Gabriel Isak

Gabriel Isak

Gabriel Isak

Gabriel Isak

Country: Sweden
Birth: 1990

Gabriel Isak was born in 1990 in Huskvarna, Sweden. In 2016, he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Photography at Academy of Art University in San Francisco, California. Isak has exhibited his work at solo exhibitions at The Cannery Gallery, San Francisco, California and his works have been included in various important exhibitions including "Acclimatize" at Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm, Sweden and "Culture Pop" at M Contemporary, Sydney, Australia. Isak lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden, from where he travels all around the world for personal and commissioned projects.

Artist Statement

Gabriel Isak's art entails surreal and melancholic scenes where he invites the viewer to interact with the inner world of solitary figures that symbolize our own unconscious states. He uses photography as a medium to draw and paint surreal images, minimal and graphic in its aesthetic, rich in symbolism and emotion, focusing on themes inspired by human psychology, dreams and romanticism, as well as his own experiences, especially the years he went through depression. Isak's work is a serene and melancholic meditation that stills the chaos of life and transforms into an introspective journey that questions the depths of existence. The objective of Gabriel Isak's art is to shine a light on the experiences of being and the states of mind those brings along. His subjects are anonymous, imprisoned in monochromatic settings, so the viewer can envision oneself as the subject, reflecting back on one's own experiences and journey in life.

Website

www.gabrielisak.com

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Seydou Keïta

Mali
1921 | † 2001

The great African portraitist Seydou Keïta lived in Bamako, Mali from 1921 to 2001. A self-taught photographer, he opened a studio in 1948 and specialized in portraiture. Seydou Keïta soon photographed all of Bamako and his portraits gained a reputation for excellence throughout West Africa. His numerous clients were drawn by the quality of his photos and his great sense of aesthetics. Many were young men, dressed in European style clothing. Some customers brought in items they wanted to be photographed with but Keïta also had a choice of European clothing and accessories - watches, pens, radios, scooter, etc. - which he put at their disposal in his studio. The women came in flowing robes often covering their legs and their throats, only beginning to wear Western outfits in the late 60s. Seydou Keïta worked primarily with daylight and for economic reasons took only a single shot for each picture. Seydou Keïta was discovered in the West in the 1990s. His first solo exhibition took place in 1994 in Paris at the Fondation Cartier. This was followed by many others in various museums, galleries and foundations worldwide. He is now universally recognized as the father of African photography and considered one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century. "It’s easy to take a photo, but what really made a difference was that I always knew how to find the right position, and I never was wrong. Their head slightly turned, a serious face, the position of the hands... I was capable of making someone look really good. The "photos were always very good. That’s why I always say that it’s a real art." Seydou Keïta, Bamako, 1995/1996 © André Magnin From en.wikipedia.orgSeydou Keïta was born in 1921 in Bamako, although the exact date is unknown. He was the oldest in a family of five children. His father Bâ Tièkòró and his uncle Tièmòkò were furniture makers. Keïta developed an interest in photography when his uncle gave him a Kodak Brownie with a film with eight shots in 1935, after returning from a trip to Senegal. In the beginning Keïta worked as both a carpenter and photographer, taking first portraits of his family and friends, later of people in the neighborhood. He learned photography and how to develop from Pierre Garnier, a French photographic supply store owner, and from Mountaga Traoré, his mentor. In 1948 he set up his first studio in the family house in Bamako-Koura behind the main prison.From www.gallery51.comConsidered to be one the important precursors of African photography, Seydou Keïta was born in Bamako (Mali) in 1920. Like many of his contemporaries, nothing particularly predestined him to become a photographer. His uncles bring back a camera from a trip to Senegal, and the young Seydou is fascinated. He starts photographing his relatives and discovers a deep passion for this art. Although he makes furniture for a living, he spends much time with Pierre Garnier who has his own studio. There, Seydou Keïta learns the secrets of the trade and soon realises that there was an enormous demand for individual pictures. This drives him to open his own studio in 1948. Up until then, whites had had a lot of trouble convincing local population to have their pictures taken, because they were so afraid to lose their identity. With Keïta it's different: he is one of them and permits them to choose their own picture that will be left for the close family. From then on, we see the opposite effect: people queue up to have their pictures taken. This is to become the great specialty of the malinese artist. Slowly he develops his own style, in which one finds accents of Mountaga Kouyaté's work, an intellectual that fought a bitter personal battle for the independence of Soedan. To look their best, that is the sole desire of people in front of Keïta's lens. Keïta even gives them costumes, accessories and furniture to further enhance their appearance.Men, women and children, all look perfectly elegant. If we look beyond the aesthetics of the black-and-white pictures, Seydou shows us a portrait of Malinese society in full transition. Finally Seydou is to become the country's official photographer, and will stop working in 1977. Nevertheless, it will be many years before his work is noted at the famous "Festival of African Photography". Source: www.seydoukeitaphotographer.com

