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FINAL DAYS TO WIN A SOLO EXHIBITION IN MAY 2026
FINAL DAYS TO WIN A SOLO EXHIBITION IN MAY 2026
Robert Virga
Robert Virga
Robert Virga

Robert Virga

Country: United States

Robert Virga is a photographer residing in the New York City metropolitan area. Though largely self-taught, he has taken Master Classes with Mary Ellen Mark and Bruce Davidson. Working with film and the traditional darkroom, his street photography portrays a social landscape of extremes, capturing reality at its most expressive. Richly emotional, lyrical and untainted by interference or staged detail. A tableau of relationships, the human condition, life and death. Reminding us of how large a fraction of what we see won't exist in its present form only a moment from now.

A humanist portrayal...candid and without comment or sentimentality, un-selfconscious in its theatricality and self-presentation. Displaying ourselves with grace and self-confidence, a sense of timelessness...and a little humor. In solitude and freed from any mystery.

Social documentary and romanticism combined in the same instant. Our lives, in a matter of seconds, are caught in the act... where the obvious and mundane transition into something more provocative.

His work has been featured in both solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Italy and Spain. In addition, he has been published and reviewed in, among others, Black and White Magazine, Photography Gala Awards, FotoNostrum Gallery, Urban Photo Awards, and winner of the 14th Pollux Street Photography Award.
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Ragnar Axelsson
Iceland
1958
For over 40 years, Ragnar Axelsson, Rax, has been photographing the people, animals, and landscape of the most remote regions of the Arctic, including Iceland, Siberia, and Greenland. In stark black-and-white images, he captures the elemental, human experience of nature at the edge of the liveable world, making visible the extraordinary relationships between the people of the Arctic and their extreme environment – relationships now being altered in profound and complex ways by the unprecedented changes in climate. A photojournalist at Morgunbladid since 1976, Ragnar has also worked on free-lance assignment in Latvia, Lithuania, Mozambique, South Africa, China, and Ukraine. His photographs have been featured in LIFE, Newsweek, Stern, GEO, National Geographic, Time, and Polka, and have been exhibited widely. Ragnar has published 7 books in various international editions. His most recent, Jökull (Glacier) was published in 2018, with a foreword by Olafur Eliasson. Andlit Nordursins (Faces of The North), was published in 2016, with a foreword by Mary Ellen Mark, and won the 2016 Icelandic Literary Prize for non-fiction. Other awards for Ragnar's work include numerous Icelandic Photojournalist Awards; The Leica Oskar Barnack Award (Honorable Mention); The Grand Prize, Photo de Mer, Vannes; and Iceland's highest honor, the Order of the Falcon, Knight's Cross. Ragnar is currently working on a 3-year project documenting people's lives in all 8 countries of the Arctic. At this pivotal time, as climate change irrevocably disrupts the physical and traditional realities of their world, Ragnar is bearing witness to the immediate and direct threat global warming poses to their survival. Must Read Article Photography and Climate Change Awareness
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
James Hayman
United States
After attending The American University for photojournalism, Hayman's first photography assignment was to photograph Nixon and Brezhnev at the 1973 Washington Summit in the White House Rose Garden. Disenchanted with the paparazzi-like frenzy, Hayman went on to study film at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and post-graduate work at New York University, though his photojournalistic roots still inform his practice today. Both his photojournalism and film education led him to travel around the world. He notably traveled to Central America, working for the UN's disaster relief efforts after the 1976 earthquake in Guatemala. This led to several series of photographic work in the region. In the 1980s, Hayman began shooting various independent films in New York City, gaining recognition as the cinematographer for An Autumn's Tale, starring Chow Yun-Fat, which swept the Hong Kong Film Awards in 1987. This led to several years of Hayman working as a cinematographer in China, Japan, and more series of photographic work documenting Asia in the 1980s. As indie film production in New York City began to end in 1989, he moved to Los Angeles, where he went on to direct and produce multiple television shows and films. Since then, he has directed numerous pilots, including Dangerous Minds and Drop Dead Diva, as well as episodes of The Sopranos, ER, Law & Order, House, Desperate Housewives, and others. Hayman has also worked as an executive producer, most notably on Ugly Betty, which led to winning a Golden Globe Award. He has also been nominated for two Emmy Awards, and a Director's Guild Award. Read the Exclusive Interview
