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Paul Brouns
Paul Brouns
Paul Brouns

Paul Brouns

Country: The Netherlands

I am a Dutch photographing artist that lives and works in Almere (near Amsterdam). I was born in 1967 in a small village in the South of the Netherlands. In 1990 I graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Tilburg (NL) in painting, drawing and photography. In the 1990's photography was still an analogue process and not having a darkroom of my own, in those early decades I was busy painting, because I wanted to work with colours and that was the most direct way to do this. However after the development of digital photography all of this started to change. By now my camera and the computer have gradually become my main tools for creation. Rhythm, color and geometry have always been important in my work and for this architecture has proven to be an ideal subject. As a photographer I am attracted by the abstract, rhythmic expression of buildings. It is my aim to captivate the viewers by feasts of dancing shadows, sunlit reflections or colour combinations. I hope that through my work they will learn to appreciate and enjoy the visual music that surrounds us.

The Music of Architecture
My motto "the music of architecture" stands for the artistic desire to communicate the abstract beauty of buildings. In the abstraction I see an important parallel with instrumental music. Terms like rhythm, composition, texture, scale and colour can be used to describe the feeling of my work, but it also can be applied to describe music. I try to visualise the sensation of a building as purely as possible: many images show façades that are completely frontal and fill the entire composition, so the rhythm and shallow depth of the building surface plays the main role. This ongoing series is called "Urban Tapestries".
In other works the perspective depth and its converging lines play an important role. A third element is using my photographic elements to create a new reality. What unites these different elements is my desire to express myself through images that are all about the fascination with colour and rhythm.
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Szymon Brodziak
What you see, is who you are - says Szymon Brodziak, the master of black and white photography. The youngest aritist exhibited at the Museum of Photography - Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin (2015). The best black & white campaign photographer of the world, acclaimed by the jury of FashionTV Photographers Awards, during 2013 Cannes Film Festival. In 2019, Brodziak confrmed his mastery by winning 1st Place in World's Top 10 Black & White Photographers contest curated by OneEyeland. He loves to photograph women. He's inspired mainly by locations, where he brings to life his monochromatic visions. Brodziak received Johnnie Walker Keep Walking Award for constant fulflment of dreams and passion for setting new paths in the search of beauty. In Europe, Brodziak received numerous medals and honourable mentions in various editions of the renowed Prix de la Photographie Paris, both for commercial and personal projects, including the title of Advertising Photographer of the Year (2016). In the USA, he won frst place in Fashion category in two photo competitions: International Photography Awards (2016) and Black and White Spider Awards (2016), which rewards the best monochromatic images from all over the word. His frst photo album ONE had its ofcial premiere in Rome (2014). It presents the frst 10 years of his professional activity. The publication starts with a personal dedication from June Newton, wife to the legendary photographer Helmut Newton. Szymon's new photographic book entitled WHAT YOU SEE IS WHO YOU ARE won a Gold Medal (Book: Cover) and 2 Bronze Medals (Book: Fine Art & Other) at Prix de la Photographie Paris 2019 and also Honorable Mention at 2019 International Photography Awards (USA). The artist's work can be seen and ordered in his own galleries of photography located in Poland and are also available worldwide at Online Shop www.szymonbrodziak.com as well as www.saatchiart.com/brodziak.
William Castellana
United States
1968
William Castellana is an award-winning photographer whose images have been published internationally in periodicals such as Silvershotz (The International Journal of Contemporary Photography), Rangefinder, Creative Quarterly (The Journal of Art & Design), Newsweek, Time, New York, and others. His photographs reside in the permanent collections of over 40 museums in the US including the Hood Museum of Art, Museum of the City of New York, Museum of Modern Art Library, Yale University Library, New Britain Museum of American Art, Southeast Museum of Photography, and the Hunter Museum of American Art. About the Series Street photography, in terms of the "unposed," is a practice that serves the compelling need to distill the ebb and flow of visually complex interactions into static form - forever fixed and with meaning. It is this desire to understand more deeply the rhythms of humanity that takes me to the streets in search of clarity. In their simplest sense, the images in this series form a social document of a people and a place; namely, a sect of Hasidic Jews known as the Satmars. This sect of Hasidic Jews was founded in Satu Mare, Romania by Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum in the early 20th century. After WWII, Teitelbaum settled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to lay the groundwork for a religious ideology that would launch one of the largest Hasidic movements in the world. Since Teitelbaum's death, the Satmar community has grown exponentially and continues to thrive economically and spiritually through closely observed traditions and social mechanisms. Between the fall of 2013 and 2014, I set out to photograph my neighbors in the one-half square mile area below Division Avenue, which demarcates the religious from the secular communities of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The photographs in this book are constrained to the "neighborhood view," since my outsider status made access to a more privileged look impossible. As an outsider, what I witnessed through my camera during that period was forever new and unique compared to my everyday routine and what the rest of the city's inhabitants were pulsing to. For me, street photography is about the preservation of time and place - a kind of poetry that distills both in equal measure.
