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FINAL DAYS TO ENTER AAP MAGAZINE B&W: PUBLICATION AND $1,000 CASH PRIZES
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Umberto Verdoliva
Umberto Verdoliva
Umberto Verdoliva

Umberto Verdoliva

Country: Italy
Birth: 1961

I was born in 1961 in Castellammare di Stabia near to Naples.
I live in Treviso (Italy).
I immediately loved street photography, this awareness over time has pushed me to investigate my "daily" in depth, constantly seeking poetry and beauty in the humanity around me.
From 2010 to 2017, I was a member of the international collective "ViVo" and in 2013 I founded "SPONTANEA" an Italian collective dedicated to street photography dissolved in 2019
I like to convey my passion by curating workshops, exhibitions, portfolio readings, presentations, writing articles and insights on photography.
Many of my photos and photographic projects have been published in the main Italian and international photography magazines.
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Emmanuelle Becker
France/United States
Rania Matar
Lebanon/United States
Rania Matar was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. in 1984. As a Lebanese-born American woman and mother, her cross-cultural experience and personal narrative inform her photography. Matar's work has been widely published and exhibited in museums worldwide, including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Carnegie Museum of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, and more. A mid-career retrospective of her work was recently on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, in a solo exhibition: In Her Image: Photographs by Rania Matar She has received several grants and awards including a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in-residency grant at the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College, 2011 Legacy Award at the Griffin Museum of Photography, 2011 and 2007 Massachusetts Cultural Council artist fellowships. In 2008 she was a finalist for the Foster Award at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, with an accompanying solo exhibition. Her work is in the permanent collections of several museums, institutions and private collections worldwide. So far, she has published the following books: L'Enfant-Femme, 2016; A Girl and Her Room, 2012; Ordinary Lives, 2009, and more recently, SHE, 2021. She is currently an associate professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. SHE: As a Lebanese-born American woman and mother, my background and cross-cultural experiences inform my art. I have dedicated my work to exploring issues of personal and collective identity through photographs of female adolescence and womanhood - both in the United States where I live and the Middle East where I am from - in an effort to focus on notions of identity and individuality, within the context of the underlying universality of these experiences. In my continuous exploration of what it is like to be a girl and a woman today, in a world that poses endless questions on girls and women of all backgrounds, I am focusing in this project on young women in their late teens/early twenties. They are the ages of my daughters - they are leaving the cocoon of home, entering adulthood and facing a new reality they are often not prepared for, a humbling reality most often harder than they expected and less glamorous than what is portrayed on social media. Whereas in A Girl and Her Room, I photographed young women in relationship to the curated and controlled environment of their bedrooms, I am photographing them here in the larger environment they find themselves in after they leave home, the more global backdrop that now constitutes their lives in transitions. I want to portray the raw beauty of their age, their individuality, their physicality, their mystery, and the organic relationship they create with their environment, being in the lush landscapes of rural Ohio, or the textured backdrops of Beirut. I want to photograph them, the way I, a woman and a mother, see them: beautiful, alive. I want to create a personal narrative with them. The process is about collaboration and empowerment, and the photo session always evolves organically as the women become active participants in the image-making process. My work addresses the states of 'Becoming' - the beauty and the vulnerability of growing up - in the context of the visceral relationships to our physical environment and universal humanity. By collaborating with women in the United States and in the Middle East - and while still looking to reveal the individuality of each young woman - I focus on our essence, our physicality and the commonalities that make us human, ultimately highlighting how female subjectivity develops in parallel forms across cultural lines. Articles: Find out more about Becoming Where Do I Go?
Qingjun Huang
China
1971
