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FINAL CALL TO ENTER AAP MAGAZINE PORTRAIT: PUBLICATION AND $1,000 CASH PRIZES
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Mariëtte Aernoudts
Mariëtte Aernoudts
Mariëtte Aernoudts

Mariëtte Aernoudts

Country: Netherlands
Birth: 1956

My name is Mariëtte Aernoudts and since 9 years I am a self thought photographer/ imagemaker. Most of my portraits are from children or young people and always in colour. I work very intuitive and during a shoot my ideas are becoming unstoppable. Except my portraits I create my own imaginary world using my storytelling images. I try to soften the realistic life. I am always looking for renewal, with my own feelings which I want to connect in my photos.

I received several dutch prizes and in 2018 I won an award in SIPA contest Siena Italy. Last February one of my photos was nominated for the Sony World Photography awards.

My Statement: 'What I see is what you get'
 

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Caterina Bernardi
I was born in a town called Orkanger on the north-west coast of Norway, the land of the northern lights and long winters. This is where I draw a lot of my inspiration from, with its incredibly dramatic scenery and landscapes, and fairytales I grew up with; stories of moody and mystical Nordic environments brimming with depictions of trolls, princesses and nature.My connection with photography first blossomed in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil where I lived in the very early 1990’s. There, I learned Portuguese, encountered very passionate people and discovered my own passion for photography. A friend had found a producer to make her first CD, and I took pictures of her recording music with famous Brazilian artists in the studio. It was an incredible experience that compelled me to pursue photography, which eventually led me to San Francisco, a magnificent city to go to live and work. There, I got my Bachelors of Fine Arts and ventured out on my own to shoot.In the past decade I have created images for clients such as Merck, Genentech, Reebok, The Times of London, Pasolivo, Gilead, Bristol-Myers Squibb, KQED TV., Yoga Journal, Vodafone, and Warner Bros, while my work has appeared in photo publications such as Communication Arts, PDN, Graphis, APA Shows, and Graphic Design USA. Currently I am located in San Francisco, CA, but once a year the northern winds call upon me and I go back home and visit Norway, to feel the breeze and see the midnight sun. Artist StatementI think artists in general have an innate appetite for life, and speaking for myself, I find that curiosity and passion drive me to explore and create, to be mesmerized by life and it’s constant flux of magical encounters, fears and achievements; my vehicle of expression is the art and craft of photography. In this process I aim to intimately connect the subject and me and ultimately the viewer to a dialogue and to linger, to inspire and to create, and to preserve intense moments of emotion and beauty and mystery.What I strive for in an image is to get genuine emotion and expressions from the subject. Sometimes it happens very naturally, and sometimes it is a real challenge to put a person at ease, to make them feel comfortable and enjoy having a camera pointed at them. It is a sensitive moment I share with my subjects while photographing, and establishing a connection with the talent is very important in order to capture striking images, and I work hard to make them comfortable and excited so they give their best. With great collaborations everyone wins and walks away with a sense of achievement.Photography gives my life a purpose and a meaning, to further explore and discover myself, the arts and science, and our mysterious existence.
Andrew Moore
United States
1957
Andrew Moore’s work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Yale University Art Gallery, the Library of Congress, the Israel Museum, the High Museum, the George Eastman House and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Recent exhibitions include The Queens Museum, Columbia University and The Museum of the City of New York in conjunction with a retrospective on the legacy of Robert Moses. Moore has had recent solo shows in Minneapolis, Moscow, Paris, San Francisco, and Nebraska. In 1975, Moore enrolled at Princeton University, where he worked on an independent major in photography under the guidance and mentorship of the historian Peter Bunnell and the photographer Emmet Gowin, who at the time, was completing his first monograph. During that time, Moore also had the benefit of working with visiting artists including Frederick Sommer, Jim Dow, and Joel Meyerowitz. Moore graduated summa cum laude in 1979. After a brief stint working with commercial photographers in New York City, Moore moved to New Orleans, where he continued a body of work first started for his senior thesis. Over the next two years, he focused on the city’s disappearing commercial district, where he found subjects such as a coffin workshop, a broom factory, and a raw furrier–places employing artisans and outdated machinery. The New Orleans Downtown Development District awarded Moore a grant which enabled him to produce a portfolio of one-hundred 8x10 color contact prints, which were placed in the city’s archives. In 1981, Moore returned to New York City, where he began a three-year project documenting the rapid changes to the urban landscape, specifically at the South Street Seaport and Fulton Fish Market in lower Manhattan. At the start of his project, the demolition of the present