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Enter AAP Magazine 54 Nature: Landscape, Wildlife, Flora & Fauna
Enter AAP Magazine 54 Nature: Landscape, Wildlife, Flora & Fauna
Karine Coll
Karine Coll
Karine Coll

Karine Coll

Country: France
Birth: 1973

Madly in love with the arts in the broad sense, greedy for words, stories, eager for esthetic experiences, passionate about theater, writing, full-time professor of letters, photographer-poet in my spare time, human being forever, Woman above all. For me, photography is the medium that allows me to get down to the essence of things, a three-step frenzied waltz in which scenography, esthetics and text all come together to create a powerful message.

Driven by a desire to delve deep into the possible, i see the photo as responding to a need to go straight to the soul, with all its diversity of approaches, a way of looking at the body as a sculptured tool, a fragment of a human being, as a dreamlike narration, pictorial reality, the shots linked but not all alike, a perpetual exploration of the possible, malleable according to my desires, giving rise to sensation, to hypersensitivity.

Fragments
The hands, the hands as witnesses of a too long forgotten body, metonymic fragments of a neglected soul, given as food to the monster lurking in the shadows.

The hands which twist in silence, those which counter blows, which protect themselves, those which heal wounds in the half-light without ever daring, cruel pantomime smothered in the hollow of a fist.

A black and white, dark, realistic series featuring hands, in close-up, the body is erased, the hands alone carry the message.

The image is soiled, a grain comes to invade the cliché, to soil it, drowning all humanity, all femininity.

Silence, taboo, shut up!

Suddenly, the hands are there, referees of the last chance, standing up timidly in a final attempt, the last ramparts against hatred ... do not lower your guard, stand up, the hands finally come together, ally because together they make sense.

A glimmer of hope that seeps through clenched fingers, gradually the woman regains body, the fist crushes in an act of assumed resistance, an unexpected force at hand, carried by a desire to wake up the sorority of all .

Peaux d'ombre
Because the body is only a conception of the mind, a fantasy projection of our eye, erotic or plastic mass, the body dissolves in the image, becomes a play of curves, a chimera.

