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Gregory Dargent
Gregory Dargent
Gregory Dargent

Gregory Dargent

Country: France
Birth: 1977

Gregory Dargent is a French musician and photographer born in 1977 in Argenteuil. A graduate of the Strasbourg Conservatoire, he has an international career as a musician (electric guitar and oud) as well as a composer. His creations have taken him all over the world, from the Berlin Philharmonic to a small place in the Itabuna Church in Brazil, from the Doha Oud Festival to the "Poisson Rouge" in New York, from the Jazz Festival in Cairo to the auditorium of Warsaw Radio.

Somewhat belatedly fascinated by photography he discovered it accidentally the day of his 38th birthday, anchored in the temporality of film, committed to the abstraction of black and white and advocating its subjectivity, he created in 2018 the Book H., published by Saturn, his first photographic work.

It is an echo in images to the disc H (contemporary trio setting to music the French nuclear tests in the Sahara). This book tells his feelings and his personal awareness during 3 short trips around the seventeenth ground zero French atomic explosions in the 60s, in Reggane and Tamanrasset, Algeria.

His book is acclaimed by the press (Christmas selection Telerama for the book + CD, L'Humanité, L'Oeil de la Photographie, L'Interval, "Par les temps qui courent" on France Culture) and became the subject of his very first exhibition as part of the collective exhibition "Le Rêve d'un mouvement" in Paris in January 2019, alongside, among others, Gilles Roudière, Damien Daufresne, Stephane Charpentier and Gael Bonnefon. This exhibition then travelled to Studio Spiral (Grenoble) in March/April 2019, at Retine Argentique (Marseille) in April/May 2019, Sharjah Art Foundation (E.A.U), Galerie VU'(Paris), Dar Abdelaatif in Algiers and will be on view at Studio Baxton (Brussels) in 2020.

He is selected in 2019 as a "young talent photographer in residence" as part of the Festival Planche (s) Contact of Deauville for which he will create a new exhibition, L'Echappée, and is currently working on his next personal projects, mixing photography, video super 8 and music. The first project is about spirituality and poetry in Haiti, "Black Venus", the second one is about the feeling of underground life mixed with ancient mythologies in Cairo (with musician and photographer Frederic D. Oberland).

Website

www.gregory-dargent.com

 

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Stephanus Meyer
Stephanus Meyer
Zambia/United Kingdom
Stephanus Meyer was born in Zambia and spent most of his childhood in South Africa. He moved out of Africa at the beginning of the 1980s to live in Spain where he is now based. He is self-taught and always inspired by his obsession with light, shadows, contrasts and the way they come together in his images. Street, social, documentary and fine art photography are his great passion. He has lived in various environments and travelled to many different places, and his camera has taught him to see the world and how people live in it from a different perspective. Street photography has taught him to see. He is inspired by people who simply live their lives. He bought his first camera at the age of 16 and so the journey began; more than 40 years later it is still going strong. He has participated in numerous photographic events such as the official section of the international Biennial of Photography of Cordoba 2006 and the International Biennial of Photography and Audiovisual Arts of Granada, among others, and has been a finalist in several international competitions such as the Photography Masters Cup (USA), Chelsea International Photography Competition (New York), Fresh M.I.L.K. (New Zealand) and Festimage (Portugal), in addition to a large number of mentions and national awards. Statement Street photography is often seen as a simple capture of the everyday moments that unfold in the bustling streets of our cities. Yet, within each frame lies a profound narrative of our times, a visual testament to the lives we lead, the cultures we inhabit, and the stories we weave amidst the urban tapestry. In my pursuit of documenting the streets, I find myself drawn not just to the fleeting moments of beauty and serendipity, but also to the deeper layers of societal fabric that unfold before my lens. Each photograph serves as a time capsule, preserving not just the faces and places, but the essence of an era; a social document for future generations to decode and understand. Just as a historian might study the archives for insights into the past, I see my street photography as a form of contemporary historiography. Through the lens of my camera, I strive to capture not just the surface appearances, but the underlying currents of