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Chad Cowan
Chad Cowan
Chad Cowan

Chad Cowan

Country: United States
Birth: 1984

Chad Cowan is a photographer and aspiring filmmaker who has been chasing storms across America's Tornado Alley over the past 10 years and 200,000 miles. His goal is to capture the awe inspiring beauty of nature in the most extreme and violent weather on earth. Cowan's current film project for which he is seeking financing and distribution is a collection of timelapses of these supercells shot in 8k resolution.

Growing up in Kansas, the epicenter of severe weather on the planet, he quickly became obsessed with thunderstorms. Inspired by a few timely weather-related gifts from his grandfather at a young age, Cowan decided he wanted to chase them once he had his driver's license.

Cowan's photos have been published around the globe and his work has appeared in major motion pictures, and on most national news outlets. In 2010, his 'Icemaker' photo of the supercell that dropped the largest hailstone ever recorded on earth came in second place in a National Geographic photo contest.

He has a BS in Economics from Kansas State University

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Laurent Dequick
Laurent Dequick is a professional architect in his forties. His photographic work has been influenced by architecture, since it is primarily focused on ideas surrounding the contemporary city and more specifically, urban sprawl. The photographer’s message is to accurately convey the impression of freneticism stemming from population density and activity in urban zones: “As you walk down the street, the lights, noises, traffic, hustle and bustle, and mix of smells are so striking that no single shot could capture all of it. So do we have to make choices? I don’t think so and I don’t want to.” To convey in images this “congestion” of urban life, Laurent Dequick does not hesitate to juxtapose, superimpose, or imbricate his shots. He fits together photographs representing architectural complexes, highways, and people, all with the same intensity. He condenses the images like the city condenses the sum of the lives of all of its inhabitants. His style is reminiscent of cubism in its rendering, which verges on abstraction in its representation of constant motion. Source: Yellow Korner The passing of time is a fascinating concept which happens all around us, at every single moment of every single day. French photographer Laurent Dequick decided to capture these fleeting seconds in a series of photographs entitled Vibrations Urbaines. Each image is a collective sequence of multiple photographs, superimposed together to visually reflect the chaos and congestion of large urban areas. The series features colorful and energetic portraits of both New York and Berlin. Viewers might feel a bit hyper as they view the still photograph which so strongly convey the motion of cars zipping past and the life of people rushing by. Dequick says his work is “primarily a reflection on the contemporary city and more specifically the proliferation of modern urban space.” Through these compositions, the artist portrays the constant urban action and excitement that are generally challenging to communicate through just one still photograph. Source: My Modern Met
Arlene Gottfried
United States
1950 | † 2017
Arlene Harriet Gottfried was a New York City street photographer who was known for recording the candid scenes of ordinary daily life in some of the city's less well-to-do neighborhoods; her work was not widely known until she was in her 50s. Born in Coney Island, she was the daughter of Lillian (Zimmerman), a homemaker, and Max Gottfried, who ran a hardware store with his own father, above which the family lived. Gottfried was the older sister of comedian and actor Gilbert Gottfried (1955–2022). When she was 9, Arlene moved to Crown Heights, where she became heavily influenced by the nearby, fast-growing Puerto Rican community. Later in the 70s, she moved with her Jewish immigrant family to the neighborhoods of Alphabet City and the Lower East Side. When Gottfried was a teenager, her father gave her an old 35 mm camera, which she eventually took to Woodstock, even though she said, "I had no clue what I was doing". She credited her upbringing for giving her the ability to get intimate photographs of strangers: "We lived in Coney Island, and that was always an exposure to all kinds of people, so I never had trouble walking up to people and asking them to take their picture." Gottfried graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology taking photography courses. She worked as a photographer for an advertising agency before freelancing for publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Fortune, Life, the Village Voice, and The Independent (London). She was a habitué of Nuyorican Poets Café, a friend of Miguel Piñero, and on the Lower East Side sang gospel with the Eternal Light Community Singers. In 1991 while on assignment Gottfried photographed the Eternal Light Community Singers, eventually singing with them, as well. Gottfried also sang gospel with the Jerriese Johnson East Village Gospel Choir. In her later years, she published five books of her work: The Eternal Light (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 1999), Midnight (powerHouse 2003), Sometimes Overwhelming (2008), Bacalaitos and Fireworks (powerHouse 2011), and Mommie: Three Generations of Women (powerHouse 2015). Her photographs and archives have been exhibited at the Leica Gallery in New York and Tokyo, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the European House of Photography (MEP), the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the New York Public Library. Gottfried died on August 8, 2017, from complications of breast cancer at her home in Manhattan at the age of 66 surrounded by friends and family.