Maia Flore
France
1988
Maia Flore was born in 1988, in France. She is currently living in Paris. Graduated from Ecole des Gobelins in 2010, she joined Agence VU' in 2011. Her approach fits into a research of coincidences between reality and her imagination. Her world is a complete fabrication in form of touching and enchanting narrations, even surrealistic. This is in Sweden she begins her first series "Sleep Elevations", a journey that indulges in childhood memories. During the summer of 2012, while her first residence in Finland, Maia Flore explores new methods of representation and narration. These researches will then continue at the Arts Center of Berkeley, California. Resulting two series (Situations and Morning Sculptures) that continue to explore the feelings of confusion in which the photographer places her characters as her audience. She is exposed for the first time in February 2011 at the festival Circulation (s) of the Young European Photography in Paris. More recently, as part of a White Card from Atout France and the French Institute, Maia Flore depicts the French heritage through her dreamy world in the series "Imagine France – Le voyage fantastique" exposed in Bercy Village until September 2014. In 2015, she wins Le prix HSBC pour la photographie. Source: Agence VU Situations (2012) In the Situations series, a girl runs through varyingly weathered landscapes donning a striking red outfit. In search of a sublime freedom, she travels to find fleeting moments of communion with nature. Draped in red, she catches the light of the sun or buries herself in the fog. As though she were attempting to rediscover this space, she roams on land-locked clouds that evaporate into the landscape upon the return of the sun as it chases away their mystery. Like a game between reality and fantasy, the clash between clairvoyance and a moment of madness, the girl is amused by her emotional confusion. Sleep Elevation (2010) "Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night," Edgar Allan Poe. This is how these girls, carried away in the air by objects, let themselves travel through boundless landscapes. Flying towards dreamed lands, making real a complete attraction between the character, his ideal universe and the world they live in: that is where these girls lead us. Their contorted movements are merging with the shape of the one revealing their passion. Mix of an imaginary realism and childhood memories, these beings in levitation invite us to dream, limitlessly.
Ralph Gibson
United States
1939
Ralph Gibson is an American art photographer best known for his photographic books. His images often incorporate fragments with erotic and mysterious undertones, building narrative meaning through contextualization and surreal juxtaposition. Ralph Gibson studied photography while in the US Navy and then at the San Francisco Art Institute. He began his professional career as an assistant to Dorothea Lange and went on to work with Robert Frank on two films. Gibson has maintained a lifelong fascination with books and book-making. Since the appearance in 1970 of The Somnambulist, his work has been steadily impelled towards the printed page. To date he has produced over 40 monographs, his most current projects being State of the Axe published by Yale University Press in Fall of 2008 and Nude by Taschen (2009). His photographs are included in over one hundred and fifty museum collections around the world, and have appeared in hundreds of exhibitions. Gibson has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1973, 1975, 1986), a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (D.A.A.D.) Exchange, Berlin (1977), a New York State Council of the Arts (C.A.P.S.) fellowship (1977), and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1985). The Rencontres d'Arles festival presented his work in 1975, 1976, 1977, 1979, 1989 and 1994. I embrace the abstract in photography and exist on a few bits of order extracted from the chaos of reality. -- Ralph Gibson His book Syntax received a mention for the Rencontres d'Arles Book Award in 1983. He was decorated as an Officier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1986) and appointed, Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2005) by the French government. His awards include: Leica Medal of Excellence Award (1988), "150 Years of Photography" Award, Photographic Society of Japan (1989), a Grande Medaille de la Ville d'Arles (1994) and the Lucie Award for lifetime achievement (2008). Gibson also received an honorary doctorate of Fine Arts from the University of Maryland (1991), and a second honorary doctorate from the Ohio Wesleyan University (1998). He has worked exclusively with Leica for almost 50 years. Gibson currently lives in New York and travels frequently to Europe and