Jacque Rupp
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Joris Hermans
Belgium
1983
Joris Hermans is a freelance documentary and travel photographer based in Belgium. In February of 2018, after winning a Nikon Press Photo Award in his country, he decided to leave his home behind and travel the world indefinitely. He tries to capture countries and people inbox ways no traveler does and documents everything on THE WORLD AHEAD OF US. He's still accepting freelance assignments. Joris' work has been featured on LifeFramer, Don't Take Pictures, PDN, Booooooom, Aint-Bad Magazine, Positive Magazine, GUP Magazine and Fotoroom Magazine. He was a finalist for the Renaissance Photography Prize and selected for the Kontinent Awards. He was a category winner of PDN World in Focus in 2015 and Nikon Press Photo Awards in 2016/2017. People Being pretty disappointed by today's travel photography, I decided to try and make a change. For me, traveling is not about selfies and "Instagrammable" places but about the people, stories and experiences. People make a country interesting and since I left to travel indefinitely more than one year ago, I've been focusing on the people in every country. Regular people I meet and who share me their story or with whom I have a quick chat in the streets are the stars in my portrait photos. it doesn't matter. They're all special. I try to take my medium format camera everywhere I go because I know an interesting person might pop up any where, any time. I hope one day, I can create a book with all these interesting faces and their stories. This is Varanasi In 2018, I spent two months traveling across India. It's become one of my favourite countries in the world. The history, culture and people inspired me every day I was there. Then, I arrived in Varanasi and it was the highlight of my time in India. Varanasi or Benares is the Holy Grail of India according to many travelers. It's one of the oldest cities in the world sitting on the banks of the river Ganges and that's exactly why it's so important to Indians. Everybody wants to die in Varanasi and/or be cremated on the banks of the holy river. After the cremation, the ashes are being sprinkled in the river and that's when the deceased reaches Nirvana. From all over India people travel to Varanasi; to die or to bring the dead, sometimes even with the corpse on ice in the trunk of a car... Life and death are not that far apart in India... The Ghats that lead up to the river is what I wanted to see. That's where the locals are and where they play cards and cricket or just relax in the evening. And that's exactly what we did too every evening when the sun started to set; just relax at the ghats of Varanasi. The light turned into a magical glow again like everywhere in India went the sun goes down and as a photographer it's an awesome few hours to be out...
Michael Young
United States
Michael Young is a New York-based photographer. His work has been shown internationally in Switzerland and Australia as well as nationally in New York City, Kentucky, Colorado, Oregon and Massachusetts. His work will be on display this coming spring at Fotofestival Lenzburg's Search for Beauty open-air show. He was a finalist in Shoot the Frame's Shoot the Face competition this past January and won 2nd place in color photography from the Plymouth Center for the Arts in Massachusetts. His work will be published later this year in the first annual Feature Shoot's The Print Swap book. Additionally, his work has previously been published in Spunk [arts] Magazine, Taking Pictures (Black Box Gallery), and The Literate Image (Plymouth Center for the Arts). Michael has a MA in Teaching from New York University and a BA in Spanish Language & Literatures from Yale University. Statement Starla, Photographer in Her Studio is part of of the series Ashes to Ashes/Dust to Dust that I began eight years ago when I first visited my partner's family, the Groves, in western Kentucky. Since I grew up in the northeast, my upbringing was different from my partner's, and initially I thought that I had little in common with his family. As an outsider I received a lukewarm welcome by many, but I remained intrigued by his family. It was my camera that afforded me an invitation into their lives and helped me build meaningful relationships with his relatives. As the project has continued, not only have I become closer to my partner's family, but I have also been fortunate to document a part of the US that has been ignored by many and deemed 'flyover country'. The Groves, who have lived in Muhlenberg County for generations, are a microcosm for Muhlenburg county. Most are hardworking coal miners, farmers, nurses, and entrepreneurs looking to better their lives. Sadly, however, some have lost parents to addiction and others have passed due to overdoses. Like many rural towns in the Bible Belt, industry continues to leave the area. While well-paying jobs in the coal industry disappear, miners must travel about an hour to find lucrative work. When Trump announced promises to rollback legislation restricting coal emissions, many in the community grew excited for a return to the prosperous past that has for many years been slipping away. These images show the dichotomy between the current stark realities and flickers of hope and beauty as the county works to rebuild and redefine itself. "
Prescott Lassman
United States
1963
