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Marcel Van Balken
Marcel Van Balken
Marcel Van Balken

Marcel Van Balken

Country: Netherlands

Marcel van Balken is a self-taught photographer from the Netherlands for about 40 years. As a photographer he is interested in specific themes and conceptual photography. He believes in working thematically with an absolute preference for surrealistic and creative photography. He gives himself a kind of theme or assignment and will not stop making photographs unless he thinks he got everything out of this assignment.

Marcel moves as a photographer ideally in the field of surrealism and magic realism. He prefers to create photographic images inspired by everyday reality combined with his own imagination. He strives to carefully compose photographic compositions of realistic looking scenes in unreal and sometimes magical spheres.

With his pictures he wants to tell a story with some level of abstraction: the image is not an explicit example of the concept, but a general expression of the idea. His goal in conceptual photography is to create a concrete image of abstract definition; to take a concept or idea and create a visual representation of it. A way of looking at the world in a completely different, sometimes surrealistic, manner.

Website

www.photure.nl

 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Yasmine Chatila
Yasmine Chatila
Egypt
1974
Yasmine Chatila was born in Cairo in 1974, growing up between Cairo, Italy, France, and Canada. She graduated with a Bachelor in fine Arts from Parsons School of Design in New York, and Masters in Fine Arts from Columbia University School of Arts in 2002. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Tag Heuer scholarship for eight consecutive years, and a Columbia fellowship. Her work has been exhibited worldwide, including locations like Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, and Ludwig Museum in Cologne. Stolen Moments have been published by Rizzoli press in the book New York: A Photographer's City and World Atlas Street Photography published by Yale Press. She has been featured in international publications including Vogue Italia, NBC News, IO Donna, Interview Magazine, Foam Magazine, Art in America, Exit Art, New York Post, Wired Magazine, Blackbook, and many more. Her website has attracted millions of viewers, making her work synonymous with voyeurism in art and conceptual photography. All about Stolen Moments On a quiet winter night, I looked out a window. I could see a building far away, the windows were illuminated, and I could vaguely make out people inside their apartments. When I imagined what they might be doing, my mind fluttered between wild fantasies and mundane clichés. I was curious to compare my expectations to the reality of their lives. After months of continuous observation in different parts of the city, I collected hundreds of photographs of strange, comical, and often haunting moments. At times, I was lucky enough to catch a glimpse of human nature when it was not guarded, not self-conscious, and completely uninhibited. This provided me with a stage where it was possible to observe myself in the most secret and vulnerable moments of others. In order to render the subjects unrecognizable, and in an attempt to render them more archetypal, they are taken out of context and displaced from their original habitat.
Elias Achy
Elias Achy
Lebanon
1999
Born and based in Lebanon, Elias Achy is an architect and self-taught photographer whose work reflects a blend for both passions. Through his artistic approach, he emphasizes the search for simplicity within the surrounding chaos, focusing on clean lines, geometry, abstraction, and minimalism. His photography captures the intricate relationships between space, structure and emotion, showcasing the beauty found in simplicity. Focusing on the architectural elements that often go unnoticed he invites the viewers to explore a fresh perspective on the world around them.
Giuliano Ottaviani
Giuliano Ottaviani
Italy
Born and raised in Rome, Giuliano is a Lifestyle photographer living and working in Paris, mostly active in the hospitality Industry. When he’s not shooting something for himself or his clients, you will probably find him strolling inside a forest, enjoying adventurous plots in a Movie Theatre with his wife, getting his hands dirty (in the kitchen) or taking care of his beloved Bonsais. At the moment, he is working on two main subjects: a photographic mapping of primary rainforests, which he started in 2017 during a discovery trip to the island of Haida Gwaii in British Columbia, and a photographic series illustrating several arts and crafts.
Sarah Elliott
Sarah Elliott
United States
1984
