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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

Lisa Thomas
United States
1974
Lisa Thomas is a self-taught Atlanta-based photographer with a passion for creating unique, abstract images. Born in Virginia in 1974, she holds a degree in physical therapy from the University of Oklahoma and has spent over 20 years in the healthcare industry. She began studying photography in 2020 as a creative outlet to cope with stress and to connect with others during a time of social isolation. Initially drawn to representational imagery, her journey as an artist has been an evolution, leading her to embrace the enchanting realm of abstract photography. Thomas’s current work, Studies in Oil and Water, is a macro view of the interplay between oil and water set against a variety of backdrops. Thomas’s distinctive style combines vibrant colors, playful compositions, and the use of light to create images that are emotionally uplifting and encourage viewers to embark on a visual journey. Studies in Oil and Water My photographic work is an exploration of two seemingly incompatible elements, oil and water. Through my lens, I capture their intricate interactions giving rise to mesmerizing abstract compositions allowing viewers to immerse themselves in a realm of color and fluidity. In this chaos, I find harmony in the hues and patterns that emerge and an appreciation for the beauty in the everyday. From bold and intense to tranquil and serene, my photographs mirror the kaleidoscope of emotions that define our lives. My aim is not only to captivate the eye but also to inspire curiosity and contemplation in the viewer.
Georges Rousse
France
1947
Georges Rousse (born July 28, 1947) is a French photographer, painter, and installation artist. He has been taking photos since receiving his first camera at the age of nine, but he never formally attended art school to pursue photography. Instead, he attended medical school in Nice, but studied photography and printing on the side. He currently lives in Paris.Source: Wikipedia When he was 9 years old, Georges Rousse received the legendary Kodak Brownie camera as a Christmas gift. Since then, the camera has never left his side. While attending medical school in Nice, he decided to study professional photography and printing techniques, then opened his own studio dedicated to architectural photography. Soon, his passion for the medium led him to devote himself entirely to photography, following in the footsteps of such great American masters as Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz and Ansel Adams. After he discovered Land Art and Malevich's Black Square against a white field, Georges Rousse altered his relationship to photography, inventing a unique approach that shifted the relationship of painting to space. He began making installations in the types of abandoned or derelict buildings that have long held an attraction for him--creating ephemeral, one-of-a-kind artworks by transforming these sites into pictorial spaces that are visible only in his photographs. From the early 1980s on, Georges Rousse has chosen to show his photographs on a large scale, so that his viewers participate in the work and experience the sense of space in a compelling way. Collapsing the usual restrictions between artistic mediums, his unique body of work quickly made its mark on the contemporary art world. Since his first exhibition in Paris, at the Galerie de France in 1981, Georges Rousse has continued creating his installations and showing his photographs around the world, in Europe, in Asia (Japan, Korea, China, Nepal.), in the United States, in Quebec and in Latin America. He is represented by several European galleries and his works are included in many major collections the world over. Georges Rousse was born in 1947 in Paris, where he currently lives andworks.Source: www.georgesrousse.com French artist and photographer Georges Rousse, converts abandoned or soon-to-be-demolished buildings into surprising visions of color and shape. Rousse translates his intuitive, instinctual readings of space into masterful images of several “realities”: that of the actual space, wherein the installation is created; the artist’s imagined mise-en-scène, realized from a single perspective; and the final photograph, or the reality flattened. Since his first exhibition in 1981 at the Galerie de France in Paris, Rousse has continued creating his one-of-a-kind installations and photographs around the globe. His work has exhibited in the Grand Palais (Paris), Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, D.C.), Haggerty Museum (WI), House of Culture (La Paz, Honduras), Sivori Museum (Buenos Aires), and National Art Museum of China, among hundreds of others. In 1988, he received the International Center of Photography Award. In 2008, Georges Rousse succeeded Sol LeWitt as an associate member of the Belgian Royal Academy.Source: Sous Les Etoiles Gallery
Herbert List
Germany
1903 | † 1975
