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Last Call to Win a Solo Exhibition this May: Deadline: April 22, 2025
Last Call to Win a Solo Exhibition this May: Deadline: April 22, 2025
Jonathan Banks
Jonathan Banks
Jonathan Banks

Jonathan Banks

Country: United Kingdom
Birth: 1971

Jonathan Banks is an award-winning photographer with over 20 years' experience in commercial and media photography.

Jonathan Banks studied under the prolific artist John Blakemore, and graduated from the University of Derby with a BA honours in Photographic Studies. He cut his teeth in editorial photography freelancing for The Daily Telegraph and various agencies.

His work has appeared in international magazines and books. Jonathan has exhibited several bodies of work as a solo artist, as well as in conjunction with other photographers in the UK and abroad. These have ranged from – personal projects to editorial assignments and photographs supporting various charities.

Jonathan has always worked with NGOs both in the U.K. and abroad. He is a British Red Cross volunteer and has exhibited work in support of International Alert. Jonathan currently works with a stable of blue chip clients, NGOs and architects providing a range of photographic and film services. Jonathan lives in Kent with his wife and two sons.

Statement
I have photographed in over 50 different countries, documenting subjects as diverse as mask dancing festivals in Burkina Faso, the effects of the Chernobyl disaster in the Ukraine and the aftermath of 9/11 in New York. My international experience includes working in security impaired areas, where my communication skills and sensitivity allow me to capture subjects in the most challenging situations. Combined with my creativity and technical knowhow, this enables me to deliver award-winning images. I am passionate about my work and embrace the challenges of collaborating with global corporations, magazines and NGOs alike. Every assignment is different, and, as such, is approached uniquely. I am always on the lookout for new creative partnerships.
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Lynn Gilbert
United States
1938
As a photographer, my mission is to document unrecorded areas of society, shining a light on the lives and stories of those often overlooked. This work is not just a passion, but a significant contribution to our understanding of the world. In the 1970s, I took environmental portraits of children from more than a hundred families in New York City from different socioeconomic backgrounds, shedding light on the diversity of urban life. My portrait of Louise Nevelson in 1976, one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, inspired my first book. Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Have Shaped Our Time, 1981, includes portraits of the trailblazers who transformed the American Landscape. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Billie Jean King, Julie Child, Gloria Steinem, and 42 other women share their inspiring stories in their own words. For almost a decade, I documented the interiors of the Traditional houses of Turkey to preserve a disappearing way of life. The municipal government in towns and villages across the country helped select these houses, a significant part of the country's cultural heritage. My book The Silk Road: Then and Now, 2017, includes images from this series. For four years, I documented the changing seasons of a world-class garden. It grew into a documentary about a multi-generational family of 30, which revolves around this garden. My work has been widely published and appeared on over 1,000 media platforms, including Netflix, Nvidia, Intel, National Geographic, MoMA, the British Museum, and The Washington Post. My portraits are in the Smithsonian, the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian, and the New York Historical Society. Recently, I started photographing and interviewing 1970s kids from different socioeconomic backgrounds to document what happened to their lives. At 86, I'm still working as fast as I can. There's so much more I want to accomplish, and I'm determined to keep pushing the boundaries of my art. Artist Statement What is a Portrait? According to the dictionary it can be a painting, photograph, drawing, or even a description. A successful portrait is achieving an image that is a timeless representation of the subject. Even with inanimate things or portraits of spaces, the goal for me is the same, to capture its soul. I've photographed hundreds of people. I have a series of NYC children and another Women of Wisdom. Getting beyond that awkwardness is not easy. The clock is ticking. Even children are uncomfortable, under the scrutiny of a prying eye. As a photographer, I'm always nervous, ''will I get that one image.'' What works for me is to keep the conversation flowing. Eventually the awkwardness fades. When photographing children there are endless things to talk about, however it is not as simple with adults. If the person is well-known then I do a lot or research about them. As the conversation progresses, I keep the camera clicking. The first pictures never work but they are important part of the process. The subjects get used to the clicking and the images get better. After about an hour I find a person relaxes. That is the moment, I can capture my subject. Real character is revealed. The tilt of the head, the shoulders go soft, the fingers relax, the legs are at ease and the eyes are unguarded. That final image happens in a split second. Decades later the portrait must still work.
Thomas Crauwels
Switzerland
1983
