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Randy Bacon
Randy Bacon
Randy Bacon

Randy Bacon

Country: United States

Randy is an American photographer with an extensive history in portrait, commercial and documentary photography, both motion and still. Randy is also co-founder and artist behind all of the photography and cinematography of the nonprofit, people empowering story movement, 7 Billion Ones

Randy has pursued photography professionally since 1984 and is in high demand with a client base extending worldwide. He travels to destinations across the United States, as well as numerous countries for projects. At the core of Randy's photography is the ability to present emotive visual stories with an underlying sense of narrative. His unique style reflects elements of influential film noir and old masters in painting and photography - Randy is especially influenced by photographers such as Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Diane Arbus, Ed Weston and others. Considering these influences, the connecting thread is the unending artistic mission to capture the art of people In their real, authentic, raw self. For Randy, this simple, yet complex, truth, "you were born an original", is still the creative seed that continues to grow his artistry for photography and film.

In 2011, Randy expanded into the motion picture arena. Almost instantly he secured multiple commercial film projects. In 2012, his film career exploded with the release of his directorial and production debut, "The Last Days of Extraordinary Lives". The movie garnered a significant amount of coverage and awards, including having the film being broadcast on PBS to rave reviews. "The Last Days of Extraordinary Lives" ran the film festival circuit and accumulated an impressive fifteen film festival official selections and won fourteen awards, including Best Documentary, Best Picture and Best Director. Shortly thereafter, Randy released his second full-length documentary, "Man Up and Go" which received official selection to nine national/international film festivals. Both films are signed to Academy Award winning film company, Earthworks Films, and are distributed nationally by Filmrise.

In 2015, Randy founded and launched the nonprofit humanitarian story movement, 7 Billion Ones, which documents lives, shares stories, connects community and empowers mankind. 7 Billion Ones is fully dedicated to using the art of photography, motion films, and written words to present people's unique stories in an artful, raw, impacting form, so that human transformation occurs exponentially. The story movement reaches a worldwide audience via sharing and connecting people through the enormous power of the world wide web. In consideration of Randycs ongoing work with 7 Billion Ones and other humanitarian projects, he was named as Presidential Social Change Artist in Residence at Saybrook University. In addition, Randy won the Award for Homeless Advocacy with the Alliance to End Homelessness.

The Road I call Home
For over 35 years I have explored the art of portraiture and I am still mesmerized by photography just like when I got my first camera at 15. It's a love affair that not only endured, but has grown as an essential part of my being. I am more in awe of photography as an art form each day.

As a photographer and filmmaker, I have always been intrigued by the fact that each and every person is a one-of-a-kind original - a never before created miracle. This simple, yet complex truth, "we are ALL original miracles'' is the creative seed that flames my passion for photography and represents the connecting thread with all of my work. Over the years, I have photographed thousands upon thousands of people, across America and around the world, propelled by an infinite fascination and commitment as a photographic artist to capture the miracle of each person - the 'ones' on this planet of over 7 billion. I am finding that after all of these many years, of tending to my relationship between me and this thing called a camera that I am artistically driven more and more by people and their stories. With my photography, no matter the walk of life, I strive to present each 'one' in an authentic, no frills manner as to truly relay their inherent beauty, uniqueness and value. With the narratives, I provide the accepting, safe place, so each person can truthfully share their raw, unfiltered story. In the end, I hope the work will punch people in the heart and help create positive change, new understandings of humanity and connection within our world. This is my mission.

The Road I Call Home is a powerfully direct extension of my mission - portraits that reveal their special qualities and dignity versus stereotypical attitudes and perceptions society commonly has of homelessness and often presented by the media. The impetus for this approach relates directly to my own life - I was guilty of being negative and uncompassionate towards the homeless. Yes, I judged the book by the cover; however as I opened the pages of each homeless person's life I saw the enlightening truth - homeless people are important 'ones' in this world of 7 billion and deserve love and compassion.

