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Julien Coomans
Julien Coomans
Julien Coomans

Julien Coomans

Country: Belgium

Julien Coomans is a Brussels based amateur photographer with a passion for photographing the natural world.
He is a highly artistic individual which led him to pursue a career as an Architect. In his free time he loves to explore his artistic side through the medium of photography and has been commended for his images in several photographic publications.
​ Through experimenting with his camera settings and techniques, Julien seeks to capture scenes of tranquillity and minimalism in a bid to counter the hustle and bustle of his daily city life.
​ He travels widely in Europe, whether it be to the expansive northern beaches of Flanders or the rugged mountains of northern Italy, Julien is happiest when at one with nature. His camera is simply an excuse to get out there, discover beautiful places and capture stunning images.

Fishing Huts, Fouras, France
I traveled to Fouras on the west coast of France to photograph some unusual but picturesque fishing huts that are dotted along the coast line. Central to my vision was to take a series of long exposures in order to set a tranquil scene and emphasise the elegant wooden structures.

The first day was miserable - windy and a lot of rain - yet despite this I was amazed by the beauty of the huts. Undeterred, I used my time to study the scene and find my compositions, ready to pounce when conditions were just right. The hardest part about finding the right compositions was avoiding stretches of land on the horizon as the bay curves quite dramatically. I had to find the perfect balance between fishing hut, weather conditions and the horizon line beyond. After finding my compositions my next challenge was to watch out for the tide times. I had to shoot as the tide was going out not only to physically be able to take the shot but to be sure I was safe.

On the second day the conditions improved and I had my window between outgoing and incoming tides. The wind had died down making the water much calmer which was better as I could keep the exposure down to a few minutes to try and improve my chance of avoiding any tripod wobble. After shooting my pre-scouted compositions and checking the LCD screen for sharpness I packed up and went for a well earned beer!

Websites

@juliencoomans

www.juliencoomans.com

 

Inspiring Portfolios

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More Great Photographers To Discover

