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LAST CALL to Win a Solo Exhibition this March!
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Marcus Bleasdale
Marcus Bleasdale
Marcus Bleasdale

Marcus Bleasdale

Country: United Kingdom
Birth: 1968

Marcus Bleasdale is a British photojournalist, born in the UK to an Irish family. He spent over twelve years covering the conflict within the borders of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the work was published in his book One Hundred Years of Darkness, his second book The Rape of a Nation addressed the issues of the conflct being fuelled by natural resource exploration and was awarded the best photojournalism books of the year in 2009 by POYi in the USA. His work on human rights and conflict has been shown at the United States Senate, US House of Representatives, The United Nations and the Houses of Parliament in the UK. He works regularly with Human Rights Watch, Medecins Sans Frontieres and other NGOs to highlight health and human rights issues in several countries. He works to cover issues which are underreported by mainstream media. In 2007, Human Rights Watch and the Open Society Institute awarded Bleasdale a grant to continue his work on justice and accountability in the DRC. Bleasdale is currently based in Oslo, Norway with his wife Karin Beate and is an owner and member of VII Photo.
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More Great Photographers To Discover

Scott M. Fincher
United States
1946
So what differentiates a portrait of a person from a picture of an object? Essentially nothing. A photographer's purpose is revelation. In the street or in the corporate suite the imperative is to take surfaces into the interior so that the viewer comes to understand something about what has been presented. This could be an aspect of personality or the structure of a design. In short, one can say no more than one can see. Early in my career, I used to fantasize that I could be a Beethoven of photography. The idea contradicts the central principle of the medium. What distinguishes photography from the other arts is time. Unlike music, which takes a single idea and expands it, photography interrupts the continuum and digests it into an exquisite moment where understanding, composition and action intersect. All this is expressed succinctly in poet e.e. cummings's introduction to his volume "Is Five": "I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement." In my eyes, photography also adheres to Francis Bacon's maxim, "The contemplation of things as they are without error, without confusion, without substitution or imposture is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of inventions." That is why I love both nature and the street and quest for the image that sits on the cusp of the real and surreal. For the most part, I do not manipulate the images in the digital "darkroom" any more than I would have were I using techniques of the old "wet" darkrooms. Mostly, I adjust luminosity. My background is print journalism. I edited photography and foreign and national news for the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times for many years before deciding to rededicate myself to my passion. It has been, as the great Edward Steichen once said about the photographic act, "Incredibly easy and impossibly difficult." Nevertheless, the results have been good, and I have won national, international and art fair awards since my return to photography in 2006. My images are in collections all over the U.S. and in Germany, Poland, Denmark and Venezuela. I hold a bachelor's in English from Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill., and have studied photography in too many workshops to enumerate. I live in Chicago.
Guillermo Espinosa
Guillermo Espinosa is a Spanish photographer born in Madrid in 1985 and currently based in Berlin. He studied Graphic arts and wine making in Madrid. He started in photography around 7 years ago, making pictures in the streets of Madrid with an old reflex camera. Later on he moved to Germany to work as a waiter. It was then when he saw the potential of street photography as a way to grow personally and escape from the routine. Since then he has combined his job as a waiter with some jobs related to photography such as Cruiseship photographer or photographer for a german decoration shop. He is currently involved in a few ongoing street photography projects in the city of Berlin. Statement My artwork is about the relation between the human being and the public enviroment, searching for the insual in the usual or mundane. Trying to find candid moments in the dalily life using what the enviroment gives me, such a light, subjects, geometry, etc. Another distinguising feature is the friction created by the layers (physical or conceptual). I have been always attracted by the contrasts that happen in everyday life, the juxtaposition in any "normal" situation that can create many humoristic, visual or critic lectures. Even a frontal shot of a character on the street can be read in many different ways depending on the viewer, place or epoque. My main aproach is to create a connection with the viewer that can go beyond the aesthetics, making an image more than a 2D object that comfrontes the previous concept of the daily life
Svetlin Yosifov
I was born in Bulgaria, and I had the privilege of living in this beautiful country all my life. My employment is in a private sports club, focused on extreme sports, which involves a lot of travelling and keeps my life dynamic and interesting. Apart from this, I love travelling abroad and do this once a year for a period of two months. I always associate these trips with diving in the unknown, meeting new people and experiencing something new. My adventurous spirit is my main drive, the inner flame, that keeps me going! Not a professional freelance photographer. I define myself as a travel-documentary-art photographer. For almost 20 years now photography has been part of my life. My passion is catching street portraits and trying to figure out my object's character.Portrait photography is the most compelling genre for me. The impact of a single photo, comes from the emotion it reflects.My Point of interest - traditions in primal and natural places like India, Ethiopia, Kenya, Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba and more. I consider good photography to be much more than a snapshot or a memory, it is something that tells a story, strong enough to influence the world we live in and raise more awareness. Throughout the years my interviews and