The Road I Call Home represents my most ambitious single project to date. What began as a small idea to photograph a handful of homeless people now stands at over 170 homeless lives recorded via portraits, stories and short films. The Road I Call Home continues its path as we push forward chronicling more of our homeless friends' lives. The project has been exhibited at numerous museums and galleries, including several states, with more being planned. A corresponding coffee table art book for The Road I Call Home was published in 2021.

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Man Ray
United States
1890 | † 1976
Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky) was an American visual artist who spent most of his career in Paris. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. He produced major works in a variety of media but considered himself a painter above all. He was best known for his pioneering photography, and was a renowned fashion and portrait photographer. He is also noted for his work with photograms, which he called "rayographs" in reference to himself. During his career, Man Ray allowed few details of his early life or family background to be known to the public. He even refused to acknowledge that he ever had a name other than Man Ray. Man Ray's birth name was Emmanuel Radnitzky. He was born in South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on August 27, 1890. He was the eldest child of Russian Jewish immigrants Melach "Max" Radnitzky, a tailor, and Manya "Minnie" Radnitzky (née Lourie or Luria). He had a brother, Sam, and two sisters, Dorothy "Dora" and Essie (or Elsie), the youngest born in 1897 shortly after they settled at 372 Debevoise St. in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. In early 1912, the Radnitzky family changed their surname to Ray. Man Ray's brother chose the surname in reaction to the ethnic discrimination and antisemitism prevalent at the time. Emmanuel, who was called "Manny" as a nickname, changed his first name to Man and gradually began to use Man Ray as his name. I photograph what I do not wish to paint and I paint what I cannot photograph. -- Man Ray Man Ray's father worked in a garment factory and ran a small tailoring business out of the family home. He enlisted his children to assist him from an early age. Man Ray's mother enjoyed designing the family's clothes and inventing patchwork items from scraps of fabric. Man Ray wished to disassociate himself from his family background, but their tailoring left an enduring mark on his art. Mannequins, flat irons, sewing machines, needles, pins, threads, swatches of fabric, and other items related to tailoring appear in almost every medium of his work. Art historians have noted similarities between Ray's collage and painting techniques and styles used for tailoring. His education at Brooklyn's Boys' High School from 1904 to 1909 provided him with solid grounding in drafting and other basic art techniques. While he attended school, he educated himself with frequent visits to the local art museums, where he studied the works of the Old Masters. After his graduation, Ray was offered a scholarship to study architecture but chose to pursue a career as an artist. Man Ray's parents were disappointed by their son's decision to pursue art, but they agreed to rearrange the family's modest living quarters so that Ray's room could be his studio. The artist remained in the family home over the next four years. During this time, he worked steadily towards becoming a professional painter. Man Ray earned money as a commercial artist and was a technical illustrator at several Manhattan companies. The surviving examples of his work from this period indicate that he attempted mostly paintings and drawings in 19th-century styles. He was already an avid admirer of contemporary avant-garde art, such as the European modernists he saw at Alfred Stieglitz's "291" gallery and works by the Ashcan School. However, with a few exceptions, he was not yet able to integrate these trends into his own work. The art classes he sporadically attended, including stints at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League, were of little apparent benefit to him. When he enrolled in the Ferrer School in the autumn of 1912, he began a period of intense and rapid artistic development. While living in New York City, Man Ray was influenced by the avant-garde practices of European contemporary artists he was introduced to at the 1913 Armory Show and in visits to Alfred Stieglitz's "291" art gallery. His early paintings display facets of cubism. After befriending Marcel Duchamp, who was interested in showing movement in static