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Tom Atwood
Tom Atwood

Tom Atwood

Country: United States
Birth: 1971

Tom Atwood is an American fine art, portrait, and celebrity photographer, best known for his books Kings in Their Castles (2005) and Kings & Queens in Their Castles (2017). The New Yorker has praised the "refreshing clarity and modesty" of his work. Born and raised in Vermont, Atwood is a graduate of Harvard University, where he studied economics. He later earned an MPhil from Cambridge University. Atwood has lived in Paris, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and currently resides in New York City.

Atwood worked several years as an advertising executive before turning full-time to commercial and fine art photography. As a photographer, Tom Atwood is largely self-taught, developing many of his techniques through trial and error. According to him, various cultural influences—including theater, painting, architecture, and psychology—have informed his photographic style.

Tom Atwood is particularly known for combining and balancing the genres of portraiture and architectural photography, so that neither the subject nor his or her surroundings predominate in the final image. His recent work has focused on portraits of people at home. He has shot over 100 luminaries including Hilary Swank, Julie Newmar, Buzz Aldrin, Mark Wahlberg (Marky Mark), John Waters, Don Lemon, Tommy Tune, Meredith Baxter, Greg Louganis, Barney Frank, George Takei, Todd Oldham, Edward Albee, Ross Bleckner, Michael Cunningham, Alison Bechdel, Ari Shapiro, Don Bachardy, Charles Busch, Alan Cumming and Leslie Jordan.

His second book, Kings & Queens in Their Castles, was recently published by Damiani. The book won multiple awards including First Place in the International Photography Awards (book category) as well as a Lucie Award (book-other category).

Atwood was included in the National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Triennial (Smithsonian Museum). He won first place in Portraiture in the Prix de la Photographie Paris. Atwood also won Photographer of the Year from London's Worldwide Photography Gala Awards, as well as first place in Portraiture.

He has won over 40 additional awards including from the Griffin Museum of Photography, Center for Fine Art Photography, International Photography Awards, Santa Fe Center for Photography, Vienna International Photo Award (Gold Medal), CameraArts, Photo Life, PDN, The Photo Review, Communication Arts, Fence at Photoville, Graphis, Camera Club of NY, Jacob Riis Award, American Photography Annual, One Life International, American Art Awards, Photography Masters Cup, Manhattan Arts International, Hellerau Photography Award, World in Focus, Artrom Gallery Guild, PhotoServe, Reclaim Photo Award, Passepartout Prize, One Eyeland, International Photographer of the Year, International Color Awards, Moscow International Foto Awards, Kodak and American Photographic Artists (sponsored by the Getty Museum and Hammer Museum). He has also been recognized on Photo Life Magazine's list of 50 Emerging Photographers.

Atwood's work has exhibited over 60 times in over 15 countries, including at the National Portrait Gallery (Smithsonian Museum), Griffin Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, National Museum of Finland (Finland), D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts, Kemper Art Museum, Center for Fine Art Photography, Museum of Photographic Arts, House of Lucie, Annenberg Space for Photography, Museum of Modern Art, University of the Arts, Frank Museum, Center for Photography at Woodstock, Benaki Museum (Greece), Museum of Science and Technology (Germany), Shibuya Cultural Center (Japan), Círculo de Bellas Artes Museum (Spain), LA Center for Digital Art, Pacific Design Center, Manhattan Arts International and other institutions.

Selected Books on Available on Amazon
Kings & Queens in Their Castles
Kings & Queens in Their Castles
Tom Atwood
Kings in Their Castles
Kings in Their Castles
Tom Atwood, Charles Kaiser

Gallery

BBA Gallery

Websites

www.tomatwood.com

@tomatwoodphoto

 

Selected Books

Kings & Queens in Their Castles
Kings & Queens in Their Castles
Tom Atwood
Kings in Their Castles
Kings in Their Castles
Tom Atwood, Charles Kaiser

Inspiring Portfolios

Marijn Fidder
© Marijn Fidder
Julien Chatelin
© Julien Chatelin
Marcus Yam
© Marcus Yam
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More Great Photographers To Discover

