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Jefferson Caine Lankford
Jefferson Caine Lankford
Jefferson Caine Lankford

Jefferson Caine Lankford

Country: United States
Birth: 1993

Jefferson Caine Lankford is a photographer born and currently based in the United States. He uses a range of photographic techniques including alternative, analog, and digital practices. Jefferson earned a BFA in photography at East Carolina University in 2016 and also attended the Australian National University, located in Canberra, Australia - where he studied documentary photography. His work focuses on a variety of subjects, ranging from environmental concerns and foreign cultures to the various aspects of the American South, such as agriculture, poverty, and society.

To Be, Rather Than to Seem
The American South has an essence that sparingly reveals itself, thus requiring unprecedented determination and patience to photograph all its splendor. Nevertheless, and despite its elusiveness, this essence I am chasing - permeates; it lingers in the air of North Carolina, and when discovered, puts on a magnificent display. This essence appears in the eyes of a jet-black cat within an abandoned barn: it agonizes within the face of an elderly Amish man; it breathes deep within the shadow of a stray dog crossing a back road; it flourishes within the wings of starlings above a farm after heavy rain; it shines on a dilapidated door in the middle of nowhere, and it tirelessly works in the tobacco fields without complaint.

Over the past three years, I have traveled throughout many impoverished towns and across countless acres of farmland to document and share an original story of existence - life and death as it occurs in rural North Carolina. The photographs within this ongoing project, To Be, Rather Than to Seem - provides a window for others to witness these fleeting moments for themselves and embrace the beautiful raw essence of my homeland.

 

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Virginia Hines
United States
Virginia Hines started photographing during high school, working part-time for the local newspaper where her parents were editors, and later studied photography with notable artists including Harvey Stein, Bruce Gilden, Alex Webb, and Geoff Winningham. She is a frequent contributor to Street Photography Magazine and their podcasts featured her in April 2021 and May 2022. She also wrote the introductory essay for Harvey Stein's latest book of street photography, Coney Island People: 50 Years. Her photographs have appeared in many print and digital publications and have been exhibited in group shows across the U.S. and in Europe. You can follow her progress on Instagram @vhines_photos and on her web site. Statement For me, photography is about making connections, most importantly, connections with other people. Even in brief interactions, there is a potential connection, a communication, that can create bonds with individuals from a variety of circumstances. Photography is an outlet for my enduring curiosity about people. There is also the challenge of making visual and conceptual connections within the confines of the frame. Photography provides a means of playing with the inescapable yet elusive dimension of time, which has fascinated me ever since I learned there was meaning to exactly how the hands were positioned on the face of a clock. I have been trying to “tell time” ever since. Finally, photography gives me a way to explore mysteries and discover order and beauty in everyday life. Often enough, life does not seem beautiful, but sometimes a photograph will bring to light qualities that lie beneath the surface. I treasure these small epiphanies and the tools photography provides for bringing them to light.