paintings, his works began to depict movement of the figures. An example is the repetitive positions of the dancer's skirts in The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows (1916). In 1915, Man Ray had his first solo show of paintings and drawings after he had taken up residence at an art colony in Grantwood, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York City. His first proto-Dada object, an assemblage titled Self-Portrait, was exhibited the following year. He produced his first significant photographs in 1918, after initially picking up the camera to document his own artwork. Man Ray abandoned conventional painting to involve himself with Dada, a radical anti-art movement. He published two Dadaist periodicals, and each only had one issue, The Ridgefield Gazook (1915) and TNT (1919), the latter co-edited by Adolf Wolff and Mitchell Dawson. He started making objects and developed unique mechanical and photographic methods of making images. For the 1918 version of Rope Dancer, he combined a spray-gun technique with a pen drawing. Like Duchamp, he worked with readymade—ordinary objects that are selected and modified. His Gift readymade (1921) is a flatiron with metal tacks attached to the bottom, and Enigma of Isidore Ducasse is an unseen object (a sewing machine) wrapped in cloth and tied with cord. Aerograph (1919), another work from this period, was done with airbrush on glass. In 1920, Man Ray helped Duchamp make the Rotary Glass Plates, one of the earliest examples of kinetic art. It was composed of glass plates turned by a motor. That same year, Man Ray, Katherine Dreier, and Duchamp founded the Société Anonyme, an itinerant collection that was the first museum of modern art in the U.S. In 1941 the collection was donated to Yale University Art Gallery. Man Ray teamed up with Duchamp to publish one issue of New York Dada in 1920. For Man Ray, Dada's experimentation was no match for the wild and chaotic streets of New York. He wrote that "Dada cannot live in New York. All New York is dada, and will not tolerate a rival." In 1913, Man Ray met his first wife, the Belgian poet Adon Lacroix (Donna Lecoeur) (1887–1975), in New York. They married in 1914, separated in 1919, and formally divorced in 1937. In July 1921, Man Ray went to live and work in Paris, France. He soon settled in the Montparnasse quarter favored by many artists. His accidental rediscovery of the cameraless photogram, which he called "rayographs", resulted in mysterious images hailed by Tristan Tzara as "pure Dada creations". Shortly after arriving in Paris, he met and fell in love with Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin), an artists' model and celebrated character in Paris bohemian circles. Kiki was Man Ray's companion for most of the 1920s. She became the subject of some of his most famous photographic images, and starred in his experimental films Le Retour à la Raison and L'Étoile de mer. In 1929, he began a love affair with the Surrealist photographer Lee Miller. She also was his photographic assistant and together, they reinvented the photographic technique of solarization. Miller left him in 1932. From late 1934 until August 1940, Man Ray was in a relationship with Adrienne Fidelin. She was a Guadeloupean dancer and model and she appears in many of his photographs. When Ray fled the Nazi occupation in France, Adrienne chose to stay behind to care for her family. Unlike the artist's other significant muses, until 2022, Fidelin had largely been written out of his life story. Man Ray was a pioneering photographer in Paris for two decades between the wars. Significant members of the art world, such as Pablo Picasso, Tristan Tzara, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí, Peggy Guggenheim, Bridget Bate Tichenor, Luisa Casati, and Antonin Artaud, posed for his camera. Man Ray's international fame as a portrait photographer is reflected in a series of photographs of Maharajah Yashwant Rao Holkar II and his wife Sanyogita Devi from their visit to Europe in 1927. In the winter of 1933, surrealist artist Méret Oppenheim, known for her fur-covered teacup, posed nude for Man Ray in a well-known series of photographs depicting her standing next to a printing press. His practice of photographing African objects in the Paris collections of Paul Guillaume and Charles Ratton and others led to several iconic photographs, including Noire et blanche. As Man Ray scholar Wendy A. Grossman has illustrated, "no one was more influential in translating the vogue for African art into a Modernist photographic aesthetic than Man Ray." Man Ray was represented in the first Surrealist exhibition with Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso at the Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1925. Important works from this time were a metronome with an eye, originally titled Object to Be Destroyed, and the Violon d'Ingres, a stunning photograph of Kiki de Montparnasse, styled after the painter/musician Ingres. Violon d'Ingres is a popular example of how Man Ray could juxtapose disparate elements in his photography to generate meaning. Man Ray directed a number of influential avant-garde short films, known as Cinéma Pur. He directed Le Retour à la Raison (2 mins, 1923); Emak-Bakia (16 mins, 1926); L'Étoile de Mer (15 mins, 1928); and Les Mystères du Château de Dé (27 mins, 1929). Man Ray also assisted Marcel Duchamp with the cinematography of his film Anemic Cinema (1926), and Ray personally manned the camera on Fernand Léger's Ballet Mécanique (1924). In René Clair's film Entr'acte (1924), Man Ray appeared in a brief scene playing chess with Duchamp. Duchamp, Man Ray, and Francis Picabia were all friends and collaborators, connected by their experimental, entertaining, and innovative art. The Second World War forced Man Ray to return from Paris to the United States. He lived in Los Angeles from 1940 to 1951 where he focused his creative energy on painting. A few days after arriving in Los Angeles, he met Juliet Browner, a first-generation American of Romanian-Jewish lineage. She was a trained dancer who studied dance with Martha Graham, and an experienced artists' model. They married in 1946 in a double wedding with their friends Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. In 1948 Ray had a solo exhibition at the Copley Galleries in Beverly Hills, which brought together a wide array of work and featured his newly painted canvases of the Shakespearean Equations series. Man Ray returned to Paris in 1951, and settled with Juliet into a studio at 2 bis rue Férou near the Luxembourg Gardens in St. Germain-des-Prés, where he continued his creative practice across mediums. During the last quarter century of his life, he returned to a number of his iconic earlier works, recreating them in new form. He also directed the production of limited-edition replicas of several of his objects, working first with Marcel Zerbib and later Arturo Schwarz. In 1963, he published his autobiography, Self-Portrait (republished in 1999). Ray continued to work on new paintings, photographs, collages and art objects till his death. Retrieved August 19, 2022. He died in Paris on November 18, 1976, from a lung infection. He was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris. His epitaph reads "Unconcerned, but not indifferent". When Juliet died in 1991, she was interred in the same tomb. Her epitaph reads "Together again". Juliet organized a trust for Ray's work and donated much of his work to museums. Her plans to restore the studio as a public museum proved too expensive; such was the structure's disrepair. Most of the contents were stored at the Centre Pompidou.Source: Wikipedia Speaking of nudes, I have always had a great fondness for this subject, both in my paintings and in my photos, and I must admit, not for purely artistic reasons. -- Man Ray “I have finally freed myself from the sticky medium of paint, and am working directly with light itself.” So enthused Man Ray in 1922, shortly after his first experiments with camera-less photography. He remains well known for these images, commonly called photograms but which he dubbed "rayographs" in a punning combination of his own name and the word “photograph.” Man Ray’s artistic beginnings came some years earlier, in the Dada movement. Shaped by the trauma of World War I and the emergence of a modern media culture—epitomized by advancements in communication technologies like radio and cinema—Dada artists shared a profound disillusionment with traditional modes of art making and often turned instead to experimentations with chance and spontaneity. In The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows, Man Ray based the large, color-block composition on the random arrangement of scraps of colored paper scattered on the floor. The painting evinces a number of interests that the artist would carry into his photographic work: negative space and shadows; the partial surrender of compositional decisions to accident; and, in its precise, hard-edged application of unmodulated color, the removal of traces of the artist’s hand. In 1922, six months after he arrived in Paris from New York, Man Ray made his first rayographs. To make them, he placed objects, materials, and sometimes parts of his own or a model's body onto a sheet of photosensitized paper and exposed them to light, creating negative images. This