marketplace and shopping pier was just getting underway. Moore returned many times over the following months, often photographing at night to portray the architecture and ambiance of the surrounding neighborhood amidst massive, rapid transformation. For this work, Moore and two other photographers, Barbara Mensch and Jeff Perkell, were awarded grants from the JM Kaplan Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts, which enabled the completed project, South Street Survey to be shown at the Municipal Art Society in 1985. During this time, Moore was also working on a series of photographs of grain elevators in Buffalo, New York with the assistance of an NYSCA individual grant. In Buffalo, Moore met a group of artists working with appropriated imagery, which inspired him to begin using mechanical and chemical processes to incorporate multiple negatives, paintings, drawings, and xeroxes into complex montage images outside of strict documentary practice. This method of recombination, in the era before Photoshop, created images of convulsive beauty and were the subject of Moore’s first solo exhibition in New York at Lieberman and Saul Gallery in 1986, following his first solo show at Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT in 1985. Moore continued this method of montaging imagery for the next 7 years, expanding his practice into experimental short films. During this time, Moore collaborated on short films with others including the artists Lee Breuer and David Byrne. His film Nosferatu 1989 was nationally broadcast on MTV and PBS’s New Television series. 42nd Street In 1995, Moore returned to his roots in documentary practice as the texture of New York’s 42nd Street was rapidly changing. With all of the theaters between 7th and 8th avenues scheduled to be razed or refurbished, Moore sought permission to photograph the torn seats and faded fire curtains which told the stories of those spaces. In 1997, Moore showed these photographs at Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York. Despite his change of style, the work was well-received; in a review for The New Yorker, Andrew Long noted, “The straight forward treatment is a departure for the photographer, who characteristically produces multi-image evocations of New York City. Nothing is lost however - his earlier poetic constructs now give way to broader arenas for the imagination to roam.” Cuba Moore first traveled to Cuba in 1998 to photograph Havana’s decaying theaters. The project soon expanded in scope to document the larger effects of Cuba’s permanent Revolution, which were particularly apparent during the economic depression known as the “Período especial.” Moore’s large-scale color photographs of Havana reveal an elegant but crumbling metropolis of muted pastel interiors, courtyards, and scenes of daily life. Moore returned to photograph Cuba’s architecture and environment over the next 14 years, in the process publishing two monographs Inside Havana (Chronicle Books, 2002) and Cuba (Damiani, 2012). Moore has said his work intends to show, “how contemporary history, and specifically cultures in transition, are expressed through architecture.” The photographer Julius Shulman wrote of Inside Havana, “Exhibited throughout Moore’s work is a genuine flavor of ‘presence’. He does not attempt to gloss over questionable conditions, nor does he try to contort reality. With tremendous sensitivity, Moore creates art statements of the architecture he shows us. His images are painterly and poetic.” Moore’s photographs from Cuba appeared as a cover story in the September 23, 2012 issue of New York Times Magazine. Russia While working in Cuba, Moore became interested in the island nation’s long relationship with Russia. This led him to photograph the architectural environments where Russian history and politics collide in unexpected ways. Between 2000 and 2004 Moore made 8 trips around Russia from St. Petersburg to the remotest parts of the country. The New Yorker wrote of the work, “in taking Russia - its contradictions and gorgeous ruins - at face value, he captures a country’s diversity and history.” For example, Moore photographed a “czarist church [that] was turned into a soap factory during the Soviet period, and now has been restored into a kind of youth center.” Moore remarked, “For me these kinds of subjects present a cross-section through time: they address Russia’s complex past, as well as the larger compacting and collapsing processes of contemporary history.” In 2004, Moore published the monograph Russia Beyond Utopia (Chronicle Books, 2004). Detroit In 2008 and 2009, Moore traveled to Detroit to portray in photographs “the idea that in an urban setting you could also have a landscape happening, the forces of nature intersecting with American urbanism, the process of decline also intersecting with the revival of nature.” In 2010, Moore released Detroit Disassembled (Damiani, 2010), with an introduction by Detroit-native and Poet Laureate Philip Levine, to coincide with an exhibition at the Akron Art Museum. He was originally invited to document the city by two young French photographers, Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, who had been photographing Detroit’s abandoned spaces since 2005. While Moore’s Detroit series follows the themes of transformation and decaying space explored in previous bodies of work, his focus on the motor city generated controversy in the pages of The New Republic and the journal Guernica. The photographs were decried as “ruin porn,” which Mike Rubin defined in The New York Times as “urban decay as empty cliché, smacking of