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Last Call AAP Magazine 54 Nature: Landscape, Wildlife, Flora & Fauna
Last Call AAP Magazine 54 Nature: Landscape, Wildlife, Flora & Fauna
Lori Pond
Lori Pond
Lori Pond

Lori Pond

Country: United States
Birth: 1959

Lori Pond is an artist using the photographic process to explore the human condition as seen through the conflict of good vs. evil, contemporary anxiety and the impermanence of all things.

She received a B.S. in Music Performance and Spanish from Indiana University and an M.A. in Broadcast Journalism from USC before embarking on a career in television, where she is a graphic artist at Conan O'Brien's talk show, "Conan." She splits her time between this and her fine art photography.

Her work has been included in numerous solo shows at institutions such as: The Griffin Museum of Photography, (Boston) Oceanside Museum of Art, University of the Arts (Philadelphia) and Gallery 825 in Los Angeles. Lori has exhibited in over 30 group shows around the globe.

Lori's body of work, "Bosch Redux," has been featured in online publications and interviews, such as: Beta Developments in Photography, Adobe Create, LENSCRATCH, Peripheral Vision Arts Salon and Your Daily Photograph. Hard copy publications of her photography have appeared in The Sun Magazine, Seeing in Sixes, Arboreal, Bosch Redux and Self.

Lori's art can be found in the permanent collections of : The Center for Fine Art Photography, Morgan Stanley headquarters and The Center for the Arts, Los Angeles.

She lives and works in Los Angeles.
 

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Vincent Laforet
France / United States
1975
Vincent Laforet is a French-American director and photographer. He shared the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography with four other photographers (Stephen Crowley, Chang Lee, James Hill, Ruth Fremson) as a member of The New York Times staff's coverage of the post 9/11 events overseas that captured "the pain and the perseverance of people enduring protracted conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan." In 2006, Laforet became The Times' s first national contract photographer. He has been sent on assignment by Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, Time, Newsweek, and Life. He is represented by the Stockland Martel agency. In 2002, PDN named Vincent Laforet as one of the "30 photographers under 30 to watch″. In 2005, American Photo Magazine recognized Laforet as one of the "100 Most Influential People in Photography." He and four other photographers were awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography for their post-9/11 coverage overseas in 2002. His work has been recognized in the Communication Arts Annual, PDN Annual, The SPD Magazine Cover of the Year (Society of Publication Designers), The World Press Photo Awards, The Pictures of the Year Competition, The Overseas Press Club, The National Headliners Awards, The Pro-Football Hall of Fame. Vincent is a Canon Explorer of Light and Canon Printmaster and serves as consultant to companies such as Apple, Adobe, Carl Zeiss, Leica, Canon, Bogen, Lexar, and X-Rite. He and his work have been profiled on CNN and Good Morning America. In 2008, Laforet directed Reverie, the first widely available short film shot with the Canon 5D Mark II camera. The video has been cited by proposers of the use of DSLR cameras in digital cinematography. In 2010, he launched a nationwide film competition Beyond The Still and he directed the final chapter the film which was screened at the Sundance Film Festival. He is a DGA Director (Directors Guild of America) and of the ICG (International Cinematographers' Guild – Local 600.) He has directed a number of short films and numerous commercials. In 2011, he was chosen by Canon to be one of the first 4 filmmakers to shoot with their first cinema camera, the Canon C300, and he directed the film Mobius which premiered at Paramount Studios. The opening was attended by Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Robert Rodriguez, and JJ Abrams. The same year, his first book Visual Stories was released by Peachpit and describes his thought process and approach to a variety of assignments throughout his photography career. He has been awarded 3 of the prestigious Cannes Lions (Platinum, Gold, Silver) for his commercial directing work. Vincent Laforet attended the Dalton School and received his B.S. from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 1997. He is fluent in French and English, and speaks Russian and Spanish. He lives in Manhattan Beach, California. Laforet was an adjunct professor at the Columbia Journalism's Graduate School of Journalism, the International Center of Photography and the Poynter Institute. He was inducted in Northwestern's Alumni Hall of Fame in 2010. In the fall of 2020 Laforet joined Apple Inc, with a focus on photography, video and future technologies.Source: Wikipedia
Sonia Costa