process was not new—camera-less photographic images had been produced since the 1830s—and his experimentation with it roughly coincided with similar trials by Lázló Moholy-Nagy. But in his photograms, Man Ray embraced the possibilities for irrational combinations and chance arrangements of objects, emphasizing the abstraction of images made in this way. He published a selection of these rayographs—including one centered around a comb, another containing a spiral of cut paper, and a third with an architect’s French curve template on its side—in a portfolio titled Champs délicieux in December 1922, with an introduction written by the Dada leader Tristan Tzara. In 1923, with his film Le Retour à la raison (Return to Reason), he extended the rayograph technique to moving images. Around the same time, Man Ray’s experiments with photography carried him to the center of the emergent Surrealist movement in Paris. Led by André Breton, Surrealism sought to reveal the uncanny coursing beneath familiar appearances in daily life. Man Ray proved well suited to this in works like Anatomies, in which, through framing and angled light, he transformed a woman’s neck into an unfamiliar, phallic form. He contributed photographs to the three major Surrealist journals throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and also constructed Surrealist objects like Gift, in which he altered a domestic tool (an iron) into an instrument of potential violence, and Indestructible Object (or Object to Be Destroyed), a metronome with a photograph of an eye affixed to its swinging arm, which was destroyed and remade several times.Source: The Museum of Modern Art
Francis Frith
United Kingdom
1822 | † 1898
Francis Frith was an English photographer of the Middle East and many towns in the United Kingdom. Frith was born in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, attending Quaker schools at Ackworth and Quaker Camp Hill in Birmingham (c. 1828–1838), before he started in the cutlery business. He suffered a nervous breakdown in 1843, recuperating over the next two years. In 1850 he started a photographic studio in Liverpool, known as Frith & Hayward. A successful grocer, and later, printer, Frith fostered an interest in photography, becoming a founding member of the Liverpool Photographic Society in 1853. Frith sold his companies in 1855 in order to dedicate himself entirely to photography. He journeyed to the Middle East on three occasions, the first of which was a trip to Egypt in 1856 with very large cameras (16" x 20"). He used the collodion process, a major technical achievement in hot and dusty conditions. Photographs taken by Frith are held in the Conway Library of Art and Architecture at the Courtauld in London. When he had finished his travels in the Middle East in 1859, he opened the firm of Francis Frith & Co. in Reigate, Surrey, as the world's first specialist photographic publisher. In 1860, he married Mary Ann Rosling (sister of Alfred Rosling, the first treasurer of the Photographic Society) and embarked upon a colossal project—to photograph every town and village in the United Kingdom; in particular, notable historical or interesting sights. Initially he took the photographs himself, but as success came, he hired people to help him and set about establishing his postcard company, a firm that became one of the largest photographic studios in the world. Within a few years, over two thousand shops throughout the United Kingdom were selling his postcards. Many of his photographs were collected into published volumes. Initially these works were compiled by established publishing companies. However, by the 1860s, Firth realized that he could profit from publishing his own images and established the publishing company F. Frith & Co. Frith died at his villa in Cannes, France, on 25 February 1898, aged 75. His family continued the firm, which was finally closed in 1971. Following closure of the business, Bill Jay, one of Britain's first photography historians, identified the archive as being nationally important, and "at risk". Jay managed to persuade McCann-Erikson the London advertising agency to approach their client Rothmans of Pall Mall on 14 December 1971 to purchase the archive to ensure its safety. Rothmans went ahead and acquired the archive within weeks. Frith was re-launched in 1975 as "The Francis Frith Collection" by John Buck, a Rothmans executive, with the intention of making the Frith photographs available to as wide an audience as possible. On 25 August 1977, Buck bought the archive from Rothmans, and has run it as an independent business since that time – trading as The Francis Frith Collection. In 2016 the company