A freelancer artist, photographer. He was born in 1971 in China. He has been engaged in photographic art creation for 30 years, currently lives and works in Peoria, IL USA. Qingjun's representative work is series from 2003 and it is still on-going. The series has reached 150 works till 2023. Robert Frank reviewed Qingjun’s works in 2012 and evaluated “ Your work is an open window to look at China. 'Family Stuff' contains the main series and some sub-series includes 'Online Shopping Family Stuff', 'Homeless People’s Family Stuff', 'China Intangible Cultural Heritage Inheritor’s Belongings', 'The Stuffs of Live Streamers', and 'Family Stuff USA'. BBC interviewed Qingjun four times, Various international media, such as New York Times, Bloomberg, Harvard Business Review and Wired, have also covered his works. His works have also been published widely on paper media, online media, photo books such as National Geographic, Architecture Boston, Business Insider, GEO, Chinese National Geography, Discovery Cultural Geographic Monthly, Guardian Weekend, China Daily, Chinese Photography Magazine, Grazia France, Dutch Weekly Magazine, Vrij Nederland, Dutch Financial Daily, Family Photography Now etc. Some of his works appeared in textbooks published by Oxford University Press, and National Geographic learning. Family Stuff I have been making my long-term project "Family Stuff" series for 20 years, which now includes 150 photographs. I gather a family’s belongings from different spaces in the home and arrange them in one place to take a photograph with the family members. Most of these photos are taken outdoors, with the home as the background. Ninety percent of my previous works were shot in China during a time of rapid economic development, modernization and globalization. I used this method of staged photographs to record history. In the photos, a household’s real interior space is briefly exposed in an external space; also can be seen are environment changes, urban expansion, technological advancements and shifts in people's lifestyles. Through static documentation of the above, I create a dynamic social panorama. From 2022, I started photographing American families. The family is the smallest unit that forms society, and many such units make up this society. I continue to use the "Family Stuff" series to reflect the internal structure and diversity of contemporary American society. I have observed that among American families, whether they live in big cities or small townships, there isn't much difference in their basic material living standards. Therefore, I pay more attention to showcasing their cultural and spiritual life. I spend a significant amount of time preparing for each photo, getting to know the story of the subjects, visiting their rooms, contemplating the concept of the shoot, and carefully selecting the items for display. The concepts of these works cover the lifestyle of native-born Americans, immigrants' nostalgia for their homeland, as well as themes of love, work, identity, gender and the passage of time. Each material object is carefully chosen to reflect the subject’s interests and aspirations. I move these items and arrange them in overlapping frames, visually enhancing the familiar scenes and highlighting the current life status, beliefs and emotional memories of the family or individual. In Oct.2023, I had photographed a Swiss man living in a camp, with his Harley motorbike and sports car living a different lifestyle in Switzerland, which makes me thinking about to document different lifestyles around the world as much as I can. I then came back to China and photographed two more interesting subjects in December 2023. I hope to move on to showing people’s spiritual life through their material life. Through a single photograph, I depict both the external reality and their inner world. The images help viewers to look at humanity itself, understand the stories and often provoke contemplation.
Thomas Hoepker
Germany
1936
Thomas Hoepker is a German photographer and member of Magnum Photos. He is known for stylish color photo features. He also documented the 9/11 World Trade Center destruction. Hoepker originally made a name for himself in the 1960s as a photojournalist with a desire to photograph human conditions. Hoepker was born in Munich, Germany. He first began taking pictures when he was 16 and received an old 9x12 glass plate camera from his grandfather. He developed his prints in his family's kitchen and bathroom, and began to earn a little money by selling pictures to friends and classmates. Hoepker studied art history and archaeology from 1956 to 1959 at Göttingen, in Munich, Germany, where he was taught about understanding images and composition. While in school he continued to photograph and sell images to help finance his education. From 1960 to 1963 he worked as a photographer for Münchner Illustrierte and Kristall, reporting from around the world. Then in 1964 he began working as a photojournalist for Stern. In the 1970s he also worked as a cameraman for German TV, making documentary films. In 1976 he and his wife, journalist Eva Windmoeller, relocated to New York City as correspondents for Stern. From 1978 to 1981 he was director of photography for American Geo. From 1987 to 1989 Hoepker was based in Hamburg, working as art director for Stern. Magnum Photos first began distributing Hoepker's photographs in 1964. He became a full member in 1989. He served as Magnum President from 2003 to 2006. For much of his career Hoepker used Leica cameras. In the 1970s he began to also use single-lens reflex cameras alongside his Leica, using Leicas for wide angle shots and Nikon or Canon cameras with zoom lenses. In 2002 he began using digital SLRs. Today, Hoepker lives in New York City with his second wife Christine Kruchen, with whom he produces TV documentaries.Source: Wikipedia
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Latest Interviews

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