Sonia Costa is an was born in Northeast Italy and is temporarily based in Rome. With her studies in Geography and her passion for nature and worldwide different cultures, she has been traveling the world for years studying the interrelationship between people and environment. Promoting a sustainable tourism with a low environmental impact, she has long worked in Indian Sub-Continent, South East Asia and in the most isolated corners of the planet. Award winning free-lance photographer, she has been taking street and documentary photographs for years. Her essential subject is social life, focusing mostly in ordinary life, cultural stories and contemporary issues, always attracted by old stories, isolated places and people out of the spotlight. Her special passion for intimacy led her to develop portraiture as one of preferred means to interact with people and better understand the human condition. Wandering the planet including its remote regions, she has always been fascinated by the profound resilience with which simple people, especially women and children, face life . In a world submerged by conflicts, she tries to document the beauty and delicacy she can still find out there. In 2016 her first pocketbook was published: "La figlia di Saadi" Ed. Polaris, a tour around the world through short stories and photographs dedicated to the female universe. She published her photographs in magazines and books and exhibited her work in collective and solo shows in Italy and in collective shows in USA and Spain, upcoming in Japan. After being away from photography world for a while, she started to share her photographs just three years ago and be awarded in various International Photography Contests. Tokyo International Awards - IPA International Awards - Julia Cameron Awards - Prix de La Photographie Paris. Nominees and Honorable mentions, Merit of Excellence and Nominees : All About Photo APP Magazine - Monochrome Awards - Fine Art Photography Awards - Pollux Awards - Black and White Spider Awards - International Colors Awards - IPA Street Awards. Ordinary life through an extraordinary year I have always loved isolated places and being able to capture images with few people filling empty spaces I felt, in some way, as I was in my loved remote and lonely journeys. I usually travel and live out of my country months a year. Due to Covid-19 Pandemic, I spent most of 2020 stuck in Italy and luckily, when possible, in other European countries. During the lockdown, I wandered through the deserted cities with my camera, in this project I tried to document the ordinary life of two Italian symbol cities: Rome and Venice. In summertime, Venice had somehow returned to what it once was many years ago, even if in indoor places masks were still compulsory. Without crowds of tourists poured through the narrow streets and the cruise ships that monstrously invaded the lagoon, I could hear my voice again and the silent canals could finally breath. Rome, in late spring and fall, looked like certain sunny summers when the city empties itself for holidays and the sultry heat. Only few people going around by tramways or in empty squares patrolled by policemen with the sound of the sea gulls in the air. Documenting ordinary life along the streets, it was like looking at old photographs during the pandemic Spanish flu in 1918. Used to observe distant countries, see and record the changing world, last year I observed and caught the world through our changing cities.
Madame d’Ora
Austria
1881 | † 1963
Dora Philippine Kallmus, also known as Madame D'Ora or Madame d'Ora, was an Austrian fashion and portrait photographer. Born in Vienna, Austria, in 1881 to a Jewish family, into a privileged background and coming of age amidst the creative and intellectual atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Vienna, Kallmus was extremely well cultured. Her father was a lawyer. Her sister, Anna, was born in 1878 and deported in 1941 during the Holocaust. Although her mother, Malvine (née Sonnenberg), died when she was young, her family remained an important source of emotional and financial support throughout her career. At age 23 while on a trip to the Côte d’Azur, she purchased her first camera, a Kodak box camera. She became interested in the photography field while assisting the son of the painter Hans Makart, and in 1905 she was the first woman to be admitted to theory courses at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt (Graphic Training Institute), which in 1908 granted women access to other courses in photography. That same year she became a member of the Association of Austrian photographers. She was the first woman photographer in Vienna to open her own studio and in May 1906, she was listed in the commercial register as a photographer for the first time. She established her studio called the Atelier d’Ora or Madame D'Ora-Benda with Arthur Benda. The name was based on the pseudonym "Madame d'Ora", which she used professionally. Self-styled simply as d’Ora, she initially took portraits of friends and members from her social circle. In the autumn of 1909, an exhibition of her work received a lively response from the press. Critics both praised the artistic style of her portraits and emphasized the prominent individuals who streamed in to view the show. Over the course of her lifetime, d’Ora turned her lens on many artists, including Josephine Baker, Colette, Gustav Klimt, Tamara de Lempicka, and Pablo Picasso, among others. Alongside these commissions, she also photographed members of the Habsburg family and Viennese aristocracy, the Rothschild family, and other prominent cultural figures and politicians. D’Ora had close ties to avant-garde artistic circles and captured members of the Expressionist dance movement with her lens, including Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste. Fashion and glamor subjects were another important mainstay of her business. She regularly photographed Wiener Werkstätte fashion models and the designer Emilie Flöge of the Schwestern Flöge salon wearing artistic reform dresses. When d’Ora moved to Paris in 