human existence – the way people dress, interact, and navigate the urban landscape. In this fast-paced world of ever-evolving trends and technologies, street photography offers a grounding force, reminding us of our shared humanity and collective journey. It is my hope that these snapshots of life on the streets will serve as a bridge across time, connecting us to the past, grounding us in the present, and inspiring us to shape a more compassionate and inclusive future. Series: Crossing the old city from within Córdoba, a city that was once a melting pot of religions and civilizations lies in the north-central section of the autonomous community of Andalusia in southern Spain. Córdoba was probably Carthaginian in origin and was occupied by the Romans in 152 BC. In 711 it was captured and largely destroyed by the Muslims. Abd al-Rahman I, a member of the Umayyad family, accepted the leadership of the Spanish Muslims rebuilt it and made Córdoba its capital in 756. The old city has one of the largest Jewish quarters in Europe with its narrow cobble- stone streets and white houses. It leads out towards the Great Cathedral-Mosque and crosses the Guadalquivir river through the Roman arch and bridge. I have been living here for almost 30 years, and have walked and crossed the old city with my camera many times. This series begins within the Great Cathedral-Mosque and takes us across the old city. As a passionate street photographer I try to capture the beauty and diversity of modern urban life in this ancient area. My style is unconventional and experimental, as I use a wide angle lens to create images that are distorted, dynamic, and dramatic. I simply walk and shoot and never engage with my subjects. I want the photos to be as natural as possible. In this series, in post-production, I used various filters to obtain that yellowish colour that for me creates the ancient mood the old city reminds me of when I walk its streets. I want the observer to feel the textures of the old stone, the mood, the pulse of daily life and the incredible light.
Lu Yanpeng
Lu Yanpeng
China
1984
Lu Yanpeng was born in 1984 in Fujian Province. He presently lives and works in Beijing. After graduating from the Art Institute of Fujian University in 2005, he has participated in numerous exhibitions both in China and internationally. Lu Yanpeng was nominated for the FOAM Paul Huf Award in the Netherlands in 2011 and received the top award at the 2011 Pingyao International Photography Festival for the Best Photographer for his work Open Air. He was the youngest artist to ever receive this award. Lu Yanpeng is a magician as if he has Midas touch. His darkroom is his magician's cloth, where his photos are but a spectacular performance in the void. He uses his hands, a symbol of the mortal body, paintbrushes, a symbol of tools, and the material world, as represented by light and stones that become a medium for thoughts. Although we are only able to recall from his work, we can easily imagine the details involved, because everything seems to have been done to perfection, which is in itself incredible. His darkroom skills and creative work have bypassed the barriers of human languages and tools. His strong awareness of his subjects carries him into an autonomous state. The artist in this state is not to be limited by his techniques; he is feeling the subjects spiritually without actually observing them. Source: www.m97gallery.com
Mark Cohen
Mark Cohen
United States
1943
Mark Cohen (born August 24, 1943) is an American photographer best known for his innovative close-up street photography. Cohen was born and lived in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania until 2013. He attended Penn State University and Wilkes College between 1961 and 1965, and opened a commercial photo studio in 1966. The majority of the photography for which Mark Cohen is known is shot in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre metropolitan area (also known as the Wyoming Valley), a historic industrialized region of northeastern Pennsylvania. Characteristically Cohen photographs people close-up, using a wide-angle lens and a flash, mostly in black and white, frequently cropping their heads from the frame, concentrating on small details. He has used 21 mm, 28 mm, and 35 mm focal length, wide-angle, lenses and later on 50 mm. Cohen has described his method as "intrusive." Discussing his influences with Thomas Southall in 2004 he cites "... so many photographers who followed Cartier-Bresson, like Frank, Koudelka, Winogrand, Friedlander." He also recognizes the influence of Diane Arbus. Whilst acknowledging these influences he says: "I knew about art photography... Then I did these outside the context of any other photographer." Cohen's major books of photography are Grim Street (2005), True Color (2007), and Mexico (2016). His work was first exhibited in a group exhibition at George Eastman House in 1969 and he had his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1973. He was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1971 and 1976 and received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1975. In 2013 Cohen moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.Source: Wikipedia Mark Cohen was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania where he lived and photographed for most of his life. (He now lives in Philadelphia.) His work was first exhibited in 1969 at the George Eastman House but came to prominence with his first solo exhibition at MoMA in 1973. Known primarily for his black and white images, Cohen was also a pioneer of the 1970s color movement that changed American photography. Shooting in the gritty environs of working class Pennsylvania, Cohen brought to street photography a literal and innovative closeness that came from his style of holding the camera at arm's length without looking through the viewfinder while using an unusually wide-angle lens. Intrusive but elegant, by turns brutal and sensuous, Cohen’s cropped bodies and faces and gritty still lives and landscapes reveal a finely tuned aesthetic and consistency. No background behind the looming foreground figures is without interest. No random object is observed without purpose. "They're not easy pictures. But I guess that's why they're mine." Says Cohen. Cohen is the recipient of two Guggenheim Grants and his work is in the collections of major museums from the U.S. to Japan. His most recent retrospective in 2013 at Le Bal in Paris and the accompanying publication Dark Knees were singled out by critics around the world as outstanding achievements in photography. Source: Danziger Gallery In many of the images, the points of attraction are clear: a giant football eclipsing the skinny torso of a young boy; the shining eyes of a black cat; a woman_’_s bare midriff beneath a pair of high-waisted cutoff shorts. We can imagine glancing or even staring at these subjects ourselves, taking in their rough-hewn idiosyncrasies. But it is in the moment that follows, when most of us would avert our eyes and move on, that the American street photographer Mark Cohen makes his work, moving forward, toward children, young women, dirty and shirtless strangers, until his wide-angle lens is close enough to bump bellies. In the nineteen-seventies, shooting in and around his native Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a small industrial city far outside the urban centers where street photography was born, Cohen pioneered an aggressive, if not invasive, approach to his craft, shortening the distance between photographer and subject until heads were lost to the frame’s edge and only collar bones and clipped limbs remained. “I have been pushed and shoved and screamed at, but nothing serious,” he has said. “I am always aware of the edge.”Source: The New Yorker “Cohen’s black-and-white photos… are deliberately disconcerting, almost vulgar… Heads are cropped out of the frame; truncated hands, legs and arms loom monstrously into view; perspective warps. Cohen wasn’t alone in his harsh, comic view of down-home America, but his in-your-face take and fragmentary results were jarringly unique, and much imitated.” -- Vince AlettiSource: The Village Voice
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson
France
1908 | † 2004
Born in Chanteloup, Seine-et-Marne, Henri Cartier-Bresson developed a strong fascination with painting early on, and particularly with Surrealism. In 1932, after spending a year in the Ivory Coast, he discovered the Leica - his camera of choice thereafter - and began a life-long passion for photography. In 1933 he had his first exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. He later made films with Jean Renoir. Taken prisoner of war in 1940, he escaped on his third attempt in 1943 and subsequently joined an underground organization to assist prisoners and escapees. In 1945 he photographed the liberation of Paris with a group of professional journalists and then filmed the documentary Le Retour (The Return). In 1947, with Robert Capa, George Rodger, David 'Chim' Seymour and William Vandivert, he founded Magnum Photos. After three years spent travelling in the East, in 1952 he returned to Europe, where he published his first book, Images à la Sauvette (published in English as The Decisive Moment). He explained his approach to photography in these terms, "For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. It is by economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression." From 1968 he began to curtail his photographic activities, preferring to concentrate on drawing and painting. In 