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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

Arthur Leipzig
United States
1918 | † 2014
Arthur Leipzig (October 25, 1918 – December 5, 2014) was an American photographer who specialized in street photography and was known for his photographs of New York City. Leipzig was born in Brooklyn. After sustaining a serious injury to his right hand while working at a glass wholesaler, Leipzig joined the Photo League where he studied photography, took part in Sid Grossman's Documentary Workshop, taught Advanced Technique classes for three years, and exhibited his work. From 1942 until 1946 he was a staff photographer for PM. He also studied under Paul Strand before quitting the League to pursue a career as a freelance photojournalist. In 1955 Leipzig's 1943 photograph King of the Hill, depicting two little boys challenging each other on a sand heap, was selected by Edward Steichen for the world-touring exhibition The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, that was seen by 9 million visitors. Leipzig was a professor of art and the director of photography at the CW Post Campus of Long Island University from 1968–1991. In an effort to build his department and enhance the quality of photographic techniques, Leipzig recruited two well-known photojournalists, Louis Stettner and Ken Johnson (formerly a photo editor with Black Star) to his staff. He also recruited the now, highly regarded female photographer, Christine Osinski. Leipzig contributed his work to many publications including Fortune, Look, Parade, and Natural History, while continuing to pursue his independent projects. In 2004, he won the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Fine Art Photography. Leipzig died in Sea Cliff, New York on December 5, 2014, aged 96.Source: Wikipedia Leipzig shot thousands of rolls of film over five decades, producing beautifully constructed yet socially powerful photographs that take a sincere look at street life. Among the most memorable are photo essays on children’s street games, city workers atop the Brooklyn Bridge, Coney Island, and V-Day. Leipzig candidly captured New York’s favorite personalities as Louis Prima, W.C. Handy and Mayor La Guardia. His assignment locales outside of New York City included Peru, Sudan, and the Sahara, as well as places closer to home like West Virginia, Kansas and Jones Beach. Acclaimed as a sensitive and impassioned documentary photographer, Arthur Leipzig has always directed his camera toward the human condition and his deep love of people, shooting in a straightforward fashion, never forcing the moment but rather allowing a human story to transform simply and spontaneously. As a result, his photographs depict the human community with great intimacy and dynamic energy.Source: Howard Greenberg Gallery Arthur Leipzig's photography is represented in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The National Portrait Gallery, The Jewish Museum, and The Bibliothèque nationale de France. His solo exhibitions include Arthur Leipzig: a World View at the Howard Greenberg Gallery, Growing Up in New York at the Museum of the City of New York, Jewish Life Around the World at the Nassau County Museum of Fine Art.Source: Jackson Fine Art
Tom Zimberoff
United States
1951
A classically-trained clarinetist, Zimberoff studied music at the University of Southern California before pivoting to photography. As a photojournalist, he has covered hundreds of historical and breaking news stories published worldwide, from the renegotiation of the Panama Canal Treaties; to NATO war games, a trip to Beijing with Secretary of State Alexander Haig opening trade talks with China; the eruption of Mount St. Helens; Super Bowl XIV; to documenting East LA gangs. One plum assignment from Esquire had him photographing "The Most Eligible Women in America." He's shot many hundreds of portraits, including magazine covers from John Lennon to Steve Jobs plus two sitting American presidents (Carter and Reagan) for the covers of Time Magazine and Fortune, as well as advertising campaigns for Fortune 500 companies, Hollywood movie studios, and the US Navy. Zimberoff was nineteen when he shot his first photo assignment for Time magazine: the farewell public recital of violin virtuoso Jascha Heifetz - a personal hero. By the time he turned twenty-one, Zimberoff had toured with the Jackson-5, the Rolling Stones, and Stevie Wonder, spent a day photographing John Lennon, and shot the first cover of People magazine. (It was the 1973 proof-of-concept issue featuring Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz.) Zimberoff has fun describing his pursuit as a predatory sport: hunting big game. "We don't 'load' cameras much anymore," he says, "but we still 'aim' them and 'shoot' pictures." He doesn't stalk his prey but gets close enough for a good clean shot (close enough for rapport as much as proximity), to avoid inflicting gratuitous wounds. He bags his quarry with a lens instead of looking down the barrel of a gun but, he also says, "I hang their heads on a wall to admire like trophies." His hunting license was a press pass. His portraits can be found in private collections and museums, including the National Portrait Gallery in London; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the San Francisco Museum of Performance and Design. Recently, his entire career archive - literally a ton of film - was acquired by the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. His first two formal portraits were Marx and Lennon - Groucho and John. Tom's expertise with the business side of photography is evidenced by the articles he's had published in leading industry journals. He is also the author of Photography: Focus on Profit (Allworth Press, 2002), which has been used as a textbook at colleges throughout the country. He also taught briefly at several San Francisco Bay Area colleges. He taught himself to write code and developed PhotoByte®, the pioneering business-management software for commercial photographers. It has been used to teach at colleges across the country. After a ten-year hiatus from shooting pictures to pursue his software business and writing, Tom picked up his cameras once again to illustrate another book, Art of the Chopper (Bulfinch Press, 2003), his tribute to a decades-long affinity for custom motorcycles. It became a best-seller, followed by a second volume (Hachette, 2006), with forewords by Sonny Barger of the Hells Angels and James Hetfield of the band Metallica, respectively. As an encore to the Art of the Chopper books, Zimberoff was invited to curate an exhibition at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library in 2008, where thirty of the actual motorcycles illustrated in print were displayed on pedestals as works of sculpture. They were juxtaposed with Zimberoff's photographs large-format black-and-white portraits plus documentary (candid) photos of the moteuriers who built each chopper. The "Art of the Chopper" exhibition traveled to the Appleton Art Museum in Ocala, Florida and to Union Station in Kansas City, Missouri. Tom's most recent venture is a startup dedicated to creating