Herbert List was a German photographer, who worked for magazines, including Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and Life, and was associated with Magnum Photos. His austere, classically posed black-and-white compositions, particularly his homoerotic male nudes, taken in Italy and Greece being influential in modern photography and contemporary fashion photography. He was born on 7 October 1903 to a prosperous business family in Hamburg, the son of Luise and Felix List. He attended the Johanneum Gymnasium, and afterwards studied literature 1921–23 at the University of Heidelberg. While still a student he became apprenticed in the family company, Landfried Coffee. In 1923, after two years in Heidelberg learning about the coffee trade and attending lectures at the university on Greek art and literature, List traveled for the family business Kaffee-Import Firma List & Heineken, Hamburg. Between 1925 and 1928 he visited plantations and contacts in Guatemala, Costa Rica, San Salvador, Brazil (where he stayed for six months) and San Francisco. During this time he began taking photographs. In 1929 he met Andreas Feininger who inspired his greater interest in photography and gave him a Rolleiflex camera. From 1930 he began taking portraits of friends and shooting still life; was influenced by the Bauhaus and artists of the surrealist movements, Man Ray, Giorgio De Chirico and Max Ernst; and created a surrealist photograph titled Metaphysique in a style he called fotografia metafisica in homage to De Chirico, his most important influence during this period. List used male models, draped fabric, masks and double-exposures to depict dream states and fantastic imagery. He has explained that his photos were "composed visions where [my] arrangements try to capture the magical essence inhabiting and animating the world of appearances." While there are surface similarities to Nazi imagery of the athletic male body—that of Leni Riefenstahl for example—unlike them, List's pictures of friends are portraits as much as they are nudes, nor did List endorse Nazi ideas, nor did his work influence National Socialist photography. He never published his male nudes in his own lifetime, and kept them hidden in his mother's house in a sack he called his poison bag". He was however influenced in his depiction of romantic paganism by the Jugendbewegung youth and physical health movement, though he did not join any of its associations, and some of the ideals of the Jugendbewegung were co-opted by the Nazis (though they later denounced the movement) and influenced their idealizing Romantic realism. List in his own notes uses a pun—"Das Objektiv ist nicht objectiv,"—to emphasize his creative, non-realist, application of photography. The lens is not objective. Otherwise photography would be useless as an artistic medium. -- Herbert List In 1936, in response to the danger of Gestapo attention to his openly gay lifestyle and his Jewish heritage, List left Germany for Paris, where he met George Hoyningen-Huene with whom he travelled to Greece, deciding then to become a photographer. In 1937 he worked in a studio in London and held his first one-man show at Galerie du Chasseur d'Images in Paris. Hoyningen-Huene referred him to Harper's Bazaar magazine, and 1936–39 he worked for Arts et Metiers Graphiques, Verve, Vogue, Photographie, and Life. List was unsatisfied with fashion photography. He turned back to still-life imagery, continuing in his fotografia metafisica style. From 1937 to 1939 List traveled in Greece and took photographs of ancient temples, ruins, sculptures, and the landscape for his book Licht über Hellas. In the meantime he supported himself with work for magazines Neue Linie, Die Dame and for the press from 1940 to 1943, and with portraits which he continued to make until 1950. In List's work the revolutionary tactics of surrealist art and a metaphysical staging of irony and reverie had been honed in on the fashion industry that relied on illusion and spectacle which after World War II returned to a classical fixation on ruins, broken male statuary and antiquity. In 1941, during World War II, he was forced to return to Germany; but because one of his grandparents was Jewish he was not allowed to publish or work professionally. In 1944 he was drafted into the German military, despite being of partly Jewish ancestry. He served in Norway as a map designer. A trip to Paris allowed him to take portraits of Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Christian Bérard, Georges Braque, Jean Arp, Joan Miró, and others. After the war, he photographed the ruins of Munich where he continued to live until 1960, working mainly for the Swiss magazine Du, with freelance photo essays for Heute, Epoca, Look, Harper's Bazaar, Flair, and Picture Post. He was made art editor of Heute magazine, published by the Allied occupying forces, in 1948. In 1951, List met Robert Capa, who invited him to work as a contributor to Magnum, but he rarely accepted assignments. For the next decade he produced copious work in Italy. During this time he also started using a 35 mm film camera and a telephoto lens. He was influenced by his Magnum colleague Henri Cartier-Bresson as well as the Italian neorealist film movement. In the 1950s he also shot portraits of Marino Marini, Paul Bowles, W. H. Auden, and Marlene Dietrich in 1960. Over the period 1949–62 he visited Italy, Greece, Spain, France, Mexico, and the Caribbean. List's 1950 picture of a woman, her black dress spread about