voyeurism and exploitation.” Curator Sarah Kennel writes in The Memory of Time, an exhibition catalog from the National Gallery of Art, that, “in Moore’s photographs, ruination serves more explicitly as an allegory of modernity’s failure.” Other critics argue that whether or not Moore’s Detroit photographs fit the category of “ruin porn” is a matter of academic debate. Joseph Stanhope Cialdella argues in the journal Environmental History that Moore’s work instead conveys the “aesthetic of a postindustrial sublime” which “gives nature the authority to transform the image of Detroit into a novel, yet disturbing landscape that blurs the lines between wilderness and the city.” Dora Apel writes in Beautiful Terrible Ruins that Moore’s “pictures of Detroit tend to emphasize the relationship of nature and culture, with nature in the ascendancy.” Apel ultimately argues that the “ruin porn” images and debate fail to focus on the political and economic policies that are the root causes of the ruins. Dirt Meridian From 2005 to 2014, Moore photographed the people and landscape of “great American Desert,” which roughly includes the area west of the 100th meridian to the Rocky Mountains, from Texas north to Canada. The area is one of the most sparsely populated regions in the country, “where the daily reality is often defined by drought and hardship.” To make many of the photographs, Moore collaborated with Doug Dean, the pilot of a single-engine aircraft, to create bird’s-eye perspectives revealing the vastness of the land. Rather than flying high above the plains, Moore chose perspectives that have “the sense of being within the landscape rather than above it.” For an essay accompanying Moore’s photographs in The New York Times Magazine, Inara Verzemnieks wrote, “From above, the land is like one endless, unpunctuated idea - sand, tumbleweed, turkey, bunch stem, buffalo, meadow, cow, rick of hay, creek, sunflower, sand — and only rarely did a house or a windmill or a barn suddenly appear to suspend the sense of limitlessness.” On the ground, Moore photographed the people who inhabit this unforgiving landscape and the evidence of their efforts, from active homesteads to abandoned schoolhouses. These photographs are published in Moore’s newest monograph: Dirt Meridian (Damiani, 2015).
Alexey Brodovitch
United States
1898 | † 1971
Alexey Brodovitch was a Russian-born American designer and photographer, known for his time as the art director of Harper’s Bazaar from 1934 to 1958. Brodovitch was born in Ogolichi, Оголичи Aholičy, Russian Empire (now Belarus) to a wealthy Polish family in 1898. His father, Cheslau or Vyacheslav Brodovitch, was a respected physician, psychiatrist and huntsman. His mother was an amateur painter. During the Russo-Japanese War, his family moved to Moscow, where his father worked in a hospital for Japanese prisoners. Alexey was sent to study at the Prince Tenisheff School, a prestigious institution in Saint Petersburg, with the intentions of eventually enrolling in the Imperial Art Academy. He had no formal training in art through his childhood, but often sketched noble profiles in the audience at concerts in the city. At the start of World War I at the young age of 16, Brodovitch abandoned his dream of entering the Imperial Art Academy and ran away from home to join the Russian army. Not long after, his father had him brought home and hired a private tutor to help Alexey finish school. Upon graduating, Brodovitch ran away again on several occasions. During the Russian Civil War, Brodovitch served with the White Army. While fighting against the Bolsheviks in Odessa, he was badly wounded and was hospitalized for a time in Kislovodsk, in the Caucasus. In 1918, the town was surrounded by the Bolsheviks, forcing Brodovitch into exile. It was during this retreat to the south through Caucasus and Turkey that he met his future wife, Nina. By good fortune, Alexey's brother Nicolas turned out to be one of the soldiers guarding the refugees in Novorossiysk. Not long after, their father, who had been imprisoned in Saint Petersburg by the Bolsheviks, managed to flee to Novorossiysk in hopes of finding his family. The three were once again together, and arranged for Brodovitch's mother and other relations to join them in Constantinople. Finally reunited, the Brodovitchs made their way to France. In Paris, he lived in poverty amidst the vibrant avant-garde scene of the era, working as a backdrop painter for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Brodovitch embraced technical developments from the spheres of industrial design, photography, and contemporary painting. His broad curiosity began to assimilate the most interesting aspects of all these fields into his work, eventually making them his own. He later instilled this same curiosity in his students, encouraging them to use new techniques like the airbrush, industrial lacquers, flexible steel needles, and surgical knives. By the age of 32, Brodovitch had dabbled in producing posters, china, jewelry, textiles, advertisements, and paintings. Eventually specializing in advertising and graphic design, he had become one of the most respected designers of commercial art in Paris. By 1930, however, Paris had lost its luster for Brodovitch. The once-flourishing spirit of adventure and experimentation was fading away. Although he was offered many design positions, Brodovitch turned them down, presumably looking for new locales to advance his designs. Brodovitch moved to the United States, accepting a post as a professor of advertising in Philadelphia. Only four years later, he was hired as the art director of Harper's Bazaar. During his tenure there, he fundamentally changed the magazine’s aesthetic, hiring a number of unique photographers to provide editorial content, including Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lisette Model, and Robert Frank. Brodovitch left the magazine in 1958, but continued to teach design until his death on April 15, 1971 in Le Thor, France. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.Source: Wikipedia