Anna Grevenitis
France / United States
1974
French-born visual artist Anna Grevenitis found photography in a meandering way: her formative years were filled with the study and teaching of the English language and literature, but when her daughter was born--and a year later her son--her world naturally morphed into full-time mothering. Drawing on the experiences of the domestic to inform her daily practice, she uses her home as a stage and her body and the body of others in her familial sphere as characters to deliver, in her photographs, the essence of what she wants to express about family and the self. For her work, the act of performing is an essential step in image making. Nowadays she divides her time between research and creation, and she is interested in building long term projects in photography as an act of establishing visual memory and engaging in social visibility. Her photographs have been exhibited both in the United States and internationally. Statement REGARD /ʁə.ɡaʁ/ verb 1. To consider or think of (someone or something) in a specified way. When my daughter was born, I was told that she had the “physical markers” for Down syndrome. A few days later, the diagnosis of Trisomy 21 was confirmed with a simple blood test. Today, years later, Luigia is a lively teenager, yet these “markers” have grown with her, and her disability remains visible to the outside world. As we try to go about our ordinary lives in our community--getting ice cream after school, going grocery shopping or walking to the local library--I often catch people staring, gawking, or side-glancing at her, at us. Even though their gaze feels invasive, I perceive it as more questioning than judging, at least most of the time. With this on-going series REGARD, I am opening a window into our reality. To emphasize control over my message, these everyday scenes are meticulously set, lit up; they are staged and posed. The performers are my daughter and me. The double self-portraits are purposefully developed in black and white, for by refusing the decorative and emotionally evocative element of color, I aim to maintain a distance between us and them. The composition of the photographs expresses routine, domestic acts in which I address the viewers directly: look at us bathing; look at us grooming; here we are at bedtime; this is us on a random day at the beach. In each scene, the viewers are plunged into the outside perspective. At first glance, it may seem that I am offering us as vulnerable prey to their judgment, yet in fact I am guarding our lives, and the viewers are caught gawking--my direct gaze at the camera. My series is very basic in its concept: it shows a child, it shows a mother, it shows them living at home, performing familial acts. Because I believe in the connective power offered by the depiction of domesticity, I hope that REGARD helps the audience rethink some of their assumptions about people living with disabilities and with this, I hope my series finds a humble spot within the movement that helps people with disabilities gain visibility.
Hector Acebes
United States/Spain
1921 | † 2017
Hector Acebes was an American photographer, notable for his expeditions to Africa and South America. He was born in 1921 in New York City, and spent most of his childhood in Madrid (Spain) and Bogotá (Colombia). He went on his first long-distance voyage at the age of thirteen, going 400 miles from Bogota to the city of Barranquilla when he ran from home to "sail around the world". He was trained at the New York Military Academy and would serve in the US army in World War II on the European front. He studied engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and graduated in 1947. He married Madeline Acebes in Boston, and they would have a son and two daughters. His first major photographic expedition was to North Africa in 1947. He embarked on a second trip to West Africa, specifically Timbuktu in 1949. Between 1950 and 1953, he embarked on several expeditions to the Orinoco River in Venezuela, and to other parts of South America. He went on his final, most extensive African expedition in 1953, going throughout the continent, from Dakar to Zanzibar. After this, he began a career as an industrial filmmaker for engineering projects throughout South America. In his final years Acebes lived in Bogota, and worked on creating the Hector Acebes Archive. He died in Bogota on 22 April 2017. Acebes's African photographs are often viewed as a departure from colonial anthropologists such as Casimir Zagourski, in whose footsteps he followed. He himself rejected the label of "anthropologist", seeking to distance himself from its colonial connotations. The work of many previous photographers was often in service to the European colonization of Africa, and sought to document Africans as colonial subjects, Acebes's portraits gave the subjects more agency to pose, express emotions and individuality, thus departing from this tradition to an extent. Hector Acebes thus existed in a transitional area between colonial anthropologists, and concurrently emerging native African photographers such as Seydou Keïta, in terms of the agency and depiction of Africans within his work.Source: Wikipedia Hector Acebes was born in New York City in 1921. He was raised in Madrid, Spain, and attended the Colegio del Pilar. His family moved to Bogotá, Colombia, where he attended the Gimnasio