Sarah Elliott was born in the USA in 1984 and received a degree in photography in New York City at Parsons School of Design. Elliott assisted Stanley Greene for a year before moving to Nairobi, Kenya, where she is currently based. Elliott has traveled extensively and is interested largely in documenting social issues, with a focus on women. Her photographs have appeared in such publications as Vanity Fair Italy, Monocle, Financial Times Weekend Magazine and Time. In 2010, she was selected by the Magenta Foundation as a Flash Forward Emerging Photographer winner as well as a participant in World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass. In 2011 Sarah was shortlisted for the Anthropographia Award for Human Rights. Sarah is a founding member of Razon Collective, an international group of visual storytellers. In 2011, Elliott won the Global World: Through the Lens of Human Rights competition and a prize in the World Press Photo contest.Source World Press Photo
Teri Figliuzzi
Teri Figliuzzi
United States
Teri Figliuzzi combines her passions for textiles, color, and photography to create phytograms, producing work that emphasizes a ‘touched by hand’ approach. Process and technique exploration is central in her work, making plant based developers and incorporating gold and silver leafing in the finished images. Using botanicals, seaweed and organic materials as her subject matter, she brings awareness to the fragile, discarded, and unnoticed in life. Her work has been in notable juried group shows including the Center for Fine Art Photography, Center for Photographic Art, and the Julia Margaret Cameron Award as honorable mention. A Merit Award was received in the Rfotofolio “Open Call 2022”, and was a Lucie Foundation 2021 category winner for “Open Call: Notions From Home”. She earned a BFA in Textile Design from the Rhode Island School of Design and resides in New York City where she continues her education in the arts. Statement A compulsive gatherer, I have a fascination and obsession with organic forms. On long walks in gardens and forests, I often seek out the common weed or discarded flower...all equally beautiful in my eyes. My work has made me slow down and take time to observe and study their subtle and unique differences more closely. I have a much deeper appreciation and respect of nature, it’s strength and perseverance, healing powers and unmatched grace. Nature’s growth and rebirth are an ever present reminder to try again and move forward.
Tomas Munita Philippi
Tomas Munita Philippi
Chile
1975
Munita travels the world exploring ritual, culture, and crisis, capturing his diverse subject matters with arresting beauty and poignancy. In 2010 Munita won the All Roads National Geographic Award for his work on Lost Harvest-the death of the Loa River. Recent areas of exploration include Kabul, Kandahar and Kashmire and the HIV epidemic. Tomás is winner of several awards, some of them are: 3 World Press Photo awards. 2006 and 2013 Chris Hondros Fund Award. 2013 LatinAmerican Photographer of the Year Poyi. 2013 2nd price Photographer of the Year Poyi Visa D´or Daily News (France) for his coverage of the Syrian conflict. 2012 All Roads by National Geographic (US), with his work Lost Harvest, Death of Loa River. 2010 Finalist for Global Vision Award (US), with Lost Harvest, Death of Loa River. 2010 Henri Nannen Preis in (Germany), with his work Island of Sorrow published by Geo. 2010 Rodrigo Rojas de Negri, Santiago. Chile. 2007 Leica Oskar Barnack Award (Germany), with the story Kabul – Leaving the Shadows. 2006 ICP Young Photographer Infinity Award (US). 2005 He is currently based in his hometown, Santiago, Chile.
Elisa Migda
Elisa Migda
France
1981
Graduated from the Sorbonne and the University Paris X in Literature, Human Sciences and Visual Anthropology (Formation de Recherches Cinématographiques created by Jean Rouch) after studying photography, video and graphic design, she joined the International photojournalism festival Visa pour l'Image Perpignan in communication and coordination. In 2016, she is also responsible for the creation of the art book fair FILAF ARTBOOK FAIR within the FILAF festival as well as the curating of the exhibitions A L'Italia by Carine Brancowitz and Before Landing by Michel Houellebecq in Perpignan. Passionate about film photography but also after having assisted various fashion and reportage photographers and contributed to various audiovisual creations, she decided to join a traditional photography laboratory in Paris, which offers more particularly the realization of large formats in order to revive the practice of printing and its processes. Eighteen months ago, she set up her own laboratory in Seine et Marne in order to carry out a more experimental and personal photographic work, that she has been pursuing for about fifteen years. In 2019, she participates in the group exhibition Le Rêve d'un mouvement in Paris with Gilles Roudière, Damien Daufresne, Stéphane Charpentier, Grégory Dargent, Frédéric D. Oberland and Gaël Bonnefon and presents her solo exhibition Sweet Surrender in Arles during the month of July with the Bergger group. Statement "My photographic work is long-term and develops around a personal project: to capture images that revolve around my life, intimate experiences and, from these photographic episodes were born portraits, self-portraits, imprints of existence. It is an abandonment where bodies and faces waver in obscure clarity, plunge into dazzle, navigate between interior and exterior spaces, loneliness and erasure from the world. In this universe, a feeling of sweet melancholy often emerges around themes such as energy, destruction, dealing with both the eternal and the ephemeral, disappearance and metamorphosis. These are trembling moments, a collection of images with fleeting, spectral visions, sprinkled with imperfections just as in our daily lives or in our dreams. There remains a disturbing strangeness, a subjective territory, trying and pensive, where the eyes are closed, frozen, elusive..." -- Elisa Migda
