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Donald Graham
Donald Graham
Donald Graham

Donald Graham

Country: United States

Donald Graham is an internationally recognized portrait, fashion and fine art photographer whose work is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the International Center of Photography. He has exhibited his photography in numerous exhibitions and his photographs are held by many collectors. He is well known for his work photographing everyday people, celebrities and fashion for magazine and advertising clients including Vogue, Vanity Fair, Sports Illustrated and Time.

Donald began his career in Paris as a fashion photographer. He then moved to New York and Los Angeles where he broadened his work to include portraiture for the movie, music, editorial and advertising industries and began devoting significant time to his personal fine art work. During his career, Donald has photographed in more than forty countries, with extensive travels in India, Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe. A book of his portraits, entitled ONE OF A KIND, was published by Hatje Cantz in 2021. After 20 years in New York City, Donald is currently based in Los Angeles, California and Taos, New Mexico.

Statement
"My portraits are about honest moments that display qualities of the human character including wisdom and sensitivity, peace and vulnerability, both joy and tragedy. I seek to make portraits that are driven by one's inner dialog. I'm not interested in poses or performances for the benefit of the camera. I'm interested in what a person is like when they are their most authentic."

Authenticity, honesty, and trust characterize Donald Graham's portraits. They are not simply photographic recordings. Looking at them is like seeing human beings in the flesh, revealed to us by Graham with his virtuoso technique and sensibilities. His exquisite, strongly contrasting black-and-white photographs are evidence of attitude, rather than studied gestures. Eyes and faces are not model-like masks; instead, they express the unique nature of those portrayed. Inevitably, viewers find themselves in a dialogue with the images. You wonder about the stories behind these faces; though unfamiliar, they are nevertheless an emotional experience.

One of A Kind
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More Great Photographers To Discover