2003, with his wife and daughter, he created the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris for the preservation of his work. Cartier-Bresson received an extraordinary number of prizes, awards and honorary doctorates. He died at his home in Provence on 3 August 2004, a few weeks short of his 96th birthday.Source: Magnum Photos His technique: Henri Cartier-Bresson almost exclusively used Leica 35 mm rangefinder cameras equipped with normal 50 mm lenses or occasionally a wide-angle for landscapes. He often wrapped black tape around the camera's chrome body to make it less conspicuous. With fast black and white films and sharp lenses, he was able to photograph almost by stealth to capture the events. No longer bound by a huge 4×5 press camera or an awkward medium format twin-lens reflex camera, miniature-format cameras gave Cartier-Bresson what he called "the velvet hand [and] the hawk's eye." He never photographed with flash, a practice he saw as "Impolite...like coming to a concert with a pistol in your hand." He believed in composing his photographs in the viewfinder, not in the darkroom. He showcased this belief by having nearly all his photographs printed only at full-frame and completely free of any cropping or other darkroom manipulation. Indeed, he emphasized that his prints were not cropped by insisting they include the first millimetre or so of the unexposed clear negative around the image area resulting, after printing, in a black border around the positive image. Henri Cartier-Bresson worked exclusively in black and white, other than a few unsuccessful attempts in color. He disliked developing or making his own prints and showed a considerable lack of interest in the process of photography in general, likening photography with the small camera to an "instant drawing". Technical aspects of photography were valid for him only where they allowed him to express what he saw: "Constant new discoveries in chemistry and optics are widening considerably our field of action. It is up to us to apply them to our technique, to improve ourselves, but there is a whole group of fetishes which have developed on the subject of technique. Technique is important only insofar as you must master it in order to communicate what you see... The camera for us is a tool, not a pretty mechanical toy. In the precise functioning of the mechanical object perhaps there is an unconscious compensation for the anxieties and uncertainties of daily endeavor. In any case, people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing." He started a tradition of testing new camera lenses by taking photographs of ducks in urban parks. He never published the images but referred to them as "my only superstition" as he considered it a 'baptism' of the lens. Henri Cartier-Bresson is regarded as one of the art world's most unassuming personalities. He disliked publicity and exhibited a ferocious shyness since his days in hiding from the Nazis during World War II. Although he took many famous portraits, his own face was little known to the world at large (which presumably had the advantage of allowing him to work on the street in peace). He dismissed others' applications of the term "art" to his photographs, which he thought were merely his gut reactions to moments in time that he had happened upon. "In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a leitmotiv."Source: Wikipedia Henri Cartier-Bresson has intuitively chronicled decisive moments of human life around the world with poetic documentary style. His photographs impart spontaneous instances with meaning, mystery, and humor in terms of precise visual organization, and his work, although tremendously difficult to imitate, has influenced many other photographers. His photographs may be summed up through a phrase of his own: "the decisive moment," the magical instant when the world falls into apparent order and meaning, and may be apprehended by a gifted photographer.Source: International Center of Photography
Paul Carruthers
Paul Carruthers
United Kingdom
1970
Born on Merseyside in 1970, Carruthers was a footballer first and creative second. Only after a knee injury ended his playing career did he begin to see the world through a different lens. Wandering around the streets of Liverpool with his trusted Fuji, Carruthers’ early work examined the funny, the absurd and the beautiful. A move to Devon in the 2000’s saw him begin the approaches for which he is most famous for today. Serene landscapes and still water marked his style during this period, with an emphasis on strong contrasts and stylised seascapes. He became the British Life Photographer of the Year in 2017, with his photograph Lifeguard earning national news coverage. His photographs have toured Australia and Asia and he has been recognised by a number