1925, she shifted her focus to fashion, covering the couture scene and leading lights of the period until 1940. She befriended key figures, such as the French milliner Madame Agnès and the Spanish designer Cristóbal Balenciaga, as well as the top fashion magazine editors of the day. She also helped create and sustain glamorous images for a variety of celebrities, including Cecil Beaton, Maurice Chevalier, and Colette. When the Nazis seized control of Paris in 1940, she was forced to close her studio and flee. She spent the war years in a semi-underground existence living in Ardèche in the southeast of France. Her sister Anna Kallmus, along with other family and friends, died in the Chełmno concentration camp. After World War II, d’Ora returned to Paris, profoundly affected by personal losses. While she lacked an elegant studio in Paris, d’Ora’s lasting connections to wealthy clients remained and many of them returned to her. While she accepted portrait commissions, mostly for financial stability, she also pushed into new, sometimes darker directions. Around 1948, she embarked on an astonishing series of photographs in displaced persons or refugee camps, which was commissioned by the United Nations. From around 1949 to 1958, d’Ora worked on a project, which she called “my big final work.” She visited numerous slaughterhouses in Paris, and amid the pools of blood and deathly screams, she stood in an elegant suit and a hat photographing the butchered animals hundreds of times. She died on 28 October 1963. Four years prior, she had sustained injuries after being hit by a motorcycle in Paris, resulting in her returning to Vienna.Source: Wikipedia
Szymon Barylski
Poland
1984
Szymon Barylski Polish freelance photographer born in 1984 based in Ireland. He has been published, among others, The Irish Times, National Geographic Poland, The Eye of Photography, Edge of Humanity Magazine. He has had a number of exhibitions in many countries including 3rd Documentary Photography Days in Istambul, MIFA Photography, The SE Centre for Photography- Documentary Photography. His pictures were awarded in many competitions. Szymon is involved in documentary photography and photo essays. Photographing for he is a tool for exploring and learning about the world. He tries to tell a story and show it directly. In his opinion, people are an inexhaustible topic and a source of inspiration. Szymon said: „When traveling, I meet people; as a result, I create the image of my relation with them. The exploration of the environment where I take photos allow me to create emotional and convincing scenes.“ He thinks you cannot photograph the things you do not know well. That is why he prepares himself for each project individually, accurately, going into detail in the newspapers and on the Internet. Next, he looks for an inspiration in other photographer’s photos and conversations, as a result, he can create real pictures. His own narrative presented in his photos are at the same time very personal and common. Szymon thinks that a lot of people can identify themselves with his works. Photographer wish his photos could increase individual and collective awareness about the social, political and economic need and urge people to act, be part of positive changes.
Lewis Hine
United States
1874 | † 1940
Lewis Hine was an American sociologist and photographer known for using his camera as a tool for social reform. His photographs were instrumental in changing child labor laws in the United States. There were two things I wanted to do. I wanted to show the things that had to be corrected. I wanted to show the things that had to be appreciated. -- Lewis Hine Lewis Hine was born on September 26, 1874, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. After his father was killed in an accident, Hine began working and saving for college. He attended the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and New York University to study sociology. He became a teacher at the Ethical Culture School in New York City, where he encouraged his students to embrace photography as an instructional tool. Hine took his sociology pupils to New York Harbor's Ellis Island, where he photographed the thousands of immigrants that landed each day. Between 1904 and 1909, he shot over 200 plates (photographs) and realized that documentary photography could be used to effect social change and reform. Hine joined the Russell Sage Foundation's staff photographer in 1907, photographing life in the steel-making regions and inhabitants of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for the landmark sociological study The Pittsburgh Survey. The next year, he left his teaching post to work as a photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC). Lewis Hine recorded child labor during the next decade, with a concentration on the use of child labor in the Carolina Piedmont, to aid the NCLC's lobbying attempts to abolish the practice. In 1913, he chronicled juvenile laborers among cotton mill workers with a series of composite pictures by Francis Galton. Charlie Foster has a steady job in the Merrimack Mills. Huntsville, Alabama.