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Stephan Vanfleteren
Stephan Vanfleteren
Stephan Vanfleteren

Stephan Vanfleteren

Country: Belgium
Birth: 1969

Stephan Vanfleteren studied photography at Lucas Institute in Brussels (1988-1992). From 1993 to 2009, he worked as a free-lance photographer for the Belgian Journal De Morgen and always worked and invested in his own personal projects. Actually, Stephan works for museums, he's publishing his portraits in foreign journals and several foreign magazines. He's cofounder of Hannibal Publishing and Cannibal Publishing. Stephan Vanfleteren is art-director for the two publishing houses.

PRICES
1996 - World Press Photo Award - Sports, third prize stories - Boxing in Cuba
1997 - World Press Photo Award - Daily Life, first prize stories - Aids, Kenia
1998 - European Fuji Awards
2000 - World Press Photo Award - Arts and Entertainment, third prize stories, Elvis & Presley
2001 - World Press Photo Award - Children's Award, prize singles - Afghanistan
2001 - European Fuji Award
2007 - Nikon Press Photo Award
2009 - Louis Paul Boon award - Belgium
2010 - Lead Awards: 'Portätfotografie des Jahres', Germany
2011 - Henri Nannen Price, Germany - Tomi Ungerer
2012 - Vijfjaarlijkse Cultuurprijs voor de Provincie West-Vlaanderen
2012 - National Portrait price of the Netherlands - Rem Koolhaas, Dutch architect
2013 - World Press Photo Award - Staged Portraits, first prize stories, People of Mercy
2019 - Henri Nannen Price, Germany - Angels of the Sea - Mare Publication.

BOOKS
1999 - Elvis&Presley, with photographer Robert Huber (Switserland)
2000 - Buren, with Mark Power & Eva Leitolf
2003 - Tales from a Globalizing World
2005 - Flandrien - Cannibal Publishing
2007 - Belgicum - Hannibal Publishing
2009 - Portret 1989-2009 - Lannoo
2012 - En avant, marche! - Hannibal Publishing
2013 - Façades & Vitrines (Limited edition 666 exp) - Hannibal Publishing
2014 - MMXIV - De Red Devils - Cannibal Publishing
2014 - Atlantic Wall - Hannibal Publishing
2015 - Charleroi, il est clair que le gris est noir - Hannibal Publishing
2018 - SURF TRIBE - Hannibal Publishing
2019 - PRESENT - Hannibal Publishing
2019 - ONUITGESPROKEN - Hannibal Publishing

About PRESENT

Stephan Vanfleteren is mainly known to the general public for his penetrating black & white portrait photography, but over the past decades his work has ranged to documentary, artistic and personal pictures. From street photography in world cities like New York to the genocide of Ruanda, from storefront façades to the mystical landscapes of the Atlantic wall, from still lifes to intense portraits. The iconic images sit side by side with unknown treasures in this heavy tome containing no less than 505 photographs.
In the very personal accompanying text, Vanfleteren reflects on how his own work and the photography genre as a whole have evolved in recent decades. You get a close-up look at his intriguing career from the very beginning, when he travelled the world with an appetite for action. He also photographed his home country: all of the headline news stories of the 1990s appeared before his lens. Around the Millennium, Vanfleteren started to focus on that which is disappearing. With painstaking attention to nuance he created a visual archive of his homeland and of his fellow Belgians, in his own inimitable style. In the last few years Vanfleteren has brought the world inside, to his daylight studio, resulting in many encounters and portraits. This book includes two new series – not previously published – which were born in the intimacy of his studio: an exploration of the still life and a study of nude photography, both in colour.
Present is an impressive overview of Vanfleteren's oeuvre that provides a complete picture of him as a photographer, an artist, and above all a human being who faces life with empathy, wonder, and curiosity.