of prestigious magazines and competitions: most notably the Head On Photography Awards and the ND Awards. His seminal series Grockles explores the relationship between tourist (or Grockle, as they’re known in Devon) and local, and has garnered widespread accolades. Often taking a humorous tone to serious subjects, Carruthers’ work has tackled wide ranging topics including tourism, the housing crisis, light pollution, and more. His keen eye for light, shadow and colour, demonstrated through award winning images like ‘Vitamin C’ and ‘Better Call Saul’, is subtle in its use of its environment to illustrate meaning behind the centered characters. Through this work, Carruthers was recently crowned as Oneeyeland’s number 1 UK street photographer. His work continues to highlight one of the unseen crises at the heart of the UK, and in typical British style, to explore the humour, absurdity and beauty that are present in seaside communities across Devon and Cornwall. Statement: Imagine you’re on a Devon high street under the hot sun, or on the edge of a breakwater as the water strikes the stone. This is beautiful country, patchwork country. Fields knit together like coloured felt. Expensive boots strike against cobbles, or are stripped away and discarded in favour of sandy feet. The water is still; the water is uproarious. The locals wipe away a sheen of sweat. There is everything. Beauty and silence, underpinned by the absurdity of hordes of tourists descending upon a part of the world that for many years was home to nothing but fishermen, or, when times were bad, shipwreckers. Second homes sit dormant for most of the year. Industries strain under the pressure of the boom and bust of the holiday season. For an artist, this is a treasure trove. Nature and people both exist simultaneously in ideal form and under great stress. I’ve explored a number of projects over the years, from the horses of Carlisle Bay in Barbados, to Lost in Venice, but my greatest body of works lies in both my landscape series Devotion, and my street photography series Grockles. It is in these that I paint an honest picture of a region and its people.
Herbert List
Herbert List
Germany
1903 | † 1975
Herbert List was a German photographer, who worked for magazines, including Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and Life, and was associated with Magnum Photos. His austere, classically posed black-and-white compositions, particularly his homoerotic male nudes, taken in Italy and Greece being influential in modern photography and contemporary fashion photography. He was born on 7 October 1903 to a prosperous business family in Hamburg, the son of Luise and Felix List. He attended the Johanneum Gymnasium, and afterwards studied literature 1921–23 at the University of Heidelberg. While still a student he became apprenticed in the family company, Landfried Coffee. In 1923, after two years in Heidelberg learning about the coffee trade and attending lectures at the university on Greek art and literature, List traveled for the family business Kaffee-Import Firma List & Heineken, Hamburg. Between 1925 and 1928 he visited plantations and contacts in Guatemala, Costa Rica, San Salvador, Brazil (where he stayed for six months) and San Francisco. During this time he began taking photographs. In 1929 he met Andreas Feininger who inspired his greater interest in photography and gave him a Rolleiflex camera. From 1930 he began taking portraits of friends and shooting still life; was influenced by the Bauhaus and artists of the surrealist movements, Man Ray, Giorgio De Chirico and Max Ernst; and created a surrealist photograph titled Metaphysique in a style he called fotografia metafisica in homage to De Chirico, his most important influence during this period. List used male models, draped fabric, masks and double-exposures to depict dream states and fantastic imagery. He has explained that his photos were "composed visions where [my] arrangements try to capture the magical essence inhabiting and animating the world of appearances." While there are surface similarities to Nazi imagery of the athletic male body—that of Leni Riefenstahl for example—unlike them, List's pictures of friends are portraits as much as they are nudes, nor did List endorse Nazi ideas, nor did his work influence National Socialist photography. He never published his male nudes in his own lifetime, and kept them hidden in his mother's house in a sack he called his poison bag". He was however influenced in his depiction of romantic paganism by the Jugendbewegung youth and physical health movement, though he did not join any of its associations, and some of the ideals of the Jugendbewegung were co-opted by the Nazis (though they later denounced the movement) and influenced their idealizing Romantic realism. List