Sajedeh Zarei

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Zied Ben Romdhane

Zied Ben Romdhane

Tunisia
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Zied Ben Romdhane (b. 1981, Tunisia) started his career as a commercial photographer. In 2011 he switched to documentary photography and photojournalism. His work has been featured in The New York Times and The Washington Post His recent exhibitions include Views of Tunisia (Arles 2013), After the Revolution (White Box, NY 2013), and Zones d’Attente (Clark House, Bombay 2013), Kushti (Maison de la Tunisie, Paris 2013), Fotofest Biennial in Houston Center for Photography (Houston , USA 2014), Sahel (1×1 Gallery, Dubai 2014), Trace (MUCEM, Marseille 2015) , Afrotopia African biennale of photography (Bamako , Mali 2017), and the Biennale of the photographs of the contemporary Arab world (France , Paris 2017). Romdhane published his first book West of Life in 2018 with Red Hook Editions. Prizes and awards include, selection for the Prize 6X6 Global Talent Program 2018 with World Press Photo Foundation, participant of Joop swart masterclass with World Press Photo, winner of the POPCAP award (Africa Image, Basel, 2015). He is the Director of Photography of Fallega (2011), a documentary film about the Arab Spring in Tunisia. Ben Romdhane was a participant in World Press Photo’s 2013 Reporting Change initiative, member of the collective “Rawiya” and “Native”. Zied Ben Romdhane joined Magnum as a nominee in 2019.Source: Magnum Photos “Zied is a documentary photographer who is using aesthetics in a tasteful way to invite the audience to his stories. His work is not pushing facts but instead he uses careful compositions that leaves room for the viewer to reflect on the images and their content.” - Rebecca Simons, Finland, independent curator, editor, educator and 6x6 nominator. Zied Ben Romdhane is a Tunisian photographer. He won the POPCAP award in 2015, and his work has been featured in Irada and Dégage. He is the Director of Photography of Fallega (2011), a documentary film about the Arab Spring in Tunisia. Romdhane was also a participant in World Press Photo’s 2013 Reporting Change initiative.Source: World Press Photo