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Mark Mann
United States
1970
Mark Mann is a celebrity and advertising photographer. He was born in Glasgow, where he lived until he went to study in the prestigious photographic program at Manchester Polytechnic. Before long, the recent graduate was assisting innovative fashion photographers Nick Knight and Miles Aldridge, learning the ropes and building his own body of work. Three years later, Mark started shooting on his own, relocating to New York City. Mark’s editorial work has appeared in Esquire, Men’s Health, Vibe, Spin, Fortune, Billboard, Parade and Complex, among others. He has shot countless celebrities, including Robert Redford, Michael Douglas, Iggy Pop, Jack Black, the Black Eyed Peas, Jerry Seinfeld, Dave Chappelle, Rihanna, Queen Latifah, Simon Baker, Stevie Wonder, Bradley Cooper, Willie Nelson, Sean Connery, John Hamm and Jennifer Hudson. Mark has amassed a sizable advertising portfolio, as well. His clients run the gamut: Reebok, Adidas, Hennessy, Bombay Sapphire, Pepsi, Gillette, Vitamin Water, NHL, Zumba, Ford, Chrysler and Svedka to name a few. Mark has just completed a yearlong project for Esquire Magazine, The Life of Man. He shot 80 American men ages 1 through 80, to celebrate 80 years of Esquire Magazine. This project took Mark to the White House where he was honored to shoot the sitting president, as well as former President Clinton. He also shot numerous other notable people and celebrities all across the country.Source: www.markmannphoto.com Because so many of Mark Mann’s striking celebrity portraits are taken from just a few feet away, he’s often asked, “Why so close?” “I’m not exactly sure where that idea of getting so close to my subjects came from. The simple answer is that I don’t like to have to shout to talk to people so—over the years—I’ve moved closer and closer. If you’re more than a few feet from someone, the nuances of what you are saying can be lost. And I always try to have a conversation to help make a connection with everyone I am photographing.” He may start out four or five feet away from a subject but “bobs and weaves” or “creeps” (as he terms it) closer to three feet or so while chatting and shooting. “That means the camera can be just 24 inches from a person’s face, or smelling distance,” says Mann. He never uses a tripod because he’s always moving, changing his distance and angles. He also shoots close up because he enjoys shooting wide open, explaining that helps give a "dimension” to his images. “They have a shallow depth of field, but I like that they almost feel three-dimensional,” he says. “There’s another reason I like shooting close,” says Mann. “I just love faces. I love looking at them. I can inspect every detail, every angle of a face when I’m just a few feet from someone as I look through my lens. I could never get that close without the camera in front of me.”Source: PPA
(Arthur Fellig) Weegee
Austria/United States
1899 | † 1968
Weegee was the pseudonym of Arthur Fellig (June 12, 1899 – December 26, 1968), a photographer and photojournalist, known for his stark black and white street photography. Weegee worked in the Lower East Side of New York City as a press photographer during the 1930s and '40s, and he developed his signature style by following the city's emergency services and documenting their activity. Much of his work depicted unflinchingly realistic scenes of urban life, crime, injury and death. Weegee published photographic books and also worked in cinema, initially making his own short films and later collaborating with film directors such as Jack Donohue and Stanley Kubrick. Weegee was born Ascher (Usher) Fellig in Z?oczów (now Zolochiv, Ukraine), near Lemberg, Austrian Galicia. His name was changed to Arthur when he emigrated with his family to live in New York in 1909. There he took numerous odd jobs, including working as an itinerant photographer and as an assistant to a commercial photographer. In 1924 he was hired as a dark-room technician by Acme Newspictures (later United Press International Photos). He left, however, in 1935 to become a freelance photographer. He worked at night and competed with the police to be first at the scene of a crime, selling his photographs to tabloids and photographic agencies. His photographs, centered around Manhattan police headquarters, were soon published by the Herald Tribune, World-Telegram, Daily News, New York Post, New York Journal American, Sun, and others.In 1957, after developing diabetes, he moved in with Wilma Wilcox, a Quaker social worker whom he had known since the 1940s, and who cared for him and then cared for his work. He traveled extensively in Europe until 1968, working for the Daily Mirror and on a variety of photography, film, lecture, and book projects. In 1968, Weegee died in New York on December 26, at the age of 69.Weegee can be seen as the American counterpart to Brassaï, who photographed Paris street scenes at night. Weegee’s themes of nudists, circus performers, freaks and street people were later taken up and developed by Diane Arbus in the early 1960s. In 1980 Weegee’s widow, Wilma Wilcox, Sidney Kaplan, Aaron Rose and Larry Silver formed The Weegee Portfolio Incorporated to create an exclusive collection of photographic prints made from Weegee’s original negatives. As a bequest, Wilma Wilcox donated the entire Weegee archive - 16,000 photographs and 7,000 negatives - to the International Center of Photography in New York. This 1993 gift became the source for several exhibitions and books include "Weegee's World" edited Miles Barth (1997) and "Unknown Weegee" edited by Cynthia Young (2006). The first and largest exhibition was the 329-image “Weegee’s World: Life, Death and the Human Drama,” brought forth in 1997. It was followed in 2002 by “Weegee’s Trick Photography,” a show of distorted or otherwise caricatured images, and four years later by “Unknown Weegee,” a survey that emphasized his more benign, post-tabloid photographs. In 2012 ICP opened another Weegee exhibition titled, "Murder is my Business". Also in 2012, exhibition called "Weegee: The Naked City", opened at Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow.Source: Wikipedia