the first data-driven marketplace for commercial and editorial photography. Zimberoff was born in Los Angeles in 1951 to a family with three grown siblings already a generation older - "like growing up with five parents," he says. His mother owned a boutique in Las Vegas, during the 50s and 60s; and his father was a musician who played the Vegas hotel orchestras that backed up Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and Bobby Darrin et al. Young "Tommy" grew up in Las Vegas, returning to California, on and off, to live with his older sister and two years in military school), finally leaving Las Vegas for his senior year at Beverly Hills High School when his parents retired. Then he received his music scholarship to USC. Zimberoff now lives in San Francisco, where he says he is ready to throw his lens cap back in the ring, as soon as the Covid-19 pandemic ends. In the meantime he is writing a memoir, an anthology of stories about his career. The title is A Photographic Memory. Each chapter juxtaposes one portrait with equally compelling prose about the events surrounding its creation. Articles Haut Moteur Principles of Portraiture on Camera AAP Magazine Portrait #40 B&W #41 Portrait #48
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Germany
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August Sander was a German portrait and documentary photographer. Sander's first book Face of our Time (German: Antlitz der Zeit) was published in 1929. Sander has been described as "the most important German portrait photographer of the early twentieth century." Sander was born in Herdorf, the son of a carpenter working in the mining industry. While working at a local mine, Sander first learned about photography by assisting a photographer who was working for a mining company. With financial support from his uncle, he bought photographic equipment and set up his own darkroom. He spent his military service (1897-99) as a photographer's assistant and the next years wandering across Germany. In 1901, he started working for a photo studio in Linz, Austria, eventually becoming a partner (1902), and then its sole proprietor (1904). He left Linz at the end of 1909 and set up a new studio in Cologne. In 1911, Sander began with the first series of portraits for his work People of the 20th Century. In the early 1920s, he came in contact with the Group of Progressive Artists (Kölner Progressive) in Cologne, a group as Wieland Schmied put it, "sought to combine constructivism and objectivity, geometry and object, the general and the particular, avant-garde conviction and political engagement, and which perhaps approximated most to the forward looking of New Objectivity [...] ". In 1927, Sander and writer Ludwig Mathar travelled through Sardinia for three months, where he took around 500 photographs. However, a planned book detailing his travels was not completed. Pure photography allows us to create portraits which render their subjects with absolute truth, truth both physical and psychological. That is the principal which provided my starting point, once I had said to myself that if we can create portraits of subjects that are true, we thereby in effect create a mirror of the times in which those subjects live. -- August Sander Sander's Face of our Time was published in 1929. It contains a selection of 60 portraits from his series People of the 20th Century. Under the Nazi regime, his work and personal life were greatly constrained. His son Erich, who was a member of the left-wing Socialist Workers' Party (SAP), was arrested in 1934 and sentenced to 10 years in prison, where he died in 1944, shortly before the end of his sentence. Sander's book Face of our Time was seized in 1936 and the photographic plates were destroyed. Around 1942, during World War II, he left Cologne and moved to a rural area, allowing him to save most of his negatives. His studio was destroyed in a 1944 bombing raid. Sander died in Cologne in 1964. His work includes landscape, nature, architecture, and street photography, but he is best known for his portraits, as exemplified by his series People of the 20th Century. In this series, he aims to show a cross-section of society during the Weimar Republic. The series is divided into seven sections: The Farmer, The Skilled Tradesman, Woman, Classes and Professions, The Artists, The City, and The Last People (homeless persons, veterans, etc.). By 1945, Sander's archive included over 40,000 images. In 2002, the August Sander Archive and scholar Susanne Lange published a seven-volume collection comprising some 650 of Sander's photographs, August Sander: People of the 20th Century. In 2008, the Mercury crater Sander was named after him.Source: Wikipedia I never made a person look bad. They do that themselves. The portrait is your mirror. -- August Sander
Attila Ataner
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Beth Moon
United States
1956
San Francisco Bay Area artist, Beth Moon, has gained international recognition for her large-scale, richly toned platinum prints. Since 1999, Moon’s work has appeared in more than sixty solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Italy, England, France, Israel, Brazil, Dubai, Singapore, and Canada. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, and the Fox Talbot Museum in Wiltshire, England. In 2013, Between Earth and Sky, the first monograph of her work, was published by Charta Art Books of Milan. In 2014, Abbeville Press published, Ancient Trees: Portraits of Time, with a third book to follow that same year from Galerie Vevais, La Lange Verte. Moon studied fine art at the University of Wisconsin before moving to England where she experimented with alternative photographic processes and learned to make platinum prints. Source: www.vervegallery.com Beth Moon was born in Neenah, Wisconsin and studied fine art at the University of Wisconsin. Classes in painting, life drawing, sculpture, and design would set the groundwork for her work in photography, which was to come years later. Moving to England, a country with a love for all things arboreal, gave her a fresh look at a land that boasts the largest concentration of ancient trees. Inspired by these trees she decided to make a series of their portraits. Unhappy with the photographic tonality and stability of ink-jet printing, she started to experiment with alternative printing processes, learning platinum/palladium printing, an ideal process for her vision. She concentrated on mastering this printing technique, doing all of her own printing. “By using the longest lasting photographic process, I hope to speak about survival, not only of man and nature’s but to photography’s survival as well. For each print I mix ground platinum and palladium metals, making a tincture that is hand-coated onto heavy watercolor paper and exposed to light. There are many steps involved in creating the final print and these are as important to me as the capturing of the image," said Moon. A platinum print can last for centuries, drawing on the common theme of time and survival, pairing photographic subject and process. Source: www.josephsaxton.com
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