Robert S Johnson
Robert S Johnson
United States
1953
Robert S Johnson was born and raised on the grounds of the Boston State Hospital which was founded in 1839 under the name "Boston Lunatic Hospital". He returned to work on the locked wards for his gap year and for summers while in college. The first image he remembers taking was of a bear climbing on the family car in Yellowstone Park. The adults were frozen but he grabbed his mom’s Brownie and shot away. After five careers, ranging from Artistic Director of THECO, a theater company, to Regional Vice President of a for-profit, after-school education company, he turned to photography fulltime in 2008. He lives in New York City and Wellfleet MA with his wife, Katherine, and their son, Asher, a (very recent) 2018 graduate of Smith College.
Joanna Borowiec
Joanna Borowiec
Poland
1971
Joanna Borowiec, a graduate of the European Academy of Photography in Warsaw, diploma thesis in the Creative and Expressive Photography Workshop, Dr Izabela Jaroszewska. Member of the Association of Polish Art Photographers (ZPAF). Scholarship holder of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage 2020. Photography Workshop. Enthusiast of medium- and large-format analogue photography. Uses historic photographic processes like ambrotype – wet collodion technique, cyanotype e.c.t. The main topic of her photos is humanistic photography, human. Winner International Photography Awards IPA 2021- category Deeper Perspective Photographer of the Year. She was also awarded the third place in Photographer of the Year category of the Black& White Spider Awards competition. Prize-winner of the Portfolio Black + White Photography UK, the Portfolio Black & White for Collectors Of Fine Photography Canada, the Portfolio 2012 Shot Magazine USA. Her works and interviews with her were published in many magazines, i.a. the Black+ White Photography UK (the cover), the Shot Magazine USA, the Black and White Magazine Canada and in national magazines. Her photographs can be found in public and private collections at home and abroad, i.a. in Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Sweden, USA e.c.t. She has participated in individual and collective exhibitions at home and abroad, i.a. in Poland, Germany, Spain, Singapore, Canada, USA e.c.t. Blue Story Many of my cyanotypes are created by layering a combination of objects and film imagery with carefully timed light exposures for a depth of blue/indigo colors. Inspired by nature and how we interact with it, I arrange natural objects such as leaves, flowers and vines with human made objects or images of objects. I choose to work with cyanotypes "live", in sunlight for the spontaneity of arranging the objects and often have a general idea of what I want to do allowing for of-the-minute additions and subtractions of objects and timing of exposures. I sometimes add acryl paint, or colored pencil to a washed and dried print. Cyanotype is a contact print process using treated, UV light sensitive paper. It results in a Prussian blue final print. Also known as photogram, sun print. The English scientist and astronomer Sir John Herschel discovered this procedure in 1842. (...) Due to the coating and printing process Cyanotypes are always non reproducible unique items in itself. Dreams Unfinished It is a story about pain, love and longing. The photos were taken after the death of my father. He passed away suddenly in his sleep. I could not understand what happened, to come to terms with the loss. I looked for him everywhere and imagined he was asleep and dreaming. As a result, I have contact with him in the dream world he is with me. Works depict dreams, motifs, shards of memories which probably appear in everyone's dreams. Dreams - eternal companions of human life - encourage us to analyse our own experiences and understand our fate. They enable us to bring to surface deeply hidden secrets and go beyond the earthly matters. These records are born out of imagination and perishable ephemeral memory. They are not meant to be unambiguous; they should leave the door open for free interpretation and free reading to enable everyone to supplement them with their own story. Glass Faces "The eyes and faces all turned themselves towards me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room" Sylvia Plath Glass Faces present unique, enchanting, climatic and hypnotising portraits. Bewitching with natural beauty and somewhat unreal, mysterious, silent and oozing various emotions. Faces of friends and people we have just met. Ambrotypes - positive images created on a sheet of glass using the 19th century wet collodion process - are the vital element of the project. The ambrotype is inimitable. You may try to reproduce it, but a piece created on black glass remains unique. Ambrotype - Ambrotos means immortal... I was born in a camp The story of Jan Chmiel, who was born in the Waltrop forced labor camp - a city in western Germany. According to a record issued by a German official, he was born in 1944. , according to information provided by the mother in 1942. Of the 143 children captured in the Waltrop camp, three survived, including Jan.
