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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
Sudabe Vatanparast
Sudabe Vatanparast
Sudabe Vatanparast

Sudabe Vatanparast

Country: Iran
Birth: 1983

Sudabe Vatanparast is an Iranian famale photographer who was born in 1983 in Tehran. Sudabe is a graduate photography.
Social concerns centered on the problems of women in iranian society are evident in Sudabe projects.
Sudabe considers herself a freelance photographer whose photos are inspired by the nightmares, problems and experiences of her life and that of her community.
Her first solo exhibition was held in 2015.
In addition to holding exhibitions in prestigious galleries in Iran, Garibaldi Gallery in Modica, Italy and Bioçkecmac Gallery in Turkey have also hosted his works separately and as a group.
Sudabe has been praised many times at various festivals under the auspices of the World Photography Federation (FIAP) and has been one of the top members of these festivals. Her latest solo exhibition is a reflection of the fear, insecurity and anxiety of Iranian women in the home environment, which has been welcomed by critics and activists in this field.
 

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Margarita Mavromichalis
Margarita Mavromichalis comes from a family of Greek diplomats and has spent her life living and traveling all over the world. She speaks five languages and studied translation and interpreting. She likes to think that photography is her second language, as it's a universal language, one that is understood by all across the world and conveys messages in the most powerful way. Margarita moved to New York in 2009. She continued her studies for three years at the International Center of Photography where she also served as a Teaching Assistant for several classes. She moved back to Greece from 2013 to 2016 where she devoted most of her work covering the refugee crisis as it developed on the island of Lesvos. She currently lives and works in London. Margarita is mostly attracted to street photography and the elements that evoke emotions and surprise in our everyday life. Furthermore she is passionate about documenting current events that she feels very strongly about, highlighting their social impact. Her work has been displayed in exhibitions in New York, Boston, San Diego, The Museum of the City of New York, the Brooklyn Historical Society and most recently in Budapest, Athens, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona and London. Selected images are part of the permanent collections of the Museum of the City of New York and the Brooklyn Historical Society. She is the winner of the 9th Pollux Awards (2016) and the winner of the 12th edition of the Julia Margaret Cameron Awards (2018) and has been nominated for the 2019 Prix Pictet Hope Award and was recently awarded the 15th edition of the Julia Margaret Cameron Award (2020). In 2021, she won a Gold Medal at the Budapest International Foto Awards, a Silver Medal at the Prix de la Photographie Paris and is an official selection and top 5 at the Tokyo International Foto Awards.
Claudia Tombini
Born in Rome in 1968, after an initial artistic training, Claudia Tombini studied Architecture at La Sapienza University. After graduating, she followed a PhD in Architecture - Theories and Design at the DIAR department of the same University. Professionally active in her hometown since 2006, she carries out her work independently after a three-year collective experience with studio A4, winner of several mentions and awards. Specialized in architectural design, she has always combined research and design. Her latest work is the restoration of the Troisi Cinema in Trastevere. In 2016 she began her own photographic research, collaborating in some of Officine Fotografiche's activities. In 2019/20 she participates in "Human" curatorial workshop with Luigi Cecconi and Francesco Rombaldi, from Yogurt Magazine, during which she elaborates her own project MoveTo LineTo. Moveto Lineto "'Living is an art of spacing,' as Jean-Marc Besse teaches us, and living is mainly a question of geography. After a lifelong dedication to architecture I now discover, thanks to these words, that living is not about architecture or city planning, nor, more generally, about construction: living is geography. There is a human sense to architecture, which even preexists architecture, as we actually live our lives outside of it, in an unbroken series of passages, intersections, and places which all leave their own special resonance and memory inside us. As I move through these, without ever pausing in the gaps — sometimes more, sometimes less consciously — I find myself measuring out the distances I have covered. Not in terms of space, though, as when it comes to landscapes distance is actually temporal, and measuring it out in its complexity is no easy task. As Matteo Meschiari has said, what I am after is “an altered state of conscience in which the landscape is simultaneously medium and recipient, cause and effect, reactor and reaction”: it is a matter of sensorial dilation. I gaze back on these landscapes, “before” and “after”, I scrutinize them to reproduce them virtually, searching for the same old viewpoints, as if they were light years away. This is the effect any catastrophic event will have on us, namely making us believe that all linearity is forever lost, as if time actually flowed in a linear way. Knowledge will not do, knowing that history is all but linear is not enough: we won’t give up our linear idea of it, and we will feel lost when confronted with any interruption of it, with any interval, any blank gap, no matter how temporary. I have been ceaselessly trying to heal the wounds that the surface of things displays, because it is on the surface that we move, it is the surface we perceive, with its naked spaces, where only the absence or the lost track of what has happened is visible. Indeed, any figuration registers an appearance that is destined to vanish, and it is through imagination that we manage to value what is actually not there. It is through the abstraction of a virtual image, an image never completely resolved in its structure and its appearance, that I have been trying to turn the image itself into matter, and thereby restore to it a potential wholeness that I feel is unattainable to me today. This new matter will do, for the time being, to represent the times and places of our passages, and the gaps in between. Like a postscript file, it will be readable in its own right, by its own definition. " -- Claudia Tombini
 Reza
Iran/France
1952
