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Win a Solo Exhibition in April 2026 + An Exclusive Interview!
Win a Solo Exhibition in April 2026 + An Exclusive Interview!
Yael Martínez
Yael Martínez

Yael Martínez

Country: Mexico
Birth: 1984

Yael Martínez (born 1984) is a Mexican Photographer which became a Magnum Photos Nominee member in 2020. Martínez is based in Guerrero, Mexico.

Martínez's work has explored the connections between, poverty, narcotrafic, organized crime, and how this affects on the communities in his native Guerrero in southern Mexico.

He is trying to represent the relationship of absence and presence and this state of invisibility in a symbolic manner working with the concepts of pain, emptiness, absence, and forgetting.

Yael Martínez received the Magnum Emergency Fund, Magnum On religión, and was named one of the PDN´s 30 new and emerging photographers to watch in 2017. In 2015 he was selected in the Joop Joop Swart Master Class Latinoamerica and was finalist in the Eugene Smith grant in 2015, 2016.

He was nominated to the Foam Paul Huf Award, the Prix Pictet and the Infinity award of the International Center of Photography.

Source: www.yaelmartinez.com


Martínez’s work addresses fractured communities in his native Mexico. He often works symbolically to evoke a sense of emptiness, absence, and pain suffered by those affected by organized crime in the region.

He is the recipient of the Eugene Smith Award 2019, was fellow of the Photography and Social Justice Program of The Magnum Foundation. He won the 2nd Prize of the World Press Photo contests 2019 in the category of long-term projects. Martínez was grantee of the Magnum Foundation in the grants: Emergency Fund and On Religion in 2016- 2017.

His work has been featured in group shows in America, Europe, Africa and Asia.

His work has been published by: The Wall Street Journal, Blomberg news, Lens NY times, Time, Vogue Italy, Vrij Nederland, Aperture.

