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Gautam Narang
United Kingdom
1984
I found photography by mistake, when doing my GCSE, I was sitting in the study room, then heard a teacher describe the subjects they taught at the school. As he was going through the subjects, he mentioned photography. I thought to myself was this a subject? Photography! It's so easy, all you do is click (How, wrong I was, how very wrong) *sigh*. As a child I used to play around with cameras. I always looked through them as was interested In them. So I sat in the lesson and was very enthusiastic to start a creative art. The journey had begun. One of the first subjects I started to picture was boats .....mmm yes boats. I lived near a canal and started to photograph boats. I don't know why I picked boats, it's quite sad when I look back, but that was one of my subjects. I took thousands of photographs, trying to make the subjects look Interesting. I remember one day I took all my photographs and filled up a whole table. The obsession had started but I hadn't known. Pictures now filled my room. From the start I always wanted to show my best. I would keep a box of my best photographs and then throw away all the one's I didn't like. I always feel the next picture is my favorite picture, wanting to create new work. As I progressed through my studies, I became distracted. There were so many subjects to do and I tried them all. One week I was doing art of history, then chemistry. I then dropped them all and just focused on photography. To this day, I follow photography. I have learned a lot but I am still confused on what to do next. I love what I do, but everybody tells me go into other things. Photography is more than clicking a button. From my first trip In India I have learned more about life then I would from anything. It teaches you to look, understand and observe rather then just walk away.All about Gautam Narang:AAP: When did you realize you wanted to be a photographer?Well after high school, I pretty much knew that is something that I’ve wanted to do, and it’s pretty much all that I’ve pictured myself doing. I’ve tried office jobs, but they usually don’t work, for example being an assistant was not a great experience. Order wold be forgotten and i’m not a office type or person, the stress kills me. So i’ve always gratiated to something creative.AAP: Where did you study photography?I studied at HND Photography at City and islington. Was the youngest student, out of the program my closet friend was Robert Harper who does amazing fashion photography. We used to chill and take pictures, it was really nice experience. Education to me, especially in the arts isn’t what i’ve expected it to be. The real learning happens when your out of school, and making friends with like minded pepole, finding who you are, I know it sounds like a really simple question, but you get asked “Who are you? What is your favorite movie? Favorite Artist and etc.” These days things are getting competitive and to really stand out is to have strong connections with people. AAP:Do you have a mentor?Yes, the teacher at my school. He was in 60’s and was my best friend, he taught me a lot on business, being an artist, encouraged me, let me use his studio and gave experience in the studio with while doing still life photography. He would also make all his own equipment, was really cool learning from him. My other mentor was Jasper James, he introduced me to style. He showed me that movies could be arty, before that I didn’t really watch any arty stuff. We also traveled around the UK on projects and that was a lot of fun. AAP: How long have you been a photographer?12 years.AAP: Do you remember your first shot? What was it?They were pictures of cannel boats, in England I used to live near a cannel.AAP: What or who inspires you?Well Edward Hooper is a great inspiration. His images feel like movie scenes, they have such a powerful mood to them. Artist have always inspired me. William Eggleston is someone would really inspires me.AAP: How could you describe your style?As simple and bold. I’m a huge fan of bold colors and like to keep things simple.AAP: What kind of gear do you use? Camera, lens, digital, film?I use the Canon 5D Mark II and my iPhone 4, it’s great, you can take it anywhere and pepole aren’t imitated by it, you look like a tourist. The iPhone has a look, in 20 years when we have images that are so sharp that you can’t tell if your looking at something real. Images from are primitive cameras and mobile devices will be called “Retro” they come with a time stamp, the actually medium is a time capsule. It’s not about the quality, it’s about the message, that will last longer.AAP: Do you spend a lot of time editing your images?I’m not a fan of editing, i’ve never liked it, only the darkroom.AAP: Favorite(s) photographer(s)?Steve McCurry, Willam Eggleston, Dorothea Lange. AAP: What advice would you give a young photographer?Go out and find your own vision, and all this likes and things mean nothing. It’s hard putting yourself out there, and pepole don’t usually respond. You start to want to appeal to others and worry if you posting to much. Do it for yourself, who cares about all this fame? Who knows if these websites will be around, this data? One day, you might be recognized.AAP: What mistake should a young photographer avoid?Don’t point fingers, point them at yourself first. Don’t blame others, really look at yourself first.AAP: An idea, a sentence, a project you would like to share?My work is constantly changing and I like that. To keep evolving you need to keep changing.AAP: Your best memory has a photographer?Working on location in India, working in a old Indian palace, documenting Indian folk singers. It’s an experience the kings once enjoyed.AAP: Your worst souvenir has a photographer?A broken camera lens.AAP: If you could have taken the photographs of someone else who would it be?Steve McCurry he has my dream jobAAP: Anything else you would like to share?I’m into film making now, really want to be a DOP or camera operator. Currently i’m based in Toronto.
