects which we felt were symbols within our Western food culture, and sought to move past the normal “appetite appeal” to look deeply and with curiosity into them. My intention was to give the ordinary a sense of magic show quality. Real, but also astonishing." About A Vita Plantae "This collection explores the relationship between art and science in a three-part series of organic images: Roots, Potato Love, and Time Preserved. These images seek to reveal some of the long-hidden truths of plants: their movement and grace, the nature of time, and the almost unbearable fragility of life. " About Memory of Absence "In 2017, my mother and father—who had not lived together for 50 years, died within 3 days of each other. In this series, I sought to convey a sense of memory and loss through the composition of found ephemera and botanical matter. The volatile botanicals represent the ever-changing nature of memory —an unstable and profoundly unreliable process."
Terri Gold
United States
1955
Terri Gold is a photographer known for her poetic infrared and color imagery of people from the remote corners of the globe. Her ongoing project "Still Points in a Turning World" explores our universal cross-cultural truths: the importance of family, community, ritual and the amazing diversity of its expression. As the timeless past meets the imminent future, indigenous cultures that still follow their traditional way of life are rapidly disappearing. At risk is a vast archive of knowledge and expertise. What is the value of ancient practices? What will be discarded and what will be treasured? If we share our stories and appreciate the mysteries of every realm, we may gain a deeper understanding of that which lies both behind and ahead of us. Her work has garnered many awards, is shown in galleries internationally and published extensively. Recent publications of her work include articles in the BBC Picture Desk, The Huffington Post, aCurator, and Featureshoot. She had a solo show at the Salomon Arts Gallery in New York in 2018. Her work won the Grand Prize in Shadow and Light magazine competition in 2019 and in The Santa Fe Photographic Workshops’ "Diversity" competition. She has received recent awards in the International Photography Awards, Prix de la Photographie, Paris (Px3), Humanity Photo Awards, and the Black and White Spider Awards. She is always happiest with a camera or three in her hands. Statement In the Sahel desert in Chad, the nomadic Wodaabe people spend months apart, searching out pastures for their herds and shelter for the families. When the rains are good, the clans celebrate with an extraordinary courtship ritual and beauty contest called The Gerewol and it's the men who are on parade. The sweltering desert region of Chad seems an unlikely place to be so concerned with beauty yet it is an integral part of the Wodaabe culture. They consider themselves to be the most beautiful people on earth. They display their beauty as a spiritual act, full of dignity and honor. Each person is an artist and they are their art. A living canvas. The intensity rises as they dance all night in their technicolor dreamcoats, a surreal line-dance. Many different arrangements are made at the festival, some for the night, some for a lifetime. All is possible at the Gerewol...
Robert Heinecken
United States
1931 | † 2006
Robert Heinecken was an American artist who referred to himself as a "paraphotographer" because he so often made photographic images without a camera. Born in Denver in 1931, Heinecken grew up in Riverside, California, the son of a Lutheran minister. He joined the Navy in 1954 and served as a fighter pilot (though too short, he passed a height test by padding his socks with paper). Heinecken later served as an officer in the Marines, discharged as a captain in 1957. Heinecken completed his bachelor's and master's degrees in art at UCLA, where he studied printmaking as well as photography. Heinecken was known for appropriating and re-processing images from magazines, product packaging or television. In Are You Rea series from 1964 to 1968, for instance, he created a portfolio of images filled with unexpected and sometimes surreal juxtapositions by placing a single magazine page on a light table, so that the resulting contact print picks up imagery from both sides of the page. In the late 1960s, he also began cutting up popular magazines such as Time and Vogue and inserting sexual or pornographic images into them. He would place his collage-publications back on newsstands in Los Angeles to be sold to unsuspecting buyers. In 1962, he founded the photography program at UCLA. He taught there until 1991. In 1964 he helped found the Society for Photographic Education, an organization of college-level teachers. He also taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where his second wife, Joyce Neimanas, was on faculty. They split their time between the two cities for several years before they moved to New Mexico in 2004. As a professor at UCLA, Heinecken was a prime mover in the Los Angeles art photography scene. His influence was felt by many students and associates. Among them were John Divola, Eileen Cowin, Graham Howe, Jo Ann Callis and Ray McSavaney. Many of them, in turn, became influences on succeeding generations of art photographers. From 1971 on he started to expose food directly on light-sensitive materials. He realized these "documentary photograms" first on black and white paper and later in color in the series Various Lunches on positive Ilfochrome paper. In 1983/84 he created such Foodograms even on large polaroid sheets (20x24 inches) in collaboration with John Reuter in San Diego and Boston. In the 1980s, he created several series on American news television that involved photographing images on the television or exposing the light of a television set directly to paper to create what he called "videograms." During his life he was mainly shown in traditional photography galleries, but two contemporary art galleries in L.A. began staging exhibitions of his work after his death: Marc Selwyn Fine Art and Cherry and Martin. Curators like Eva Respini at the Museum of Modern Art now place his work in a conceptual art lineage, associating him with Pictures Generations artists such as Cindy Sherman, John Baldessari and Richard Prince.
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