Stuart Franklin

Stuart Franklin

United Kingdom
1956

Stuart Franklin is a British photographer. He is a member of Magnum Photos and was its President from 2006 to 2009. Franklin was born on June 16 1956 at Guys Hospital in London. He studied drawing under Leonard McComb in Oxford and Whitechapel, London, and from 1976 to 1979 photography at West Surrey College of Art and Design, where he graduated with a BA. Moreover, between 1995 and 1997, he studied geography at the University of Oxford, first receiving a BA and the Gibbs Prize for geography. He received a doctorate in Geography from the University of Oxford in 2000. Stuart Franklin was awarded a professorship in documentary photography in 2016. He teaches photography and visual storytelling at Volda University College, Norway. From 1980 until 1985, Franklin worked with Sygma in Paris. During that time he photographed the civil war in Lebanon, unemployment in Britain, famine in Sudan and the Heysel Stadium disaster. Joining Magnum Photos in 1985, he became a full member in 1989. In the same year, Franklin photographed the uprising in Tiananmen Square and shot one of the Tank Man photographs, first published in TIME Magazine, as well as widely documenting the uprising in Beijing earning him a World Press Photo Award. In 1989 Franklin traveled with Greenpeace to Antarctica. He worked on about twenty stories for National Geographic between 1991 and 2009, subjects including Inca conqueror Francisco Pizarro and the hydro-struggle in Quebec and places such as Buenos Aires and Malaysia. In addition, he worked on book and cultural projects. In October 2008, his book Footprint: Our Landscape in Flux was published by Thames & Hudson. An ominous photographic document of Europe’s changing landscape, it highlights Franklin's ecological concern. During 2009 Franklin curated an exhibition on Gaza - Point of No Return for the Noorderlicht Photo Festival. Since 2009 he has focused on a long-term landscape project in Norway published as Narcissus in 2013. More recently he has worked on documentary projects on doctors working in Syria, and immigration in Calais. Franklin's most recent book, The Documentary Impulse was published by Phaidon in April 2016. It investigates the nature of truth in reporting and the drive towards self-representation beginning 50,000 years ago with cave art through to the various iterations and impulses that have guided documentary photography along its differing tracks for nearly 200 years. Franklin was the general chair of the World Press Photo jury 2017.Source: Wikipedia How Stuart Franklin took his Tank Man photograph In our book, The Documentary Impulse, the acclaimed photographer Stuart Franklin explores the human drive behind documentary photography, whether it's the passion to record the moments we experience, or the need to bear witness to forces that we want to change. The second of those two drives spurred Franklin in the summer of 1989, when he shot Tank Man, the unnamed, and to-this-day still unknown pro-democracy protestor who stood in the way of the Chinese army’s tanks, as they tried to clear Tiananmen Square. Franklin's film was smuggled out of Beijing to Magnum's Paris office by a French student in a box of tea, and, following its development and distribution, his picture moved world leaders across the globe, including the then US president George H W Bush. Here’s how he got that photograph. “I remember lying prone on a balcony on the sixth floor of the Beijing Hotel with the Newsweek photographer Charlie Cole, photographing the event around noon on 4 June,” Franklin recalls. “Earlier that day Tiananmen Square had been cleared by the Chinese Army. However, a group of civilians lined up to face a double row of soldiers who themselves stood in firing positions in front of a column of tanks. These civilians were shot at repeatedly, leaving at least twenty casualties. As the bodies were carried away the standoff died down and a column of tanks broke through, moving slowly eastwards. Waiting for them a few hundred metres down the road was a man in a white shirt and dark trousers, carrying two shopping bags. Alone he blocked the path of the tanks, watched by groups of nervous bystanders and perhaps fifty journalists, camera crews and photographers on balconies on almost every floor of the hotel." Franklin captured the most widely distributed image of the event. Yet, after the taking the shot, he wasn’t convinced of the image’s power. “On the balcony after the event, which lasted less than three minutes, a conversation ensued with a writer for Vanity Fair, T.D. Allman. Allman insisted on the significance of the spectacle,” Franklin writes. “I recalled images from 1968 in Prague and Bratislava where protesters stood up bare-chested against Russian tanks, and similar accounts from China during the Japanese invasion. Tank man felt very distant by comparison." Thankfully, once his film was out of the country, the world looked favourably on the photograph. “My rolls of film were smuggled out of China the following day packed in a small box of tea and carried to Paris by a French student,” he recalls. “The transparencies were later processed, duplicated and distributed from Magnum’s office in Paris." “Images and reports of the tank man incident emerged slowly. The first the world saw of the tank man was on television on 5 June. Television drew the world’s attention to the incident. George Bush Senior referenced it after watching CNN. ‘I was very moved today’, Bush said at a news conference on the morning of 5 June, ‘by the bravery of that one young individual that stood alone in front of the tanks, rolling down the avenue there.’”Source: Phaidon

Bear Kirkpatrick

Bear Kirkpatrick

United States
1965

Bear Kirkpatrick’s work has been exhibited at the Center for Fine Art Photography (Ft.Collins), The Rayko Center (San Francisco), wall-space Gallery (Santa Barbara and Seattle), photo-eye Gallery (Santa Fe), Flowers Gallery (New York), and the PRC Gallery (Boston). His Wallportrait series was recently awarded a solo exhibitions at the Center for Fine Art Photography by Amy Arbus who juried the Portraits 2014 exhibition. His work has been published in Eyemazing (Netherlands), The Opera (Germany), Photo+ (South Korea), and Musee (New York City).He works with the American artist Robert Wilson as the chief installer of his video portraits in private residences, museums, and galleries around the world.He lives and works in Portsmouth, NH.

Jost Franko

Slovenia
1993

Jošt Franko is a young documentary photographer born in Slovenia in 1993. His work is mostly focused on long term projects exploring domestic and international social issues, and his themes often touch on the loss of traditional values in the modern world. Franko’s vision in photography is to document the world, and to thereby unfold, discover and understand it. He believes that his youth and curiosity drive him to pick up themes that are easily and often overlooked.