It is in the shadow of time that the male body reveals its power, sublimating our shadow areas.
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Richard Misrach
United States
1949
Richard Misrach (born 1949) is an American photographer "firmly identified with the introduction of color to 'fine' [art] photography in the 1970s, and with the use of large-format traditional cameras" (Nancy Princenthal, Art in America). David Littlejohn of the Wall Street Journal calls Misrach "the most interesting and original American photographer of his generation," describing his work as running "parallel to that of Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky, two German contemporaries." Littlejohn notes that all three used a large scale color format that defied the expectations of fine art photography at the time. Misrach is widely recognized as "one of this century’s most internationally acclaimed photographers." He is perhaps best known for his depictions of the deserts of the American west, and for his series documenting the changes brought to bear on the environment by various man-made factors such as urban sprawl, tourism, industrialization, floods, fires, petrochemical manufacturing, and the testing of explosives and nuclear weapons by the military. Curator Anne Wilkes Tucker writes that Misrach's practice has been "driven [by] issues of aesthetics, politics, ecology, and sociology." In a 2011 interview, Misrach noted: "My career, in a way, has been about navigating these two extremes - the political and the aesthetic." Describing his philosophy, Tracey Taylor of the New York Times writes that "[Misrach's] images are for the historical record, not reportage." Misrach has been married since 1989 to writer Myriam Weisang and has a son, Jake, from his first marriage to Debra Bloomfield. Misrach's book Desert Cantos received the 1988 Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and his Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West, co-authored with Myriam Weisang Misrach, was awarded the 1991 PEN Center West Award for a nonfiction book. His Katrina monograph Destroy This Memory won Best Photobook of the Year 2011 at PhotoEspaña. He has received numerous awards including four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an International Center of Photography Infinity Award for a Publication, and the Distinguished Career in Photography Award from the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies. In 2002 he was given the Kulturpreis for Lifetime Achievement in Photography by the German Society for Photography, and in 2008 he received the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Fine Art Photography. In 2010, Apple licensed Misrach's 2004 image Pyramid Lake (at Night) as the inaugural wallpaper for the first iPad. The opening credits of the 2014 HBO series True Detective featured a montage of images from Misrach's Petrochemical America. In 2016, the AIGA selected Border Cantos for its "50 Books | 50 Covers" competition, a "survey of the best in book design represent[ing] perhaps the longest-standing legacy in American graphic design." Source: Wikipedia Richard Misrach is one of the most influential photographers of his generation. In the 1970s, he helped pioneer the renaissance of color photography and large-scale presentation that are in widespread practice today. Best known for his ongoing series, Desert Cantos, a multi-faceted approach to the study of place and man’s complex relationship to it, he has worked in the landscape for over 40 years. A recent chapter of the series, Border Cantos, made in collaboration with the experimental composer Guillermo Galindo, explores the unseen realities of the US-Mexico borderlands. This work was exhibited at the Amon Carter Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and San Jose Museum of Art in 2016-17. In the most recent chapters, Premonitions and The Writing on the Wall, Misrach documents graffiti on abandoned buildings throughout the Southwest and Southern California, finding an angry and ominous response to the highly charged political climate before and after the 2016 election. Both series premiered at Fraenkel Gallery in 2017. Other notable bodies of work include his documentation of the industrial corridor along the Mississippi River known as Cancer Alley, the study of weather, time, color and light in his serial photographs of the Golden Gate Bridge, and On The Beach, an aerial perspective of human interaction and isolation. Recent projects mark departures from his work to date. In one series, he has experimented with new advances in digital capture and printing, foregrounding the negative as an end in itself and digitally creating images with astonishing detail and color spectrum. In another, he built a powerful narrative out of images of graffiti produced in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, made with a 4-megapixel pocket camera. In fall 2012, in collaboration with landscape architect Kate Orff, Misrach launched a major book and exhibition entitled Petrochemical America, which addresses the health and environmental issues associated with our dependency on oil. Source: Fraenkel Gallery
Norm Diamond
United States
1948