Brazil.Source: Wikipedia Having begun his acclaimed photographic career as an apprentice to the great documentarians Dorothea Lange and Robert Frank, Ralph Gibson is known for his highly distinctive vision in still photography. By intensifying contrast and emphasizing the grain of the film in his prints, Gibson concentrates on the minute details: the edge of a café table, the arc of a hip, the glint of a fork. Gibson’s works are both formally vigorous and eternally evocative. His photographs are in major private and public collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.Source: Weston Gallery I’m interested in producing truncated shapes in proportion to the frame and composition, shapes that are preferably luminous. I’m not interested in the full-figure. I want to abstract forms. -- Ralph Gibson
MD Saiful Amin
Bangladesh
1969
I’m a street and documentary photographer from Dhaka. I began taking photos in the mid-90s, but it wasn’t until 2015 that I pursued photography seriously. My profession is in private service at a construction company. During the "Pilkhana Tragedy" on February 25, 2009, the armed border guards opened fire on civilians. I was taking pictures as they approached their gate, but suddenly, a bullet from a Chinese rifle hit me. My sciatic nerve was severely injured, and my leg was shattered into multiple pieces. From 2009 to 2011, I underwent seven major surgeries. I was bedridden for 4 ½ years. Unfortunately, during that time, my hard drive crashed, and I lost all my images from the 80s up to February 2009. It was an incredibly frustrating period for me. When I received my first DSLR camera in 2015, I picked up photography again. Despite the constant pain in my leg, I’ve never stopped. I never leave home without my camera, even for a single day. My work – Since 2016, I’ve focused on documenting the Bihari and Dalit communities, as well as homeless and street kids, urban slum communities, the tannery, and plastic industries, among other subjects. Achievements – I’ve participated in about 50 national exhibitions (winning 1st prize twice), and I’ve exhibited my work in Kolkata and Romania as a solo participant. I’ve received several FIAP honorable mentions and acceptances in salons worldwide. One of my photos was published in the 2018 edition of the 'Wisden' annual cricket book, often referred to as the Bible of Cricket. My work has also been featured in numerous international photography websites and magazines. In 2020, I won the FIAP Gold Medal and the "Photographer of the Year" trophy at the ABP Salon, a prestigious contest organized by the Bangladesh Photographic Society (BPS). Workshops – I’ve attended both short and long photography workshops with GMB Akash, the late Anwar Hossain Anu, M. R. Hasan, Prito Reja, Chanchal Mahmud, and Rafiqul Islam. Mentorship – I’ve also served as a judge for several national photography exhibitions between 2018 and 2019. Life in Bihari Camp, Dhaka, Bangladesh A young girl writes a poem in which she asks a simple yet profound question—one that no one can answer. She asks, Who am I? Her forefathers were born in India, they migrated to Pakistan, and she was born in Bangladesh. India abandoned them long ago, Bangladesh refuses to accept them as children of the land, and Pakistan won’t take them back. She says she has many names: Bihari, Maura, Muhajir, Non-Bangalee, Marwari, Urdu-speaker, Refugee, and Stranded Pakistani. But she desires only one identity: Human. This is the reality for the 160,000 camp-based Urdu-speaking community members in Bangladesh. In Geneva Camp alone, around 50,000 Urdu-speaking people of Indian and Pakistani origin live in difficult conditions. After the partition of India in 1947, amidst large-scale communal riots on both sides of the border, hundreds of thousands of Muslims from Bihar, Kolkata, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and as far as Hyderabad migrated to what was then East Pakistan. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the All India Muslim League, promised them that Pakistan would be a "safe haven for all Muslims." As is typical of people migrating from a shared locality, the Biharis formed separate clusters from the Bengalis. Their communities became concentrated in areas like Mohammadpur, Mirpur, Khulna, Chittagong, and Santahar. The new generation, born after the war, now comprises the majority of camp residents. They have no affiliations with either India or Pakistan. They were born in Bangladesh and identify as Bangladeshis. Unfortunately, the state is reluctant to accept them as such. It is a complex issue, with the majority population skeptical of their loyalty to the country they wish to call home. The inhumane conditions in which they live and the societal effects of their marginalization make it imperative to resolve this painful issue. 365 Photography Library This is the largest photography library in Bangladesh, with around 2,000 books on photography. It’s free for everyone, and I created it for young photographers and the next generation. I plan to leave it to them as my legacy before I die. www.365photographylibrary.com