Evgenia Arbugaeva
Evgenia Arbugaeva
Russia
1985
Evgenia Arbugaeva (born 1985) is a photographer of the Russian Arctic. Having grown up in Yakutsk, she has an empathy with the people living in the far north and the difficult living conditions they experience, and several of her photographic projects have involved them. The National Geographic has funded her to photograph the people and economic changes on Russia's northern coast. Arbugaeva was born in Tiksi, a small port town of the Sakha Republic on the Arctic Sea, near the mouth of the Lena River. As part of the Soviet Union, Tiksi supported military airfields and became the world's most northern settlement with over 5000 people. Her memories of the place include pink mountains, whiteout snowstorms in which she lost all sense of place, fields of snow colored green or gold by the surrounding light, and auroras in the endless night of winter. One of her childhood heroes was explorer Jacques Cousteau. At the age of eight, and at the fall of the Soviet Union, she and her family moved to Yakutsk, "the coldest city on earth" and a place that she found much less visually appealing. She studied management in Moscow before moving to New York City. There, she studied photography at the International Center of Photography, graduating in 2009. 19 years after moving from her hometown, Arbugaeva decided to move back to Tiksi because she could no longer remember anything from the town. These memories had faded so much to the point where they seemed unreal. Arbugaeva's photographic method involves living with her subjects on a long enough term to become friends with them and for them to relax in front of her camera. For instance, in one of her projects she traveled with Siberian hunters for the tusks of mammoths, newly exposed by global warming. She won the trust of the hunters by stitching up the injured hand of the head of the group. She often works without a camera, scouting locations that she returns to frequently until the lighting and inspiration combine to give her a photo. In 2010 Arbugaeva returned to Tiksi, now becoming a ghost town, on a personal visit to compare it to her memories, but left the town with only one photo she liked, of a teenage girl playing on the seashore. Inspired by the photo, she traveled back to Tiksi in 2011 to meet the girl and her family and to document their daily life, overlain with her own memories. Despite the decline of the town and the difficult life there (which drove her host family to plan their own departure), her photos in this project are "bright and whimsical, their compositions and vivid colours redolent of the books she read there as a child". Arbugaeva learned of the weather stations of northern Russia in a dog sledding incident, when she and her father had to take shelter from bad weather at one of the stations. In her project Weather Man, she took a two-month passage on an icebreaker to 22 of the stations, including the station at Khodovarikha, where she met meteorologist Vyacheslav (Slava) Korotki. The portrait taken of Vyacheslav Korotki is an intimate story of an individualistic man, who is facing the fading winter of the Arctic. In early 2014, she returned to Khodovarikha by helicopter for a two-and-a-half-week visit and photography session with Korotki. Based on this work, a much darker series of photos than the ones from Tiksi, she published a profile of Korotki in The New Yorker. Arbugaeva's other photography projects have included nomadic Yakut reindeer herders in Sakha, and Amani, a sequence of fictionalized images set on an abandoned anthropological research station on a former German coffee plantation in Tanzania. Arbugaeva is the 2013 winner of Leica's Oskar Barnack Award for her work in Tiksi, for which she also received a Magnum Foundation International Emergency Fund grant in 2012. In 2018, National Geographic named her as one of their four inaugural Media Innovation Fellows, funding her to photograph the people and economic changes on Russia's northern coast.Source: Wikipedia
Elena Donskaya
Elena Donskaya
Russia
1969
I was born in a small village in Buryatia and have been surrounded by the beauty of this region since birth. My parents worked in a geological expedition, which instilled in me a love of travel. During my school years, I graduated from the School of Arts. I have traveled extensively — to over 30 countries — and visited numerous museums and galleries, experiences that have fueled my passion for photography and helped me develop a refined artistic taste. I have been actively engaged in photography for the past three years, specializing mainly in female portraits, while also exploring a variety of other genres. AAP Magazine: AAP Magazine 49: B&W
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