Moderno. Acebes returned to the United States for high school at the New York Military Academy. He gained much of his technical photographic skill by participating in the school’s camera club and through study and practice on his own. After graduating from the Chauncey Hall School in Boston, he entered Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study engineering. While in college, he maintained his own photo studio. During World War II, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in Germany. On his return, he completed his degree at MIT and then moved with his wife to Bogotá. He has a son and two daughters. Throughout the late 1940s and the 1950s, Acebes took expeditions through Africa and South America and started his work as a professional filmmaker and lecturer. By the late 1950s, Acebes Productions had established a reputation for creating excellent documentary and industrial films. Acebes wrote, filmed, directed, and edited each of the forty-three films Acebes Productions released. Hector Acebes died at the age of 96 on April 22, 2017 in Bogotá. For the last ten years, the Hector Acebes Archives has been active in bringing Acebes' work to the attention of galleries, collectors, and museums. It is managed by Ed Marquand.Source: Hector Acebes Archives
Alexandro Pelaez
Venezuela
1977
Alexandro Pelaez is a Caracas-born analogue photographer based in London with a BA in Communication (Advertising) at Jacksonville University in Florida and was headhunted as an art director in the advertising agency BVK Meka in Miami. Having moved to London in 2001, where he completed his second BA (Hons) in Graphic at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, Alexandro has worked over the years on various photography projects with different clients in the UK, Latvia, Germany, Italy, France, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Shanghai and USA. In 2014 Alexandro received the Highly Commended Award by the London Photographic Association for his "HEROES & VILLAINS". In 2017 Alexandro was the finalist with the "Londoners" series at the ACCI "Art of Living" Photography Competition in California, and won two Honourable Mentions by International Photographer of the Year for both categories of Fine Art: Conceptual and People: Portrait; and by Density Neutral Photography Awards for the category Fine Art: Conceptual. Recently, Alexandro received three Honourable Mention Awards by the IPA International Photography Awards in New York (2019) with the OneShot Street Photography competition New York (single image) Category: Specials; also received the Finalist Award by the Fine Art Photography Awards (2019) Category: Cityscape (series). Alexandro received the 2nd place award by the IPA International Photography Award 2019 in New York in the category of: Analogue/ Film, Other. Artist Statement "When I am shooting in double exposure with my 35mm film camera, in my way and style, I am trying to capture the true essence of a city or an area. What I want to convey is my perspective of “what you see is what you get" by capturing those unique moments when I catch an image. The double exposure allows me to capture all that but can take my images to a different level where I can be more creative by holding double layered scenarios that will give the viewer a magical, almost surreal perspective and sense of unnatural futurism." Alexandro Pelaez and the Magical in the Realism
Josephine Sacabo
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Artist Statement: "I believe in Art as a means of transcendence and connection. My images are simply what I’ve made from what I have been given. I hope they have done justice to their sources and that they will, for a moment, ‘stay the shadows of contentment too short lived.’” Sacabo divides her time between New Orleans and Mexico. Both places inform her work, resulting in imagery that is as dreamlike, surreal, and romantic as the places that she calls home. Born in Laredo, Texas, in 1944, she was educated at Bard College in New York. Prior to coming to New Orleans, Sacabo lived and worked extensively in France and England. Her earlier work was in the photo-journalistic tradition and influenced by Robert Frank, Josef Koudelka, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. She now works in a very subjective, introspective style, using poetry as the genesis for her work. Her many portfolios are visual manifestations of the written word, and she lists poets as her most important influences, including Rilke, Baudelaire, Pedro Salinas, Vincente Huiobro, and Juan Rulfo, Mallarmé, and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. Her images transfer the viewer into a world of constructed beauty. During her 36 year career her work has been featured in over 40 gallery and museum exhibitions in the U.S., Europe and Mexico. She has been the recipient of multiple awards and is included in the permanent collections of the George Eastman House, the International Center of Photography, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and la Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France. Source: josephinesacabo.com
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United States
