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Last Call to Win a Solo Exhibition this February. Juror: Harvey Stein
Last Call to Win a Solo Exhibition this February. Juror: Harvey Stein
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.
 

Inspiring Portfolios

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Neşe Arı
Turkey
1980
Neşe Arı is an independent artist based in Istanbul, who has transformed photography into a powerful means of personal expression. Immersed in the world of photography for over fifteen years, Arı focuses on capturing the simple yet profound moments of everyday life. Working primarily in documentary, travel, and street photography, she draws attention to human stories, emotions, and the often unseen details of life. Her photographs invite the viewer to witness small but meaningful fragments of time. Her artistic approach is built on sincerity, simplicity, and a strong narrative voice. Particularly passionate about social responsibility projects, she gained recognition through her long-term project "Yaşamda Kal" ("Stay Alive"), which sheds light on the life journeys of individuals overcoming physical disabilities. Through this project, she aims to highlight the strength and resilience of people who reclaim life through sports. Neşe Arı’s work has been exhibited in numerous shows across Turkey and internationally, and has been published in renowned outlets such as The Times, The Daily Telegraph, and The Guardian. In 2016, she was awarded the EFIAP distinction by the International Federation of Photographic Art (FIAP). Her photographs have also been featured in major international projects such as "Women's Cry", "Changes", and "Open Doors", and her work has been showcased in exhibitions in the Vatican and many other countries. For Neşe Arı, every journey and every new face represents a story waiting to be told. She continues to use her camera as a tool to create photographs that touch lives, provoke thought, and evoke deep emotions. Artistic Vision: As Neşe Arı, I aim to make the simple yet profound moments of life visible. I use photography as a language to touch human stories, reveal emotions, and uncover the hidden beauty of everyday life. With each frame, I strive to create an impact that invites the viewer to reflect, feel, and connect with the essence of existence. By emphasizing sincerity, simplicity, and the strength of the human spirit, I seek to preserve and celebrate the diverse faces and stories of life.
John Vachon
United States
1914 | † 1975
John Vachon was a world-traveling American photographer. Vachon is remembered most for his photography working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) as part of the New Deal and for contributions to Look magazine. One becomes keenly alive to the seeking of picture material. It becomes part of your existence to make a visual report on a particular place or environment. -- John Vachon John Felix Vachon was born on May 19, 1914 to a middle class Irish Catholic Family in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He was the son of Ann Marie (O'Hara) and Harry Parnell Vachon. His parents were not well off, his father made a get-by living as a traveling salesman in stationery supplies. He had one younger brother named Robert. Vachon had a Catholic education and graduated from Cretin High School local military Catholic high school (now Cretin-Derham Hall High School). He continued his education at the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul and received a bachelor's degree in 1934. Vachon moved to Washington, D.C. after receiving a fellowship to attend graduate school at Catholic University of America to study English literature and become a writer. As he began his studies, a few months later, he was forced to leave school due to his drinking. After his leave from graduate school, Vachon looked for work around Washington D.C., finding his first job in photography working for the Farm Security Administration's Historic Division as one of the photographers hired by Roy Stryker to document the plight of migrants during the Great Depression. In about 1938 Vachon married Millicent Leeper who was known as Penny. While Vachon was on the road working as a photographer for the FSA, he wrote daily letters to Penny, as well as to his mother. He wrote them to describe his experiences, ambitions, self-doubt, sense of humor, the obligation to the FSA, the people he met, the news he read about, and the movies he watched. In the letters, Vachon describes how he relied on Penny to support him and his work. They had three children. Penny committed suicide in 1960. Vachon married Marie Francoise Fourestier in 1961. They had two more children. Vachon served in the United States Army in 1945. Vachon's daughter, Christine Vachon, became an independent film producer in adulthood, and their son Micheal became an editor who worked with his father in later years. The FSA was a New Deal agency created in 1937 to combat rural poverty during the Great Depression in the United States. The FSA is famous for its small but highly influential photography program which ran from 1935 to 1944, and documented the challenges of rural poverty and farm life. John Vachon's first job at the FSA carried the title "assistant messenger." He was twenty-one, and had come to Washington D.C from his native Minnesota to attend The Catholic University of America. Vachon had no intention of becoming a photographer when he took the position in 1936, but as