Asako Naruto
Japan
1974
Asako Naruto is a Japanese photographer living in Madrid since 2005. After obtaining a BA of Science of Design in Tokyo, she studied Art History, specializing in El Greco until she completed doctoral studies. Although she has been taking photographs for some time, it was around 2020 that she began to rediscover and immerse herself in photography as a personal creative activity. Her photographic style is characterized by a sense of introspection while using a street snapshot approach. In 2022, she won the annual Grand Prix of Digital Camera Magazine (Impress, Japan). Since then, she has received numerous awards from various international photography competitions including VIEPA, PISPA, IPA, BIFA, TIFA and many more. Recently, she has been working on a series of fantastical urban fragments using prismatic filters, one of which, "Reverve+Graphy", won the Gold Medal at the Paris International Street Photography Awards (2023). Statement: Press the shutter button to take a picture. I like the simplicity of it. For me, the real pleasure of photography lies in this physicality of moving my hands and feet and feeling the connection between sight and brain. For me, photographic expression may be an attempt to translate my inner thoughts, which are difficult to verbalize, while capturing fragments of my daily life with a camera. I feel that I want to be a storyteller more than an observer. I try to reveal or represent the scenes I collect in the city by overlaying them with the stories that unfold in my mind. Nevertheless, I carefully avoid encouraging the viewer to have a fixed interpretation of my work by explaining in detail the message it may contain. I want my work to be open to gradations of interpretation and to stimulate the viewer's personal emotional recall.
Kathryn Nee
United States
Kathryn is an Fine Art/Freelance Photographer/Food Photog/Urban Explorer living in Atlanta. A Georgia native, she has been photographing life as art for over 15 years. Kathryn finds incredible beauty in old, decaying, and forgotten places and objects and loves all things vintage, weird, macabre, dark, whimsical, unusual, and strange. When she's not photographing abandoned and vacant structures, Kathryn steps into the land of the living and captures the beauty of people. Kathryn works as a freelance photographer for Sports Gwinnett Magazine and is the director of photography for the Urban Mediamakers Film Festival. All about Kathryn Nee: AAP: When did you realize you wanted to be a photographer? I knew I wanted to be a photographer when I was in elementary school. I'd rummage through National Geographic magazines in the library, mesmerized by the images. I knew that one day, after working several lousy jobs that I hated, I'd become a photographer. Where did you study photography? I am self taught. I learned through trial and error, years of studying, and practice. Do you remember your first shot? What was it? I remember my first roll of film with my first 'real' camera, a Nikon N60. I was a teenager who would sneak into Atlanta clubs and bars on weekends. I'd roam around photographing graffiti. I found the mess to be beautiful. What or who inspires you? Decaying, forgotten, and unloved places. I have a vivid imagination that runs wild all day, every day. I can call a friend and say, "I need you to suffer through a long, strenuous shoot in an abandoned building. It will be weird, but I have a vision" and they trust me enough to go through with it. It works out well. What kind of gear do you use? Camera, lens, digital, film? I use all Canon equipment. Do you spend a lot of time editing your images? I actually don't. I like my photos the way I like my food: organic. I try not to over do it with editing or manipulation. What advice would you give a young photographer? Break rules to get the shot you want. Don't waste money on art school. What mistake should a young photographer avoid? Please don't HDR all of your work. An idea, a sentence, a project you would like to share? I'm currently working on a new series that will be a visual expression of how work, domestic home life, parenting, and society can beat us down physically and mentally. It sounds depressing but it's actually the most fun I've ever had shooting. Your best memory as a photographer? Being published by National Geographic twice in one month. I couldn't believe it. If you could have taken the photographs of someone else who would it be? I'd give just about anything to photograph Régine Chassagne of Arcade Fire.