A philanthropist, idealist, humanist, Reza's career began with studies in architecture. He has gone on to become a renowned photojournalist who, for the last three decades, has worked all over the world, notably for National Geographic. His assignments have taken him to over a hundred countries as a witness to humanity's conflicts and catastrophes. His work is featured in the international media (National Geographic, Time Magazine, Stern, Newsweek, El País, Paris Match, Geo...), as well as a series of books, exhibitions and documentaries made for the National Geographic Channel. Along with his work as a photographer, since 1983 Reza has been a volunteer committed to the training of youths and women from conflict-ridden societies in the language of images, to help them strive for a better world. In 2001, he founded Ainaworld in Afghanistan, a new generation NGO which trains populations in information and communications through the development of educational tools and adapted media. While pursuing his reportages for international media outlets, Reza has continued to conduct workshops on the language of images in a variety through his association Reza Visual Academy. He works with refugees, urban youths in Europe and others from disadvantaged backgrounds. After his work, Mémoires d'Exil ("Memories of Exile") shown at the Louvre Carrousel in 1998, he has shared his humanitarian vision through a series of monumental installations: Crossing Destinies, shown on the grilles of the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, One World, One Tribe in Washington DC, and the Parc de la Villette in Paris, War + Peace at the Caen Memorial and on the banks of the Garonne in Toulouse, Hope in Doha (Qatar), Windows of the Soul in Corsica, Soul of Coffee, 250 photographic exhibitions throughout the world, including major installations on the banks of the Seine, or at Kew Gardens in London, Land of Tolerance at the UN Headquarters in New York, the European Parliament in Brussels, as well as UNESCO in Paris. In 2014, Azerbaijan: the Elegance of Fire, presented at the Petit Palais revealed a little-known people with an ancestral culture, turned towards modernity. Finally, the giant panorama A Dream of Humanity was featured along the banks of the Seine during the summer of 2015, showing portraits of refugees around the world taken by Reza and photographs taken by refugee children in Iraqi Kurdestan who were trained as "camp reporters" at the workshops organized by Reza Visual Academy. Author of thirty books, and a recipient of many awards over the course of his career, Reza is a Fellow and Explorer of the National Geographic Society, and a Senior Fellow of the Ashoka Foundation. His work has been recognized by World Press Photo; he has also received the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, the Lucy Award, an honorary medal from the University of Missouri and the honorary degree of Doctor Honoris Causa from the American University of Paris. France has also appointed him a Chevalier of the National Order of Merit.
Gabriele Galimberti
Gabriele Galimberti, born in 1977, is an Italian photographer who frequently lives on airplanes, and occasionally in Val di Chiana (Tuscany), where he was born and raised. He has spent the last few years working on long-term documentary photography projects around the world, some of which have become books, such as Toy Stories, In Her Kitchen, My Couch Is Your Couch and The Heavens. Gabriele's job consists mainly of telling the stories, through portraits and short stories, of people around the world, recounting their peculiarities and differences, the things they are proud of and the belongings with which they surround themselves; social media, in all its forms, is a fundamental part of the research needed to get in touch, discover and produce those stories. Gabriele committed to documentary photography after starting out as a commercial photographer, and after joining the artistic collective Riverboom, best known for its work entitled Switzerland Versus The World, successfully exhibited in festivals, magazines and art shows around the world. Gabriele is currently traveling around the globe, working on both solo and shared projects, as well as on assignments for international magazines and newspapers such as National Geographic, The Sunday Times, Stern, Geo, Le Monde, La Repubblica and Marie Claire. His pictures have been exhibited in shows worldwide, such as the well known Festival Images in Vevey, Switzerland, Le Rencontres de la Photographie (Arles) and the renowned V&A museum in London; they have won the Fotoleggendo Festival award in Rome and the Best In Show prize at the New York Photography Festival. Gabriele recently became a National Geographic photographer and he regularly works for the magazine. Publications Gabriele Galimberti, Paolo Woods, "The Heavens", Delpire/Dewi Lewis, Paris-London 2015 Gabriele Galimberti, "My Couch Is Your Couch", Clarkson Potter, New York 2015 Gabriele Galimberti, "In Her Kitchen", Clarkson Potter, New York 2014 (also translated in French, Chinese and Korean) Gabriele Galimberti, "Toy Stories", Abrams Book, New York 2014 Gabriele Galimberti is the Second Place Winner of All About Photo Awards 2020 with his work The Ameriguns
Jon Wollenhaupt
United States
For more than 20 years I have been dedicated to photography and fine art printmaking. During this span of time, I have I provided photography services to corporations, not-for-profit organizations, and news and media outlets. My street photography has been exhibited nationally in the United States and published internationally. I have a degree in Fine Art from Grossmont College and further studies in Studio Arts at San Francisco State University. Other current work includes a series called Awakening, which is a series of photomontage works that involve the overlaying of disparate images that reflect the workings of the unconscious mind and amorphous embedded memories. I also experiment extensively with alternative printing processes such as platinum pallidum and cyanotype. About Tales of a City: San Francisco Artist North Beach© Jon Wollenhaupt For more than 10 years I prowled the streets of San Francisco taking photos without a particular theme in mind. Or, you could say the city itself was the theme. I was more interested in trying to reveal something about the fabric of the city than looking only at specific threads. I hope these photos display a faithful chronicle of everyday life, in which there is glimmer of what John Szarkowski calls “ineffable dramatic possibilities.” Can it be that the capture of those small daily dramas that take place on busy streets, in alleys, and between tall buildings, can tell the story of a city as complex and unique as San Francisco? Perhaps. The story of a great city is always unfolding, and each day a page of a new chapter begins."
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Win a Solo Exhibition in February
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Call for Entries
All About Photo Awards 2026
$5,000 Cash Prizes! Juror: Steve McCurry