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Esther Bubley was an American photographer who specialized in expressive photos of ordinary people in their everyday life. She worked for several agencies of the American government and her work was also featured in multiple news and photographic magazines. Bubley was born in Phillips, Wisconsin, the fourth of five children of Russian Jewish immigrants Louis and Ida Bubley. In 1936, while Esther was a senior at Central High School in Superior, Wisconsin, the photo magazine Life first hit the newsstands. Inspired by the magazine, and particularly by the pictures of the Great Depression produced by the Farm Security Administration, she developed a passion for photojournalism and documentary photography. As editor-in-chief of the yearbook, she sought to emulate the style of Life. After high school, Bubley spent two years at Superior State Teachers College (now the University of Wisconsin–Superior) before enrolling in the one-year photography program at the Minneapolis School of Art (now the Minneapolis College of Art and Design). After college in 1941, Bubley moved to Washington, D.C. seeking work as a photographer. Failing to find a job in Washington, Bubley moved to New York City. During the 1941 Christmas season, she landed a position at Vogue in New York, but she didn't like the work. Early in 1942, she returned to Washington when she was offered a job as a microfilmer for the National Archives and Records Administration. In the fall of 1942, Roy Stryker hired her as a darkroom assistant at the Office of War Information (OWI), where his photographic unit had recently been transferred from the Farm Security Administration. With the encouragement of Stryker, and some of the more senior photographers, she moved to take pictures for the OWI historical section, documenting life on the home front during the war. Her most challenging assignment was a noted series on the bus system in the Midwest and South. In late 1943, when Stryker left the OWI to work on a public relations project for the Standard Oil Company (New Jersey), she accompanied him, along with other photographers, including Gordon Parks and John Vachon. The Bus Story series she produced for Standard Oil, a reprise of her earlier Bus Story for the OWI, earned the award for Best Picture Sequence in the Encyclopædia Britannica/University of Missouri School of Journalism "News Pictures of the Year" in 1948. During this period, she was briefly married to Edwin Locke, Stryker's administrative chief, but they soon divorced. By 1947, Bubley was expanding her horizons beyond Stryker and Standard Oil. She began working for the Children's Bureau, a federal child welfare agency. Over the next several years, she contributed thousands of images to their files, and her work appeared on more than thirty covers of their journal The Child. In 1949, Bubley's photo essay on mental illness for the Ladies' Home Journal was given the first place award for a feature in the Encyclopædia Britannica/University of Missouri School of Journalism contest, winning Bubley a second set of the Encyclopedia. She continued working for the Ladies' Home Journal, producing a dozen photo stories for their celebrated series "How America Lives," which ran intermittently between 1948 and 1960. In 1951, Bubley began to freelance for Life, eventually contributing 40 photo stories, including two cover stories. Bubley was one of the first women to successfully support herself by working as a freelance photographer for major magazines. In 1951, she also produced a series on the Pittsburgh Children's Hospital for Stryker, who was then establishing the Pittsburgh Photographic Library. Edward Steichen, Directory of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), used 13 prints from this series in the 1952 exhibition Diogenese with a Camera. He also mounted and displayed her contact sheets to show how she used every frame. This series led to medical themes becoming a major part of her portfolio. In 1953, she was hired by UNICEF and the French government to travel to Morocco to photograph a program to treat trachoma, an infectious disease that causes blindness. Bubley entered a photo from this assignment in the international division of a contest sponsored by Photography magazine in 1954. She became the first woman to win first place, and she received a trophy depicting a male photographer. In 1955, Steichen included her work in his monumental The Family of Man exhibition. A year later, Pepsi-Cola International hired Bubley to cover Latin America for their company magazine Panorama. In the mid-1960s, Pan American World Airways sent her around the world twice to make images for their corporate photographic library. In the late 1960s, Bubley reduced her workload as sales of photographic magazines declined, and she wearied off the grueling travel schedule. She spent more time at home in New York City where she pursued projects of personal interest, producing two children's books about animals and a book featuring macro photography of plants. A devoted animal lover, she spent her mornings in Central Park walking her dog, taking photographs, and making notes that she hoped to turn into a book about the park. In 1991 the Minneapolis College of Art and Design awarded Bubley an honorary doctorate. She died in New York City, of cancer, on March 16, 1998. In 2001 a retrospective exhibition of Bubley's work appeared at the UBS Art Gallery in New York City. In 2005 Aperture Foundation published a monograph about Bubley, Esther Bubley: On Assignment by photographic historian Bonnie Yochelson with Tracy A. Schmid, archivist for the Bubley Estate. In 2010, the Library of Congress published the monograph Fields of Vision: The Photographs of Esther Bubley.Source: Wikipedia