in his own notes uses a pun—"Das Objektiv ist nicht objectiv,"—to emphasize his creative, non-realist, application of photography. The lens is not objective. Otherwise photography would be useless as an artistic medium. -- Herbert List In 1936, in response to the danger of Gestapo attention to his openly gay lifestyle and his Jewish heritage, List left Germany for Paris, where he met George Hoyningen-Huene with whom he travelled to Greece, deciding then to become a photographer. In 1937 he worked in a studio in London and held his first one-man show at Galerie du Chasseur d'Images in Paris. Hoyningen-Huene referred him to Harper's Bazaar magazine, and 1936–39 he worked for Arts et Metiers Graphiques, Verve, Vogue, Photographie, and Life. List was unsatisfied with fashion photography. He turned back to still-life imagery, continuing in his fotografia metafisica style. From 1937 to 1939 List traveled in Greece and took photographs of ancient temples, ruins, sculptures, and the landscape for his book Licht über Hellas. In the meantime he supported himself with work for magazines Neue Linie, Die Dame and for the press from 1940 to 1943, and with portraits which he continued to make until 1950. In List's work the revolutionary tactics of surrealist art and a metaphysical staging of irony and reverie had been honed in on the fashion industry that relied on illusion and spectacle which after World War II returned to a classical fixation on ruins, broken male statuary and antiquity. In 1941, during World War II, he was forced to return to Germany; but because one of his grandparents was Jewish he was not allowed to publish or work professionally. In 1944 he was drafted into the German military, despite being of partly Jewish ancestry. He served in Norway as a map designer. A trip to Paris allowed him to take portraits of Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Christian Bérard, Georges Braque, Jean Arp, Joan Miró, and others. After the war, he photographed the ruins of Munich where he continued to live until 1960, working mainly for the Swiss magazine Du, with freelance photo essays for Heute, Epoca, Look, Harper's Bazaar, Flair, and Picture Post. He was made art editor of Heute magazine, published by the Allied occupying forces, in 1948. In 1951, List met Robert Capa, who invited him to work as a contributor to Magnum, but he rarely accepted assignments. For the next decade he produced copious work in Italy. During this time he also started using a 35 mm film camera and a telephoto lens. He was influenced by his Magnum colleague Henri Cartier-Bresson as well as the Italian neorealist film movement. In the 1950s he also shot portraits of Marino Marini, Paul Bowles, W. H. Auden, and Marlene Dietrich in 1960. Over the period 1949–62 he visited Italy, Greece, Spain, France, Mexico, and the Caribbean. List's 1950 picture of a woman, her black dress spread about her, reclining at a respectable distance from an elderly man reading, with one leg of his trousers rolled above his socks and garter, both enjoying the spring sunshine on the front steps of the Glyptothek in Munich, was selected by curator Edward Steichen for the world-touring Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Family of Man, seen by 9 million visitors. In 1964 List was awarded the David Octavius Hill Prize of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Lichtbildner. Herbert List is best known for his book Junge Männer (1988) which contains more than seventy images of young men lounging in the sun, wrestling and innocently regarding the camera lens. It is introduced by Stephen Spender in whose autobiographical novel The Temple, written in 1929 but not published until 1988, List is fictionalized as Joachim Lenz. List gave up photography in the early 1960s to concentrate on his collection of Italian Old Master Drawings. He died in Munich on 4 April 1975, and his archive was absorbed in the Ratjen collection which was later acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington.Source: Wikipedia
Barbara Hazen
Barbara Hazen
United States
1958
Barbara Hazen’s work explores the internal self and the intersection of memory and the family scrapbook, with an emphasis on cyanotype and platinum palladium processes. Her most recent work uses flowers as a metaphor to observe beauty in the beginning and ending of life. She received a BS from UCSB and later attended the California Culinary Academy. After a career as pastry chef, Hazen returned to her photographic practice. Her work has been featured in numerous publications and exhibited in both group and solo exhibits including Center for Photographic Art, ASmith Gallery, HLiiC Gallery, The Plaxall Gallery, CordenPotts Gallery, The Image Flow, SoHo Photo Gallery, Sorensen Gallery, LightBox Gallery, and Focus Gallery.