© Lewis Hine / Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. Lewis Hine's work for the NCLC was frequently hazardous. Factory police and foremen routinely threatened him with violence or even death as a photographer. The immorality of child labor was intended to be hidden from the public at the time. Photography was not only forbidden, but it also posed a significant danger to the enterprise. Hine was compelled to disguise himself in order to gain access to the mills, mines, and factories. He worked as a fire inspector, postcard vendor, bible salesman, and even an industrial photographer documenting manufacturing technology. During and after World War I, he shot relief efforts for the American Red Cross in Europe. Hine created a series of work portraits in the 1920s and early 1930s that stressed the human contribution to modern industry. Lewis Hine was commissioned to photograph the Empire State Building's construction in 1930. He photographed the workers in perilous positions as they secured the structure's steel framework, taking many of the same hazards as the employees. He was hoisted out in a specially built basket 1,000 feet above Fifth Avenue to get the best views. He recalls hanging above the city at times, with nothing below but "a sheer drop of nearly a quarter-mile." Cherryville Mfg. Co., Cherryville, N.C. One of the smallest boys. Doffer. 1908© Lewis Hine / Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. During the Great Depression, Hine worked for the Red Cross, photographing drought relief in the American South, and for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), documenting life in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. He was also the chief photographer for the Works Progress Administration's National Research Project, which investigated changes in the industry and their impact on employment. Hine was also on the faculty of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. Lewis Hine was chosen as the photographer for the Works Projects Administration's National Research Project in 1936, but his work there was never completed. His final years were filled with professional struggles caused by the loss of government and corporate patronage. Hine hoped to participate in the Farm Security Administration photography project, but despite numerous letters to Roy Stryker, Stryker always declined. Hine lost his house and applied for welfare because few people were interested in his work, past or present. After an operation, he died on November 3, 1940, at Dobbs Ferry Hospital in Dobbs Ferry, New York. He was 66 years old at the time. Group of workers, including boys and girls, standing outdoors© Lewis Hine / Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. Hine's photographs aided the NCLC's campaign to end child labor, and the Children's Bureau was established in 1912. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 eventually put an end to child labor in the United States. Corydon Hine, Hine's son, donated his father's prints and negatives to the Photo League, which was disbanded in 1951. The Museum of Modern Art declined to accept his photographs, but the George Eastman House did. Wendy Lamb Books published Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop's historical fiction middle-grade novel Counting on Grace in 2006. The final chapters focus on Grace, a 12-year-old girl, and her life-changing encounter with Lewis Hine during his 1910 visit to a Vermont cotton mill known to employ a large number of child laborers. The iconic photograph of Grace's real-life counterpart, Addie Card (1897-1993), taken during Hine's undercover visit to the Pownal Cotton Mill, graces the cover. In 2016, TIME Magazine published colorized versions of several of Hine's photographs of child labor in the US. In the early days of my child labor activities I was an investigator with a camera attachment... but the emphasis became reversed until the camera stole the whole show. -- Lewis Hine Lewis Hine was trained to be an educator in Chicago and New York. A project photographing on Ellis Island with students from the Ethical Culture School in New York galvanized his recognition of the value of documentary photography in education. Soon after, he became a sociological photographer, establishing a studio in upstate New York in 1912. For nearly ten years Hine was the photographer for the National Child Labor Committee, contributing to exhibitions and the organization's publication, The Survey. Declaring that he "wanted to show things that had to be corrected," he was one of the earliest photographers to use the photograph as a documentary tool. Around 1920, however, Hine changed his studio publicity from "Social Photography by Lewis W. Hine" to "Lewis Wickes Hine, Interpretive Photography," to emphasize a more artistic approach to his imagemaking. Having joined the American Red Cross briefly in 1918, he continued to freelance for them through the 1930s. In 1936 Hine was appointed head photographer for the National Research Project of the Works Projects Administration, but his work for them was never completed. His last years were marked by professional struggles due to diminishing government and corporate patronage, and he died in 1940 at age sixty-six.Source: The J. Paul Getty Museum Born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Lewis W. Hine studied sociology before moving to New York in 1901 to work at the Ethical Culture School, where he took up photography to enhance his teaching practices. By 1904 he had begun a series of photographs documenting the arrival of immigrants at Ellis Island; this project, along with his pictures of harsh labor conditions published in the Pittsburgh Survey, brought his work to the attention of the National Child Labor Committee. He served as its official photographer from 1911 to 1916, and later traveled with the Red Cross to Europe, where he documented the effects of World War I in France and the Balkans for Red Cross Magazine. After returning to the United States in 1922, he accepted commercial assignments, produced another series on Ellis Island immigrants, and photographed the construction of the Empire State Building. Several of these construction pictures were published in Men at Work (1932), a book celebrating the individual worker's interaction with machines in the modern world. Despite the success of this book, Hine's financial situation became desperate and his photography was virtually forgotten. Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland learned of his work through the New York City Photo League and mounted a traveling retrospective exhibition of his work to revive interest in it in 1939. Lewis Hine is best known for the documentary images of child labor practices that he produced under the aegis of the National Child Labor Committee from 1911 to 1916. These photographs not only have been credited as important in the passing of child labor laws, but also have been praised for their sympathetic depiction of individuals in abject working conditions. Hine labeled his pictures "photo-interpretations," emphasizing his subjective involvement with his subjects; this approach became the model for many later documentary photographers, such as Sid Grossman and Ben Shahn.Source: International Center of Photography
William Eugene Smith
United States
1918 | † 1978
William Eugene Smith was an American photojournalist known for his refusal to compromise professional standards and his brutally vivid World War II photographs. Smith graduated from Wichita North High School in 1936. He began his career by taking pictures for two local newspapers, The Wichita Eagle (morning circulation) and the Beacon (evening circulation). He moved to New York City and began work for Newsweek and became known for his incessant perfectionism and thorny personality. Smith was fired from Newsweek for refusing to use medium format cameras and joined Life Magazine in 1939 using a 35mm camera. In 1945 he was wounded while photographing battle conditions in the Pacific theater of World War II. As a correspondent for Ziff-Davis Publishing and then Life again, W. Eugene Smith entered World War II on the front lines of the island-hopping American offensive against Japan, photographing U.S. Marines and Japanese prisoners of war at Saipan, Guam, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. On Okinawa, Smith was hit by mortar fire. After recovering, he continued at Life and perfected the photo essay from 1947 to 1954. In 1950, he was sent to the United Kingdom to cover the General Election, in which the Labour Party, under Clement Attlee, was narrowly victorious. Life had taken an editorial stance against the Labour government. In the end, a limited number of Smith's photographs of working-class Britain were published, including three shots of the South Wales valleys. In a documentary made by BBC Wales, Professor Dai Smith traced a miner who described how he and two colleagues had met Smith on their way home from work at the pit and had been instructed on how to pose for one of the photos published in Life. Smith severed his ties with Life over the way in which the magazine used his photographs of Albert Schweitzer. Upon leaving Life, Smith joined the Magnum Photos agency in 1955. There he started his project to document Pittsburgh. This project was supposed to take him three weeks, but spanned three years and tens of thousands of negatives. It was too large ever to be shown, although a series of book-length photo essays were eventually produced. From 1957 to 1965 he took photographs and made recordings of jazz musicians at a Manhattan loft shared by David X. Young, Dick Cary and Hall Overton. In January 1972, William Eugene Smith was attacked by Chisso employees near Tokyo, in an attempt to stop him from further publicizing the Minamata disease to the world. Although Smith survived the attack, his sight in one eye deteriorated. Smith and his Japanese wife lived in the city of Minamata from 1971 to 1973 and took many photos as part of a photo essay detailing the effects of Minamata disease, which was caused by a Chisso factory discharging heavy metals into water sources around Minamata. One of his most famous works, Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath, taken in December 1971 and published a few months after the 1972 attack, drew worldwide attention to the effects of Minamata disease. Complications from his long-term consumption of drugs, notably amphetamines (taken to enable his workaholic tendencies), and alcohol led to a massive stroke, from which Eugene Smith died in 1978. He is buried in Crum Elbow Cemetery, Pleasant Valley, New York. Smith was perhaps the originator and arguably the master of the photo-essay. In addition to Pittsburgh, these works include Nurse Midwife, Minamata, Country Doctor, and Albert Schweitzer - A Man of Mercy. Today, Smith's legacy lives on through the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund to promote "humanistic photography." Since 1980, the fund has awarded photographers for exceptional accomplishments in the field.Source: Wikipedia Born and reared in Wichita, Kansas, W. Eugene Smith became interested in photography at the age of fourteen, and three years later had begun to photograph for local newspapers. He received a photography scholarship to the University of Notre Dame, but he left after a year for New York, where he joined the staff of Newsweek and freelanced for LIFE, Collier's, Harper's