MG Vander Elst
Belgium/United States
1967
Raised In Antwerp, Belgium, MG Vander Elst is a Fine Art Photographer and holds a Certificate of Photography from The Portfolio Center in Atlanta, Ga. She worked as a photographer’s assistant in NYC and developed her Portraiture work which later expanded to include, still life, abstract and landscape work. Art was all around her growing up in Antwerp, where she regularly visited the Ruben’s house, studied the Dutch Masters, and shared her parents love for Modern Art. The light, gesture and intimacy of the Dutch masters and the minimalism of modernists still influence her work. MG’s fine art photography approach is intuitive, stemming from an idea or an emotion. Whether photographing landscape, florals or abstracts she tries to make visible what is invisible, pursuing that intimate moment between inhale and exhale. Statement MG’s latest work in florals, still life and abstract work all stem from the same place, a place of loss, identity and forging ahead. Letting go "Floral images are my new center, I use flowers that I encounter in my neighborhood and local shops, it is no surprise to learn that these flowers embody the range of emotions I have been going through, like remembrance, growth, healing, refuge, and love. Through this process I am learning that photographing the simple lines and daintiness of these flowers they become an exercise in form, in juxtapositions and in letting go. In closely observing the shifting shapes of these living forms, who then transition, mature, and wilt I witness the contrasting paradox in beauty when blossoming or dying combined with their shaggy stalk and the petal’s ethereal texture which generates this visual dissonance that captivate me. I am not frozen and no longer afraid, but instead I am finding a rise of energy in this newfound freedom of moving in a place I have never been." Finding my Way "At the onset of the Pandemic, I lost my mother, simultaneously, my eldest son was preparing to leave for college. With the loss of my mother, I became the adult, the matriarch. The guidance I trusted and the intimacy I relied on was gone, that comfort of being the child vanished. With the anticipation of my son’s departure, I was thrusted into an uncharted emotional landscape, one where I felt undefined as a mother and did not know how to move forward. So, returning to myself and turning the camera onto my body is my way forward. By abstracting my body, I examine the shapes and textures of my form; in this pause, I am able to explore and chart my new emotional landscape. This way I am relearning who I am in order to know where I am going." Conformity "When I am creating still life’s in my own domestic spaces or in my studio. I am asking questions about my life today, as a woman, as mother and as a spouse. Whose ideas about myself am I conforming to? Why do I possess a pink razor, Is this herbal tea really soothing me? By calling attention to the everyday mundane possessions, we surround ourselves with, my intention is clear from the start. In certain instances, I juxtapose them with random objects, or I deliberately leave them by themselves. But by posing these objects in specific places I am adding a tension to the image and the one-dimensional image becomes a multi-dimensional exploration of the time we live in. I am making room for consideration, focusing on what that object means to us and what it evokes in us and why we surround ourselves with it. I aim to create a pause." AAP Magazine: AAP Magazine 26 Shapes Article Silences
Yoni Blau
Israel
1982
I consider myself a travel photographer, but my primary focus is on people and cultures rather than nature, landscape and wildlife. I was fortunate enough to be able to spend a good amount of time traveling and I genuinely wish I will be able to keep exploring this beautiful planet of ours and the fascinatingly different cultures around the globe. Proud Women of the Omo Valley This project ("Proud Women of the Omo Valley") was taken inside a Suri tribe in the Omo Valley in Southern Ethiopia. The models were not dressed, simply recorded as is. No artificial lighting was used. The pictures with the black backdrop were taken within a dark tent with the light coming in from the entrance of the tent. In the Omo Valley, it feels as if time has no meaning. Days, months, seasons and years are irrelevant in this timeless corner of the world. Same goes for the concept of money, or the modern angst that comes with intellectual pursuit of the meaning of life and death. There, it's about life's essentials. It's about freedom and bare necessities. About being satisfied, joyful and surrounded by loved ones. I tried capturing the essence of what it means to be "stuck in time" which made me keep wondering whether they were left behind or whether the modern world is the one who made the wrong turn. This project taken in Dec 2019 feels more current than ever, especially in times like these with the Covid-19 global health crisis and the economic downturn, when we all got to spend some alone time and got back in touch with our most basic human needs and what "really matters".
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