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Win a Solo Exhibition this October, Open Theme. Juror Aline Smithson.
Win a Solo Exhibition this October, Open Theme. Juror Aline Smithson.
Johan Gerrits
Johan Gerrits
Johan Gerrits

Johan Gerrits

Country: Netherlands
Birth: 1962

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not - Ralph Waldo Emerson I was born in the east of the Netherlands, a green countryside full of nature. My interest for nature was one of the reasons to start 25 years ago with photography. Since then subjects changed from nature, architecture, art into people. Especially the last one takes a big role in my travelphotography.

Two of my great passions in life are photography and travelling. I believe that travel broadens one's view of the world, makes you more tolerant, and reflects on our way of living and thinking.

Experiencing other cultures, rituals and customs, enrichen your knowledge and deeper understanding of the world around you. By documenting these unique cultures, in which some of them are vanishing very fast. I hope that my work has a merit in preserving their beautiful and cultural diversity.

In my photography I try to reveal a person's character, his spirit, his way of showing himself to the world. In doing this I respect their culture, habits and religion as much as possible.

I'm not a professional photographer, just an amateur who likes to photograph the beauty of mankind.
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Costanza Rossi
Costanza Rossi is an Italian-born documentary and travel photographer whose work explores remote and indigenous communities around the world. Dividing her time between Italy, the UK, and extended travels, she has developed a practice rooted in cultural storytelling and human connection. Her photographs are the result of immersive fieldwork in some of the most isolated places on earth, from the nomadic herders of northern Mongolia to the tribes of the Omo Valley in Ethiopia, the Amazon rainforest, or the Darién Gap. Costanza’s work has appeared in both solo and collective exhibitions, with venues such as the History Museum of Salento and the Paris Imagination Gallery. She is the co-author of I mondi nascosti dei popoli Surma (Pensa Editore, 2025) and the editor and curator of the forthcoming Anthropology & Photography Quarterly published by the History Museum of Salento. Her practice combines her professional background in communication and branding with a passion for documenting humanity in its many forms, always seeking to highlight resilience, dignity, and alternative ways of living. Artist Statement My photography is driven by a curiosity for different worlds and the many ways humanity can be expressed. I seek out communities that exist at the edges of globalization, where traditions, rituals, and identities have been preserved against the current of modernity. I am an avid traveler, fueled by the excitement and wonder that arise when I encounter cultures so different from my own. This sense of discovery and the adrenaline of confronting unfamiliar realities inspire me to keep searching, documenting both diverse traditions and pressing social issues. I approach people’s lives with empathy, building stories that honor their uniqueness. I am drawn to subjects that challenge conventional narratives, and what unites my projects is a search for visual storytelling that sparks both recognition and wonder: images that remind us of our shared humanity, while revealing the beauty of cultural difference. Awarded Photographer of the Week - Week 36, 2025
Anthony Goicolea
United States/Cuba
1971
Anthony Goicolea is a New York-based fine art photographer. Goicolea's photographs frequently deal with issues of androgyny, homosexuality, and child sexuality. Goicolea, Cuban-American and gay, was educated at the University of Georgia and studied painting, photography, and sculpture at that institution. He holds an MFA in fine arts from the Pratt Institute. He made his debut in 1999, and now shows work with Postmasters gallery in New York and Aurel Scheibler in Berlin, Germany. In 2005, he received the BMW-Award for Photography. Some of his work features photographs of "pre- to barely pubescent boys" (Art in America, Dec, 2001) in elaborately staged tableau settings, commonly showing multiple boys wearing traditional private school uniforms either engaged in school-life or recreation after school — but with often transgressive and erotic twists in their activities. Of great interest in these compositions is the fact that Goicolea himself portrays all of the boys in his photographs through the astute use of costumes, wigs, make-up, and post-production editing via the software Adobe Photoshop; "always looking uncannily like a boy on the edge of puberty" (The Advocate, August 14, 2001). Therefore, despite having numerous figures in them, Goicolea's photographs are actually very complex large-scale self-portraits, and are always done in a flawlessly realist manner. The pioneering fine-art photographer Cindy Sherman is an apparent influence on Goicolea's work, given her own extensive use of self-portraits and emphasis on sexually-charged narrative topics. Sherman and Goicolea have also had several joint exhibitions. His work can be strongly compared to similar manipulated and/or staged art photography featuring children and adolescents, such as that of Bernard Faucon, Loretta Lux, and Justine Kurland. Recently, Goicolea has also been producing and exhibiting his drawings, which follow much of the same subject matter as his photographs. He has also published several books. Goicolea is also represented by Gow Langsford Gallery based in Auckland, New Zealand.Source Wikipedia