Frieke Janssens
Belgium
1980
Over the past 25 years, Frieke Janssens has acquired a reputation as a photographer of surreal staged tableaux and group portraits, often originating in a specific concept, and almost always stemming from an inexhaustible interest in human diversity. Her series often stand out because of their confrontational nature. Notable series include, among others, Smoking Kids, Your last shot, Diana's, Animalcoholics, and recently Lightness. In the same way that an oil painter builds up a work layer by layer, she too meticulously creates each image, down to the smallest detail. In every picture we can recognise the same artistic touch, the same technical perfection, combined with a playful duality between reality and fiction. At first glance, her images attract the viewer because of their pared-down beauty. Yet once one really starts to look in earnest, one realises that there are always multiple layers of meaning. It seems as if the people portrayed are trying to tell us something. However, they are silent, and consequently have to rely on the viewers to create the story for themselves. Frieke does not adopt any particular position, but aims to convey the feeling that one is not only looking at a photograph, but at a mirror as well. As such, she leaves the viewers free in their interpretation, yet never leaves them indifferent. She sometimes lends her pared-down style to clients with whom she has a good connection, like a cultural centre, or a campaign, or a newspaper or magazine. In recent years, Frieke Janssens has exhibited in New York, Chicago, London, Hull, Bilbao and obviously also in her own country, including in Antwerp and Knokke-Heist. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, Huffington Post, Knack, De Morgen, De Tijd and NRC, among others. Her book The Sweetest Taboo won gold at the 2019 Henry Van De Velde awards. In 2022, her third book Lightness was published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition in Foto Knokke-Heist.
Christian Chaize
Christian Chaize, a self-taught artist, lives and works in Lyon, France. In 1992, he was awarded the Prix European Panorama de Kodak for Young European Photographer in Arles, France. In addition to his artistic achievements, he enjoys a successful career as a commercial photographer. In 2004, Chaize became intrigued by a small stretch of coastline in southern Portugal. Itching an artistic scratch, he began shooting what was then an entirely new subject matter for him. Using medium and large format cameras, his commitment to photographing a single beach front several times a year since then is now evident in the series, Praia Piquinia. This work has been the focus of two one-man museum shows in Portugal, as well as gallery exhibitions in New York, Berlin, and Lyon. Among other publications, it has been featured in The Collector’s Guide to New Art Photography Vol. 2, BLINK MAGAZINE, Issue No. 13, and Elle Decor. In addition to its popularity on 20×200.com, Praia Piquinia is also the subject of Chaize’s first monograph, published by Chronicle Books in the Spring of 2013. Paradis, images made in the Seychelles, and To Praia Grande, a separate beach series shot in Portugal, have also been exhibited in New York and Berlin, respectively. Future projects will continue to reveal his interest in enlightening the way we look at something that has otherwise become banal, or merely familiar. In the words of Marcel Proust, and in the tradition of all the great modern photographers who came before him, Chaize is always seeking to « have new eyes ».
Cathleen Naundorf
France/Germany
Cathleen Naundorf is a French German photographer. In the late 1980s, she graduated from photography studies in Munich. She worked as a photo assistant in New York, Singapore and Paris in the following years, before she started traveling in 1993 to such destinations as Mongolia, Siberia, Gobi Desert and the Amazonas headwaters in Brazil. The results of these insightful pictures have been included in eight publications of renowned publishing houses. Inspired by her encounter of and longstanding friendship with Horst P. Horst, Cathleen Naundorf early on turned to fashion photography. As of 1997, she started photographing backstage Paris fashion shows for Condé Nast. Since 2005, Cathleen Naundorf has worked on her haute couture series “Un rêve de mode” focusing on seven couture houses : Chanel, Dior, Gaultier, Lacroix, Saab, Valentino and Philip Treacy. Thanks to her outstanding pictures, Cathleen Naundorf got the privilege to choose gowns from the couturiers’ archives for her elaborate and cinematic productions. This work got published in "The Polaroids of Cathleen Naundorf", Prestel Edition, 2012.She works with large format cameras like Plaubel or Deardorff for her shootIngs and use mostly Polaroid or negative films. Cathleen Naundorf is working passionately on Haute Couture and Luxury Prêt-à-Porter. Her work got published in magazines like Harper's Bazaar, Tatler, VS Magazine or American Express.Cathleen Naundorf's work is represented by the Hamiltons Gallery in London.