her, reclining at a respectable distance from an elderly man reading, with one leg of his trousers rolled above his socks and garter, both enjoying the spring sunshine on the front steps of the Glyptothek in Munich, was selected by curator Edward Steichen for the world-touring Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Family of Man, seen by 9 million visitors. In 1964 List was awarded the David Octavius Hill Prize of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Lichtbildner. Herbert List is best known for his book Junge Männer (1988) which contains more than seventy images of young men lounging in the sun, wrestling and innocently regarding the camera lens. It is introduced by Stephen Spender in whose autobiographical novel The Temple, written in 1929 but not published until 1988, List is fictionalized as Joachim Lenz. List gave up photography in the early 1960s to concentrate on his collection of Italian Old Master Drawings. He died in Munich on 4 April 1975, and his archive was absorbed in the Ratjen collection which was later acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington.Source: Wikipedia
Jeff Wall
Canada
1946
Jeff Wall's artistic technique mixes the fundamentals of photography with influences from other art forms such as painting, film, and literature. This synthesis takes place within a complex framework that he refers to as "cinematography." His wide body of work ranges from classical reporting to sophisticated constructions and montages, which are frequently performed on bigger scales typically associated with painting. Wall, who was born in 1946 in Vancouver, Canada, and still lives there, became interested in photography in the 1960s, a time when Conceptual art was popular. By the mid-1970s, he had incorporated the spirit of experimentation inherent in Conceptualism into his own style of pictorial photography. Wall's photos, created as backlit color transparencies, a method more commonly associated with advertising than fine art photography at the time, made a huge effect when displayed in galleries and museums. They had a critical influence in establishing color as an important part of photographic composition. In his early works, Wall explicitly references other artworks, creating linkages to the history of image creation. "The Destroyed Room" (1978) is inspired by Eugène Delacroix's enormous picture "The Death of Sardanapalus" (1827), which explores themes of violence and sensuality. "Picture for Women" (1979) resembles Édouard Manet's "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" (1882) while contextualizing the painting's implications within late-'70s cultural politics. These works exhibit Wall's concept of "blatant artifice," which emphasizes the theatricality of both the subject and the production. One important part of Wall's body of work is "near documentary," which are pictures that mimic documentary style but are made in conjunction with the people they include. Wall's method of using nonprofessional models, which captures ordinary moments with complex meanings, is reminiscent of the neorealism of Italian cinema in the 1950s and 1960s. Wall explores formal and dramatic possibilities, delving into the meanings and affects of documentary photography by depicting events that were seen but not captured on camera at the time. Since the mid-1990s, Wall has expanded his artistic repertoire, incorporating traditional black-and-white prints and, more recently, inkjet color prints into his evolving body of work.
Mahdiyeh Afshar Bakeshloo
Mahdiyeh Afshar Bakeshloo (born 1995 in Tehran) is a professional photographer in the category of fine art and concept from Iran. Afshar has been studying photography professionally for 2 years in an academy since 2014 and is currently working in Tehran. Mostly she deal with human issues by referring to inner feelings that combined them with the inanimate environment. The starting point of her works have always been his surroundings and personal feelings. Sensitively, she tries to explore her relationship with the world around her today. Afshar held her first group exhibition at Mojdeh Gallery. Her most famous collection is "The light in the city", which takes a look at contemporary Tehran. Reason for popularity of this collection was due to a special technique that was done by manipulating the photo. So far, it has received various awards from world festivals such as IPA, Monochrome photography awards, Fine Art Photography Awards, ND Photography Awards, and Spider Photography Awards. Afshar says about her photos: “Each of my projects describes human emotions such as sadness, loneliness, confusion. I try to make viewers find their hidden feeling in my photos. Every time I take a photo, my personal feelings affect my work and shape my inner thoughts. I want to have something in common with my audience to talk to them. " Most of Afshar's works are presented in single black and white photos. Her photos has been published in various Magazine such as Float Photo Magazine, Humble Arts Foundation, F-stopmagazine, More Art please. She has participated in many exhibitions in Iran, Greece and Rome.
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Latest Interviews

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