Bazaar, The New York Times, and other publications. Beginning in 1939, Smith began working sporadically as a staff photographer for LIFE, with which he had a tempestuous relationship throughout the rest of his career. During World War II he was a war correspondent in the Pacific theater for the Ziff-Davis publishing company and LIFE, for whom he was working when he was severely wounded in Okinawa in 1945. After a two-year recuperation, he returned to the magazine and produced many of his best photo essays, including Country Doctor, Spanish Village, and A Man of Mercy. In 1955, he joined Magnum, the international cooperative photography agency founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, George Rodger and Chim (David Seymour), and began work on a large photographic study of Pittsburgh, for which he received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1956 and 1957. Smith continued to freelance for LIFE, Pageant, and Sports Illustrated, among other periodicals, for the rest of his career. From 1959 to 1977, he worked for Hitachi in Japan and taught at the New School for Social Research and the School of Visual Arts in New York and the University of Arizona in Tucson. His last photo essay, Minamata, completed in the 1970s, depicted victims of mercury poisoning in a Japanese fishing village. Smith is credited with developing the photo essay to its ultimate form. He was an exacting printer, and the combination of innovation, integrity and technical mastery in his photography made his work the standard by which photojournalism was measured for many years. In recognition of his outstanding contribution to the development of photojournalism, the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund was established after his death to support the projects of photographers working in the tradition he established. Source: International Center of Photography
Deba Prasad Roy
I was born in the year 1952 and clicked my first photograph in the year 1968 with an Agfa CLICK III camera. Then I used Agfa ISOLI 2 for some years. In 1992 I bought Pentax K 1000. & NIKON film cameras till 2008. I was a member of “Photographic Association of Bengal” since September 2003 to March 2012. I acquired a bit of proficiency in photography following the senior photographers of the club (not in age), who are entitled to write distinctions approved by The International Federation of Photographic Art (FIAP), & The Photographic Society of America (PSA). In this period I have participated hundreds of FIAP & PSA approved Salons and other photographic competitions. After my official retirement from Banking Service, I engage myself as a Freelance Documentary & Travel photographer to pass my retirement holidays and as a passionate and serious photographer ”Participated and still participating in photography competitions throughout the world and try to win prizes and recognition.. I am a professional photographer from my heart (Not as those who sell their photographs for their livelihood or those who are working as an employee in any organization.). I never sold a single photograph in my livelihood i.e. for money. So the meaning of a professional photographer is different to me. A NOBLE MISSION A NOBLE MISSION is partially a story of economic exploitation by the employers worldwide in underdeveloped and developing countries and simultaneously deliberate callousness and negligence of the Government and its agencies make this labor force vulnerable in the hands of the entrepreneurs. The other side of the story is the dedication of the two women teachers; their voluntary service to provide a minimum education to those historically illiterate students, no one in the previous generations of them including their parent got any elementary education in any school. We should also keep in mind the economic sacrifice of the teachers, in these days time is money, if they teach any other students in the society they are definitely eligible for remuneration and may get a chance to uplift their own economic status. That is the point which impressed me a lot. PLASTIC RECYCLING AND ENVIRONMENT Plastic pollution is a major global phenomenon that has crept up on us over the decades, and it really requires a global and comprehensive solution that includes systemic rethinks about usage and production. While carbon emissions and water use are pretty firmly embedded in the consciousness of most organizations, the use of plastic generally is not. But campaigners and scientists are increasingly sounding the alarm over the amount of plastic that is used wastefully (think of single-use drink bottles and packaging materials), which ends up as trash in rivers and oceans. Many say that plastic pollution has swelled into a major threat for the world’s oceans and for the global environment as a whole. Here is why: About 300 million tons of plastic is produced globally each year. Only about 10 percent of that is recycled. In other words, because plastic is inexpensive, lightweight and durable, virtually every industry — be it retailing, manufacturing or logistics — loves it. Because it is light and cheap, and because it is so durable, it does not “go away.” Plastic accumulated over half a century is now out there. That could mean reducing wasteful use; collecting, reusing or recycling plastic trash; stepping up the use of recycled plastic or of more easily biodegradable materials; and modifying product designs to minimize plastic use. There by we could leave our world as habitable for our future generations.