Norm Diamond spent thirty years as an interventional radiologist in Dallas, Texas. Treating severely ill and injured patients on a daily basis had a profound effect on him, which he came to fully understand when he retired and began his second career as a fine art photographer. Mentored by Cig Harvey since 2013, he began making work focused on themes of memory, loss, and isolation. In his first major project, What Is Left Behind - Stories from Estate Sales, he visited several hundred estate sales searching for and photographing objects left by one generation for the next. Daylight Books published this work as a monograph in 2017. In his next series, Doug's Gym, he chronicled the last six months of a dilapidated, yet beautiful old gym in downtown Dallas. It was owned by 87-year-old Doug Eidd, who had run the gym since 1962. Both he and the gym came from a bygone era never to be seen again. Kehrer Verlag published Doug's Gym in 2020. Diamond has now returned to an old project, Dark Planet. It reflects his worldview drawn from his experiences as a physician, his family background, and current events. The images reflect the same themes he has photographed for his two previous projects, but they are not tethered to specific locations or settings. Diamond was named a finalist in the Photolucida Critical Mass competitions of 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, and 2020. The Afterimage Gallery in Dallas and the Cumberland Gallery in Nashville have hosted solo shows of his work. His prints are in the hands of private collectors and have also been shown in multiple galleries and museums including Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Griffin Museum of Photography, Masur Museum of Art, Houston Center for Photography, Center for Fine Art Photography, and Center for Photographic Art. Doug's Gym: The Last of Its Kind By Norm Diamond Doug's Gym: The Last of Its Kind Norm Diamond What Is Left Behind: Stories From Estate Sales
August Sander
Germany
1876 | † 1964
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
Yuyang Liu
China
1991
Yuyang Liu, b.1991, graduated from Department of History, East China Normal University. He is a freelancer photographer based in Guangzhou, China. When he was a high school student, he started to love taking photos and decided to be a photographer. His images focus on the change and connection of people in the changing society. He had won Magnum Foundation Human Rights & Photography Fellowship, Abigail Cohen Fellowship in Documentary Photography and Ian Parry Scholarship. His work was published on TIME, New York Times, the Guardian, NPR and BBC World Service. Awards Ian Parry Scholarship, 2015 Abigail Cohen Fellowship in Documentary Photography (Magnum Foundation/ChinaFile, 2015 National Geographic Photo Contest China, Honorable Mention, 2014 Magnum Foundation: The Human Rights & Photography Fellowship, 2014 ND Scholarship, 3rd Prize, 2014 2013 Shanghai Youth Art Exhibition, Shortlisted, 2013 5th Foundation of OFPiX Photo Agency, Shortlisted, 2012 Exhibitions & Events Magnum Foundation Human Rights & Photography Fellowship Program Forum: Inter Art Center and Gallery, Beijing, China, 2014 Home of Youth: High School No.7 Chengdu (multimedia):PhotoChina Original International Photographic Exhibition, Confucius’ Hall, Guiyang, China, 2014 Neither Here Nor There (multimedia): LOOKbetween 2014, Virginia, USA, 2014 Auspicious Things: Lishui International Photography Festival Hand-made Books Workshop, Pump Factory, Lishui, China, 2013 Auspicious Things: 2013 Shanghai Youth Art Exhibition, China Art Museum, Shanghai, China, 2013 About the project: At home with mental illness: In 2014 there were reportedly 16 million people in China living with severe mental illness. 80% of patients diagnosed did not receive sufficient or necessary treatment due to China’s flawed health care system. Most people who suffer from these illnesses are forced to live at home with their families or on their own. They are overlooked or often not recognized at all within society, they are invisible. So I decide to film these patients and families who have mental illness such as psychosis or dysgnosia. I’ve been to several towns and villages in Guangdong Province which is the richest region in southern China and filmed some mental illness at home. This project aims to explore the unique relationship between the mentally ill, their families, and society at large.
Sara Markese
United States
1975
Sara Markese is a child psychologist by day and a photographer in every spare moment in between. A long hiatus from creative work began anew as she returned to photography, and macro photography especially. With a background in psychoanalytic clinical psychology training at the CUNY Graduate Center, NYC, research in microanalysis of mother-infant communication at Columbia University NYSPI, and study of mother-infant howler monkeys in Nicaragua, as well as a decade as a play therapist in NYC and fifteen more years in play therapy since, she has always been a keen observer of behavior, nuance, affect and detail. She approaches photography as she did cherished treasure walks as a child, letting her eye be caught and emotion and visual wonder guide the image. She uses simple elements of nature, daily life and common objects, and childhood themes of wonder, hiding, seeking and peeking to create feeling mementos in each photograph. With a focus on bringing elements of color, light and simple detail to center stage, her photographs encourage the viewer to see things as they would look if you just got on your knees and peered carefully. Champion of the tiny, wanderer with purpose, she is drawn to the things out of place, the slivers of light and gleams of color. In her work, she seeks to show the world in its infinitesimal detail and beauty, to convey the majesty of the miniscule and the extraordinary nature of the ordinary things that go unnoticed in our bustling world. She is often a quiet observer, always with camera in hand, moving through the many busy