Daniel Sackheim

Daniel Sackheim

United States
1962

Daniel Sackheim, born in 1962 in Los Angeles, California, is a photographer and film and television director and producer living and working in Los Angeles. As a director, Sackheim is best known for his work on multiple highly acclaimed television series. Some of his directorial credits include: Game of Thrones, True Detective, The Americans, The Walking Dead, Jack Ryan, Servant, Better Call Saul, The Leftovers, The Man in the High Castle, Ozark, and more recently Lovecraft Country. He has received multiple Emmy nominations, more recently in 2017 for directing the Ozark episode "Tonight We Improvise," which is a category he won in 1997 for an episode of NYPD Blue. In addition to his television work, Sackheim directed the Sony feature film, The Glass House, starring Leelee Sobieski, Diane Lane, and Stellan Skarsgard, and he produced the film, The X-Files: Fight the Future, for 20th Century Fox. Alongside fellow HBO alum Tony To, Sackheim is the co-founder of Bedrock Entertainment, which produces prestige content programming streamers and premium cable platforms. Sackheim's photographic practice translates the filmic league of his career into still photography that explores the nature of mystery, urban environments, and narrative ambiguity. His attraction to spaces dominated by shadows stems from his love of film noir and its predilection for heightened reality. A member of a number of photography centers, he is also a curator for www.streetfinder.site which is a growing community for street photography. Statement A camera is like a keyhole through which one can peer into dark spaces in search of a hidden narrative I've come to define as the unknown. Using photography, I am endeavoring to shine a light on that narrative, bringing it into sharper relief. My work occupies a space dominated by shadows. This attraction to the dark and ambiguous stems from my love of film noir and the heightened reality this filmic language personifies. Like noir, my photography aims to access the subconscious, exploring a world of omnipresent solitude and alienation. Article Exclusive Interview with Daniel Sackheim

Thomas James Parrish

Thomas James Parrish

Australia
1993

Based in Sydney, Thomas is an Australian photojournalist and travel photographer driven by a passion for exposing and championing environmental and humanitarian issues that exist in today’s societies, all over the world. Thomas’ work explores current social issues; combining his passion for creative storytelling with a desire to inspire positive social change. Working closely with local NGOs, charities and communities, this work has taken him across the world where he has founded projects and campaigns with refugees, religious groups, environmental agencies and education programs. His photographic journey began in 2016 when he spent 6 months documenting the north of India as part of his project ‘Oh India’ which, after first being released as an exhibition in Sydney, has since become a photobook and has raised over $10,000 for a remote education program in West Bengal. In 2017 Thomas travelled across Italy documenting the refugee crisis, working closely with volunteer groups and NGOs to tell the stories of those seeking asylum for his ongoing project ‘A Voice for a Refugee’. After spending a year studying at the Speos International Photographic Institute in London in 2018/19 and obtaining his diploma in professional photography, Parrish then went on to document the Camino del Norte, an 850km pilgrimage across Spain, as a way of raising money through sponsorship and prints sales for Amazon Watch as part of his project ‘Camino for the Amazon’ which aided in the recovery program for indigenous communities most affected by the fires in the Amazon in 2019, raising over $4,000. Thomas has since returned home to Australia where he recently released his latest body of work ‘A Place Called Manly, A Place Called Home’, which celebrates the everyday beauty of his hometown in Sydney Australia and was exhibited in Paddington, Sydney. Thomas’s work has featured in multiple international photographic publications such as Suitcase Magazine, Lodestars Anthology, Australian Photography Magazine, Dodho Mag, Stade and Ernest Journal and more. Statement “With my work I try to emphasise our responsibility as humans to care for the world, and to express the importance of identity, through engaging storytelling. I hope I ensure a positive impact for humanity and the natural world and that my photographs can act as an instrument for inspiration and change.”

Gabriella Aragon

Gabriella Aragon

United States
1987

I am an artist with a concentration in photography and experimenting in post-production, color, and light. I like to work with many mediums and have created props, sets, and accessories to incorporate into my work. I enjoy learning and exploring which has led me to create many characters in self-portraits and portraits of others. Traditionally trained in advertising, I also continue to photograph still lifes that explore natural light. When I am not photographing, you can find me weaving, painting, drawing, sewing, or gardening.

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