Dorothea Lange
United States
1895 | † 1965
Dorothea Lange was an American documentary photographer, who studied photography at Columbia University and worked as an assistant to Arnold Genthe before beginning a photographic trip around the world in 1918. When she ran out of funds in San Francisco, she remained, opened a photographic studio, and during the early 1930s began photographing homeless rural people flooding into the city from the Dust Bowl exodus. Her photographs brought her to the attention of Paul Taylor, an economist at California University, who hired her to create a documentary record to accompany his report on agricultural conditions for the California State Relief Administration, and subsequently married her. When Roy Stryker saw these images, he hired her as a staff photographer for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), for which she worked sporadically as Stryker's budget allowed 1935-9. During this period, she made many of her best-known photographs, including the image known as Migrant Mother (1936). She later also photographed for the San Francisco branch of the Office of War Information, 1943-5, recording the internment of Japanese-Americans and the founding of the United Nations. In 1954-5 she was a photographer for Life magazine, afterward travelling extensively and producing photographic essays on Ireland, Egypt, and Asia.Source: The Oxford Companion to the Photograph In 1945, Ansel Adams invited Lange to teach at the first fine art photography department at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA), now known as San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). Imogen Cunningham and Minor White also joined the faculty. In 1952, Lange co-founded the photography magazine Aperture. In the mid-1950s, Life magazine commissioned Lange and Pirkle Jones to shoot a documentary about the death of the town of Monticello, California, and the subsequent displacement of its residents by the damming of Putah Creek to form Lake Berryessa. After Life decided not run the piece, Lange devoted an entire issue of Aperture to the work. The collection was shown at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1960. Another series for Life, begun in 1954 and featuring the attorney Martin Pulich, grew out of Lange's interest in how poor people were defended in the court system, which by one account, grew out of personal experience associated with her brother's arrest and trial. Lange's health declined in the last decade of her life. Among other ailments she suffered from was what later was identified as post-polio syndrome. She died of esophageal cancer on October 11, 1965, in San Francisco, at age seventy. She was survived by her second husband, Paul Taylor, two children, three stepchildren, and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Three months after her death, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City mounted a retrospective of her work that Lange had helped to curate. It was MoMA's first retrospective solo exhibition of the works of a female photographer. In February 2020, MoMA exhibited her work again, with the title Dorothea Lange: Words and Pictures, prompting critic Jackson Arn to write that "the first thing" this exhibition "needs to do—and does quite well—is free her from the history textbooks where she’s long been jailed." Contrasting her work with that of other twentieth-century photographers such as Eugène Atget and André Kertész whose images "were in some sense context-proof, Lange’s images tend to cry out for further information. Their aesthetic power is obviously bound up in the historical importance of their subjects, and usually that historical importance has had to be communicated through words." That characteristic has caused "art purists" and "political purists" alike to criticize Lange's work, which Arn argues is unfair: "The relationship between image and story," Arn notes, was often altered by Lange's employers as well as by government forces when her work did not suit their commercial purposes or undermined their political purposes. In his review of this exhibition, critic Brian Wallis also stressed the distortions in the "afterlife of photographs" that often went contrary to Lange's intentions. Finally, Jackson Arn situates Lange's work alongside other Depression-era artists such as Pearl Buck, Margaret Mitchell, Thornton Wilder, John Steinbeck, Frank Capra, Thomas Hart Benton, and Grant Wood in terms of their role creating a sense of the national "We". In 2003, Lange was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. In 2006, an elementary school was named in her honor in Nipomo, California, near the site where she had photographed Migrant Mother. In 2008, she was inducted into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts. Her son, Daniel Dixon, accepted the honor in her place. In October 2018, Lange's hometown of Hoboken, New Jersey honored her with a mural depicting Lange and two other prominent women from Hoboken's history, Maria Pepe and Dorothy McNeil. In 2019, Rafael Blanco (artist) painted a mural of Lange outside of a photography building in Roseville, California.