places she has lived. Raised in suburban Chicago, she has lived in NYC, Boston, and now lives in suburban Washington DC. Amidst the busy pace of life as a therapist, photographer and mother to a dynamic 9-year-old daughter, she strives to be in complete stillness and silence when she is with her camera, known to spend hours on a square foot of grass in the “wild” of her backyard or a local park or trail where most of her work is focused. She teaches creative photography for children with an emphasis on the development of their unique artistic perspective alongside basic photography skills, composition and exploration of different photographic styles. She has had her work exhibited at Praxis Gallery, PhotoPlace Gallery, SE Center for Photography, Black Box Gallery, and LoosenArt Gallery in Rome as well as featured in ArtDoc Magazine online and several issues of F-Stop Magazine. Wayward Summer - Project Statement: Summer can be like a Sunday. Too long, lonely and quiet in all the wrong places. A respite awaited and longed for, only to arrive with an aura of loss before it starts. Summers growing up in suburban Chicago felt that way, oppressively humid, stretching, and filled with unease as I wandered the micro world of my backyard dreading the end of the season. At night, to the contrary, everything seemed to come to life on my block. Then I was missing out, peering out my window while the sounds of neighborhood games rang from the street. I was inside looking out, like I was in another world. Since then, I’ve been in many other worlds, only to find myself back as I approach my fiftieth year as a wife and mother in the suburbs of Washington DC. Back in a suburban summer and back in that old feeling. Lost. It started as I followed my daughter, my lovely, brilliant, precociously independent daughter, Elodie, who I have been following for nine years, since she was able to walk and always way ahead of me. It was different this summer, though. Admittedly, something in me was unsettled already. I had always followed her and then joined, but now she spent her time in the deep end, doing things that just didn’t involve me and suddenly I was not following or joining. I was sitting alone. And there was that familiar disconnected feeling –sitting with time, with loneliness, with space, with thoughts – she will grow up, I will miss her – sitting with sadness, with self. Summer is long, and so there is July, like I just described, and there is August. I have tried to remedy my August malaise with an end of summer trip. My daughter and I always leave my husband at home to go on a road trip. I look forward to our trip as a gift from rushing through our days, time to spend freely exploring, roaming, adventuring, being as we wish, together. We have done this since she was very small, and she has always been beyond her years in her ability to roll with the long stretches and unknowns a road trip can bring even with the best planning. We usually know where we are going, but not this year, I didn’t know where to go and didn’t have it in me to plan. No direction, and now she is older, even farther ahead, leaving me to watch from further away. I found myself left with time - to sit and be still, to look at what was near, to gaze at my own hands, the poolside, the light reflecting off the table, the sand on my feet - and then she would return to show me what she created, often bringing me a gift to see or photograph. The gift of a memory shared. We were very often together too, in laughter, joy, closeness, and when she was still and we were together, that was a gift too, and those photos are rare but treasured. “Wayward Summer” is about loss and its depths, but also about turning “lost” into finding a way forward. As much as the feeling of too much space has always been disquieting, I also love to be lost. Wandering is and has always been my strength and my joy. From my childhood lost in the world of grass, bugs and dirt in the backyard, to driving blindly through the Chesapeake on an August trip with my 9-year-old daughter this summer, loss and “lost” are entwined in all my most deeply meaningful experiences. “Wayward Summer” is a project about all the moments that make a summer, the bright, the quiet and calm, the lonely and lost ones, and the turning of feeling lost into wandering. I found that unleashing purpose from the equation and accepting disconnection led me back to one of my greatest joys – untethered wandering. It allowed me to find beauty in the tiny details that stillness allows and a way to see moments that won’t last or stay still because they cannot and should not. The pictures in this series are all memory mementos – each contains elements of the mood evoked, sensory recollections and traces of the thoughts and feelings I was having as I watched my daughter play, learn, leave. Summers have a life of their own and can feel like a lifetime. In that, they can generate enormous unease, but also have room for so much growth. Children come back and they have changed, grown taller, sound different, want different, need less. Summers allow us a burst of freedom, a chance for joy, connection and change before we return to our lives overcome by time demands, structure, separation and parallel movement. They are a treasure veined with the knowing that they will end, but the memories glimpsed as they unfold when we are forced to let go are mementos of the magic that filled them. Awarded Photographer of the Week - Week 42
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Call for Entries
AAP Magazine #54 Nature
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