Bernard Plossu
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Don Hong-Oai
China
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Don Hong-Oai was born in Canton, China in 1929 as the youngest son to a business family, and was raised and educated in Saigon, Vietnam. At age thirteen, he began an apprenticeship at a Chinese photo and portrait shop. In 1979, he immigrated to the United States and settled in San Francisco's Chinatown. Don began making a living by selling his landscape photographs in front of Macy’s and began to receive recognition for his craftsmanship. His style was heavily influenced by the legendary photographer Long Chin-San’s technique of layering negatives. By taking three negatives, foreground, middle ground, and background, and selecting a subject from each negative, thus forming one composite image of a serene landscape. All the various scenes in an image existed in reality, but each uniquely handcrafted photograph is a concoction of the artist's imagination. Each photograph was assembled only by the artist himself, never having an assistant or master printer aid him. His work has won scores of international awards and has been collected worldwide. Source: www.peterfetterman.com Don Hong-Oai (1929-2004) was born in Canton, China, and spent most of his life in Vietnam. At the age of 13, he began an apprenticeship at a photo and portrait shop. When he was not at the studio, he traveled and took photographs of the landscape. He stayed in Vietnam through the war, but fled by boat to California in 1979. He lived in San Francisco’s Chinatown where he had a small darkroom to create his photographs. While living in the US, he returned to China every few years to make new negatives. Hong-Oai’s style was heavily influenced by the legendary photographer Long Chin-San’s technique of layering negatives. By taking three negatives, foreground, middle ground, and far ground, and selecting a subject from each negative, Don would construct a serene landscape. Each of his uniquely handcrafted photographs in its entirety is a concoction of the artist's imagination. He assembled and printed the photographs by himself, never having an assistant or master printer aid him. Don’s work has won scores of international awards and has been collected worldwide. Source: www.gallery71.com
Thomas Annan
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Thomas Annan was a Scottish photographer, notable for being the first to record the bad housing conditions of the poor. Born in Dairsie, Fife he was one of seven children of John Annan, a flax spinner. After his initial apprenticeship as a lithographic writer and engraver at the Fife Herald in Cupar, he moved to Glasgow in 1849 and worked as a lithographer and engraver for Joseph Swan until 1855. He set up business with George Berwick at 40 Woodlands Road, Glasgow, listing in the 1855 - 56 Glasgow post office directory as calotypists, practitioners of this early form of photography. In 1855, he photographed the ship RMS Persia, under construction on the Clyde, which was probably a commission by engineer, Robert Napier. This photograph was part of a group of images sent to the Photographic Exhibition in connection with the British Association. After dissolving his previous partnership, he established himself in a photographic studio at 116 Sauchiehall Street during 1857. In 1859, the business moved to 200 Hope Street and he was also able to establish a printing works in Hamilton in 1863. First interested largely in architectural photography and then portraits, as well as photographing artworks and maps, in 1866 Annan photographed slum areas of the city. These images were used by Glasgow City Improvement Trust to document the overcrowded, unhygienic conditions ahead of extensive redevelopments. It was this series of photographs, created between 1868 and 1871, entitled Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow, that ensured his posterity. In 1869, Annan purchased the contents of Rock House, which belonged David Octavius Hill, which included many of Hill's photographs and negatives. These were eventually exhibited by Thomas' son, James Craig Annan, and reproduced in photogravure in Alfred Stieglitz's journal Camera Work. Annan's photographs of the Loch Katrine Waterworks were praised in the British Journal of Photography: "The views by Mr. Annan could scarcely fail to be attractive, for in a country so beautiful a clever artist is bound to produce results in keeping with the nature of the subject, and this Mr. Annan has done." Indeed, Annan's work was often praised not only for its aesthetics, but also for its technical virtuosity. Twenty years later, Annan's studio would be singled out by Baden Pritchard for its accomplishments in carbon printing and "beautiful pictures of exteriors and interiors of Scotch strongholds." Thomas Annan purchased the rights to the photogravure process in Britain from Karel Klíč of Vienna in 1883 after visiting the city with his second son, James Craig Annan. James was a noted photogravurist and associated with late nineteenth-century art photography continued in his father's profession, receiving a Royal Warrant as Photographers and Photographic Engravers to Her Majesty in Glasgow. Thomas Annan died on 14 December 1887 at his home in Lenzie. Before his death by suicide, he had experienced a month-long period of "mental aberration". The family business survives to the present day in the form of the Annan Fine Art Gallery, located on Woodlands Road in the West End of Glasgow. A selection of prints from the Glasgow Improvements act 1868 series were displayed in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery from 2011 to 2012. In 2017, the J. Paul Getty Museum curated an exhibition entitled Thomas Annan: Photographer of Glasgow, the first to survey his career and legacy as photographer and printer.Source: Wikipedia
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