photographs have been published in many magazines and websites. About Mursi People Mursi People is a series of photos that were taken during my visits to Ethiopia and are part of the albums "Ethiopian tribes expedition 2018" and the "Second Ethiopian tribes expedition 2019" The African tribe of Mursi people is isolated in Omo valley - South Ethiopia near the border with Sudan. They are one of the most fascinating tribes in Africa with their lives being a combination of brutal reality and amazing beauty. What was really appealing to me, as a photographer, was to capture and recreate the perplexing nature of their culture and way of life. Suffering from extreme drought in the past few years has made their life cruel and sometimes dangerous, but has not left a single mark on their traditions. Living among them gave the sense of extreme authenticity and in the same time felt like an illusion. Their faces filled my insatiable passion for capturing pure, untouched souls of a culture on the brink of extinction." Discover Svetlin Yosifov's Interview
Mostafa Nodeh
Mostafa Nodeh (b. 1980) is an Iranian artist and self-taught photographer based in Guilan, on the northern coast of Iran. He is known for his captivating minimalist landscape photographs in black and white, which, inspired by conceptual photography, are strongly rooted in themes, ideas and symbolism. About the Freedom Collection Global Appeal and Interpretative Depth The Freedom collection showcases how the simplest of elements can carry profound meanings. While some may see in his images themes of hope and resilience, others might interpret them as reflections on personal growth or the changing seasons of life. A Celebration of Universal Themes Mostafa Nodeh’s Freedom is a testament to his belief that freedom is a deeply personal and universal experience. The collection invites viewers to reflect on their journeys, embodying resilience and aspiration through serene imagery. Nodeh’s work serves as an invitation to pause, appreciate the quiet elegance of the world, and find strength in simplicity. Nodeh’s photography reminds us that within each image lies an opportunity to find peace and inspiration, celebrating the beauty of life’s most fundamental experiences. Statement Very poetic and existential in nature, Nodeh's works invite us to reflect on the deeper questions in life. What is the meaning of it? How are we spending it? Or to engage with more politically charged questions such as which lives matter? Or who is disposable? All the while they also hold another important message, which perhaps is the root of Nodeh’s minimalism: ''To me minimal photography is an art in the way that artists learn how to omit the extra elements which seem to be very necessary in such a hectic life. I see it as an international language to communicate with the people round the world'' Awarded Photographer of the Week - Week 49
Ellen von Unwerth
Eugene Richards
United States
1944
Eugene Richards is a noted American documentary photographer. During the 1960s, Richards was a civil rights activist and VISTA volunteer. After receiving a BA in English from Northeastern University, his graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were supervised by photographer Minor White. Richards' published photographs are mostly intended as a means of raising social awareness, have been characterized as "highly personal" and are both exhibited and published in a series of books. The first book was Few Comforts or Surprises (1973), a depiction of rural poverty in Arkansas; but it was his second book, the self-published Dorchester Days (1978), a "homecoming" to Dorchester, Massachusetts, where Richards had grown up, that won most attention. It is "an angry, bitter book", both political and personal. Gerry Badger writes that "[Richards's] involvement with the people he is photographing is total, and he is one of the best of photojournalists in getting that across, often helped by his own prose". Richards has been a member of Magnum Photos and of VII Photo Agency. He lives in New York.Source: Wikipedia Eugene Richards, photographer, writer, and filmmaker, was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1944. After graduating from Northeastern University with a degree in English, he studied photography with Minor White. In 1968, he joined VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America, a government program established as an arm of the so-called "War on Poverty". Following a year and a half in eastern Arkansas, Richards helped found a social service organization and a community newspaper, Many Voices, which reported on black political action as well as the Ku Klux Klan. Photographs he made during these four years were published in his first monograph, Few Comforts or Surprises: The Arkansas Delta. Upon returning to Dorchester, Richards began to document the changing, racially diverse neighborhood where he was born. After being invited to join Magnum Photos in 1978, he worked increasingly as a freelance magazine photographer, undertaking assignments on such diverse topics as the American family, drug addiction, emergency medicine, pediatric AIDS, aging and death in America. In 1992, he directed and shot Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue, the first of seven short films he would eventually make. Richards has published seventeen books. Exploding Into Life, which chronicles his first wife Dorothea Lynch’s struggle with breast cancer, received Nikon's Book of the Year award. For Below The Line: Living Poor in America, his documentation of urban and rural poverty, Richards received an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography. The Knife & Gun Club: Scenes from an Emergency Room received an Award of Excellence from the American College of Emergency Physicians. Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue, an extensive reportorial on the effects of hardcore drug usage, received the Kraszna-Krausz Award for Photographic Innovation in Books. That same year, Americans We was the recipient of the International Center of Photography's Infinity Award for Best Photographic Book. In 2005, Pictures of the Year International chose The Fat Baby, an anthology of fifteen photographic essays, Best Book of the year. Richards’s most recent books include The Blue Room, a study of abandoned houses in rural America; War Is Personal, an assessment in words and pictures of the human consequences of the Iraq war; and Red Ball of a Sun Slipping Down, a remembrance of life on the Arkansas Delta.Source: eugenerichards.com
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