Andrew Moore
Andrew Moore
United States
1957
Andrew Moore’s work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Yale University Art Gallery, the Library of Congress, the Israel Museum, the High Museum, the George Eastman House and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Recent exhibitions include The Queens Museum, Columbia University and The Museum of the City of New York in conjunction with a retrospective on the legacy of Robert Moses. Moore has had recent solo shows in Minneapolis, Moscow, Paris, San Francisco, and Nebraska. In 1975, Moore enrolled at Princeton University, where he worked on an independent major in photography under the guidance and mentorship of the historian Peter Bunnell and the photographer Emmet Gowin, who at the time, was completing his first monograph. During that time, Moore also had the benefit of working with visiting artists including Frederick Sommer, Jim Dow, and Joel Meyerowitz. Moore graduated summa cum laude in 1979. After a brief stint working with commercial photographers in New York City, Moore moved to New Orleans, where he continued a body of work first started for his senior thesis. Over the next two years, he focused on the city’s disappearing commercial district, where he found subjects such as a coffin workshop, a broom factory, and a raw furrier–places employing artisans and outdated machinery. The New Orleans Downtown Development District awarded Moore a grant which enabled him to produce a portfolio of one-hundred 8x10 color contact prints, which were placed in the city’s archives. In 1981, Moore returned to New York City, where he began a three-year project documenting the rapid changes to the urban landscape, specifically at the South Street Seaport and Fulton Fish Market in lower Manhattan. At the start of his project, the demolition of the present marketplace and shopping pier was just getting underway. Moore returned many times over the following months, often photographing at night to portray the architecture and ambiance of the surrounding neighborhood amidst massive, rapid transformation. For this work, Moore and two other photographers, Barbara Mensch and Jeff Perkell, were awarded grants from the JM Kaplan Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts, which enabled the completed project, South Street Survey to be shown at the Municipal Art Society in 1985. During this time, Moore was also working on a series of photographs of grain elevators in Buffalo, New York with the assistance of an NYSCA individual grant. In Buffalo, Moore met a group of artists working with appropriated imagery, which inspired him to begin using mechanical and chemical processes to incorporate multiple negatives, paintings, drawings, and xeroxes into complex montage images outside of strict documentary practice. This method of recombination, in the era before Photoshop, created images of convulsive beauty and were the subject of Moore’s first solo exhibition in New York at Lieberman and Saul Gallery in 1986, following his first solo show at Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT in 1985. Moore continued this method of montaging imagery for the next 7 years, expanding his practice into experimental short films. During this time, Moore collaborated on short films with others including the artists Lee Breuer and David Byrne. His film Nosferatu 1989 was nationally broadcast on MTV and PBS’s New Television series. 42nd Street In 1995, Moore returned to his roots in documentary practice as the texture of New York’s 42nd Street was rapidly changing. With all of the theaters between 7th and 8th avenues scheduled to be razed or refurbished, Moore sought permission to photograph the torn seats and faded fire curtains which told the stories of those spaces. In 1997, Moore showed these photographs at Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York. Despite his change of style, the work was well-received; in a review for The New Yorker, Andrew Long noted, “The straight forward treatment is a departure for the photographer, who characteristically produces multi-image evocations of New York City. Nothing is lost however - his earlier poetic constructs now give way to broader arenas for the imagination to roam.” Cuba Moore first traveled to Cuba in 1998 to photograph Havana’s decaying theaters. The project soon expanded in scope to document the larger effects of Cuba’s permanent Revolution, which were particularly apparent during the economic depression known as the “Período especial.” Moore’s large-scale color photographs of Havana reveal an elegant but crumbling metropolis of