Arja Katariina Hyytiäinen
Arja Katariiina Hyytiäinen was born in 1974 in Turku, Finland. She is a graduate of the Department of Documentary Photography at FAMU (Prague, Czech Republic). Hyytiäinen is interested in self-experienced stories. Thanks to her classical documentary background, her works often reflect a combination of self-experienced subjective reality and fictional intuitive storytelling. She has published two books ‘Distance Now’ and ‘Arja Hyytiäinen – Cahiers’. She is the recipient of the Critical Photography Prize, Prix Kodak in France 2006, as well as the Grand Prix at the 2007 Lodz Festival. Since 2006, Arja Hyytiäinen’s work has been distributed by Agence VU’. She has been based in La Rochelle, France, since 2010.Source: EPEA For the Finn Arja Hyytiäinen photography is a means of entering into the lives of others. It is an echo of personal experiences that help enlarge her understanding – and ours. The often sombre black and white photographs that she took in the port city of Marseille underscore the feeling that she got there, as if the residents had an almost permanent mental hangover. She shows the disfigured faces of people in illegal bars, she evokes the sound of fans, wind and footsteps that echo against shuttered windows, and depicts the restless energy of the night, which shades into a day where the heat envelopes your body like a second skin. The city, she says, left an emotional mark behind on her soul. With her subjective images she does the same for the viewer. In the space of only a couple years Arja Hyytiäinen (Finland, 1974) has made a name for herself as a contemporary street photographer, with a subjective, cinematographic style. She spent considerable time in Eastern Europe and was awarded the Kodak Prize for Critical Photography and the Polish Fotofestival Grand Prix. Hyytiäinen lives by turns in Paris and Berlin.Source: Noorderlicht "Completely contemporary, free and demanding, the work of Arja Katarrina Hyytiäinen is part of the today’s school, from the tradition of the street photography, and that has replaced its form to claim the author status. Saying its necessity and its singularity, devoting itself to subjectivity, and influenced by cinematographic aesthetic, the whole work, extremely respectful for representing people, is from a new contemporary humanism," according to Christian Caujolle. In just a few years, she has acquired a reputation throughout Europe, particularly where she has lived in Eastern Europe, and become known through her solo exhibitions (Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Moldavia, Slovenia). In 2006 she was awarded by the Kodak Prize for Critical Photography and the Fotoestiwal (Poland) Grand Prix in 2007.Source: Agence VU
Lotta Lemetti
Finland
1995
Lotta Lemetti is a photographer with a unique vision that embraces the beauty of the simple and mundane. Her minimal aesthetic carries through the diverse work she loves to make and she's not afraid to use alternative processes, mixed media and graphic design in her image making. The native of Finland obtained her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from the NewYork Film Academy, and was also the recipient of the highly prestigious Fulbright undergraduate award in 2015, one of only 3 Finnish winners that year and the only grantee in the field of arts. Her work has since been exhibited in galleries around the world, including New York, Los Angeles, Italy, and Finland. Lotta is constantly sought after by leading artists in her field, and has worked alongside many, including award-winning photographer and visual artist Amanda Rowan, named Chromatic Photographer of the Year 2018 for her achievements in color photography and Photo District News' The Curator Fine Art competition in Still Life in 2019, whose work has been exhibited in Photo LA, and Paris Photo as well as the Wall Street Gallery and the Leica Gallery in Los Angeles, and on display at the Palms with Damien Hirst, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, and Takashi Murakami, and Photographer/Visual Artist Naomi White, winner of Photo District News' Objects of Desire award and has exhibited throughout North America and Europe, including with Tobey Fine Arts, Christopher Henry Gallery and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in New York. In 2018, Lemetti's latest photography series Kekta won the title of Latitude Life APS Photographer of the Year. Kekta was then exhibited in New York and the city of Pravisdomini, Italy. Ms. Lemetti's work has been featured in FAYN Magazine, U+I Magazine, NewBeauty Magazine, PhotoVogue and FLOAT Magazine. Kekta is an exploration of cultural blending and national identity. These photographs originate from her own experience of living between two cultures. She created scenes that are inspired by the immemorial beliefs of unity between humans and nature, and cultural traditions that have been passed on for generations in the form of oral folk tales about Finnish mythology. The stories are hand picked from the Finnish national epic Kalevala, which is a book of poems collected from different regions of Finland and then stitched together into one cohesive story. I took these individual stories and photographed them in a variety of American landscapes, with people from different ethnic backgrounds, creating a new narrative of polycultural identity. Today, we live in a global age, which means that we must reconsider the old ways of thinking about national identity. People are no longer bound by the geographical borders of countries and only a few places on earth can be said to remain monocultural. Bigger metropolis cities are starting to resemble a ‘human mosaic' in which we are moving from multiculturalism, which emphasises the coexistence of different individual cultures to polyculturalism, which indicates the integratedness of the cultures.