completed a two-year project to scan the entire archive and now holds over 330,000 high resolution digital images. The company website enables visitors to browse all 330,000 Frith photographs, depicting some 7,000 cities, towns and villages.Source: Wikipedia Born into a Quaker family in 1822 in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, Francis Frith was a remarkable person, philosophical and devoutly religious by nature and pioneering in outlook. He was a complex and multi-talented man who had a formidable instinct for business. By the time he founded his photographic publishing company in 1860 he had already established a wholesale grocery business in Liverpool which was so successful that by the mid 1850s he was able to sell it for a price which made him a the equivalent of a multi-millionaire today. Frith had been a founder member of the Liverpool Photographic Society in 1853 – only 14 years after the invention of photography, 1839. Between 1856 and 1860, as a gentleman of leisure, he made three pioneering and sometimes dangerous photographic expeditions to the Middle East, taking bulky cameras, equipment and glass plates with him and travelling by boat, donkey, mule and camel. These journeys took him to Egypt, Nubia, Ethiopia, Sinai, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, and established his reputation as an outstanding pioneer photographer. The photographs he took on these expeditions were marketed by the London firm of Negretti & Zambra as hugely popular stereoscopic views, and were also published in London and New York in limited edition part-works of prints, with sales totalling over £3 million in today’s value.Source: www.francisfrith.com
Jennifer Thoreson (Hudson)
Jennifer B Thoreson (Hudson) is a fresh, young visual fine art photographer creating staged imagery that is both artistically stylized and meticulously crafted. Drawing inspirations from themes of faith, restitution and re-purpose, and the intricacy of personal relationships, Jennifer is a dynamic and emotional illustrator of the human heart. With an innate ability to plumb the antique, the work is soulful; seeking the use of the forgotten or discarded, eerie and quiet. Raised in a spiritual and conservative home in rural Texas, Jennifer grew up imaginative, curious, and experimental, and has used her upbringing in her intensely personal artwork to bring insight and awareness using heartfelt, acutely mapped personal experiences. Jennifer is currently working in Albuquerque. New Mexico. she is an MFA Degree Candidate at the University of New Mexico, and is studying within the studio art in Photography program. Alongside varied private portrait commissions, she is an international speaker and lecturer whose programs are sought after year after year by many professional public and private photographic organizations. She has just completed her latest major body of work entitled ‘Medic’, a collection of ten images exploring the breadth of human relationships during illness and recovery. Jennifer’s work has been a part of many group and solo exhibitions, and is represented by three major galleries across the country. Exclusive Interview with Jennifer B Thoreson (Hudson): All About Photo: Where did you study photography? Jennifer Thoreson:The University of New Mexico How long have you been a photographer?About 12 years. What or who inspires you?Thomas Demand, Ann Hamilton, Rachel Whiteread, Francesca Woodman, Deborah Turbeville, Sarah Moon, Gertrude Kassebier, Julia Margaret Cameron Do you have a favorite photograph or series?Deborah Turbeville's Past Imperfect What kind of gear do you use? Camera, lens, digital, film?I have a Nikon D3, and use the 24-70mm 2.8 for just about everything. What advice would you give a young photographer?First, commitment and conviction are paramount. If you combine conviction and energy, you've really got something. Second, be humble, engaged, passionate, and well spoken. An idea, a sentence, a project you would like to share?I'm working on a project now about re-birth and reconciliation. I'm creating large scale installations in each room of a house, and photographing them with human subjects. The house itself, and all of the furnishings are unwanted or discarded items I have collected. I'm repairing them, beautifying, and repurposing them for the photographs; sort of a baptism for each object. The finished work will be photographs; small records, or documents of the transformation. The compliment that touched you most?Someone once told me that one of my photographs helped her to cope and heal from a life crisis. It meant the world to me. If you were someone else who would it be?Imogen Heap.Your favorite photo book?'Francesca Woodman' See the Book