muted pastel interiors, courtyards, and scenes of daily life. Moore returned to photograph Cuba’s architecture and environment over the next 14 years, in the process publishing two monographs Inside Havana (Chronicle Books, 2002) and Cuba (Damiani, 2012). Moore has said his work intends to show, “how contemporary history, and specifically cultures in transition, are expressed through architecture.” The photographer Julius Shulman wrote of Inside Havana, “Exhibited throughout Moore’s work is a genuine flavor of ‘presence’. He does not attempt to gloss over questionable conditions, nor does he try to contort reality. With tremendous sensitivity, Moore creates art statements of the architecture he shows us. His images are painterly and poetic.” Moore’s photographs from Cuba appeared as a cover story in the September 23, 2012 issue of New York Times Magazine. Russia While working in Cuba, Moore became interested in the island nation’s long relationship with Russia. This led him to photograph the architectural environments where Russian history and politics collide in unexpected ways. Between 2000 and 2004 Moore made 8 trips around Russia from St. Petersburg to the remotest parts of the country. The New Yorker wrote of the work, “in taking Russia - its contradictions and gorgeous ruins - at face value, he captures a country’s diversity and history.” For example, Moore photographed a “czarist church [that] was turned into a soap factory during the Soviet period, and now has been restored into a kind of youth center.” Moore remarked, “For me these kinds of subjects present a cross-section through time: they address Russia’s complex past, as well as the larger compacting and collapsing processes of contemporary history.” In 2004, Moore published the monograph Russia Beyond Utopia (Chronicle Books, 2004). Detroit In 2008 and 2009, Moore traveled to Detroit to portray in photographs “the idea that in an urban setting you could also have a landscape happening, the forces of nature intersecting with American urbanism, the process of decline also intersecting with the revival of nature.” In 2010, Moore released Detroit Disassembled (Damiani, 2010), with an introduction by Detroit-native and Poet Laureate Philip Levine, to coincide with an exhibition at the Akron Art Museum. He was originally invited to document the city by two young French photographers, Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, who had been photographing Detroit’s abandoned spaces since 2005. While Moore’s Detroit series follows the themes of transformation and decaying space explored in previous bodies of work, his focus on the motor city generated controversy in the pages of The New Republic and the journal Guernica. The photographs were decried as “ruin porn,” which Mike Rubin defined in The New York Times as “urban decay as empty cliché, smacking of voyeurism and exploitation.” Curator Sarah Kennel writes in The Memory of Time, an exhibition catalog from the National Gallery of Art, that, “in Moore’s photographs, ruination serves more explicitly as an allegory of modernity’s failure.” Other critics argue that whether or not Moore’s Detroit photographs fit the category of “ruin porn” is a matter of academic debate. Joseph Stanhope Cialdella argues in the journal Environmental History that Moore’s work instead conveys the “aesthetic of a postindustrial sublime” which “gives nature the authority to transform the image of Detroit into a novel, yet disturbing landscape that blurs the lines between wilderness and the city.” Dora Apel writes in Beautiful Terrible Ruins that Moore’s “pictures of Detroit tend to emphasize the relationship of nature and culture, with nature in the ascendancy.” Apel ultimately argues that the “ruin porn” images and debate fail to focus on the political and economic policies that are the root causes of the ruins. Dirt Meridian From 2005 to 2014, Moore photographed the people and landscape of “great American Desert,” which roughly includes the area west of the 100th meridian to the Rocky Mountains, from Texas north to Canada. The area is one of the most sparsely populated regions in the country, “where the daily reality is often defined by drought and hardship.” To make many of the photographs, Moore collaborated with Doug Dean, the pilot of a single-engine aircraft, to create bird’s-eye perspectives revealing the vastness of the land. Rather than flying high above the plains, Moore chose perspectives that have “the sense of being within the landscape rather than above it.” For an essay accompanying Moore’s photographs in The New York Times Magazine, Inara Verzemnieks wrote, “From above, the land is like one endless, unpunctuated idea - sand, tumbleweed, turkey, bunch stem, buffalo, meadow, cow, rick of hay, creek, sunflower, sand — and only rarely did a house or a windmill or a barn suddenly appear to suspend the sense of limitlessness.” On the ground, Moore photographed the people who inhabit this unforgiving landscape and the evidence of their efforts, from active homesteads to abandoned schoolhouses. These photographs are published in Moore’s newest monograph: Dirt Meridian (Damiani, 2015).