Lise Sarfati
Lise Sarfati
France
1958
Lise Sarfati has lived and worked in the United States since 2003. She has realized six important series of photographs there. They have been followed by exhibitions and publications. Each of her works makes clear the identity of an approach focused on the intensity of the rapport established with the person photographed, and of that person with the context. A vision in which the individual is environment, a map outlining a perilous cultural geography. The richness of perception is constructed without effects. The compositions are flawless in the simplicity and unity of the image – the style tends to be elementary and clean, avoiding all qualifications, but the traits of each thing and each person trace a hundred thousand folds. The dimension of the interplay of postures is that of a solemn immaturity: the scenery formed by the people and places is the silent crumpling of a dream in which each risks his or her skin. A feminine seduction tinged with fateful coincidences; the beauty of the adolescents looks like a magic spell. Their solitude and strangeness in the world turn the image into an echo chamber inhabited by the photographer, her subject and the viewer. The earlier period of a photographic work carried out in Russia (continuously from 1989 to 1999) confirms the tendency of this research. She identifies a very precise and endless psychological spectrum. The projections, the ambitions associated with the immense space, the way in which they compose these figures, play an essential role: the supporting roles are incandescent. A determinism of the heroic, inevitably tragic figure, as if not even we really have another choice.
Sheila Metzner
Sheila Metzner
United States
1939
Sheila Metzner (born 1939) is an American photographer. She was the first female photographer to collaborate with the Vogue magazine on an ongoing basis. Metzner lives in Brooklyn, New York. Metzner graduated from the Higher School of Art and Design and the Faculty of Visual Communications of the Pratt Institute. After that, she was engaged in promotional activities. In the 1960s, she became the first woman to be promoted to art director by Doyle Dane Bernbach, an advertising agency. Thanks to this, she successfully collaborated with well-known photographers, including Richard Avedon, Melvin Sokolsky, Bob Richardson and Diane Arbus. Inspired by the work of 19th-century English photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, who painted pictures of her family, Metzner photographed her husband, artist Jeffrey Metzner, and her children. In the first 10 years, she shot only her family without publishing photos. Her first show in New York was called Friends & Family. She decided to show part of the images to the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, John Sarkovsky. In 1978, he bought one and included in MoMA exhibition Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960. A second exhibition – Photography (Spring 1981): Couches, Diamonds and Pie – took place there. After that, The New York Times and The Sunday Times published a photograph of Sheila's husband. In 2008 the School of Visual Arts presented the exhibition Time Line: Shelia Metzner at the Visual Arts Museum, New York. Sheila Metzner lives in New York. She was married to the artist Jeffrey Metzner, with whom she had seven children.Source: Wikipedia Sheila Metzner's unique photographic style has positioned her as a contemporary master in the worlds of fine art, fashion, portraiture, still life and landscape photography. Born in Brooklyn, she attended Pratt Institute, where she majored in Visual Communications, and was then hired by Doyle Dane Bernbach advertising agency as its first female art director. She took pictures all the while, amassing them slowly over the next thirteen years, while raising five children. One of these photographs was included in a famous and controversial exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art - Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960 - and became the dark horse hit of the exhibition. Gallery shows and commercial clients soon followed. Her first commercial client was Valentino, followed by Elizabeth Arden, Perry Ellis, Shiseido, Fendi, Saks Fifth Avenue, Paloma Picasso, Victoria's Secret, Revlon, and in recent years Levi's, Ralph Lauren, Club Monaco, Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus. Sheila's fine art photographs are featured in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, The International Center of Photography, The Brooklyn Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Chrysler Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, Agfa and Polaroid Corporations, Saks Fifth Avenue, as well as many personal collections. She has published five monographs: Objects of Desire, which won the American Society of Magazine Photographers Ansel Adams Award for Book Photography; Sheila Metzner's Color; Inherit the Earth, a collection of landscapes shot during her travels, Form and Fashion, a collection of images culled from twenty years of her work in fine-art and fashion, and Sheila Metzner: From Life in 2017.Source: sheilametzner.com
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Interview
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.
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Exclusive Interview with Henk Kosche
Interview
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.
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Exclusive Interview with Anastasia Samoylova
Interview
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.
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Exclusive Interview with Marijn Fidder
Interview
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.
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Exclusive Interview with Josh S. Rose
Interview
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.
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Interview with Maureen Ruddy Burkhart
Interview
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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