Yusheng Jiang
China
1999
Born in Shanghai, Yusheng Jiang was deeply captivated by the allure of photography from a young age. His father, a photojournalist from the 1990s, left him with precious visual records, igniting his profound interest in photography, especially the transformation of cities and the vibrant rhythms within. Yusheng's academic journey began at the Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts, where he majored in photography and uniquely explored human desires through 3D software. Subsequently, he pursued his MFA at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York, specializing in photography, video, and related media. He further expanded his artistic horizons there, particularly delving deep into the relationship between cities and their inhabitants through interdisciplinary studies. To Yusheng, photography is not merely about capturing images but represents a unique perception and understanding of the world. He believes that behind the mechanical and alienating modern urban life lies a deeper spiritual sanctuary for people. Through installations, animation, and sculptures, he unveils every nook and cranny of urban transformations. What stands out is Yusheng's aspiration to fuse technology and art, offering audiences an entirely fresh aesthetic experience. He hopes that viewers are not just recipients but active participants in his works, interacting and crafting their distinct artistic expressions. ARTIST STATEMENT "The series of documentary photography focuses on the giant development of Shanghai after ‘The Open Door Policy’ in 1979. As time goes by, it is slowly surrounded by the bustling business district and finally disappears into the river of urban construction. The exposed bricks and crisscrossing scaffolding reached Shanghai at the peak of development by the working class. Long Tang is a unique form of residential house in Shanghai. It is also the place where I grew up in childhood. With the demolition and reconstruction, the memory of my life has been sealed up by the metropolis. In this series of photos, I present the process of urban evolution and think about the link between me, space, history, and Shanghai." Awarded Photographer of the Week - Week 35, 2025
Tony Law
China
1963
Tony Law is a professional designer and photographer. He has a studio, mainly focussed on interior design, graphic design, architectural illustration and photography. He was born and raised in Guangzhou, China. He studied in Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. majoring in Industrial Design. In the early 1990s, he came to Australia for further study, settled in Sydney, and has been living there ever since. He was interested in art and photography when he was a child. After joining the "Chinese Photographic Society of Australia Inc." in 2011, he began his photography journey. Later in 2012, he and some local landscape photographers formed the "Australian Seascape Photography Group"". He has great interest in shooting a wide range of subjects, exploring different styles and techniques. In recent years, though, he has mainly focused on shooting sports, seascape and astrophotography. His works have been published in magazines and he has won many prominent international photography awards. His main achievements are: The Finalist of All About Photo Awards 2020. Top 101 International Landscape Photographs of the Year 2019 First Place in Astrophotography Category, Sony Alpha Awards 2019. First Place in Night Category, Australian Travel Photography Awards 2019. Sports Photographer of the Year, International Photography Awards 2019. 2nd Place in Nature, Astrophotography Category, International Photography Awards 2019. 2nd Award in Photojournalism Category, 2019 Xposure International Photography & Film Contest. 3th Place in People Category, The Mono Awards 2019. Top 3 in Editorial Category, Sony Alpha Awards 2018. Silver Award in Amateur Category, The EPSON International Pano Awards 2017. Runner Up Award in Theme Passion Category, 2017 Heritage Bank Photographic Awards. 2nd Place of 2017 GAILCK creates visual landscape photography award. Silver Award of 2016 The Real Australia Landscape Photo Awards Artist statement I am attracted by wild and brutal power of extreme sports; I am amazed by the magical power of nature. I often work tirelessly to explore and discover new places. The long coastline of Sydney is where I go for inspiration, finding the fine balance between light and shadow, from sunrise to sunset, watching the stars of the Milky Way emerge from the horizon. Photography makes me forget myself and brings me endless happiness, and it will always fascinate me.