"I am an attorney by day and amateur photographer in my free time. Based in Washington, D.C., I focus mainly on black-and-white photography — somewhere between street and documentary with a strong dose of minimalism for good measure. I have a background in philosophy and try to incorporate it into my photography. One of my favorite philosophers, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, has influenced me deeply. In fact, I view my photography as a Jungian exercise in synchronicity. Using an intuitive approach, I search for images that resonate, for moments of synchronicity in everyday life. Because this approach relies on unconscious triggers, my photographs are often richly symbolic, though their meaning is not immediately clear (at least not to me). For me, this is the essence of photography: capturing an image that resonates and then, over the course of months or years, figuring out why." Statement Domesticated Animals is a multi-year project that explores the domestication that lies at the heart of domestic life. It started with a question that simply would not go away: "How did I become such a domesticated beast?" And then the natural follow up: "Is the domesticated life worth it?" These photographs are my attempt to answer these questions and make sense of my predicament — everyone’s predicament — by providing an unpolished glimpse of the myths we accept, the masks we are taught to wear, the roles we are forced to play, the needs and desires we sublimate (and sometimes don’t), and the tremendous pressures we face to conform in order to sustain our comfortable, domestic lives. AAP Competitions: AAP Magazine 23 Women AAP Magazine 25 B&W AAP Magazine 31 Portrait AAP Magazine 36 Street AAP Magazine 37 Travels All About Photo Awards 2024 AAP Magazine 40 Portrait AAP Magazine 45 Travels AAP Magazine 49 B&W AAP Magazine 53 Travels
Leonard Freed
United States
1929 | † 2006
Leonard Freed was a documentary photojournalist and longtime Magnum member. He was born to Jewish, working-class parents of Eastern European descent. Freed had wanted to be a painter, but began taking photographs in the Netherlands and discovered a new passion. He traveled in Europe and Africa before returning to the United States where he attended the New School and studied with Alexey Brodovitch, the art director of Harper's Bazaar. In 1958 he moved to Amsterdam to photograph its Jewish community. Through the 1960s he continued to work as a freelance photojournalist, traveling widely. He documented such events and subjects as the Civil Rights movement in America (1964–65), the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and the New York City police department (1972–79). His career blossomed during the American civil rights movement, when he traveled the country with Martin Luther King, Jr. in his celebrated march across the US from Alabama to Washington. This journey gave him the opportunity to produce his 1968 book, Black in White America, which brought considerable attention. His work on New York City law enforcement also led to a book, Police Work which was published in 1980. Early in Freed's career, Edward Steichen purchased three photographs from Freed for the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.[ In 1967, Cornell Capa selected Freed as one of five photographers to participate in his "Concerned Photography" exhibition. Freed joined Magnum Photos in 1972. Publications to which Freed contributed over the years included Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Fortune, Libération, Life, Look, Paris-Match, Stern, and The Sunday Times Magazine of London. In later years, Freed continued shooting photographs in Italy, Turkey, Germany, Lebanon and the U.S. He also shot four films for Japanese, Dutch and Belgian television.Source: Wikipedia Born in Brooklyn, New York, to working-class Jewish parents of Eastern European descent, Leonard Freed first wanted to become a painter. However, he began taking photographs while in the Netherlands in 1953, and discovered that this was where his passion lay. In 1954, after trips through Europe and North Africa, he returned to the United States and studied in Alexei Brodovitch's 'design laboratory'. He moved to Amsterdam in 1958 and photographed the Jewish community there. He pursued this concern in numerous books and films, examining German society and his own Jewish roots; his book on the Jews in Germany was published in 1961, and Made in Germany, about post-war Germany, appeared in 1965. Working as a freelance photographer from 1961 onwards, Freed began to travel widely, photographing blacks in America (1964-65), events in Israel (1967-68), the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and the New York City police department (1972-79). He also shot four films for Japanese, Dutch and Belgian television. Early in Freed's career, Edward Steichen, then Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, bought three of his photographs for the museum. Steichen told Freed that he was one of the three best young photographers he had seen and urged him to remain an amateur, as the other two were now doing commercial photography and their work had become uninteresting. 'Preferably,' he advised, 'be a truck driver.' Freed joined Magnum in 1972. His coverage of the American civil rights movement first made him famous, but he also produced major essays on Poland, Asian immigration in England, North Sea oil development, and Spain after Franco. Photography became Freed's means of exploring societal violence and racial discrimination. Leonard Freed died in Garrison, New York, on 30 November 2006.Source: Steven Kasher Gallery
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All About Photo Awards 2026
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