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Latest Interviews

Exclusive Interview with Peter Ydeen
Winner of AAP Magazine #45 Travels, his series reflects this unique vision—capturing the spirit of place through subtle layers of light, color, and emotion. Whether traveling abroad or observing the rhythms of his own surroundings, Ydeen creates images that feel both grounded and enchanted, inviting viewers into a world where reality and reverie meet.
Exclusive Interview with Julie Wang
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Exclusive Interview with Ghawam Kouchaki
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Exclusive Interview with Tommi Viitala
Tommi Viitala, winner of AAP Magazine #44: Street, is a Finnish photographer celebrated for his striking and cinematic street photography. With a keen eye for atmosphere and composition, he captures fleeting urban moments that reveal the poetry of everyday life. His work often explores the tension between solitude and connection within contemporary cityscapes, blending documentary realism with artistic sensibility. Viitala’s photographs have been exhibited internationally and recognized for their strong visual storytelling and emotional depth. We asked him a few questions about his life and work.
Exclusive Interview with Robert Mack
Robert Mack is a California-based visual artist, photographer, and filmmaker. His fine art photography and films have been exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, with major shows at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Reiss-Engelhorn Museum in Mannheim, Germany. Both institutions hold his work in their permanent collections. Working across different media, Mack has built a career exploring the complexities of human presence and representation. In 1981, while living in Baltimore, he produced The Perkins Project: Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity, a rare photographic and film study inside Maryland’s hospital for the criminally insane. These stark yet compassionate black-and-white portraits remain one of his most powerful and controversial bodies of work.
Exclusive Interview with Alan Schaller About Irys
Alan Schaller is a London-based photographer best known for his striking black-and-white street photography and as co-founder of Street Photography International, one of the largest online communities dedicated to the genre. With years of experience both behind the camera and in building platforms that give visibility to photographers, Schaller has now turned his focus to creating a new digital space for photography itself. His latest venture, Irys, is a photography app designed by photographers, for photographers, with the aim of offering a dedicated platform where images are respected as works of art rather than treated as disposable content.
Exclusive Interview with Guillaume Bonn
With his latest book Paradise, Inc., celebrated documentary photographer Guillaume Bonn takes us deep into the heart of East Africa, where the promises and failures of wildlife conservation collide. Far from offering a romanticized vision of nature, Bonn’s work confronts us with urgent realities: the tensions between local communities and conservation policies, the sacrifices of rangers on the frontlines, and the long-lasting impact of human activity on fragile ecosystems. Spanning more than two decades of fieldwork, the project blends powerful imagery with investigative depth, raising difficult but necessary questions about transparency, accountability, and the Western-led models that dominate conservation. Enriched by the voices of those too often left out of the conversation—including a preface by Maasai leader Ezekiel Ole Katato and an introduction by journalist Jon Lee Anderson—Paradise, Inc. is both a stunning visual journey and a call to action. In the following interview, Guillaume Bonn reflects on the making of Paradise, Inc., the ethical dilemmas at the heart of his work, and the urgent need to rethink our approach to conservation in East Africa and beyond.
Exclusive Interview with Sander Vos
Sander Vos is a fine art photographer based in London whose work seamlessly blends elements of Surrealism with portraiture. Drawing inspiration from his background in design, Vos embraces light and contrast to sculpt striking, graphic compositions. His photographs invite the viewer into a world where revelation and concealment coexist, leaving space for imagination and interpretation.
Exclusive Interview with Tomasz Trzebiatowski Editor-in-chief FRAMES Magazine
Founded in 2020 by photographer, publisher, and classical pianist Tomasz Trzebiatowski, FRAMES Magazine has quickly established itself as a thoughtful space for photography lovers who believe that powerful images deserve to live on paper. Known for its beautifully printed quarterly issues and dynamic international community, FRAMES bridges the gap between tradition and innovation in the photographic world. As editor-in-chief, Trzebiatowski has created not only a publication but a platform that celebrates diverse genres, nurtures dialogue, and champions the tactile experience of print in a digital age. In this interview, he reflects on the journey from founding FRAMES to building a global membership, the challenges of independent publishing, and the future of photography in both print and digital forms.
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