Source: Magnum Photos


 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Chris Anthony
Chris Anthony is an artist from Stockholm, Sweden, primarily known for his macabre and Victorian Gothic-inspired photographs. Anthony has also directed commercials for companies such as Deutsche Telekom and music videos for groups such as The Dandy Warhols. Anthony currently specializes in photography. He often uses vintage lenses produced between 1860 and 1910 to help create an "otherworldly atmosphere." He uses 5x7 and 8x10 formats in conjunction with digital scanners in order to manipulate the images in Photoshop. Chris Anthony has won several prestigious awards including: Black Book Raw - 50 Photographers 2008 Go Indie Photo Contest/PDN Stock Photo Guide 2008 - Professional Grand Prize Winner & Category Winner for "I'm the Most Normal Person I Know" The 2007 Grand Prize in the American Photo Images of the Year competition for "Victims and Avengers" First place in the music advertising category in the International Photography Awards 2007's Professional Photographer of the Year Competition. American Photography 23rd Annual 2007, My Chemical Romance "The Black Parade".Source: Wikipedia Chris Anthony's world is wonderful collection of object symbols, set design, and character development. His photographs are an intersection of Renaissance set and costume design, melted with a process that employs both antique photographic equipment and technology through post-production. His work is lush and painterly guided by deep hues of color, muted and apart in time. He creates an image that is akin to filmwork in its narrative, both cinematic and containing all the elements of a story left open-ended. His characters linger in a loosely draped studio space, a century gone by, waiting, wandering, lost in thought, casting challenge to unravel the mystery of the objects that accompany. Chris Anthony’s work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, Stockholm, Brooklyn, Hong Kong, Washington D.C., London, Bath, San Francisco and is included in many private and public collections around the world. Publications that have featured Anthony and his work include the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Photo District News, Eyemazing, Art News, American Photo, Blink, Paper, Photo+, GUP, Fraction Magazine, Nylon, Black Book, Juxtapoz, Zoom, Angeleno, Huffington Post, Corriere Della Sera and LA Weekly. Clients include Chiat/Day, Sony Playstation, Sony Music, Universal Music Group, Republic Records, Warner Music, Los Angeles Magazine, Hollywood Records, Reprise, Stuttgart City Ballet, Myspace Records, Dell and USC. Born in Sweden, Anthony currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.Source: Randall Scott Projects
Benita Mayo
United States
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Benita Mayo is a visual artist based in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is a resident artist at the McGuffey Art Center and an active member of the Charlottesville Black Arts Collective. She holds a B.A. in Rhetoric and Communications from the University of Virginia (UVA). Mayo’s work is guided by curiosity and empathy, qualities that shape both her process and subject matter. Her photographs explore the collective female experience through the lens of a Black woman navigating grief, memory, ancestry, genealogy, and trauma. By weaving personal history with broader social narratives, she examines how inherited legacies shape identity and belonging. Rooted in storytelling and social commentary, her practice stands as both testimony and tribute—illuminating overlooked histories while creating space for dialogue, reflection, and connection across communities and generations. Mayo was a 2025 Critical Mass finalist. She was the winner in the 23rd Julia Margaret Cameron Award for "Women Seeing Women" category and received Honorable Mention in the portraiture category. Mayo’s work has been featured in publications including Zeke Magazine, Lenscratch, Cuba Seen Issue 9, Virginia Quarterly Review, Canvas Rebel, Portraits The 27 Fine Art Book, A Smith Gallery, SxSE Magazine, Library of Congress, C-Ville Weekly 434 Magazine, and Charlottesville Tomorrow. Her work has been exhibited at various galleries including the Griffin Museum of Photography, The Center for Photographic Art (CFPA), the Center for Fine Art Photography (C4FAP), A Smith Gallery, Filter Photo, Social Documentary Network and several galleries in the Mid-Atlantic region. Her work has been recognized internationally and is held in private collections.
Stanley Kubrick
United States
1928 | † 1999
Stanley Kubrick (July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999) was an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and photographer. He is frequently cited as one of the greatest filmmakers in cinematic history. His films, which are mostly adaptations of novels or short stories, cover a wide range of genres and are noted for their realism, dark humor, unique cinematography, extensive set designs, and evocative use of music. Kubrick was raised in the Bronx, New York City, and attended William Howard Taft High School from 1941 to 1945. He received average grades, but displayed a keen interest in literature, photography, and film from a young age, and taught himself all aspects of film production and directing after graduating from high school. After working as a photographer for Look magazine in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he began making short films on a shoestring budget, and made his first major Hollywood film, The Killing, for United Artists in 1956. 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Imani McCray
United States
1992
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Laura Heyman
United States
Laura Heyman was born in Essex County, New Jersey. She received a B.F.A in photography from University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA, and an M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI. Heyman’s work has been exhibited at Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Deutsches Polen Institute, Darmstadt, DE, Ampersand International Arts, San Francisco, CA, Senko Studio, Viborg, DK, Silver Eye Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA, The Palitz Gallery, New York, NY, Light Work Gallery, Syracuse, NY, The Ghetto Biennale, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Philadelphia Photographic Arts Center, Philadelphia, PA, The Laguna Art Museum, Laguna, CA, The United Nations, New York, NY and The National Portrait Gallery, London, UK.In 2010, she was nominated for a John Guttman Photography Fellowship, and was awarded a Light Work Mid-Career Artist Grant. She has received the Silver Eye Fellowship, a Ragdale Fellowship and multiple NYFA Strategic Opportunity Stipends. Heyman has curated exhibitions and panel discussions at Vox Pouli, Philadelphia, PA, Wonderland Art Space, Copenhagen DK and the Clocktower Gallery, New York, NY, and her work has been reviewed and profiled in The New Yorker, Contact Sheet, Frontiers, and ARTnews.Pa Bouje Ankò: Don’t Move Again uses the studio portrait to explore embedded hierarchies between photographers, subjects and viewers. The work is driven in part by longstanding questions around photographic representation, specifically those involving the voyeurism and objectification of so-called “third world” subjects by “first world” artists. Seeking to examine these questions in depth, I established an outdoor portrait studio in the Grand Rue neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti in late November 2009. Advertisements circulated news about