Walker Evans
Walker Evans
United States
1903 | † 1975
Walker Evans was an American photographer best known for documenting the effects of the Great Depression for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The large-format, 8x10-inch camera was used extensively by Evans during the FSA period. As a photographer, he aspired to create images that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent". Many of his works are in museum permanent collections, and he has had retrospectives at places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art or George Eastman House. Walker Evans was born into a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, to Jessie (née Crane) and Walker. His father worked as an ad executive. He grew up in Toledo, Chicago, and New York City. In 1922, he graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He attended Williams College for a year, studying French literature and spending most of his time in the library, before dropping out. In 1926, he returned to the United States to join the edgy literary and art crowd in New York City after spending a year in Paris. Among his friends were John Cheever, Hart Crane, and Lincoln Kirstein. From 1927 to 1929, he worked as a stockbroker's clerk on Wall Street. Evans began photographing in 1928, while living in Ossining, New York. In 1930, he published three photographs (Brooklyn Bridge) in Hart Crane's poetry collection The Bridge. Dock-worker, Havana, Cuba, 1932© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art After spending a year in Paris in 1926, Walker Evans returned to the United States to join the edgy literary and art crowd in New York City. John Cheever, Hart Crane, and Lincoln Kirstein were among his friends. He was a clerk for a stockbroker firm in Wall street from 1927 to 1929. Evans took up photography in 1928 around the time he was living in Ossining, New York. In 1930, he published three photographs (Brooklyn Bridge) in the poetry book The Bridge by Hart Crane. Lincoln Kirstein sponsored a photo series of Victorian houses in the Boston area in 1931. In 1933, he photographed the revolt against dictator Gerardo Machado in Cuba for the publisher of Carleton Beals' then-upcoming book, The Crime of Cuba. Evans briefly met Ernest Hemingway in Cuba.  With the camera, it’s all or nothing. You either get what you’re after at once, or what you do has to be worthless. -- Walker Evans Evans began a two-month photographic campaign for the Resettlement Administration (RA) in West Virginia and Pennsylvania in 1935. From October to December, he continued to photograph for the RA and, later, the Farm Security Administration (FSA), primarily in the South. While still working for the FSA, he and writerJames Agee were sent on assignment to Hale County, Alabama, by Fortune magazine for a story that the magazine later decided not to run. Allie Mae Burroughs, 1935 or 1936© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a groundbreaking book published in 1941, featured Evans' photographs and Agee's text detailing the duo's stay with three white tenant families in southern Alabama during the Great Depression. Its detailed account of three farming families paints a heartbreaking picture of rural poverty. In her 1980 book Diana & Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography, critic Janet Malcolm noted a similarity to the Beals' book, pointing out the contradiction between Agee's prose and the quiet, magisterial beauty of Evans' photographs of sharecroppers. The three families, led by Bud Fields, Floyd Burroughs, and Frank Tingle, lived in the Hale County town of Akron, Alabama, and the landowners told them that Evans and Agee were "Soviet agents," though Allie Mae Burroughs, Floyd's wife, later recalled her dismissing that information. Evans' photographs of the families immortalized their misery and poverty during the Great Depression. For its 75th anniversary issue, Fortune returned to Hale County and the descendants of the three families in September 2005. When Evans and Agee visited the Burroughs family, Charles Burroughs, who was four years old at the time, was "still angry" at them for not even sending the family a copy of the book; Floyd Burroughs' son was also reportedly angry because the family was "cast in a light that they couldn't do any better, that they were doomed, ignorant." The secret of photography is, the camera takes on the character and personality of the handler. -- Walker Evans Walker Evans remained with the FSA until 1938. An exhibition, Walker Evans: American Photographs was on display at Museum of Modern Art in New