Hugo Thomassen
Netherlands
1972
Shadow of Truth In his search for shadow, Hugo Thomassen found light. It is not the play of light that intrigues, but the richness of shadow. The bottles are what they are, yet they inadvertently evoke associations. Are we looking at a nocturnal cityscape with figures? Are we witnessing a chance encounter, a moment frozen in time, or simply an elegant composition with one or more bottles as the photographic subject? The bottle as a shape. In actual fact, the bottle has been constructed down in minute detail. Although the associations may suggest coincidence, the composition itself makes no such assumption. After all, it was built layer by layer. Painstakingly so. It is rich in its simplicity. No expense is spared. Each line is deliberate, considered. So much is expressed through so little. Without warning, this piece sends you soaring into the void - at least it had that effect on me. The void in which there is no time, and the severity of silence reigns. From a compositional standpoint, you have no reference point for space and time. As such, you go on your instincts and create a story yourself. Or you experience it in a meditative sense. What am I feeling? Is it abandonment, bottomless loneliness? Or am I experiencing silence, light, and intimacy? The image is poetic, still, melancholy, and harmonious. Reassurance emanates from the strict imposition of order. Coincidence is out of the question. The meaning of the work is hidden in the order that it projects. The interplay of lines formed by light and shadows never becomes a labyrinth, instead forming a guide pointing out the right direction. The photo has a reassuring effect on me which does not indicate a lack of thought. It makes me wander off in my mind’s eye while deciding my own perspective. This piece puts me outside of time. I can find no links to a memory, something which photography usually excels at. The image is new, though I believe I see a shade of art history through which the influence of Giorgio de Chirico, Morandi, and Night Shadows by Edward Hopper subtly shine through. The photograph distils the bottle to its purest form. It lays bare its essence. An idea. Is it truth that we see? Reality being exposed? Or are these simply shadows created by shapes? It is this that Thomassen plays with. Is it a single photograph or a picture composed of several images, a multitude of shots? In a sense, the photographic image is attempting to transcend the flatness of the paper. Photography is the means by which Thomassen explores the world. He exposes order in chaos or reveals an event through an ordering. He is the author of a visual story. His work is a narrative without words. It is excitement without something taking place. It represents an ode to emptiness, silence, and form. The bottle as the bearer of meaning. Everything has been translated into a language that one does not necessarily need to understand, but that one feels. He finds beauty in the composition of things, of objects. Naturally, a bottle is just a bottle, but in a composition and in relation to other bottles, by sheer coincidence a story is created. Thomassen brings light and shadow as nuances to that composition. He does not impose hierarchy onto the image. The background, the negative space, is just as important as the bottle. This piece is so streamlined that there are no secondary subjects. Light and shadow are of equal importance, because they need one another. Hugo Thomassen provides a context to the bottles. It is up to the viewer to make a story out of them - or not, of course. Because what is simply a charming image to one may appear to another as a story about existence and appearances. Ludo Diels
Stefano De Luigi
I was born in Koln and spent all my life so far, between Rome, Milan and Paris. Even if we are living in a time where is not really trendy, I feel myself deeply Europeen. I choose photography to became my language, because I felt it is universal, the only filter you have to use is your own mind-eyes. Below the essential of my biography I am a photographer since 1989. I attended 2 years of courses at ISF (Instituto Superiore di Fotografia) in Rome between 1987/89 and moved, for the first time, to Paris from 1989 to 1996, working, among others for the Louvre Museum. Back and forth from France to Italy In 2000 I received the Honorable Mention of Leica Oskar Barnack Award. That same year I started the project Pornoland, a photographic journey on pornographic movie sets around the world. In 2004 Pornoland became a book enclosing 16 pages