a photography studio in the area, where members of the local community could schedule appointments to have their portraits made for free. Working in black and white with an 8x10 camera, I photographed one hundred and twenty people over a period of two weeks.Three weeks later, the meaning of those images shifted with the earthquake. They became both records and memorials. That event also changed the focus of the project, which evolved to include various expanding populations in Port-au-Prince tied to future development and reconstruction.Issues of representation, visual sovereignty and cultural protocol, central to the project from the beginning, became more complicated after the earthquake. When I first arrived in Port-au-Prince, I imagined that positioning myself as a “studio photographer” would allow me to escape or subvert the complex tangle of hierarchies at play in Haiti, as well as in the exchange between photographer and subject. Neither has been the case. Instead, layers of meaning and intention continue to reveal themselves, expanding the project's framework and engaging the myriad contradictions and impossibilities present in the work’s original question.All about Laura Heyman:AAP: When did you realize you wanted to be a photographer?I began making photographs in high school, and knew I wanted to be a photographer before going to college.AAP: Where did you study photography?At University of the Arts in Philadelphia, I studied with Jack Carnell and Alida Fish. At Cranbrook Academy of Art, where I got my MFA, I studied with Carl Toth, and also Grant Kester, who taught Critical Theory at the school during my first year there.AAP:Do you have a mentor or role model?I don’t know that I’d say I have a mentor – there are peers I look to regularly for advice and feedback on my work.AAP: Do you remember your first shot? What was it?One of my first shots was the stream in my grandparent’s backyard in Phonecia, New York. My grandfather fished there, and my older sister and I used to run around and catch salamanders and frogs.AAP: What or who inspires you?Artists like Collier Schorr, An-My Lê, Roni Horn, Robert Adams, Mark Ruwedel, Pieter Hugo; David Shrigley, Jennifer Dalton Ai Wei Wei; Richard Mosse and Liz Cohen. I’m inspired by artists whose work makes me think, those using humor in their practice, and artists who really put themselves on the line. Books and essays, movies and performance – I’m inspired by a lot of different people and things.AAP: How could you describe your style?The visual style of my work changes according to the subject – a constant is subjects or projects that can and do express a layered viewpoint, or pose a series of questions.AAP: What kind of gear do you use? Camera, lens, digital, film?While I sometimes shoot digital, mostly I work analogue, with a medium or large format camera. Lately that has meant using Ilford HP5 black and white film with a Deardorff 8X10 camera and a 300 mm lens.AAP: Do you spend a lot of time editing your images?For me, editing (by which I mean deciding what images are included in a series, not post-production) is at least fifty percent of the job. I spend as much, if not more time editing a series as I do producing it.AAP: Favorite(s) photographer(s)?Collier Schorr, Robert Adams, Rineke Djikstra, Zoe Strauss, Luc DelahayeAAP: What advice would you give a young photographer?Know what you want. Shoot twice as much as you think you should. Be prepared to shoot and re-shoot until you get what you want.AAP: Your best memory as a photographer?A number of photographs I made of some friends while we waited in a car for the ferry. It was cold out, and we were all inside, smoking. The images captured the moment and the subjects very precisely – although this was over twenty years ago, they still have an immediacy that thrills me.AAP: Your worst souvenir as a photographer?A little while ago I was shooting some portraits on a very sunny day, and forgot to flag the lens. The negatives l ended up with were completely fogged and unusable.AAP: If you could have taken the photographs of someone else who would it be?Either Robert Adams What We Bought, or Collier Schorr’s Jens F. Both books have a real hold on me – I’m completely consumed every time I open one up. And after years of looking at them, they still surprise and fascinate me.
Sem Langendijk
The Netherlands
1990
Sem Langendijk is a documentary photographer with an interest in communities and their habitat, the urban environment and spatial arrangements. He observes the identity of a place, the impact communities have on their environments, and how space functions within the structures of a city. Langendijk shoots on large and medium format cameras, and aims to imbue his subjects with a certain tranquility. He continues to balance his work on the very narrow edge between visual storytelling and poetic personal documentation. Langendijk studied documentary photography at the Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague. In 2018, he was a recipient of the Mondrian Fund Stipendium for Emerging Artists and his work is exhibited at multiple art fairs and festivals, most recently 'The American Landscape', a group show travelling the US with The Gallery Club. He is currently working in Amsterdam, Londen and New York, on a personal body of work, continuing his research about the former Docklands. As an artist I intend to raise questions about the concept of 'the city' in our time. What role does history play in the identity of place, and feeling of belonging? How does ownership of (private) property relate to the right of the city? Through working with communities and researching their habitats I try to reveal (economical and political) systems that influence today's city life. My visual work is loosely related to social geography and anthropology, as I do field research and create visual notes. I combine this with more structured and methodological work, such as typologies. With these approaches I mean to reflect upon, as well as creating a more personal excerpt of, reality.
Sean Du
United States
1987
Sean Du is a landscape photographer whose work aims to reconnect us with nature. Born and raised in Taiwan, he developed a fondness for nature at an early age thanks to his family upbringing. He later relocated to the United States and earned a BFA in photography at ArtCenter College of Design. Sean combines his artistic practice and a passion for the wilderness to create many award-winning imageries. His works have been exhibited across the United States, in Canada, and overseas. Statement: Above the Treeline is an ongoing study that seeks to capture, by way of hiking and climbing, seldom-seen views of North America's mountain wildernesses. Where trees give way to tundra, snow, ice and rock, the power of the Earth-shaping forces becomes evident – as seen in the tilt and fold of the rocks and the remnants of valley-carving glaciers. The physical contact with million-year-old rocks puts the briefness of humans' existence into perspective, but at the same time, establishes an intimate connection between the climber and the Earth. From here, it becomes apparent why the mountains are often referred to as the “beginning places” when one sees trickles of water gaining volume downstream to support complex ecosystems below. What the mountains have returned to me is a renewed capacity for wonder, but more importantly, I hope my passion for the mountains will inspire a greater sense of connection to the land, for it is key to the protection of the places and things we depend on. AAP Magazine AAP Magazine 54 Nature
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