York that year. This was the museum's first exhibition devoted solely to the work of a single photographer. The catalogue also included an essay by Lincoln Kirstein, whom Evans had met in his early days in New York. Evans took his first photographs in the New York subway in 1938, with a camera hidden in his coat. Many are Called was a book that collected these stories in 1966. Evans collaborated with and mentored Helen Levitt in 1938 and 1939. Evans, like such other photographers as Henri Cartier-Bresson, rarely spent time in the darkroom creating prints from his own negatives. He only loosely supervised the printing of most of his photographs, sometimes only attaching handwritten notes to negatives with printing instructions. Evans was an avid reader and writer who joined Time Magazine's staff in 1945. He then worked as an editor at Fortune magazine until 1965. That same year, he joined the faculty of the Yale University School of Art as a photography professor. Evans completed a black and white portfolio of Brown Brothers Harriman's offices and partners for publication in Partners in Banking, which was published in 1968 to commemorate the private bank's 150th anniversary. He also shot a long series with the then-new Polaroid SX-70 camera in 1973 and 1974, after age and poor health made it difficult for him to work with elaborate equipment. In 1971, the Museum of Modern Art held another exhibition of his work, simply titled Walker Evans. Walker Evans died in 1975 at his home in Lyme, Connecticut. The Estate of Walker Evans donated its holdings to New York City's The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1994. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the sole owner of all Walker Evans works of art in all media. The only exception is a group of about 1,000 negatives in the Library of Congress collection that were created for the Resettlement Administration (RA) / Farm Security Administration (FSA). Evans's RA / FSA works are free to use. Evans was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame in 2000. Images: © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Hiroji Kubota
Hiroji Kubota
Japan
1939
Hiroji Kubota (born 2 August 1939) is a Japanese photographer, a member of Magnum Photos who has specialized in photographing the far east. Born in Kanda (Tokyo), Kubota studied politics at Waseda University, graduating in 1962. In 1961 he met the Magnum photographers René Burri, Elliott Erwitt, and Burt Glinn. He then studied journalism and international politics at the University of Chicago, and became an assistant to Erwitt and Cornell Capa, in 1965, a freelance photographer. Kubota photographed the 1968 US presidential election and then Ryūkyū islands before their return to Japan in 1972. He then photographed Saigon in 1975, North Korea in 1978, and China in 1979–85, and the USA in 1988–92, resulting in books and exhibitions. Kubota won the Mainichi Art Prize in 1980,[2] and the Annual Award of the Photographic Society of Japan in 1981. Three of his publications won him the first Kodansha Publishing Culture Award in 1970: "Black People", and essays on Calcutta and the Ryūkyū islands.Source: Wikipedia Hiroji Kubota sounds a little over-the-top when he insists his "life is meaningless" without photography. But a glance at his latest and 19th book will convince you he is absolutely right, given how his life has been intertwined with some of Magnum's legendary photographers, like René Burri, Burt Glinn and my father, Elliott Erwitt. He started out working with some of them as a fixer and translator, even though he refused payment at first. "I was brought up comfortably and didn't need it," he said. He did, however, accept a beat-up Leica M3 from Burri. His life changed when he got the first edition of Henri Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment a month later. "When I opened it, I said, 'My gosh, what is this?" he recalled. "That motivated me. That's when I became serious." His fate was sealed when Burri showed him a Swiss magazine that featured his Gaucho pictures. "It shocked me like crazy," he said. "I knew then I wanted to be a photographer." The results of those personally decisive moments are evident in Aperture's Hiroji Kubota Photographer a retrospective covering 50 years of his work. I met Hiroji almost that long ago, because my father, Elliott Erwitt, sponsored him when he first came to America, even picking him up at the TWA terminal at Kennedy Airport. They had met when Hiroji worked as a fixer on one of my father's early trips to Japan, in 1962, to illustrate Robert Donovan's book PT 109, about John F. Kennedy's World War II exploits. Hiroji was my father's translator when he photographed the captain and crew of the destroyer that famously cut Kennedy's boat in two. That kind of work led to his meeting other influential photographers who would encourage