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Win a Solo Exhibition this February. Juror: Harvey Stein
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Jackson Patterson
Jackson Patterson
Jackson Patterson

Jackson Patterson

Country: United States
Birth: 1975

Jackson Patterson received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2009. He began his process in Arizona where he grew up. Exposed to the expansive landscapes throughout the west Jackson laid foundation for his appreciation for the land and the human story within it. He continues to tell the stories of his family and others intertwined with the majestic landscapes in his photomontages. Patterson’s images breathe insight into representation, fabrication, visual language and the relationship of earth and people.

He has been exhibiting his photographs in Hong Kong, London, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Texas, Colorado, Oregon, California and Arizona since 2000 at the Houston Center for Photography, the Museum of Contemporary Craft, Morris Graves Museum of Art, the Pendleton Art Center, the Center for Fine Art Photography, and at the David Brower Center. His work is in various private collections and in the Paul Sack Collection at the SFMOMA. He was recently awarded the Renaissance Photography Prize 2013 for best single image, the International Photography Awards 1st place in 2014, and was a Photo Lucida Critical Mass top 50 photographer in 2015.
Jackson currently resides and works in Chicago.
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

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.
Brian Ulrich
United States
1971
Brian Ulrich is an American photographer known for his exploration of consumer culture. Ulrich's work is held many collections including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Photo District News named Ulrich as one of 30 Emerging Photographers (2007). He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2009). His work has been featured in the New York Times Magazine; Time Magazine; Mother Jones; Artforum; and Harper’s. Aperture and the Cleveland Museum of Art published his first major monograph, Is This Place Great or What (2011). The Anderson Gallery published the catalog Closeout: Retail, Relics and Ephemera (2013).Source: Rhode Island School of Design Ulrich was born in Northport, New York, and lives in Providence, Rhode Island. He received a BFA in photography from University of Akron in Akron, Ohio (1996) and an MFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago (2004). He has taught photography at Columbia College Chicago and Gallery 37, both in Chicago; and at the University of Akron. He is an Associate Professor of Photography at the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2001 in response to a national call for citizens to bolster the American economy through shopping, Ulrich began a project to document consumer culture. This project, Copia, is a series of large-scale photographs of shoppers, retail spaces, and displays of goods. Initially focused on big-box retail establishments and shoppers, the series expanded to include thrift stores, back rooms of retail businesses, art fairs, and most recently empty retail stores and dead malls. Ulrich works with a combination of 4×5 large format and medium format cameras, and also incorporates found objects as sculpture, juxtaposed with his photographs on gallery walls.Source: Wikipedia
Madison Casagranda
United States
Madison Casagranda is a recent graduate from Brigham Young University where she studied photography and art education. She works primarily with alternative photographic processes in the darkroom, and enjoys the hands-on nature of these processes. Her goal is to communicate culturally and historically significant concepts and connect us to the past in order to address challenges in the present day. Her photography most often centers around her personal and family history, United States history, anti racism, and amplifying voices from marginalized communities. She has had two solo exhibitions at BYU and her work has been included in many group exhibitions across the country, including at The Springville Museum of Art, The Southeast Center for Photography, and The Praxis Gallery. Her work has been published in Communication Arts and she is currently working on self publishing a book of her series, The Black Stories Project. The Black Stories Project The wet plate collodion tintype process was first invented in the 1850s and became a primary photographic practice in the 1860s and 1870s, documenting much of the Civil War. The tintypes of the Black Stories Project embody the history of photography and the history of racial inequity in the United States and more specifically in the state of Utah. They draw a connection between the history of racism and the dialogue about race today. In a state where the black population is less than two percent and a dominant religious culture presents a unique and complicated narrative of the past and present, we can only address the current issues of systemic inequality while acknowledging and grappling with the history behind them. This project is a study about how the weight of our state's history and the lens through which it is told, affects how black individuals experience life here today. The Black Stories Project is made up of the portraits and voices of members of the black community here in Utah, and stands as an effort towards opening the conversation, understanding the past and changing the future narrative of our history.
Melvin Sokolsky
United States
1933 | † 2022
Melvin Sokolsky is an American photographer and film director. Born in New York City in 1933, Sokolsky was raised on the Lower East Side. He had no formal training in photography, but started to use his father's box camera at about the age of ten. Always analytical, he started to realize the role that emulsion played as he compared his own photographs with those his father had kept in albums through the years. "I could never make my photographs of Butch the dog look like the pearly finish of my father's prints, and it was then that I realized the importance of the emulsion of the day." Around 1954, Sokolsky met Robert Denning, who at the time worked with photographer Edgar de Evia, at an East Side gym. "I discovered that Edgar was paid $4000 for a Jell-O ad, and the idea of escaping from my tenement dwelling became an incredible dream and inspiration." Whether floating models down the Seine in a bubble, or shrinking his subjects, Alice-like, to miniature heights, Melvin Sokolsky helped to pioneer illusory fashion photography long before the age of digital enhancement took hold. Though he is best known for his editorial fashion photographs for publications such as Harper's Bazaar (for which he produced, in 1963, the Bubble series of photographs depicting fashion models “floating” in giant clear plastic bubbles suspended in midair above the River Seine in Paris), Vogue, and The New York Times, Sokolsky’s work is not limited to that field. Three quarters of his print photography has been for advertising, which does not usually carry a byline. As Sokolsky said in an interview: “I resented the attitude that ‘This is editorial and this is advertising. I always felt, why dilute it? Why not always go for the full shot?” Toward the end of the 1960s, Sokolsky worked as both commercial director and cameraman. He did not, however, abandon the world of print photography; in 1972 he was asked to photograph the entire editorial content of McCall's Magazine, a first for any photographer.Source: Wikipedia Melvin Sokolsky was born and raised in New York City where he started his distinguished career as a stills photographer. At the age of twenty-one he was invited to join the staff of Harper's Bazaar. Within the next few years he worked as a major contributor to four prestigious magazines: Esquire, McCall's, Newsweek, and Show. His photographs of internationally famous personalities have appeared in many of the major museums and magazines worldwide. In 1962, Sokolsky photographed the entire editorial content of McCall's Magazine, a first in its time. He is best known of his infusion of surrealism in his fashion photography, with his iconic series of women encased in plastic bubbles, floating around various cityscapes. In 1964, Sokolsky was invited by the School of Visual Arts in New York to teach a special class at his studio in New York. In 1969, Sokolsky embarked on a new career in television commercials as director/cameraman. Sokolsky has been honored with twenty-five Clio Awards, and is the recipient of every major television commercial award including the coveted "Directors Guild" nomination. Many of Sokolsky's commercials are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. In 1972, Sokolsky versed in all phases of special effects and cinematography, presented a computerized zoom lens that he designed to the Academy of Arts and Sciences. The system was subsequently nominated for an Academy Award. 1975, Sokolsky was invited by the Japanese Graphic Society to lecture in Tokyo and Kyoto, and was subsequently named Honorary Professor of Photography. In 1986, the Victoria and Albert Museum installed an exhibition of photographs called Shots of Style, a retrospective of the worlds major fashion photographers. The Victoria & Albert included Sokolsky's photographs in the exhibit, and subsequently placed many of them in their permanent collection. In 1991, the Victoria and Albert Museum mounted a show called Appearances, that is slated to travel around the world. Source: www.sokolsky.com
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.
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Call for Entries
All About Photo Awards 2026
$5,000 Cash Prizes! Juror: Steve McCurry