Caterina Bernardi
I was born in a town called Orkanger on the north-west coast of Norway, the land of the northern lights and long winters. This is where I draw a lot of my inspiration from, with its incredibly dramatic scenery and landscapes, and fairytales I grew up with; stories of moody and mystical Nordic environments brimming with depictions of trolls, princesses and nature.My connection with photography first blossomed in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil where I lived in the very early 1990’s. There, I learned Portuguese, encountered very passionate people and discovered my own passion for photography. A friend had found a producer to make her first CD, and I took pictures of her recording music with famous Brazilian artists in the studio. It was an incredible experience that compelled me to pursue photography, which eventually led me to San Francisco, a magnificent city to go to live and work. There, I got my Bachelors of Fine Arts and ventured out on my own to shoot.In the past decade I have created images for clients such as Merck, Genentech, Reebok, The Times of London, Pasolivo, Gilead, Bristol-Myers Squibb, KQED TV., Yoga Journal, Vodafone, and Warner Bros, while my work has appeared in photo publications such as Communication Arts, PDN, Graphis, APA Shows, and Graphic Design USA. Currently I am located in San Francisco, CA, but once a year the northern winds call upon me and I go back home and visit Norway, to feel the breeze and see the midnight sun. Artist StatementI think artists in general have an innate appetite for life, and speaking for myself, I find that curiosity and passion drive me to explore and create, to be mesmerized by life and it’s constant flux of magical encounters, fears and achievements; my vehicle of expression is the art and craft of photography. In this process I aim to intimately connect the subject and me and ultimately the viewer to a dialogue and to linger, to inspire and to create, and to preserve intense moments of emotion and beauty and mystery.What I strive for in an image is to get genuine emotion and expressions from the subject. Sometimes it happens very naturally, and sometimes it is a real challenge to put a person at ease, to make them feel comfortable and enjoy having a camera pointed at them. It is a sensitive moment I share with my subjects while photographing, and establishing a connection with the talent is very important in order to capture striking images, and I work hard to make them comfortable and excited so they give their best. With great collaborations everyone wins and walks away with a sense of achievement.Photography gives my life a purpose and a meaning, to further explore and discover myself, the arts and science, and our mysterious existence.
Manuela Thames
German
1975
Manuela Thames is a photographic artist based in Saint Paul, Minnesota where she lives with her husband and two children. Born and raised in Germany, she moved to the US in 2004 after marrying her American husband. Her background is in nursing and alternative health, but around 2008 she began to focus solely on photography after two life changing events happened within one year, the birth of her first son and the death of her brother. Manuela uses various photographic techniques to explore themes around loss and grief, her personal experience with generational trauma, as well as the notions of belonging, connection and what it means to be human. Within that she continues to explore human ways of coping, the strength that evolves out of suffering and our common desire for healing and journey towards wholeness. Much of her work consists of black and white, conceptual self-portraits. Manuela’s photography has been described as contemplative, evocative, and cinematic and has been widely exhibited nationally as well as internationally. Her “Trauma” series won 1st place conceptual series of the year in the Monovisions Award in 2019, and in the same year she won the 13th Julia Margaret Cameron Award in the Self-Portrait Category. In addition, her work has been published online and in print in such places as Black and White Magazine, Sun Magazine, Dohdo Magazine and Shots Magazine. She teaches workshops privately and through various places such as Santa Fe Workshops, LA Center of Photography, SE Center of Photography, and offers mentoring services as well.
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