Tianhu Yuan
China
1986
Tianhu Yuan (Tales Yuan) is a self-taught Chinese visual artist based in Chengdu and Chongqing. He has a long-standing interest in ACG-related generalized Nijigen subcultural community, and aims to build a dialogue between mainstream society and subculture through his work. He also focuses on the progress of society to explore the relationship between current technology and future developments. His work has been exhibited at China 29th National Photographic Art Exhibition, RPS IPE165, Galerie Huit Arles, PHOTO IS:RAEL International Photo Festival, Jakarta International Photo Festival, PhEST Festival, Head On Photo Festival and Lishui Art Museum. He was also awarded or shortlisted from Sony World Photography Awards, Fine Art Photography Awards, BJP OpenWalls Arles, BJP Portrait of Humanity, Lucie Foundation Scholarships, PhMuseum Photography Grant, the Meitar Award for Excellence in photography and Head On Photo Awards. Self Iterating of Chongqing A traditional neighbourhood is demolished to make way for bustling shopping districts. People are digging tunnels and building bridges to build railways, leaving behind the mountains and rivers that once defined the city's character. Citizens cope with the extremes of summer in the city known as the furnace of China. It is a city of tradition, but it is also a city looking to the future. In choosing to develop, human beings leave something behind and gain something new. People believe in moving towards a better future at the moment of choice. By capturing these moments of transition and transformation, I aim to highlight the complexities of urban development and the challenges that societies face when balancing progress with environmental preservation. I try to contemplate the role of human beings in shaping our cities and the environment, and to consider the choices we make as we look towards the future. AAP Competitions All About Photo Awards 2025
Manuello Paganelli
Dominican Republic/United States
1960
I was born in the Dominican Republic and growing up in the 1960s I watched my parents devote time to help others, exposing me to the inequality of wealth, education, and the lack of mind and body wellness prevalent on our small island. It was hard for me to understand why poor children would be on the streets instead of in a warmer, safer place. I saw school-age boys like me but barefoot and shining the fancy shoes of businessmen. Scruffy kids with open hands asking for pennies. Running, begging for anything to eat, fending for themselves, and surviving on their wits alone. None of my parents' words made it better, or helped me understand what led to my country's socio-economic crisis. With my parents' humanistic influence, I figured I would become an attorney like my father or a missionary doctor. In 1972, I arrived in the US for high school without speaking any English. By my last year of college in Tennessee, I lost all desire to become a doctor, My father stopped supporting me. I found work on the assembly lines and loading docks of the local McKee Baking Company. In 1982 I bought my first camera as a way to forget my doomed career. While browsing in a bookstore I learned about a man named Ansel Adams. A few glances at Adams' powerful black-and-white landscapes left me hypnotized. Within days, I was on the telephone with Ansel. It was an innocent call but that first conversation with Ansel Adams led to many more, until we established a warm mentoring relationship that lasted until he passed away in 1984. My break into professional photography began when I was hired as a staff photographer for The Chattanooga Times in 1982. While that photojournalism experience was invaluable, I soon left for the Washington, DC area, where I began a freelance editorial photography career and from there migrated into humanistic photography. In 1989, I began traveling to Cuba to find long-lost relatives. There I learned about the social issues of the island and the survival spirit of the Cuban people, becoming increasingly aware of the socio-political climate I continued to travel there. My documentary photos from my Cuban project culminated in an exhibition in 1995, where a Washington Post columnist wrote: "Paganelli's Cuban photographs are a brilliant window on a land and people too long hidden from North American eyes... Paganelli brings an artist's eyes and a native son's sensibility to his superb photographs." My current essay project, which started in 1994, explores Black Cowboys across the USA, examining cultural and regional influences within this well developed sub-culture. Statement I never planned on becoming a professional photographer. I always thought I'd be a doctor, but during my senior year in college I began to have doubts about a career in medicine. It was around that time that I bought a Canon camera. Despite years in the business, I still possess that same excitement for the craft that gripped me the first time I picked up a camera. And, too, I maintain a passion for sharing my subjects' stories through documentary photography. My influences are the things that my eyes capture from the moment I get up, see, sense and experience and everything else beyond that with the elements of sounds , shadows and light. But I've always admired the work of Walker Evans, Henry Cartier Bresson and most notably the works of W.Eugene Smith and Robert Frank. I also love the landscape of Ansel Adams and the beautiful magical touches of the portraits done by Irving Penn.
Denis Church
United States
1949
I grew up on an Iowa (USA) farm and drove trucks, tractors, and heavy machinery at a very young age. I loved being out in the weather and open-air fields. One of my earliest memories is riding with my parents when they took a drive to look at area agricultural crops freshly planted and growing in the springtime. These trips inspired my current desire to make car trips to see the world. I studied psychology and sociology in college and was planning a career as a counseling psychologist. These experiences formed my inclination to photograph in public outdoor areas and investigate how the world is “painted and put together”. I acquired a very good expensive camera on a total whim a long time ago, and something radical shifted for me. I left graduate school six credits shy of a master’s degree to pursue the art of photography, which I intuitively felt was my path to truth, instead of the science. I have held many jobs: farm hand, gas station attendant, auto dealer parts manager, car salesman, government employee in two different states, free-lance commercial photographer, real estate investor, landlord, property developer, and photography instructor. Photography has been my main energizing activity for fifty years, for both commercial clients and for myself, pursuing and refining my personal vision of the world. My photographic aesthetic is based on observational street/documentary photography. I currently have several self-assigned documentary projects that I am pursuing. My interest is producing photo-books as a depository for my work, that have availability to future generations. AMERICOLOR - Exploring Urban Color Fields The series or project is a retrospective look at my work from 2007 to 2024. I saw a large exhibition of Color Field painters in early 2024 at The NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, Florida. A painting by Frank Stella particularly enthralled me and I was puzzled why it had such a strong hold on me. A few days later while I was editing photographs I came across my photograph, Bonita Springs, Florida 2012, and I immediately felt a connection and the reason why the Stella painting was so entrancing. I found that many of my photographs have a similar feel with layered subjects and a planar feel: some more, some less. I decided to edit a group of photographs into a book paying homage to the color field painters, therefore my title, AMERICOLOR: Exploring Urban Color Fields. Recently in 2024, I published this book in collaboration with Palm Beach Atlantic University where I also presented an exhibition of about one third of the 116 photographs in the book.