I live at the service of these impetuous guardians of the eternal snows. Watching their light, vibrating to the rhythm of their beauty has become second nature. I like to live these moments of contemplation of panoramas both frozen and changing, which feed me with their greatness. In these moments, I taste peace and melt into the landscape. When the clouds are absent, when my gaze goes on forever and I can let my inspiration flow freely. Without any particular goal. Just to live. To let myself be carried. At other times, I become a truth hunter. I look for the ephemeral moments. The coming storm. The elements colliding. The wind, the air, the rock, creating a chaos that engulfs me in intense and intoxicating sensations. These minutes where I hold my breath so much they are nimbered of a perfection which exceeds me and carries me in a different space. A space that my eye and its accomplice, my camera, know how to capture. Suddenly, everything calms down. Just after the fin of the world, the revelation of another world arrives. Before my amazed gaze, my senses on the alert, the clouds are torn apart like the curtain rises on a new show. The highest summits are adorned with another light, a new contrast. Nature creates before my eyes. Trembling with an inner joy, I try to capture impermanence. It is like a miracle always renewed. Just after the storm, when the first rays of sunlight illuminate the peaks with their royal light. My daily life is punctuated by the study of weather forecasts. Detecting the approach of the forces of nature. A subtle alliance between intuition and the rational study of the elements. I am at one with nature, who is the chief creative artist...and I the humble craftsman. Mixture of experience and naivety, dancing alchemy of summits and elements, fusion between nature and the human being that I am. Who am I in front of all this? A stardust, present, vibrating, panting in the heart of the mystery of life. I aspire to the mastery of the moment which however escapes... In the end, should I really try to control the moment? When I have everything in place with rigor and yet failure looms, I let my heart speak. And then, sometimes, the miracle happens. This miracle that floods me with joy. I am happy to share with you some of the nuggets I brought back from these journeys to the end of my dreams... My quest for an ever-renewed perfection, nature has offered it to me so that I can offer it to you in turn. I hope you will have as much pleasure in dreaming in front of these photos as I had in looking for the perfect moment, the right moment.
Brigitte Carnochan
United States
1941
Brigitte Carnochan's photographs are represented nationally and collected globally by museums, corporate and private collectors. She has had solo exhibitions in Latvia, Italy, Chile, and Hong Kong as well as in New York, Houston, Boston, Palo Alto, Los Angeles, Santa Fe, Ketchum, Woodstock, Albuquerque, Carmel and San Francisco. In addition to the publication of three monographs (Bella Figura 2006, Shining Path 2006, Floating World 2012), The German publisher, Edition Galerie Vevais, launched a monograph of her images in 2014 at Paris Photo. For many years she taught workshops and classes through the Extension Program at UC Santa Cruz and Stanford's Continuing Studies Program. She is on the Advisory Councils of Center, in Santa Fe and The Center for Photographic Art in Carmel. Statement: Despite the debates over "honesty" and "truth" in photography, it is an intrinsically subjective art and form of communication. The photographer has chosen, from a huge range of images, certain ones - or pieces - from a certain perspective, with the light at a certain angle and at a unique moment in time. And the "story" in the photograph begins with the photographer's decision of when to click the shutter and isn't completed until each viewer interprets that image in his or her own way. The qualities that have fascinated me and led me to make a particular photograph are usually quite intuitive. I generally don't have a completed concept in my mind when I begin--I move things around, change angles, lighting--until everything seems right. To further complicate issues of "truth," I often add color to a black and white image in order to bring out, most convincingly, the impression it has made on me--and I have no concern about whether the colors are the "real" colors. In documentary photography the same subjective issues apply--but realizing and recording the "right" moment requires quicker reflexes and a different kind of intuition. Sensing a moment coming by keenly observing the scene--and always being ready for that moment--is the excitement in that kind of photography. All of my images begin as straight gelatin silver prints, but in my nudes and floral still lifes, I am often drawn to hand coloring on several counts. First in literature and now in photography, I have been interested in the power of the imagination--how it colors everyday life - creates, in fact, private views of experience, whether revealed in words or in images. Even though most people see the world in color, they do not see everything in the same exact colors. From an optical point of view, the colors we see depend on where we stand in relation to the object, where the sun is on the horizon, what color the walls are, or the tint of our glasses (or contact lenses), and so on. From a psychological point of view--everything depends on whether we are worried, elated, anxious, in love, lonely, distracted, or fully alert. For this reason, I often hand color my work, because the process allows me to interpret the essence of my subject according to my own imagination. Whether it is nudes and flowers or the black and white images in my series from Cuba, Africa, or Mexico, imagination colors--literally and figuratively--not only what I see initially, but what the viewer sees, ultimately. And seeing, of course, is everything in photography: seeing--and light and shadow. Beginning in 2007, I am continuing to paint gelatin silver images, but I am also scanning the first copy in each new painted edition (now limited to 25) and creating small limited editions of archival pigment prints* in three sizes. The level of current technology makes me confident that these digitally printed images will not only render the original painted photograph faithfully, but will, like the original, last over time. Discover Brigitte Carnochan's Interview
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