James Fee
United States
1949 | † 2006
James Fee was an American photographer best known for his photographs of abandoned factories and lonely highways. He was born in the town of Knoxville, Iowa. Fee drove from Iowa to California after graduating from high school and settled in San Francisco. He married Sharon Kitzman in San Francisco. Fee has also lived in New York City and Los Angeles. A Graflex Norita 66 with extension tubes, tele-extenders, and mid-century telephoto lenses was used for much of Fee's earlier personal work. The camera and equipment were stolen in the early 1990s while he was working on his "Photographs of Americana" series. Fee discovered that it was difficult to replace the camera and began experimenting with the Russian-made Kieve 90 with lens embellishments. Fee appreciated the irony of finishing the series with a Russian camera. Because of Fee's approach to photography, museum curators gave his exhibitions titles like "American Noir" and "The Weight of Time." His photographs can be found in the permanent collections of the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts, the William Benton Museum of Art, and the Getty Museum. Fee once worked with sculptor George Herms, who shared his love of the Beat Generation. Fee later taught photography at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, from 1994 to 2003. He began teaching at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles in 1993. Fee photographed images he thought represented declining cultural icons in the United States, such as crumbling drive-in movie theaters and rusted, abandoned cars. During World War II, Fee's father, Russell James Fee, served in the United States Navy as a medical corpsman attached to the Marine Corps. During a tense battle on Peleliu Island in 1944, he captured images of his fellow sailors and Marines as well as the aftermath of battles. Russell Fee passed away in 1972. In 1998, James Fee visited Peleliu Island and photographed remnants of World War II battles, such as rusted and overgrown tanks, roads, and the tip of a sunken Japanese fighter plane. He attempted to photograph the same scenes that his father had captured more than 50 years before. Fee created an exhibit called the "Peleliu Project" in which he artistically combined his own photographs with images taken by his father. The exhibition toured the United States and was first shown at the Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica in 2001 before being permanently housed at the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts. James Fee is survived by his wife of 30 years, Elena Stoyanov (NJ), and Illya Eric Isaac Fee (CA), his son from his first marriage. Fee was found dead in Beverly Hills, California. Hepatitis C and liver cancer were the causes of his death. At the time of his father's death, Illya Fee was by his side.
Don McCullin
United Kingdom
1935
Don McCullin is one of our greatest living photographers. Few have enjoyed a career so long; none one of such variety and critical acclaim. For the past 50 years he has proved himself a photojournalist without equal, whether documenting the poverty of London's East End, or the horrors of wars in Africa, Asia or the Middle East. Simultaneously he has proved an adroit artist capable of beautifully arranged still lifes, soulful portraits and moving landscapes. Following an impoverished north London childhood blighted by Hitler's bombs and the early death of his father, McCullin was called up for National Service with the RAF. After postings to Egypt, Kenya and Cyprus he returned to London armed with a twin reflex Rolleicord camera and began photographing friends from a local gang named The Guv'nors. Persuaded to show them to the picture editor at the Observer in 1959, aged 23, he earned his first commission and began his long and distinguished career in photography more by accident than design. In 1961 he won the British Press Award for his essay on the construction of the Berlin Wall. His first taste of war came in Cyprus, 1964, where he covered the armed eruption of ethnic and nationalistic tension, winning a World Press Photo Award for his efforts. In 1993 he was the first photojournalist to be awarded a CBE. For the next two decades war became a mainstay of Don's journalism, initially for the Observer and, from 1966, for the Sunday Times. In the Congo, Biafra, Uganda, Chad, Vietnam, Cambodia, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan, Northern Ireland and more, he time and again combined a mastery of light and composition with an unerring sense of where a story was headed, and a bravery that pushed luck to its outermost limits. He has been shot and badly wounded in Cambodia, imprisoned in Uganda, expelled from Vietnam and had a bounty on his head in Lebanon. What's more, he has braved bullets and bombs not only to get the perfect shot but to help dying soldiers and wounded civilians. Compassion is at the heart of all his photography. Away from war Don's work has often focused on the suffering of the poor and underprivileged and he has produced moving essays on the homeless of London's East End and the working classes of Britain's industrialised cities. From the early 1980s increasingly he focused his foreign adventures on more peaceful matters. He travelled extensively through Indonesia, India and Africa returning with powerful essays on places and people that, in some cases, had few if any previous encounters with the Western world. In 2010 he published Southern Frontiers, a dark and at-times menacing record of the Roman Empire's legacy in North Africa and the Middle East. At home he has spent three decades chronicling the English countryside - in particular the landscapes of Somerset - and creating meticulously constructed still lifes all to great acclaim. Yet he still feels the lure of war. As recently as October 2015 Don travelled to Kurdistan in northern Iraq to photograph the Kurds' three-way struggle with ISIS, Syria and Turkey.Source: donmccullin.com Photography has given me a life… The very least I could do was try and articulate these stories with as much compassion and clarity as they deserve, with as loud a voice as I could muster. Anything less would be mercenary. -- Don McCullin
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