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Khanh Phan Thi
Khanh Phan Thi
Khanh Phan Thi

Khanh Phan Thi

Country: Vietnam
Birth: 1985

Hi I'm Khanh Phan, I'm 34 and I'm from Vietnam. I was born in 1985.
I was born in Quỳnh Phụ, Thái Bình, a mainly agricultural land. My parents were farmers. I currently work at the bank and I am a bank teller.
Photography is my passion. After a broken marriage in 2017, I was heartbroken and desperated and losing faith in life. Then I thought, I couldn't be like this forever, I needed to get over it and I bought a camera.
First I went to take photos of flowers in a park near my house, then I realized that Vietnam, my beloved country, has so many hidden fabulous natural and cultural scenes that only few places in the world have. I have been to many places, met and learned about the different regional customs and practices. I then took those pictures, posted them on social media, and became popular with my friends. Photography has changed my life, got me through difficult times and is now my only personal joy today.
At first I received strong opposition from my family. My mother thinks photography is too dangerous. I often have to go to the sunrise photograph from 4 am, come home after sunset. There are nights when I wait for the night dew, or milkyway, I have to be outside all night. My mother worried that I would be in danger of being robbed because women who go out late at night are very dangerous. And with my income, my mother is afraid that I will not be able to take care of my son and maintain a stable life if i pursues photography because photographic equipment is very expensive.
I have never taken a class in photography and photoshop, I myself researched and practiced on photoshop and learned the experience for myself. I have been taking pictures for 2 years.
Finally, with my own efforts, I received some small awards in photography, my mother believed in me and she supported my work.
Vietnam is a country with many feudal dynasties. The Vietnamese family is mainly patriarchal. Today Vietnamese women know how to fight for gender equality, a few participate in politics and hold important positions in the state, but the gender discrimination is still quite clear.
In addition to working for a living as a man does, we also hold the maternity role, take care of childeren and family, do the houseworks and rarely have the time to do the things we love.
In order to persue my passion for photography, I have to sacrifice my happiness. I could not get married again. My income is about 15 million VND per month (about 600$ per month). With that income, it is enough to raise my son and still has a small part of it for photography enthusiasts including equipments and travel expenses. I often had to take pictures alone, and experienced many life-threatening things like staying in the cemetery alone at night when waiting for the sunrise at the churchs in Thanh Xa, Bao Loc, Lam Dong, wrestling with waves at Hang Rai, Phan Rang seashores, climbing mountains, or wading into swamps. Sometimes I forget I'm a woman.
I have won a number of awards such as Sonyworld award 2019, Skypixel 2019, Drone award of Siena 2019 but some people do not recognize my ability and efforts. They think I'm lucky and for the reason that I am a woman.

Vietnam from Above

Vietnam is a beautiful country with a diverse culture. Each region will have many unique cultural features with traditional villages that are hundreds of years old. The Vietnamese people stick to the traditional profession and take it as a way of gratitude to their ancestors. Although the traditional profession is very hard and low-income compared to other modern jobs, the artisans still stick to the profession as flesh and blood and want to pass it on to future generations.
The daily lives and jobs of Vietnamese workers are recorded from above.
 

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Janette Beckman
United Kingdom
1959
Janette Beckman is a British documentary photographer who currently lives in New York City. Beckman describes herself as a documentary photographer. While she produces a lot of work on location (such as the cover of The Police album Zenyatta Mondatta, taken in the middle of a forest in the Netherlands), she is also a studio portrait photographer. Her work has appeared on records for major labels, and in magazines including Esquire, Rolling Stone, Glamour, Italian Vogue, The Times, Newsweek, Jalouse, Mojo and others. Beckman was at King Alfred School, in Golders Green in north London, from 1953 to 1967. She spent a year at Saint Martin's School of Art, and then three years at London College of Communication studying photography. After initially working for Sounds magazine with Vivien Goldman – her first shoot was with Siouxsie and the Banshees – she had a job shooting for music magazines such as Melody Maker and The Face, with a studio and darkroom in central London. Her primary focus was the UK's burgeoning punk subculture. Beckman moved permanently to New York City in 1982 and continued her career, shooting for her UK clients as well as new ones in the U.S. After moving to New York, Beckman presented her portfolio to American record companies looking for work shooting album covers, but the gritty feel of her work did not fit the "airbrushed" aesthetic preferred at the time. She was passed on to smaller rap and hip-hop labels, where she photographed acts such as Salt-N-Pepa, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, and