Justyna Neryng
Poland
1981
Born in Poland in 1981, Justyna Neryng spent much of her childhood playing with her father’s cameras and dark room while roaming the forests of Chelmsko on the Czech boarder. As an adult, a mother and an immigrant to Britain, her photography has flourished into a substantial body of portraiture. Perhaps the most evocative of her works are her exquisitely emotive self-portraits that seem to carry the dark spirit of the forest from her childhood as well as potently baring the scares of modern womanhood. They show vulnerability and intimate eroticism as well as a deep sense of isolation and alienation. It is these portraits that have been most published and exhibited in both in her polish homeland and in the UK. More recently Justyna has begun to collaborate with her daughter Nell, on a project called Childhood Lost. Justyna currently produces her works in her adopted home town of Brighton and Hove, where she lives with her daughter. Artist Statement: Childhood Lost is an autobiographical ,self portrait in a different body, ongoing project exploring the nature of portraiture and memory. As a single mother I have found myself exploring notions and representations of childhood. I see my daughter’s experiences of growing up in urban England conflicting with my own experiences of growing up in rural Poland.I must confess that my own childhood is not a source of many happy memories, perhaps the most resonant of which are the times I escaped to a world of fantasy played out in the forests surrounding my home village of Chelmsko. Watching my daughter grow up has in a sense held a mirror to my own memories of the past while experiencing her childhood dreams enacted through play, and story telling. I find myself in a strange place where I can experience my own memories as well as see my daughter’s childhood through my adult eyes. It is these notions I am seeking to explore with the Childhood Lost project. Interweaving childhood nostalgia with the stories and myths of my Polish childhood and those that I share with my essentially British daughter. The project is using these ideas to produce a series of portraits that evoke characters that populate this world we know as childhood. A court of characters from myth and dreams. The images are aesthetically inspired by portraiture from the Golden Age of Dutch painting. By drawing on paintings as inspiration I am hoping to give a timeless feel to the final images. Also key to the project is also the painstaking styling and prop building, which I am using to evoke these different persona played out by my daughter. I want to develop the series in to a substantial set of portraits of my daughter playing the characters of childhood, as well as producing more elaborate set pieces embracing a theatricality that would take the project to the next level. Subject to funding it would also be a dream of mine to be able to revisit the forests of my own childhood and produce work there. Justyna Neryng is a multi-award winning self-taught photographer born in Poland and now living and working in the United Kingdom. She spent much of her childhood playing with her father’s cameras and dark room while roaming the forests of her hometown. She specialises in portraits and nudes, her photography has flourished into a substantial body of portraiture. She is mainly known for her enchanting theatrical portraits of her daughter, a gallery of triumphal characters, captured on a neutral and undefined background, with their fantastic ‘uniforms’ and imperious look . These images are aesthetically inspired by portraiture from the Golden Age of Dutch painting. And her exquisitely emotive self-portraits that seem to carry the dark spirit of the forest from her childhood as well as potently baring the scars of modern womanhood. They show vulnerability and intimate eroticism as well as deep sense of isolation and alienation.Source: justynaneryng.com
Fern L. Nesson
United States
Fern L. Nesson is a graduate of Harvard Law School. She received an M.A. in American History from Brandeis and an M.F.A in Photography from the Maine Media College. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She practiced law in Boston for twenty years and subsequently taught American History and Mathematics. Nesson's photographs have been shown internationally in solo exhibitions at the Politecnico University in Torino, Italy, Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, France, Ph21 Gallery in Budapest, Hungary and at The University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. In the United States, Nesson has had solo exhibitions at the Griffin Museum of Photography, at MIT and Harvard, and at the Beacon Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts, the Pascal Gallery in Rockport, and Maine, and Through This Lens Gallery in Durham, NC. Additionally, her work has been selected for numerous juried exhibitions in the U.S., Barcelona, Rome and Budapest. Nesson's photobooks, Signet of Eternity and WORD, won the 10th and the 12th Annual Photobooks Award from the Davis-Orton Gallery. Her photography can be found at www.fernlnesson. Statement ''Art should not be copies of living things but... [itself] be [a] living thing – a real living form.'' Malevich (1916) My photographs capture the moment when mass becomes energy. My goal is to create living works of art that offer energy to the viewer. I shoot from reality; my images are never constructed, only sparingly edited. They distill a scene or an object it to its essence. Photographs that embody energy rely upon the camera to record a specific moment but, if they hit their mark, they escape and float free of it. The energy from the moment of capture enlivens these images. Like Cezanne's paintings, they are alive, they breathe. An energetic image expresses interconnectedness, visualizes movement and flow. It constitutes a moment of transcendence and teaches us that, although everything changes form, nothing is ever destroyed. It lives on, resonating with the past, celebrating the present, pointing to the future, embodying the universal, iconically representing the eternal. As Whitman’s wrote in Leaves of Grass, it can “chant the [viewer] into a new state of being, get him psychically airborne, boost him up to that height where he can identify with the past and commune with the future.”