him, eventually bringing him to New York, where he became a familiar figure at the Magnum offices. Back then, the agency was a small, international and slightly dysfunctional family that was accessible if you met the right people, which he did. Cornell Capa, a Magnum photographer, "adopted me literally, not legally," he said. "He had no children, so he needed a son, a fairly well-behaved son who could cook for him." Capa, who entertained "big shots" at his Fifth Avenue apartment, helped Hiroji make a few extra dollars by having him cook. Burt Glinn also hired Hiroji as an assistant to help him get by. Hiroji showed similar ingenuity when he spent the better part of a year photographing in Chicago, where he ran an ad hoc Japanese catering business every other weekend to help pay the bills. By 1967, he was a successful photographer firmly ensconced at Magnum, and it was time to return to Japan. He has proved to be a remarkably tenacious photographer who immerses himself in a story and returns to it until he is satisfied. He has managed to get to places others can't - like his unlimited access on many trips to China, when travel within the country was still limited. He would talk government officials into allowing him the time and access he needed to achieve his purpose. Same with North Korea; he has made countless visits - at its invitation - at a time when it was essentially a closed country. -- By Misha ErwittSource: The New York Times During a visit by Magnum members to Japan in 1961, Hiroji Kubota came to know René Burri, Burt Glinn and Elliott Erwitt. After graduating in political science from Tokyo’s University of Waseda in 1962, Kubota moved to the US, settling in Chicago, where he continued photographing while supporting himself by working in a Japanese catering business. He became a freelance photographer in 1965, and his first assignment for the UK newspaper The Times was to Jackson Pollock’s grave in East Hampton. In 1968, Kubota returned to live in Japan, where his work was recognized with a Publishing Culture Award from Kodansha in 1970. The next year he became a Magnum associate. Kubota witnessed the fall of Saigon in 1975, refocusing his attention on Asia. It took him several years to get permission to photograph in China. Finally, between 1979 and 1984, Kubota embarked on a 1,000-day tour, during which he made more than 200,000 photographs. The book and exhibit, China, appeared in 1985. Kubota’s awards in Japan include the Nendo Sho (Annual Award) of the Japanese Photographic Society (1982), and the Mainichi Art Prize (1983). He has photographed most of the Asian continent for his book Out of the East, published in 1997, which led to a two-year project, in turn resulting in the book Can We Feed Ourselves? Kubota has had solo shows in Tokyo, Osaka, Beijing, New York, Washington, Rome, London, Vienna, Paris and many other cities. He has just completed Japan, a book on his homeland and the country where he continues to be based.Source: Magnum Photos
Paul Gravett
Paul Gravett
Canada
1960
Photography was my earliest entry into the creative arts, as I learned as a pre-teen to develop film and prints in my father’s darkroom. Although music came second, piano studies eventually led to a varied career of performance, arts administration, and concert programming. In the midst of this was a brief foray into floor loom and tapestry weaving, during which time I developed a line of scarves that was carried in a number of shops. More recently, I returned to my first love of photography, but this time with a digital camera in hand, supported with a computer, and new artistic vision. My passion now is to explore the intersection of photography and contemporary art through a blend of photographic techniques and to develop a ‘voice’ that I can call my own.
David Peabody
David Peabody
United States
David Peabody is an American architect and photographer. He was born and raised in Natchez, Mississippi. After college, inspired by the work of Walker Evans, David spent a year working odd jobs and moving around Mississippi, documenting rural life. Now, nearly 50 years later, he is completing the project, digitally scanning and printing that early work. In the process, he is photographing the changed landscape of rural Mississippi. David went on to study and practice architecture, but has always returned to taking pictures Currently he is following the progress of several young couples building homesteads in rural Maine. In one way or another, most of his work is an attempt to find beauty and see beyond the corporate veneer that increasingly covers our built environment. David lives with his wife Ginger in Alexandria, Virginia and East Blue Hill, Maine.
Mendi Thaler
Mendi Thaler
Israel
2003