Juan Cruz Olivieri
Argentina
1980
Juan Cruz Olivieri was born in 1980 in Zárate, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, where he currently resides. Although he is an electrical engineer by profession, his passion for photography emerged in 2012. His most notable work revolves around gaucho culture, deeply influenced by childhood memories and travels with his father through the Buenos Aires countryside. In series such as Gauchos and Silent Inhabitants, Olivieri portrays Argentine rural life with sensitivity and authenticity, capturing not only faces but also the soul of his subjects. For Olivieri, photography is a way to preserve cultural heritage: “It’s not just an artistic expression, but a way to perpetuate our traditions.” His intimate and unembellished style seeks to move away from the idealized image of the gaucho, instead revealing its mystical and resilient essence. Summary of the “Gauchos” Series The gauchos in Argentina are emblematic figures, representing the men who conquered the pampas. In my work, I strive to create intimate photography, stepping away from the role of the intrusive outsider to become a confidant in a story told through light and shadow. I distance myself from the typical idealized images that viewers expect, allowing the mystical and rugged identity of gaucho culture to emerge through a sense of closeness and spontaneous naturalness. Each photo is free of ornamental pretension, and its magnetic power lies in the determined way the gauchos position themselves before the camera—resolved to reveal more than just their faces: the living soul of the life they embrace. Awarded Photographer of the Week - Week 33, 2025
Steve McCurry
United States
1950
Steve McCurry has been one of the most iconic voices in contemporary photography for more than 30 years, with scores of magazine and book covers, over a dozen books, and countless exhibitions around the world to his name. Born in a suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; McCurry studied film at Pennsylvania State University, before going on to work for a local newspaper. After several years of freelance work, McCurry made his first of what would become many trips to India. Traveling with little more than a bag of clothes and another of film, he made his way across the subcontinent, exploring the country with his camera. It was after several months of travel that he found himself crossing the border into Pakistan. There, he met a group of refugees from Afghanistan, who smuggled him across the border into their country, just as the Russian Invasion was closing the country to all western journalists. Emerging in traditional dress, with full beard and weather-worn features after weeks embedded with the Mujahedeen, McCurry brought the world the first images of the conflict in Afghanistan, putting a human face to the issue on every masthead. Since then, McCurry has gone on to create stunning images on all seven continents and countless countries. His work spans conflicts, vanishing cultures, ancient traditions and contemporary culture alike - yet always retains the human element that made his celebrated image of the Afghan Girl such a powerful image. McCurry has been recognized with some of the most prestigious awards in the industry, including the Robert Capa Gold Medal, National Press Photographers Award, and an unprecedented four first prize awards from the World Press Photo contest. The Minister of French Culture has also appointed McCurry a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters and most recently, the Royal Photographic Society in London awarded McCurry the Centenary Medal for Lifetime Achievement. McCurry has published books including The Imperial Way (1985), Monsoon (1988), Portraits (1999 | 2013), South Southeast (2000), Sanctuary (2002), The Path to Buddha: A Tibetan Pilgrimage (2003), Steve McCurry (2005), Looking East (2006), In the Shadow of Mountains (2007), The Unguarded Moment, (2009), The Iconic Photographs (2011), Untold: The Stories Behind the Photographs (2013), From These Hands: A Journey Along the Coffee Trail (2015), India (2015), On Reading (2016), Afghanistan (2017), A Life in Pictures (2018), Animals (2019), In Search of Elsewhere: Unseen Images (2020). @stevemccurryofficial "What is important to my work is the individual picture. I photograph stories on assignment, and of course they have to be put together coherently. But what matters most is that each picture stands on its own, with its own place and feeling" -- Steve McCurry If the photographer's images have made the rounds of newspapers around the world, like the portrait of the young Afghan woman with piercing eyes, it is also due to their aesthetic impact. Steve McCurry spoke of the importance of colour in his photographs, the importance of post-production and retouching, and their ability to touch the viewer: "each single picture has its single story, and we put ours in it" (Steve McCurry). "Sometimes with pictures and photography, what is interesting is that the imagination can go off in different directions. Everything should not be explained" (Steve McCurry): the photographer stresses the importance of leaving their share of mystery to the photographs. Steve McCurry was confronted with the horror of war; his images bear witness to this. If Susan Sontag suggests in Regarding the Pain of Others that photography “beautifies” and “bleaches out a moral response to what is shown”, the photographer brings an entirely different perspective to the issue. He refers to the mission of war reporters to fight against the blindness and ineptitude of public opinion: "Should we be informed about what's happening in our world? Should we let our governments tell us ? I think that would be a very bad idea. [...] Somebody has to go and give us their impression. We need some person to go there and find the truth" (Steve McCurry).Source: www.sciencespo.fr