of text by English writer Martin Amis. Pornoland has been published by : Thames & Hudson, Knessebeck, La Martinière and Contrasto. This work has been exhibited at REA gallery (Paris 2004), Santa Cecilia gallery (Rome 2005), Lanificio (Naples 2006), Festival Transphotographiques (Lille 2007), New York Photo Festival (NY 2011). Personal exhibitions in these years, among others, include WHO Headquarter (Geneva 2010), VII Gallery (New York 2010), 10b Gallery (Rome 2010), Museum of Modern Art (Rovereto 2011), Photofestival (Athens 2011/15), Fondazione Stelline (Milan, 2013) FotoIstanbul (2015) , Candiani Cultural Center ( Venice 2017) Plenum Gallery ( Catania 2018) Museum of Palazzo Ducale ( Genes 2019) Image Gibellina 2021, Photolux (Lucca 2022) Planches Contact (Deauville 2022). From 2003 to 2010, I worked on Blindness-, my main work, which lasted 8 years. A photographic project on the life condition of blind and low vision people, around the world. Blindness received the patronage of Vision 2020- World Health Organisation and won the W.E. Smith Fellowship Grant in 2007. In 2006 I embarked on the project Cinema Mundi, a World Cinema exploration of the alternative cinematographic scene external to the Hollywood dream factory including China, Russia, Iran, Argentina, Nigeria, South Korea and India. Cinema Mundi has been also transformed into a 7 minutes short movie screened at Locarno International Film Festival on August 4th, 2007. I have been awarded in the World Press Photo contest four times in different categories (1998-2007-2010-2011). In 2009 the Moving Walls of Open Society Foundation exhibited my work in Washington and New York. In 2010 I was the recipient of the Days Japan International Photojournalism Award and the Getty Grant for Editorial Photography, Syngenta Prize 2015, CNC grant for the documentary"Mare Amarum" 2019, Planches Contacts grant 2021 and I was the recipient of Strategie Fotografia grant from the Italian Ministry of Culture in 2022. I published 6 books Pornoland (Contrasto 2004), Blanco, (Trolley book 2010) iDyssey, (Edition Bessard 2017) Babel with Michela Battaglia (Postcart 2018) Pornoland Redux (Self-published 2021) Il Bel Paese (L'Artiere 2023). T.I.A Africa is a continent. But Africa is also a well-defined place in my mind. Africa is unique. Every time I have had the opportunity of going there I have come face to face with incredible tragedies but also with the unwavering hope of its people. Ever since my first journey to South Africa in 1989, where I saw Walter Sisulu walk free in Soweto after years of imprisonment, I continue to be both deeply moved and deeply shocked by all the stories I have witnessed and heard. Every time I step onto African soil I know I will experience something deep, something that inevitably leads to a search for the meaning of life, something that, for me at least, surfaces from deep within when I am in Africa. The questions raised call for humbleness, since often they are without answers. We know that the truth often lies in the middle folds of things. This project aims to raise questions and provoke thoughts which could, perhaps, lead to some answers and which in turn could correspond to some truths. I have tried to conceive this project as a poem. Or perhaps it would better be described as a ballad. The ballad with verses which challenge and play with each other. In the space between two facing photographs there is a story. One of the thousand stories I witnessed in Africa, one of the thousand questions I asked myself, one of the thousand experiences I was fortunate to live. The photographs represent the two extremes of the story that links them: the beginning and the end. I couldn't find a better form of expressive language to convey how Africa is an all-encompassing experience for any human being wishing to embrace it to its full. A painful yet joyful ballad of my personal and ongoing relationship with this continent. This is why I have called it "This is Africa". I should probably have called it "This is my vision of Africa" but it didn't sound the same. By no means does this mean it is the only view of Africa. I know it may seem inadequate and subjective. But so is everything in life, I guess. So, This is Africa. Blanco How does the look of a blind person look like? Can the blind show joy, happiness, disappoint, pain, suffering, pity, regret, with the only use of their eyes? The absence of sight can mean also the absence of complicity behind the camera's lens? We always use the term blind to characterize a person, such as blond, fat, poor, rich. And maybe, in some way, it is the truth. It doesn't matter if it happens in Africa, Asia, or the old Europe. The fact is, they cannot see the light, the colors, the daily scenes, how awful or gorgeous they can be. The blind are a contrast. It is easier to ignore them, their handicap is hidden, but they do have it. It's not necessary to turn the face to something or someone else, they won't see it. They seem 'normal', but they're not. They have their own world, the same and another than ours, made of different feelings, different images, different colors. And dark.
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