Born on September 29, 2003 in Jerusalem, Israel. From my childhood I was drawn to plastic art. I loved looking at pictures and photographs. Later, as I grew up, I became more and more interested in photography. In 2019 I started taking photography classes. In 2020 I participated in the international photography competition "Berdychevsky Vernissage Photography 2020" in the street photography section. My work "On the Way to Work" was awarded a diploma in the photography competition. In 2021 I participated in a photography competition, solo exhibition. Photography has become an important part of my life. Street photography, reportage, portrait and landscape are genres of photography that I work with. My motto is from imagination to creation
Lisa Kristine
Lisa Kristine
United States
1965
Acclaimed humanitarian photographer Lisa Kristine specializes in images of remote indigenous peoples. Best known for her evocative and saturated use of color, her fine art prints are among the most sought after and collected in the world. Lisa has documented in over 100 countries on six continents, using a 19th century 4×5” field view camera for the majority of her work. Lisa Kristine was born in San Francisco, California, on September 2, 1965. She developed an early interest in anthropology and photography. Lisa was mentored in her youth in Silver Gelatin and Cibachrome printing. Following graduation from the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in San Francisco, Lisa photographed for nearly five years in Europe and Asia. Lisa has collaborated with international humanitarian organizations. When the State of the World Forum convened in San Francisco in 1999 and in New York in 2000, Lisa was asked to present her work to help inspire discussions on human rights, social change, and global security. Her work was auctioned by Christie’s New York to benefit the United Nations with Kofi Annan. She was also honored to be the sole exhibitor at the 2009 Vancouver Peace Summit with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Reverend Tutu and award winning Nobel Laureates. In 2010 Lisa collaborated with Free the Slaves documenting modern-day slavery. She traveled into the heart of broiling brick kilns, down rickety mine shafts, and into hidden lairs of sex slavery. She bore witness to the most horrific abuses imaginable and the astonishing glimpses of the indomitable human spirit. A groundbreaking photographic book entitled Slavery in which Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote the foreword was released in the fall of 2010. The sales of the book will help to end slavery. John C. Sweeney, Director of the United Nations, says of her work, “Lisa Kristine’s sensitive and beautiful portrayal of isolated and distant peoples helps us to better appreciate the diversity of the world. She captures the sheer beauty of the differences in people and places and allows us to comprehend the shared nature of the human condition: its hope, its joy and its complexity.” Her work is made distinctive by her passion and intuition and her intense interest in the humanity of her subjects. “I want a person to feel at ease with me, so that they remain who they are and are unchanged by a new, foreign element such as a stranger (myself) or a camera. In order for me to photograph a person in this unaffected environment of ‘self,’ there must be a firm trust between us. Without this, one might still create a beautiful image, but not a stirring one. I’m drawn to people who have been living closer to the earth, and who have very old traditions. People who have not, in any way, been altered by modernity.” “The saturation of color opens our eyes to those who are living in ways very different from our own,” says Paul Oppenheimer, a highly regarded philosopher and teacher. “Lisa invites each of us as humans to look into the eyes of those whom we cannot understand—in a setting that does not diminish our differences. In those differences, we find the roots of our unity.” The images, both inspiring and evocative, draw a connection between the viewer and the subject. Lisa Kristine’s art is her personal statement about the connection of humanity, and about the diversity, beauty, and hardship of our world. Published in 2003, Lisa’s limited edition hardcover monograph A Human Thread of 120 photographs sold out within a year. The accompanying short documentary film, A Human Thread, explores the process behind the photographs and includes interviews with Kristine as well as footage of her on location. Following on the success of her first book, Kristine published This Moment in 2007. This Moment won the bronze metal for the Independent Publisher Book Awards. The book consists of 62 full color plates showcasing her use of the large-format 4x5 field view camera. A second documentary film, Through the Lens, was produced in association with the book. The film illuminates her photographic and artistic process in using a 4x5 large-format view camera.
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