Joseph-Philippe Bevillard
United States/France
Born in Boston, Joseph-Philippe started drawing and painting after he lost his hearing at the age of 3. He took up photography during his senior year at a private school in Massachusetts. In 1985, he enrolled at the Rochester Institute of Technology to study photography where he remained there for 2 yrs before changing direction in career due to financial circumstances, In 1990 he return to photography to study at the Art Institute of Boston. It was in 1990, Joseph-Philippe developed a style for his square B&W portraitures of people he met in the nightclubs and on the street. After working for several major photo labs in Massachusetts in the last half of 1990, he moved to Ireland during the millenium to start his property management business. In 2007, he went back to photograph portraits using the same camera and style as he did in the early 90's. In 2010, he started a new project, photographing the Irish Travellers and four years later, he formed the Irish Travellers Photo Workshop. In June 2018, Joseph-Philippe started a colour project on Irish Travellers using a digital camera and continue shooting B&W film with Hasselblad. His work has been published by Amnesty International, Der Spiegel, EyeShot, Dodho, FotoNostrum, British Journal of Photography, Junge Welt, Lenswork, Life Force, Photo-Letter, Square, Shots and Vogue Italia as well as received awards from International Photography Awards, PX3 Paris, Photo Vogue Italia, FotoNostrum and Lensculture. His recent exhibitions included Les Recontres d'Arles, Espace Beaurepaire Paris, Leica Gallery Milan, Somerset House London, New Hampshire Institute of The Arts, Royal Hibernian Academy Dublin and Central Intelligence Agency in Washington, DC. His first monograph 'Minceirs' will be available in early May 2021 and can be pre-ordered through this link: www.skeletonkeypress.com or thru the artist. For workshop info, exhibition, publication and prints enquiry, please contact the artist through his email at: joseph-philippebevillard@hotmail.com MINCÉIRS: Mincéirs are a traditionally nomadic ethnic minority indigenous to Ireland, referred to by the Irish Government and the settled population as Irish Travellers. The Mincéir is a true name of the Irish travelling community in their own language which is called Cant or Gammon. Although the Irish Travellers speak English, the lingo they use amongst each other at times is Cant/Gammon. The name Traveller was put upon them because of their nomadic identity. Back in the 5th century the term these groups of people were called Whitesmiths because of their association and skills as tin-smithing. Over the years the Irish Travellers have been called Tinkers, Knackers, Itinerants, Gyspy and Pavee by some of the settled population which the Irish Travellers have found very offensive and racial. Any settled person who is not racist would use the term Irish Traveller or Travellers which is politically correct. Unfortunately many of the Irish Travellers are subjected to the continuous use of these offensive labels. I would like to mention a few facts and some background information on this minority group of people who live mostly in Ireland I will refer to them as Irish Travellers or Travellers for short. Approximately 35,000 Travellers live in Ireland, less than 1% of the Irish population. Most of the Irish Travellers live in halting sites which have been designated by the Irish government in 1968. The government were not happy with the Irish Travellers roadside camping, so they set up the so called temporary sites. Some families chose to stay and never moved, there are many of these halting sites which I have been privy to visit, but some are overcrowded due to large families and lack proper updated facilities. This in turn has forced some families to set up their own camps in disused fields, but because seen as illegal encampments the local councils are constantly trying to move the families on, and will not provide basic needs such as fresh water, electricity or sanitation. There is a small amount of Irish Travellers who wish to settle and have gone on the housing list. This can also be a tricky situation settled neighbours usually oppose having a travelling family living on their road, these leads to tension and racial abuse at times. So this discourages many families from settling. While education is mandatory for all children living in Ireland, the Irish Travellers usually drop out by the age of 15, a lot of this is due to the children being needed at home to tend to the younger or some just find mainstream school boring and not suited to their culture. I have heard from a home economics teacher that her class is probably the most popular subject amongst the female Travellers as cooking is necessary. There have also been some fantastic stories of Irish Travellers finishing 3rd level education and obtaining great careers such as Dr. Sindy Joyce. Dr. Joyce is the first Irish Traveller to graduate with a PhD and was recently appointed by our President as one of his advisors for council of the state in 2019. Vice-Chair of the National Traveller Mental Health Mags Casey explained that the causes of mental health issues affecting Travellers are Complex: "Clearly the issues that affect all Travellers-such as racism and exclusion matters relating to identity, sexuality, addiction, as well as unemployment, education and accommodation have a profound impact on the community's mental health". The following information is an excerpt from the National Traveller Mental Health Network officially launched in NUI Galway in 2019: 82 % of the Irish Traveller community have been affected by suicide. 