his responsibilities increased for maintaining the FSA photographic file, his interest in photography grew. The FSA sent more than forty photographers into the field and collected images of American life that would result in an archive of 165,000 FSA prints. Some FSA employees had well-established careers, while others become famous as photographers as a result of their work, including Esther Bubley, Marjory Collins, Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Delano, Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Gordon Parks, Charlotte Brooks, Carl Mydans, Dorothea Lange and Ben Shahn. By 1937 Vachon started to take photographs himself, and with advice from Ben Shahn, he tried out a Leica camera in and around Washington. His weekend photographs of "everything in the Potomac River valley" were clearly the work of a beginner, but Stryker lent him equipment and encouraged him to keep at it. Arthur Rothstein, who took him along on a photographic assignment to the mountains of Virginia. In October and November 1938, Vachon traveled to Nebraska on his first extensive solo trip. He photographed agricultural programs on behalf of the FSA's regional office and pursued an extra assignment from the photography project's chief, Roy Stryker: the city of Omaha. Vachon worked extensively in the midwestern and Great Plains states. As the Great Depression lessened and American involvement in the War in Europe increased, the government moved FSA photography project to the Office of War Information, and Vachon's job transferred to that agency as well, where he worked from 1942 to 1943. He later worked as a staff photographer for Standard Oil Company of New Jersey between 1943 and 1944. After serving in the army in 1944-45, in 1947 Vachon joined the Photo League, where he wrote book reviews for Photo Notes and participated in many exhibitions. Between 1945 and 1947 he photographed New Jersey and Venezuela for Standard, and Poland for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. Vachon became a staff photographer for Life magazine, where he worked between 1947 and 1949, and for over twenty-five years beginning in 1947 at Look magazine. In 1953 Vachon took the first pictures of Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio when Monroe cured a sprained ankle near Banff, Canada. With Look closed, he had continued to work as often as he could. He photographed two stories for Vermont Life, a magazine edited at the time by his son Brian and became a freelance photographer. In 1973, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1975, he was a visiting professor at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. In Vachon's later years, he was teaching a class in photography where he kept notebooks on the main points of the day. For December 9th, 1974 he reflects on it earlier assignment he had given his students to emulate the work of FSA photographers. Vachon continued as a freelancer until cancer brought him down. Vachon died of cancer in 1975 in New York at age 60.Source: Wikipedia
Fred Herzog
Canada
1930 | † 2019
Fred Herzog devoted his artistic life to walking the streets of Vancouver as well as almost 40 countries with his Leica, photographing - mostly with color slide film - his observations of the street life with all its complexities. Herzog ultimately became celebrated internationally for his pioneering street photography, his understanding of the medium combined with, as he put it, "how you see and how you think" created the right moment to take a picture. Fred was born Ulrich Herzog in Stuttgart, Germany in 1930 and spent his childhood in Rottweil, Germany. He lost both of his parents during the war, and in 1946 Herzog went to work as an apprentice in his grandparents' hardware store. Disillusioned by the ravages of war and the situation in Germany, he emigrated to Canada in 1952 and settled in Vancouver in 1953. During the next several years. Herzog studied photography magazines while working aboard ships for the CPR steamship line, and in 1957 he was hired as a medical photographer at St. Paul's Hospital. In 1961, he became the head of the Photo/Cine Division in the Department of Biomedical Communications at UBC, and in 1970 was appointed Associate Director of the Department. Herzog was also hired as an Instructional Specialist in the Fine Arts Department at Simon Fraser University in 1967, and in 1969 became an instructor in the Fine Arts Department at UBC. Herzog had a walking route through Vancouver that enabled him to build friendships with other photographers and neighborhood residents and gave him an acute understanding of the daily life and soul of Vancouver. Over the course of several decades, Herzog produced a substantial body of color photographs, taking urban life, second-hand shops, vacant lots, neon signage, and the crowds of people who have populated city streets over the past years as his primary subjects. Herzog's use of color was unusual in the 1950s and 60s, a time when fine art photography was almost exclusively associated with black and white imagery. Additionally, Herzog photographed using Kodachrome slide film which was notoriously difficult to print. For decades he remained virtually unknown until his mid-seventies when printing technology caught up, allowing him to make archival pigment prints that matched the exceptional color and intensity of the Kodachrome film. A retrospective exhibition, Fred Herzog: Vancouver Photographs, was held