the Beastie Boys in their early days. In a 2015 interview with American Photo magazine, she recalled "It is amazing, 30 years later, people going 'oh you photographed legends.' I guess I did, but they weren’t legends when I was taking pictures of them".Source: Wikipedia As a child growing up in London in the 1960s, Janette Beckman visited the National Portrait Gallery. Entranced by the portraits of people from distant times and places, she instinctively knew that’s what she wanted to do. “I was always fascinated by people,” she remembers. “I’d see them at the bus stop on the way to school but I was too shy to talk to anybody, so I’d stare at them. My mother would say, ‘Don’t stare,’ but I couldn’t help myself.” Drawn to the irrepressible expression of style, character, and personality, Beckman forged ahead with her dream of becoming an artist. In the early 1970s, she enrolled at Central St. Martins to study art while living in a semi-squat in Streatham, South London, with her classmates. “We lived on four floors, shared a bathroom, and there was no heat — but my rent was only £5 a week,” she recalls. Beckman’s foray into photography happened by sheer serendipity. “We would sit around drawing each other endlessly,” she says. “My dear friend Eddie was a fantastic artist; he could draw as well as David Hockney. I would look at his work, then mine, and realize I was never going to be that good. When the end of the school year came, I had to decide what I was going to do, and I thought, I’ll try photography.” After enrolling in photography school, where she was just one of three women in the class, Janette Beckman quickly realized she didn’t want to learn by instruction — she wanted to do it herself. Determined to chart her own path, Beckman gave herself portrait assignments, and only went into class to learn the things she needed to know, like how to make prints. “I was in my really rebellious stage,” says Beckman, who followed this guiding light throughout her career. Her love for subversives, innovators, and activists is collected in the new book, Rebels: From Punk to Dior, which brings together four decades of photographs celebrating artists, musicians, and movements on the fringe that have redefined mainstream culture and society. Beckman’s photographs have played a seminal role in these seismic shifts — one so undeniable that institutions are finally taking note. In a truly full-circle moment, earlier this year, the National Portrait Gallery acquired four Beckman prints of British musicians including the Specials and Laurel Aitken as part of “Inspiring People,” a major curatorial redevelopment project to represent cultural and gender diversity across both sitter and artists.Source: Blind Magazine
Imogen Cunningham
United States
1883 | † 1976
Imogen Cunningham is renowned as one of the greatest American women photographers. In 1901, having sent away $15 for her first camera, she commenced what would become the longest photographic career in the history of the medium... Cunningham soon turned her attention to both the nude as well as native plant forms in her back garden. The results were staggering; an amazing body of work comprised of bold, contemporary forms. These works are characterized by a visual precision that is not scientific, but which presents the lines and textures of her subjects articulated by natural light and their own gestures. Her refreshing, yet formal and sensitive floral images from the 1920’s ultimately became her most acclaimed images. Cunningham also had an intuitive command of portraiture but her real artistic legacy was secured though her inclusion in the "F64" show in San Francisco in 1932. With a small group of photographers which included Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, she pioneered the renewal of photography on the West Coast. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, Cunningham’s work continues to be exhibited and collected around the world.Source: Photography West Gallery I never divide photographers into creative and uncreative, I just call them photographers. Who is creative? How do you know who is creative or not? -- Imogen Cunningham Cunningham was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1883. In 1901, at the age of eighteen, Cunningham bought her first camera, a 4x5 inch view camera, from the American School of Art in Scranton, Pennsylvania. She soon lost interest and sold the camera to a friend. It wasn’t until 1906, while studying at the University of Washington in Seattle, that she was inspired by an encounter with the work of Gertrude Käsebier, to take up photography again. 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Davide Bertuccio
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Margo Davis
United States
1944
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Miina Savolainen