Tomáš Neuwirth
Czech Republic
1972
Tomáš Neuwirth was born in Czech Republic in 1972. He is a freelance photographer specializing in drone photography. A major milestone in his life was the year 1995, when he began to devote himself to paragliding. As a pilot, he was fascinated by taking pictures of the bird's eye, then still on the 35mm film camera. The following year, he moved to the USA. His stay here after three and half years ended the paragliding incident and with serious injuries of the spine he returned to the Czech Republic. He then spent eight months in a sanatorium, learned not only to walk again, but also met his future wife Gabriela. Capturing of aerial footage continued to attract him. And with the advent of unmanned systems, new possibilities were opened. His first drone he folded in 2011, it was a kit. However, the desired shots were made by commercially produced drones in the following years. Today, Tomas is involved in drone and classical photography professionally. By selecting extraordinary places and post-production processing, he is trying to shift drone photography to the next level. From capturing landscapes to a Fine Art expression. He received many awards from international competitions. In 2019 he succeeded to win with in the prestigious contest MIFA - Moscow International Fotography Awards (Nature Photographer of the Year). In the same year, The Independent Photographer Magazine included his image among the TOP 10 Most incredible landscapes from across the planet. And ranked him in the selection Talents of the Year 2018/2019. He was also nominated for a Personality of Czech Photography. Statement I generally regard art as a form of self-expression. An opportunity to share own opinion, own perception of the world, with others. Photography has become my means of expression. Its strength is in capturing a given moment - a unique, unrepeatable moment. Everything is different in a second. I focus mainly on drone photography which, by its very nature, is predestined for landscape, long-distance views, great depth of field etc. From the perspective of the photographer, there are fewer possibilities for artistic expression. Therefore it depends very much on the choice of location and how to capture it. I, therefore, try to find unusual locations - often places that do not seem that interesting on the first impression. However, a bird's eye view gives them a whole new dimension.
Bob Newman
United States
1950
Bob began photographing on a regular basis after retiring as a physician. His images document the challenges and culture within marginalized communities, which are often similar to the underprivileged patients he enjoyed serving. After retirement, photography came to occupy much of this time. Initially his forays were associated with photo trips or workshops. When he first saw images of the Irish Travellers in 2015, he became intrigued. Photographing their culture and lives became his first long-term project. In the last five years, he has returned to visit the Travellers thirteen times, averaging 2-3 visits per year. To date he has visited 30 sites. Returning on multiple occasions has provided an opportunity to take a deep dive into their history and traditions. Statement The Irish Travellers is a long-term photographic project that began in 2016. Often referred to as Pavees, they number about 40,000 in Ireland and are ethnically separate from Romani/Gypsies. No longer nomadic, they now live in extended family roadside camps or halting sites. They are predominantly Irish Roman Catholic, endogamous, and traditional marriages are the norm. The women spend their time with their families, sometimes raising as many as 16 – 18 children. Girls are taught to act and dress provocatively as toddlers. It is exceedingly difficult for Traveller men to find jobs. The unemployment rate is 84%. Most live on a dole from the Irish Government. With time on their hands, horses and dogs play a major role in their lives. They face discrimination and racism because of their differences from the Settled Irish. Despite this, they are a remarkably resilient group who highly prize their culture, traditions and family life. This series focuses on Traveller children.
Vladimir Nosalskiy (Lenin)
Russia Federation
1973
I was born in USSR on June 10-th 1973. My pseudonyms in arts is Lenin. Back there our country was far from being open towards new ways of self-expression such as modern art, creative photography or so. For a long time everything people could percept from art and culture has been gray and monotonous. My childhood passed in criminal district. However, both of my parents are self-educated artists. I am sure that my ability to see beauty in ordinary, routine things originates from my family. Photography itself appeared in my life when I was 10.With my father's camera Zenith; I discovered all the nearby corners of my district, all the parks and squares. When I was teenager, the only way to make surrounding world more beautiful was to go studying as a tailor, which was the only creative profession in our town back there. During Perestroika Russia moved from cultural aspects of governmental policy into market economy, which made a life of an artist hard. I built into the system by creating decorations and shows for governmental and business events. However, I always missed the camera, it was my companion everywhere. I took pictures of the art plans, events, nature, city and travel. However, my comeback to real inspirational photoshoots happened several years ago. "Contemplate, create, enjoy" - has become my moto since I was young. I had several personal exhibitions art & photo: 1999, "26 steps", Moscow, Russia, 2000, "Cocoon-2000", Moscow, Russia. And several group exhibitions 1999, "Kazantip", "Kazantip-2" The exhibition of young artists "Lenin i Deti", Moscow, Russia, 2016, "Planet Moscow 2016" , Moscow, Russia. My inspiration in photography and arts are: Alexander Rodchenko, Auguste Rodin, Billy Monk, Claude Monet, Francisco Josè de Goya, Hieronymus Bosch, Ivan Bilibin, Jackson Pollock, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Leonardo da Vinci, René Magritte, Vladimir Tatlin, Wassily Kandinsky.
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