at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2007 and was the first major recognition of Herzog's body of work. Herzog exhibited his work both in Canada and internationally, including the exhibitions Fred Herzog: Photographs, C/O Berlin, Germany (2010), Fred Herzog: A Retrospective, Equinox Gallery, Vancouver (2012), Eyes Wide Open! 100 Years of Leica Photography, Haus der Photographie, Hamburg, Germany (2015), Photography in Canada, 1960-2000, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2017), and many others. In 2010 Herzog received an Honorary Doctorate from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and in 2014 he received the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts. An artist profile on Herzog was featured on the Knowledge Network for the series Snapshot: The Art of Photography II in 2011. In 2014, Herzog's photograph Bogner's Grocery (1960) was released as a limited edition stamp as part of Canada Post's Canadian Photography Series. Herzog died on September 9, 2019 at age 88.Source: Wikipedia
Pieter Henket
The Netherland
1979
Pieter Henket is a Dutch photographer living and working in New York City. His notable work includes shooting the cover of Lady Gaga’s debut album The Fame, and photographing National Congolese acting out their mythologies in the Congo rainforest for the book Congo Tales published by Random House / Prestel Publishing in 2018. He is known for a photographic style that takes inspiration from the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age of painting. Henket was born in Geldrop, Netherlands. He is the son of the Dutch architect Hubert-Jan Henket and the nephew of the Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen. After high school in the Netherlands, Henket moved to the States to take a three-month film course at the New York Film Academy, followed by a documentary-film-making course at the NYU film school. Shortly after, Henket got his start by interning for director Joel Schumacher. In 1999, he worked on the set of the film Flawless, starring Robert De Niro and Philip Seymour Hoffman. He had a long-time collaboration with recording artist and producer Ryan Leslie. He has worked with celebrities such as Anjelica Huston, Mary-Kate Olsen, Sir Ben Kingsley, Kristen Stewart and Lady Gaga for whose debut album The Fame Henket shot. In 2010, the iconic image was presented at the American Woman exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 2015 Henket was commissioned by Tales of Us in Berlin to photograph Congolese from the Mbomo District acting out their mythologies in the Odzala Kokoua National Park for the book Congo Tales. Source: Wikipedia About Congo Tales In the deep heart of Africa lies a tropical rainforest second only in size to the Amazon – the Congo Basin. It measures 500 million acres, spans 6 nations, and is home to some of the largest swaths of intact tropical rainforest in the world, with the pristine Odzala Kokoua National Park as the crown jewel. Known to ecologists as the world’s second lung, the Congo Basin is the Earth’s other Amazon – as vital to preventing runaway Climate Change as the Brazilian rainforest and as vulnerable to deforestation and abuse. Yet the Congo Basin falls far short of the Amazon when it comes to the world’s awareness of it as a major player in the global environment, a cathedral of nature’s treasures, and a stopgap against looming ecological catastrophe. Published in 2018 by Prestel, Congo Tales is intended to help solve this lack of awareness, and help create a conservation infrastructure for this critical pillar of the world’s fragile ecological balance. Upturning the traditional conventions of fear-based environmental messaging and the portrayal of Africa solely as a place of plague and war, Congo Tales takes a completely different approach to communicating the urgency of conservation efforts in this region. Channeling the primal heartbeat of one of the world’s most powerful ecosystems and the people who call it home, the mythological tales of the Congolese – of supernatural forces in control of life and death, of ritualistic initiations into adulthood, of the laws of nature that lie outside the laws of people – are revealed as a treasure trove of universal wisdom that is both existential and pragmatic, with the unspoiled Odzala Kokoua National Park as stage and actor.Source: The Independant Photographer
Amira Al-Sharif
Amira Al-Sharif is an award-winning Paris-based Yemeni photographer and artist with two decades of visual storytelling experience. Over the years, she has received numerous awards and fellowships, including from the World Press Photo Foundation, the Magnum Foundation, the Prince Claus Fund, the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, the Samir Kassir Foundation, Women Photograph, and Free Press Unlimited’s “Most Resilient Journalist Award.” Her work has been published by National Geographic, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the New York Times, ARTE TV, TV5 Monde, NPR, ICORN, UNICEF, UNHCR, among other outlets and organizations, and she penned a chapter for the best-selling anthology Our Women On the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World (2019). She has also participated in scores of photography exhibitions and festivals in Europe, the MENA region, and across the world, from India to South Korea, and Cambodia to the United States.In 2010, she studied photojournalism and documentary photography at the International Center of Photography in New