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During years the photographing has become an intimate and profound way to interact with the girls. This exceptional long-term relationship can be seen in the special kind of openness and intimacy of the photographs. Although the pictures in the series of the Loveliest Girl in the World are artificial and not from the everyday life they are bound to the tradition of realistic photography. The documentary quality of the pictures is multilayered. On one hand the pictures are documents of growing up, the young girls' personalities and dreams. On the other hand the pictures make certain features of the girls visible which cannot be seen in their everyday selves. The childhood of the young who have grown up in a Children's home includes a lot of feelings of being abandoned and of being invisible. It also includes the burden of other people's prejudices, the stigmatisation of being a Children's home resident. The fairytale-like pictures are juxtaposed with real life story that seldom had fairytale qualities. The pictures express sadness but also hope and desire to see oneself in a more gentle way. With the aid of the non-everyday world of the pictures the young have been allowed to be seen and to see themselves differently like never before. The girls do not see the pictures as role-playing. In the everyday life the girls may also lead “roles” which appear wrong and foreign to the girls. The pictures may show, for the first time, a side that the young person holds real and dear to herself, a picture that she wants to cherish in her mind. The Loveliest Girl in the World -pictures are extreme documents: they are pictures of a person’s inner identity. This inner side becomes visible and the deeper emotional “truth” can be reached by mixing the truth and the fiction. Every human being has an inviolable right to feel himself or herself special. The pictures are a proof of conclusiveness of the photograph, which is not only bound to what’s visible. The Loveliest Girl in the World doesn't portray the Children's home residents the way the people living in margins are usually portrayed. The pictures are also something else from the sexist way of how young women and girls are exhibited in today's public places. Above all the fairy-tale feeling of the pictures is metaphorical; it is a longing for a clean, innocent state of dreaming where you can see yourself as a whole and an ideal person, protected from the gaze and the expectations of other people. The series brings up questions on how the present visual culture makes one a part of the society. The pictures of the young in the Children's home tell stories of being a girl and being a human in general. The deepest content of the pictures, the need to be seen, is familiar to anyone. The attempt to learn to see oneself in a more gentle way is especially addressing in our time where people are surrounded by the endless requirements from different fields of life. The Loveliest Girl in the World exhibitions have prompted the public to think about the capacity of the photograph to influence on societal and personal levels. From the point of view of photography the project also raises questions about the author and ethics. This project could be seen as community photography. It includes the models not only in the creation of the photographs but also in the selection of the exhibited pictures.The project, its accompanying exhibition and Miina Savolainen has been awarded the Spotlight of the Year 2003 special prize of the jury, the Vision of the Year award 2004, Duodecim Finnish Medical Association’s 2005 Cultural Award, the Young Photographer of the Year award 2005 and the State Award for Children´s Culture 2006. Patricia Seppälä Foundation, the Finnish Cultural Foundation, Finnfoto and the City of Helsinki have supported the production.
Marco Gualazzini
Born in Parma in 1976, Marco Gualazzini began his career as a photographer in 2004, with his home town's local daily, La Gazzetta di Parma. His works include reportage photography on microfinance in India, on the freedom of expression in Myanmar, on the discrimination of minorities in Pakistan. For the last few years he has been covering Africa extensively. He devised and took part in the creation of a documentary for the Italian national TV network RAI on the caste system in India, which has been selected at IDFA- The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, and has been awarded with the Best Camera Work Award at the Aljazeera International Documentary Film Festival 2014. Gualazzini published in national and international titles and he has received numerous accolades, including the Getty Images Grant for Editorial Photography, the PDN and the World Press Photo. Represented by CONTRASTO Agency Resilient is his first book and it's published by ContrastoBooks PUBLICATION: The New York Times, GEO, Al-Jazeera, Paris Match, LIGHTBOX- TIME magazine, Courrier International, L'Express, 6Mois, Internazionale, L'Espresso, InsideOver, CNN, M (Le Monde), Der Spiegel, The Sunday Times Magazine, Newsweek Japan, and Vanity Fair. AWARDS: Nomination award HPA2011- the Humanity photo awards 2011 Finalist CGAP 2011- Microfinance Photograpy contest Short-Listed, premio internacional de fotografia humanitaria Luis ValtueÑa 2011 Short-Listed 3rd Lumix Festival for Young Photojournalism, Hannover 2012 Silver Medal, category press-war, Prix de la Photographie 2013 Premio giornalistico Marco Luchetta- Miran Hrovatin 2013, 1st Prize Getty Images Grants for Editorial Photography Recipient 2013 Short Listed Premio giornalistico Internazionale Marco Luchetta - Miran Hrovatin 2014 Lucie Fondation, Photo Taken Scholarship Recipient 2015 Winner in PDN Photo Annual photo contest 2016 Final 100 to The Other Hundred Educators, The Other Hundred 2016 Photographer of the year All About Photo Awards, 2017 Short Listed - Premio giornalistico Internazionale Marco Luchetta 2017 Wiki Loves Africa, 2nd Prize All About Photo Awards 2019, 4th Prize Wiki Loves Africa, 1st Prize World Press Photo 2019 Photo Contest, Environment, Stories, 1st Prize EXHIBITIONS & SCREENINGS: Palazzo Pigorini, Collettiva sulla città con i fotografi NEOS, Parma, Italy, 2009 Galleria d'arte Camera Sedici, Storie in tre scatti, Milano, Italy, 2010 FoFu Phot'arte, Festival internazionale fotografico, Fucecchio (FI), Italy, 2011 Medicos del Mundo, premio Luis ValtueÑa, Madrid, Spain, 2011 The Humanity photo awards, Memories of Mankind VII, con il patrocinio dell' UNESCO, Beijing, Cina, 2011 3rd Lumix Festival for Young Photojournalism, Hannover, Germany, 2012 Angkor Photo Festival, Angkor, Cambodia, 2013 Les Rencontres d'Arles, Screening, Arles, France, 2013 Visa pour L'image, Screening, Perpignan, France, 2013 'Italy. Another View' Vadehra Art Gallery, India Art Fair, NSIC Exhibition Grounds, New Delhi, India, 2014 One Day in Africa - Spazio Oberdan, Milan, Italy, 2014 "One World" - Photofestival Horizonte, Zingst, Germany, 2014 Angkor Photo Festival, Screening, Angkor, Cambodia, 2015 World Humanitarian Summit, Istanbul, Turkey, 2016 Pune Biennale, Pune, India, 2017 Visa pour l'image, Screening in Campo Santo, Perpignan, France, 2017 Spazio Forma Meravigli, solo exhibition , Milan, Italy, 2019 Palazzo Pigorini, solo exhibition , Parma, Italy, 2019 World Press Photo, World Wide, 2019 RESILIENTI2020 - Installation Art Città di Parma, Parma, 2020
Christer Strömholm
Christer Strömholm is recognized as one of the major figures of 20th-century European photography. Strömholm captured his surroundings in black-and-white images that display his integrity, understated humor, and a highly personal aesthetic. With an unmistakable sensitivity to human suffering, based on his personal experience, he took photography in a new direction. Sean O’Hagan, writing in The Guardian, has described him ''as the father of Swedish photography both for his abiding influence and for his role as a teacher.'' Born in Stockholm, Strömholm discovered photography via graphic art in the late 1940s. During the 1950s and 60s he lived much of the time in Paris, where he developed his particular style of street photography. It was here that he produced his most famous work, Les amies de Place Blanche, a tribute to a group of young transsexuals with whom he became friends and whose lives he shared over many months. They were very much outsiders, struggling to survive with their main source of income being from prostitution. In these legendary photographs, shot at night in available light, Strömholm merged street photography and portraiture, depicting them as the close friends they were, in intimate and honest portraits far from the spectacular or speculative. Les amies de Place Blanche raises profound issues about sexuality and gender; and, in Strömholm’s own words, ''it is about obtaining the freedom to choose one’s own life and identity.'' Strömholm also went on numerous photographic expeditions to places around the globe in the early 1960s, including Spain, Japan, India, and the USA. Early in his career, he began teaching in Stockholm, eventually setting up the legendary Fotoskolan, from which some 1,200 students graduated between 1962 and 1974. Strömholm’s work has inspired many generations of photographers, though he did not become known to the broader public until 1986, with a major exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Stömholm died in 2002. Article Christer Strömholm
Claudio Rasano
Switzerland
1970
Claudio Rasano lives and works in Basel, Switzerland. His work explores the relationship between spaces and humans, the subject within the space and the space as the subject itself. Rasano has a genuine and identifiable style that crosses documentary and fine art practices. He works with people from similar backgrounds, circumstances and experiences - environmental portraits and landscapes depicting a quiet anthropological commentary. There is a strong relationship between the environmental portraits and the landscape images. He is the recipient of Photovogue Portraits 2017, Taylor Wessing Photographic Prize 2016, Lensculture portrait award Finalists, Syngenta Photography Award Unseen and Life 2017 Framer World Travellers. 2019 Meitar Award for Excellence in Photography at PHOTO IS:RAEL Statement My work may cross countries and continents, but there is one thing that features centrally throughout, people. People are the focal point of his work, whether it's schoolchildren in South Africa or cigarette sellers in Tirana, the story of the country that Claudio is working in is told through its people. "I love to explore the relationship between spaces and humans, the subject within the space and the space as the subject itself, I work with people from similar backgrounds, circumstances and experiences -environmental portraits and landscapes depicting a quiet anthropological commentary. It is important for me to see that there is a strong relationship between environmental portraits and landscape images." His work is focused around the human stories of an area, but in many cases it is not just the person that is of interest. The composition of many of his images, even when portraits, provides a snapshot of the landscapes and built environments that are around the subject. This contextualises many of his photographs, helping you to build a more rounded impression of the individuals based on their surroundings too - the perfect example of this being his image of South African workmen in sodden clothes.
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AAP Magazine #39 Shadows
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