David Vasilev
David Vasilev
Bulgary
David Vasilev was born in Stara Zagora, Bulgaria in 1981, where he spent his early years. Ever since he was a little kid, he was always surrounded by photojournalists, his dad being one of them. This had a great impact on his perception of the world, thus photography become a necessary tool for self-expression. After he moved to the United States he begun his extensive journey to find inspiration in the cultural contrasts of North America. To observe is to spend more time looking through the lens than photographing. That is how I catch elusive moments of reality in a single frame. Growing up in a culturally mixed neighborhood in Stara Zagora, Bulgaria, defined me as a person and as a photographer. I’ve captured the raw human spirit in people distanced from society—the joy and sadness they feel just by surviving, alongside the simplicity we lack. I follow my instincts without looking back, which has led me to fascinating places. I’ve visited forgotten parts of the United States, time capsules filled with pure instinct and the most archaic traces of human nature still intact. In one excursion I visited the Hutterites—a German-speaking colony located in the prairies of the Dakotas. I felt their sincere hospitality instantly, even when they couldn't understand why I was there to begin with or what photography even was. They maintained a humble existence that I wanted to preserve on film. With time, they got used to me being there, and my presence was gradually ignored. Only then did I witness and photograph their essence: the realness of their daily lives, creating a visual memory of this time and place. I will never forget the children. One day a girl with curious eyes approached me quietly and asked, "Have you seen the ocean?" David Vasilev
J.M. Golding
J.M. Golding
United States
J. M. Golding is a photographic artist based in the San Francisco Bay area. She chooses plastic, pinhole, and vintage film cameras as her primary tools: plastic cameras such as the Holga for the spontaneity they promote and their capacity to help create dreamlike images, pinhole cameras for their simplicity and their contemplative quality, and vintage film cameras for the subjectivity of the images that are possible. J. M.'s photographs have been shown internationally in numerous juried and invitational group exhibitions, and she is the recipient of the 2013 Holga Inspire Award, the Lúz Gallery Curator's Choice Award (2009), Best of Show in Wanderlust (Dickerman Prints, 2017, in collaboration with Al Brydon), and several Honorable Mentions in other juried exhibitions. Her work has also appeared in Black & White, Diffusion, Shots, F-Stop, Square, and Insight magazines, Inside the Outside, Don't Take Pictures, The Holga Darkroom, and The Shot and in two books of pinhole photographs. She has been profiled in LensCulture, F-Stop Magazine, Wobneb Magazine, Mother F-Stop, Toycamera.es, and Pinholista. About Transitional Landscapes These photographs contain transitions from outer landscape to inner, from objective landscape to subjective. Square frames of film that are typically separate join together to form new, integrated images that would not have been possible otherwise, wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts, landscapes that are simultaneously real and imaginary. In this way, and also by transcending the literal separation of the component scenes, they allude to psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott's concept of the transitional object. The photographs embody the eye's transitions across the scene, moving incrementally from one perspective to another as they take on and combine multiple points of view. Because the overlapping exposures used to create the images are made sequentially, as compared to the single moment typically seen in photographs, the series of exposures in each image portrays transitions in time from one moment to the next, creating a connection between past and present, and possibly, present and future. Although the time and distance traversed are in many ways small, the transitions across them create surprising changes in what is visible.
Sebastian Piórek
Sebastian Piórek
Poland
1988
Based in Warsaw (Poland) is a talented photographer who specializes in capturing minimalistic shots of architecture and landscapes. Through his photographs, he strives to create and present a simple and austere approach to the viewers. In today's world, where we are inundated with a lot of technical and visual information, minimalism offers a soothing respite for our busy minds. His intention is to prompt the audience to perceive reality from a fresh perspective, encouraging contemplation on time and existence. His exceptional works have garnered acclaim in numerous Polish and international photography contests. Recently, his photographs have been published in renowned publications such as "100 [HUNDRED] Best Selected," "Photography in the Visual Culture," "We Contemporary 2022," and "Black, White & Infinite Colors."
Shomei Tomatsu
Shomei Tomatsu
Japan
1930 | † 2012
Shomei Tomatsu (東松 照明, Tōmatsu Shōmei) was a Japanese photographer, primarily known for his images that depict the impact of World War II on Japan and the subsequent occupation of U.S. forces. As one of the leading postwar photographers, Tomatsu is attributed with influencing the younger generations of photographers including those associated with the magazine Provoke (Takuma Nakahira and Daido Moriyama). Tomatsu was born in Nagoya in 1930. As an adolescent during World War II, he was mobilized to support Japan's war effort. Like many Japanese students his age, he was sent to work at a steel factory and underwent incessant conditioning intended to instill fear and hatred towards the British and Americans. Once the war ended and Allied troops took over numerous Japanese cities, Tomatsu interacted with Americans firsthand and found that his preconceptions of them were not entirely salient. At the time Tomatsu's contempt for the violence and crimes committed by these soldiers was complicated by individual acts of kindness he received from them – he simultaneously loved and hated their presence. These interactions, which he later described as among the most formative memories of his childhood, initiated his long-standing fixation on and feelings of ambivalence towards the subject of American soldiers. If I had seven lives, I’d be a photographer in every one. -- Shomei Tomatsu Tomatsu embraced photography while an economics student at Aichi University. While still in university, his photographs were shown frequently in monthly amateur competitions by Camera magazine and received recognition from Ihei Kimura and Ken Domon. After graduating in 1954, he joined Iwanami Shashin Bunko, through an introduction made by Aichi University professor Mataroku Kumaza. Tomatsu contributed photographs to the issues Floods and the Japanese (1954) and Pottery Town, Seto Aichi (1954). He stayed at Iwanami for two years before leaving to pursue freelance work. In 1957, Tomatsu participated in the exhibition Eyes of Ten where he displayed his series Barde Children’s School; he was featured in the exhibit twice more when it was held again in 1958 and 1959. After his third showing, Tomatsu established the short-lived photography collective VIVO with fellow Eyes of Ten exhibitors; these other members included Eikoh Hosoe, Kikuji Kawada, Ikkō Narahara, Akira Satō, and Akira Tanno. Towards the end of the 1950s, Tomatsu began photographing Japanese towns with major American bases, a project that would span over 10 years. Tomatsu's artistic output and renown grew significantly during the 1960s, exemplified by his