Nan Goldin
United States
1953
Nancy "Nan" Goldin is an American photographer. As a teenager in Boston in the 1960s, then in New York starting in the 1970s, Nan Goldin has taken intensely personal, spontaneous, sexual, and transgressive photographs of her family, friends, and lovers. In 1979 Nan Goldin presented her first slideshow in a New York nightclub, and her richly colored, snapshotlike photographs were soon heralded as a groundbreaking contribution to fine art photography. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency—the name she gave her ever-evolving show—eventually grew into a forty-five-minute multimedia presentation of more than 900 photographs, accompanied by a musical soundtrack. Goldin first exhibited at Matthew Marks Gallery in 1992. Her work has been the subject of two major touring retrospectives: one organized in 1996 by the Whitney Museum of American Art and another, in 2001, by the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. Recent exhibitions include the slide and video presentation Sisters, Saints & Sybils at La Chapelle de la Salpêtrière, Paris, and her contributions to the 40th Les Rencontres d'Arles in 2009. Goldin was admitted to the French Legion of Honor in 2006 and received the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in 2007. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was most recently presented live in Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London, in 2008, and the slideshow was installed in the exhibition Here is Every. Four Decades of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Modern Art New York, September 2008 to March 2009. Her Scopophilia exhibition is currently part of Patrice Chéreau's special program at the Louvre. Goldin lives and works in Paris and New York.Source: www.matthewmarks.com For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It’s a way of touching somebody—it’s a caress.... I think that you can actually give people access to their own soul. -- Nan Goldin Nancy Goldin is an American photographer and activist. Her work often explores LGBT subcultures, moments of intimacy, the HIV/AIDS crisis, and the opioid epidemic. Her most notable work is The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986), a slide show, that documents the post-Stonewall gay subculture and Goldin's family and friends. She is a founding member of the advocacy group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now). Goldin's first solo show, held in Boston in 1973, was based on her photographic journeys among the city's gay and transgender communities, to which she had been introduced by her friend David Armstrong. While living in downtown Boston at age 18, Goldin "fell in with the drag queens," living with them and photographing them. Among her work from this period is Ivy wearing a fall, Boston (1973). Unlike some photographers who were interested in psychoanalyzing or exposing the queens, Goldin admired and respected their sexuality. Goldin said, "My desire was to show them as a third gender, as another sexual option, a gender option. And to show them with a lot of respect and love, to kind of glorify them because I really admire people who can recreate themselves and manifest their fantasies publicly. I think it's brave". Goldin admitted to being romantically in love with a queen during this period of her life in a Q&A with Bomb "I remember going through a psychology book trying to find something about it when I was nineteen. There was one little chapter about it in an abnormal psych book that made it sound so ... I don't know what they ascribed it to, but it was so bizarre. And that's where I was at that time in my life. I lived with them; it was my whole focus. Everything I did – that's who I was all the time. And that's who I wanted to be". Goldin describes her life as being completely immersed in the queens'. However, upon attending the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, when her professors told her to go back and photograph queens again, Goldin admitted her work was not the same as when she had lived with them. Goldin graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1977/1978, where she had worked mostly with Cibachrome prints. Her work from this period is associated with the Boston School of Photography. Following graduation, Goldin moved to New York City. She began documenting the post-punk new-wave music scene, along with the city's vibrant, post-Stonewall gay subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s. She was drawn especially to the hard-drug subculture of the Bowery neighborhood; these photographs, taken between 1979 and 1986, form her slideshow The Ballad of Sexual Dependency—a title taken from a song in Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera. Later published as a book with help from Marvin Heiferman, Mark Holborn, and Suzanne Fletcher, these snapshot aesthetic images depict drug use, violent, aggressive couples and autobiographical moments. In her foreword to the book she describes it as a "diary [she] lets people read" of people she referred to as her "tribe". Part of Ballad was driven by the need to remember her extended family. Photography was a way for her to hold onto her friends, she hoped. The photographs show a transition through Goldin's travels and her life. Most of her Ballad subjects were dead by the 1990s, lost either to drug overdose or AIDS; this tally included close friends and often-photographed subjects Greer Lankton and Cookie Mueller. In 2003, The New York Times nodded to the work's impact, explaining Goldin had "forged a genre, with photography as influential as any in the last twenty years." In addition to Ballad, she combined her Bowery pictures in two other series: I'll Be Your Mirror (from a song by The Velvet Underground) and All By Myself. Goldin's work is most often presented in the form of a slideshow, and has been shown at film festivals; her most famous being a 45-minute show in which 800 pictures are displayed. The main themes of her early pictures are love, gender, domesticity, and sexuality. She has affectionately documented women looking in mirrors, girls in bathrooms and barrooms, drag queens, sexual acts, and the culture of obsession and dependency. The images are viewed like a private journal made public. In the book Auto-Focus, her photographs are described as a way to "learn the stories and intimate details of those closest to her". It speaks of her uncompromising manner and style when photographing acts such as drug use, sex, violence, arguments, and traveling. It references one of Goldin's notable photographs "Nan One Month After Being Battered, 1984" as an iconic image which she uses to reclaim her identity and her life. Goldin's work since 1995 has included a wide array of subject matter: collaborative book projects with Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki; New York City skylines; uncanny landscapes (notably of people in water); her lover, Siobhan; and babies, parenthood and family life. In 2000, her hand was injured and she currently retains less ability to turn it than in the past. In 2006, her exhibition, Chasing a Ghost, opened in New York. It was the first installation by her to include moving pictures, a full narrative score, and voiceover, and included the three-screen slide and video presentation Sisters, Saints, & Sybils. The work involved her sister Barbara's suicide and how she coped through the production of numerous images and narratives. Her works are developing more and more into cinemaesque features, exemplifying her gravitation towards working with films. After some time, her photos moved from portrayals of dangerous youthful abandonment to scenes of parenthood and family life in progressively worldwide settings. Source: Wikipedia
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Call for Entries
All About Photo Awards 2026
$5,000 Cash Prizes! Juror: Steve McCurry