Ruth Lauer Manenti
United States
Ruth Lauer Manenti received an MFA from The Yale School of Art in painting and drawing in 1994. In 2012, she was given a large format camera and taught herself how to use it. Gradually she accomplished what she was striving for in drawing and painting, through photography. Her mother was also an artist who left behind a legacy of unknown work. Part of Ruth's determination as an artist is to reward her mother for her efforts and to create a continuum. She was awarded a NYFA grant in photography in 2016 and had a solo exhibition at The Center for Photography in Woodstock, NY in 2020. Her book Alms is currently on view on an online exhibition at The Griffin Museum of Photography. Her recent book of photographs entitled Since Seeing You, is a visual diary of the woods behind her house as experienced during Lockdown. The pictures give pause, to process the sorrow of the time, rather than as an escape or erasure. Since breaking her neck in a car crash at the age of twenty, Ruth has developed a spiritual life and practice that has propelled much of her photographic work. She lives in the Catskill Mountains in NY. Shard: This ongoing series of photos called Shard was made over the last 4 years during which time I was wanting to see whether I could place objects on a table as arrangements for unspoken emotions. In 2017-18 I was unwell. It wasn't mental illness but the line between that and trauma was sometimes hard to find. I stayed indoors and at home as much as possible. I spent a lot of time watching daylight enter through the windows in different ways according to the clouds, seasons and weather. The windows are old, and the glass is wavy so that the sun rays come in as ripples. I was interested in using objects as symbols of fragility. I found that the work of making the pictures, and the safe cocoon that I had created between myself and the table, was informed by a kind of benevolent force that accompanied me through my suffering. In some traditions it is believed that when the heart breaks an entrance for Spirit is created. It's a way that trauma or defeat can become a portal; so much so that sometimes people have a nostalgia for the times in their life when they have suffered most. More recently I have been thinking about the process of repairing things rather than throwing them away. I wonder if appreciating something damaged, torn, or saved, even if no longer usable, could have an implied nonliteral meaning for getting through the past year, 2020, gracefully, despite so much loss and depression. I think there is a beauty in the effort of putting one's life back together after experiencing brokenness and I have tried through still life to communicate that.
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AAP Magazine #57 Portrait
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Exclusive Interview with Luca Desienna and Laura Estelle Barmwoldt
For over seven years, Of Lilies and Remains has explored the depths of the goth and darkwave underground, unfolding in Leipzig—a city long associated with a vibrant and enduring subcultural scene. Moving between iconic gatherings such as Wave-Gotik-Treffen and more intimate moments on the fringes, the project offers a rare and immersive glimpse into a world often misunderstood, yet rich in expression and community. Created by Luca in collaboration with Laura Estelle Barmwoldt, the work embraces a cinematic and deeply personal approach. Rather than documenting from a distance, it moves within the scene itself, capturing its atmosphere, its codes, and its quiet contradictions. The title Of Lilies and Remains hints at this duality—where beauty and darkness, fragility and strength coexist. As the book prepares for its release, we spoke with both artists about the origins of the project, their process, and what it means to document a subculture that continues to evolve while remaining true to its spirit.
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Exclusive Interview with Jan Janssen
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German photographer Henk Kosche turns his lens toward the streets of Halle an der Saale, capturing everyday life in the late years of the former German Democratic Republic. At the time, Kosche was studying design and exploring the city with his camera, drawn to the atmosphere of its industrial landscape and the quiet rhythms of daily life. His series Street Photography at the End of the 80s, selected as the Solo Exhibition for July 2025, revisits a body of work created just before a period of profound change. Rediscovered decades later in a small box of 35mm negatives, these photographs offer glimpses of a city and its people at a moment suspended between the familiar and the unknown.
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