90% Of Travellers agree that mental health issues are common amongst their community 56% of Travellers report poor physical and mental health restricts their normal daily activities. In March 2017, after 25 years of campaigning, finally Irish Travellers won formal recognition as a distinct ethnic group within the State. On that day the former director of the Irish Travellers Movement, Bridgid Quilligan stated: "We want every Traveller in Ireland to be proud of who they are and to say that "we are not a failed set of people. We have our own unique identity, and we shouldn't take on all the negative aspects of what people think about us. We should be able to be proud and for that to happen our State needed to acknowledge our identity and our ethnicity, and they're doing that today." What I have written is brief with some facts about these fascinating people who have made me feel utterly welcome at all times for the past 11 years. I am clearly not a writer, so I have recorded some facts and a brief synopsis into the life of Irish Travellers. I hope my photographs portray what I could not begin to write, and captured some of the Irish Travellers Lifestyle and Culture that is steeped in traditions, full of colour, celebrations, and hardships. Joseph-Philippe Bévillard, September 2020
Amy Anderson
United States
1977
Amy Anderson is an award-winning portrait photographer living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her work has been exhibited internationally and hangs in local and national galleries, museums and private collections. She has had works acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Florida Photographic Museum. She has received the prestigious Minnesota State Arts Board grant in 2012 and again in 2018 resulting in several solo shows. Funded again in 2021 by the state of Minnesota, she is currently working on a new body of portraits exploring ways to encourage reconnection in her own community after a time of isolation and unrest. Statement I strive to impact my community by creating authentic portraits that explore the universal themes that connect us as humans. My practice has been to live alongside a community and create connection with the people I photograph in hopes of presenting a meaningful image of a an individual to our larger collective community. I have completed several large, multi-year projects including At Risk, With Promise ; a series exploring the challenges and triumphs of at-risk youth in Minnesota. Over the course of this project I explored themes like marginalization and resilience, adolescence and personal growth, disconnection and intersecting identities. At Risk, With Promise culminated in a full and completed body of work that received recognition and was included in many local and national exhibitions. In 2018 with funding from the Minnesota State Arts Board, I began a new body of work exploring these and other themes in the context of several different communities, most significantly the elderly. Working closely with one woman, Rose Kaprelian, allowed me to dig deeper into the everyday realities of this nearly invisible marginalized group. As a nonagenarian in a culture increasingly connected by technologies that are foreign and largely inaccessible, women like Rose face isolation and stagnation as they age. This work is developing to encompass many universal themes from a unique perspective as well as preserving voices that are fading from our collective conversations. During the isolation and uprising in my city in 2020 I continued to make portraits as a way to document and explore the events that changed our world. From window portraits of those who were isolated to protest photos of those who marched, each image was an attempt to connect with my community and explore the changing landscape in which we found ourselves. I continue this exploration daily.
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Exclusive Interview with Carolyn Moore
American photographer Carolyn Moore explores the inner landscape of emotion, memory, and personal transformation through a deeply intuitive photographic practice. Her work unfolds as a quiet dialogue between artist and viewer, where images become a space for reflection, vulnerability, and connection.
Exclusive Interview with Luca Desienna and Laura Estelle Barmwoldt
For over seven years, Of Lilies and Remains has explored the depths of the goth and darkwave underground, unfolding in Leipzig—a city long associated with a vibrant and enduring subcultural scene. Moving between iconic gatherings such as Wave-Gotik-Treffen and more intimate moments on the fringes, the project offers a rare and immersive glimpse into a world often misunderstood, yet rich in expression and community. Created by Luca in collaboration with Laura Estelle Barmwoldt, the work embraces a cinematic and deeply personal approach. Rather than documenting from a distance, it moves within the scene itself, capturing its atmosphere, its codes, and its quiet contradictions. The title Of Lilies and Remains hints at this duality—where beauty and darkness, fragility and strength coexist. As the book prepares for its release, we spoke with both artists about the origins of the project, their process, and what it means to document a subculture that continues to evolve while remaining true to its spirit.