York, and later returned to her home city of Sana’a, Yemen, to teach visual storytelling to hundreds of aspiring photographers. Since fleeing Yemen in 2018, due to the wartime constraints on her work and life, Amira has completed a two-year-long artist residency at Cité Internationale des Arts and is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Art at the Beaux-Arts de Paris. With her five-year French Talent Passport for artistic and cultural professionals, she has also launched a Paris-based company for her art practice. Artist Statement People often comment that they do not see war in my beautiful pictures of Yemen, where the world’s worst humanitarian crisis continues to cast a tremendous, even inescapable shadow across the landscape. But, since the war began nearly eight years ago, the vast majority of the scenes that I have captured in my beloved motherland have put my life at risk. Even if the outcome looks beautiful — schoolchildren or fishermen smiling in the north, newlyweds or goatherders smiling in the south, women young and old with fighting spirits from north to south — destruction, destitution, and danger often lurk just beyond the frame. War makes my beautiful pictures war pictures. There are an untold number of bloody scenes from Yemen that only exist in my mind. Mental images that I cannot publish in a newspaper or hang on a gallery wall. They are the scenes that I did not want to photograph, to remember more than I already do. For me, just like my sister Hayat, who is also a photographer, flashing back to the stories and scenes that epitomize how ugly the war has been to us, and how much it has scattered us in all directions, is like free-falling into the darkness. We want to be in the light, to move on with our ambitions and dreams. That is why the word “move” has been dominant in my thoughts and speech over the last couple of years. In spite of the challenging conditions and hardships, we need to keep moving. We need to let go of that which imprisons our souls in all of the unfortunate things that have happened and are still happening to us. Sadly, we cannot stop this war. I often ask myself if people who live in peaceful countries and regions could better identify with the beautiful pictures — seeing themselves in us, their lives in ours — rather than the bloody ones that commonly inundate the international media, from Syria at present to Vietnam in the past. As a photographer with over sixteen years of experience on the ground in Yemen, I have come to the realization that the logic of “blood is to war as beauty is to peace” is flawed, incomplete. And the reason my work tends to focus on the beauty of my suffering country is simple, relatable: like people everywhere, regardless of their context of war or peace, Yemenis appreciate love and life. We, too, wish to live our loves and our lives before that unavoidable moment called “death.” -- Amira Al-Sharif About A Love Song to Socotra Island Documentary photography series (2014) Socotra is an isolated Yemeni island, and UNESCO World Heritage site, that lies between the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea. Described as “one of the most distinctive places on Earth,” or the “jewel of Arabia,” this special, almost secret, place is where I made A Love Song to Socotra Island, my first long-term documentary photography series. One Socotran woman in particular, Saadiya, lit up my imagination, and so for months at a time, I shadowed her days, just like the birds of the island. When I met Aunt Saadiya, as I affectionately call her, the mother of seven was locked in a near decade-long struggle against local tribesmen who were after her inherited plot of land, which sustains and shelters her family and dozens of animals. “I have a fighting spirit,” she told me one day. “Whatever happens, I am not leaving my land. I fear nobody.” From mountaintop to seaside, I documented Aunt Saadiya’s radiant life force, relatively free from the everyday constraints and fears of the conflict-ravaged mainland. After we rose with the sun, she greeted the birds and the trees, tended to her goat herd, taught her children to swim, and defended her family’s right to survive. In our last months together, a local court declared her “the rightful owner of the land.”
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All About Photo Awards 2026
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Latest Interviews

Exclusive Interview with Marijn Fidder
Marijn Fidder is a Dutch documentary photographer whose work powerfully engages with current affairs and contemporary social issues. Driven by a deep sense of social justice, she uses photography to speak on behalf of the voiceless and to advocate for the rights of those who are most vulnerable. Her images have been widely published in major international outlets including National Geographic, CNN Style, NRC Handelsblad, Volkskrant, GUP New Talent, and ZEIT Magazin. Her long-term commitment to disability rights—particularly through years of work in Uganda—culminated in her acclaimed project Inclusive Nation, which earned her the title of Photographer of the Year 2025 at the All About Photo Awards. She is also the recipient of multiple prestigious honors, including awards from World Press Photo and the Global Peace Photo Award. We asked her a few questions about her life and work.
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Call for Entries
All About Photo Awards 2026
$5,000 Cash Prizes! Juror: Steve McCurry