Exclusive Interview with Matthew Finley
American photographer Matthew Finley turns inward, using photography as a way to explore identity, memory, and emotional truth. Based in Los Angeles, his practice moves between performance, gesture, and found imagery, creating a visual language that is both intimate and deeply personal
Exclusive Interview with Jan Janssen
Dutch photographer Jan Janssen explores universal human experiences through his long-term project It Matters, winner of the May 2025 Solo Exhibition. Begun in 2016, the series captures intimate moments of everyday life—love, loss, connection, and belonging—across Central and Eastern Europe. Working in countries such as Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, Janssen spends extended time within communities, building relationships based on trust and respect. His approach allows him to move beyond observation, revealing deeply human and authentic moments. Rooted in travel and personal discovery, It Matters reflects Janssen’s search for what connects us all in an increasingly divided world. The project is ongoing and will culminate in a photobook scheduled for publication in 2026.
Exclusive Interview with Henk Kosche
German photographer Henk Kosche turns his lens toward the streets of Halle an der Saale, capturing everyday life in the late years of the former German Democratic Republic. At the time, Kosche was studying design and exploring the city with his camera, drawn to the atmosphere of its industrial landscape and the quiet rhythms of daily life. His series Street Photography at the End of the 80s, selected as the Solo Exhibition for July 2025, revisits a body of work created just before a period of profound change. Rediscovered decades later in a small box of 35mm negatives, these photographs offer glimpses of a city and its people at a moment suspended between the familiar and the unknown.
Exclusive Interview with Anastasia Samoylova
Anastasia Samoylova is an American artist whose photographic practice is shaped by close observation and a deep attentiveness to place. Working between documentary and formal exploration, she photographs landscapes, architecture, and everyday scenes with a sensitivity to light, structure, and atmosphere. Since relocating to Miami in 2016, her work has increasingly focused on how environments—both natural and built—carry social, cultural, and emotional traces. We asked her a few questions about her practice and her way of seeing, to better understand the thoughts and experiences that shape her work—while allowing the images themselves to remain open and speak in their own time.
Exclusive Interview with Marijn Fidder
Marijn Fidder is a Dutch documentary photographer whose work powerfully engages with current affairs and contemporary social issues. Driven by a deep sense of social justice, she uses photography to speak on behalf of the voiceless and to advocate for the rights of those who are most vulnerable. Her images have been widely published in major international outlets including National Geographic, CNN Style, NRC Handelsblad, Volkskrant, GUP New Talent, and ZEIT Magazin. Her long-term commitment to disability rights—particularly through years of work in Uganda—culminated in her acclaimed project Inclusive Nation, which earned her the title of Photographer of the Year 2025 at the All About Photo Awards. She is also the recipient of multiple prestigious honors, including awards from World Press Photo and the Global Peace Photo Award. We asked her a few questions about her life and work.
Exclusive Interview with Josh S. Rose
Josh S. Rose is a multidisciplinary artist working across photography, film, and writing. His practice bridges visual and performing arts, with a strong focus on movement, emotion, and the expressive potential of the image. Known for his long-standing collaborations with leading dance companies and performers, Rose brings together authenticity and precise composition—a balance he describes as “technical romanticism.” His work has been commissioned and exhibited internationally, appearing in outlets such as Vogue, at the Super Bowl, in film festivals, and most recently as a large-scale installation for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. A sought-after collaborator, he has worked with major artists, cultural institutions, and brands, following a previous career as Chief Creative Officer at Interpublic Group and the founder of Humans Are Social. We asked him a few questions about his life and work.
Interview with Maureen Ruddy Burkhart
Photographer Maureen Ruddy Burkhart brings a quietly attentive and deeply human sensibility to her exploration of the world through images. Shaped by a life immersed in photography, film, and visual storytelling, her work is guided by intuition, observation, and an enduring interest in the emotional undercurrents of everyday life. With a practice rooted in both fine art traditions and documentary awareness, she approaches her subjects with sensitivity, allowing subtle moments to emerge naturally rather than be imposed. Her series Til Death, selected as the Solo Exhibition for February 2025, reflects this long-standing commitment to photography as a space for reflection rather than spectacle. Drawn to moments that exist just outside the expected frame, Burkhart’s images suggest narratives without resolving them, leaving room for ambiguity, humor, and quiet connection. We asked her a few questions about her life and work.
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