prolific engagements with many prominent Japanese photography magazines. He began the decade by publishing his images of U.S. bases in the magazines Asahi Camera and Camera Mainichi and his series Home in Photo Art. In contrast to his earlier style which resembled traditional photojournalism, Tomatsu was beginning to develop a highly expressionistic form of image-taking that emphasized the photographer's own subjectivity. In response to this emergence, a dispute arose when Iwanami Shashin Bunko founder Yonosuke Natori wrote that Tomatsu had betrayed his foundations as a photojournalist by neglecting the responsibility to present reality in a truthful and legible manner. He rejected the claim that he was ever a photojournalist, and admonished journalistic thinking as an impediment to photography. Both essays were published in Asahi Camera. In addition to Asahi Camera and Photo Art, Tomatsu worked for magazines Gendai no me and Camera Mainichi. For Gendai no me, he edited a monthly series titled I am King (1964); for Camera Mainichi, he printed multiple collaborations made with Yasuhiro Ishimoto and Shigeichi Nagano in 1965 and his own series, The Sea Around Us in 1966. Tomatsu first went to Okinawa to photograph the American bases under the auspices of Asahi Camera in 1969. The images he captured formed the book Okinawa, Okinawa Okinawa which served as an explicit critique of the American air force. On the cover, an anti-base slogan verbalizing his disdain with the overwhelming U.S. presence in Okinawa reads: "The bases are not in Okinawa; Okinawa is in the bases". This sentiment was foreshadowed in Tomatsu's earlier writings, like his 1964 essay for Camera Manichi in which he stated "it would not be strange to call [Japan] the State of Japan in the United States of America. That's how far America has penetrated inside Japan, how deeply it has plumbed our daily lives." Tomatsu visited Okinawa three more times before finally moving to Naha in 1972. While in Okinawa, he traveled to various remote islands including Iriomote and Hateruma; he spent seven months on Miyakojima where he organized a study group called “Miyako University” aimed at mentoring young Miyako residents. Combined with his images taken in Southeast Asia, Tomatsu's photographs of Okinawa from the 1970s were shown in his prizewinning Pencil of the Sun (1975). Although he had come to Okinawa in order to witness its return to Japanese territory, Pencil of the Sun revealed a considerable shift away from the subject of military bases that he pursued throughout 1960s. He credited a diminishing interest in the American armed forces, in addition to the allure of Okinawa's brilliantly colored landscapes, for his adoption of color photography. In 1974, Tomatsu returned to Tokyo where he set up Workshop Photo School, an alternative two-year-long workshop (1974–76), with Eikoh Hosoe, Nobuyoshi Araki, Masahisa Fukase, Daidō Moriyama, and Noriaki Yokosuka; the school published the photo magazine Workshop. Tomatsu's dedication to nurturing the photography community in Japan was also evidenced in his role as a juror for the Southern Japan Photography Exhibition and his membership in the Photographic Society of Japan's committee to create a national museum of photography. The efforts of this group led to the establishment of photography departments at major national museums, such as Yokohama Museum of Art and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, as well as the first photography museum in Japan, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. In this, photography is the same thing as love. When my gaze, diving into the sea as my subject, converges with the act of photography, hot sparks fly at the point of intersection. -- Shomei Tomatsu Tomatsu took part in his first major international show, New Japanese Photography (1974) at MoMA New York, alongside workshop members Hosoe, Moriyama, Fukase, and 11 other photographers. New Japanese Photography was the first survey of contemporary Japanese photographers undertaken outside of Japan. It traveled to eight other locations in the United States including the Denver Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Art, and Portland Art Museum. By 1980, Tomatsu published three more books: Scarlet Dappled Flower (1976) and The Shining Wind (1979) were composed of his images from Okinawa; and Kingdom of Mud (1978) featured his Afghanistan series printed earlier in Assalamu Alaykum. In the early 1980s, Tomatsu had his first international solo exhibition, Shomei Tomatsu: Japan 1952-1981 shown at thirty venues over three years. He was also included in notable international group exhibitions regarding Japanese art: in 1985, he was one of the main artists in Black Sun: The Eyes of Four first shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; in 1994, he was featured in the seminal show Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky at the Yokohama Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In the last decade of his career, Tomatsu embarked on a new and comprehensive series of retrospectives, dividing his oeuvre into five "mandalas" of place. Each mandala was named after the area it was exhibited: Nagasaki Mandala (Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum, 2000); Okinawa Mandala (Urasoe Art Museum, 2002); Kyoto Mandala (Kyoto National Museum of Modern Art, 2003); Aichi Mandala (Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, 2006); and Tokyo Mandala (Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 2007). Tomatsu also had a separate retrospective, Shomei Tomatsu: Skin of the Nation, for the international museum circuit. Skin of the Nation was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and curated by Sandra S. Phillips and the photographer and writer Leo Rubinfien. The exhibition toured three countries and five venues from 2004 through 2006: Japan Society (New York); National Gallery of Canada, Corcoran Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Fotomuseum Winterthur. In 2010 Tomatsu moved to Okinawa permanently, where he held the final exhibition during his lifetime, Tomatsu Shomei and Okinawa - Love Letter to the Sun (2011). He succumbed to pneumonia on 14 December 2012 (although this was not publicly announced until January 2013).Source: Wikipedia
Paul Carruthers
Paul Carruthers
United Kingdom
1970
Born on Merseyside in 1970, Carruthers was a footballer first and creative second. Only after a knee injury ended his playing career did he begin to see the world through a different lens. Wandering around the streets of Liverpool with his trusted Fuji, Carruthers’ early work examined the funny, the absurd and the beautiful. A move to Devon in the 2000’s saw him begin the approaches for which he is most famous for today. Serene landscapes and still water marked his style during this period, with an emphasis on strong contrasts and stylised seascapes. He became the British Life Photographer of the Year in 2017, with his photograph Lifeguard earning national news coverage. His photographs have toured Australia and Asia and he has been recognised by a number of prestigious magazines and competitions: most notably the Head On Photography Awards and the ND Awards. His seminal series Grockles explores the relationship between tourist (or Grockle, as they’re known in Devon) and local, and has garnered widespread accolades. Often taking a humorous tone to serious subjects, Carruthers’ work has tackled wide ranging topics including tourism, the housing crisis, light pollution, and more. His keen eye for light, shadow and colour, demonstrated through award winning images like ‘Vitamin C’ and ‘Better Call Saul’, is subtle in its use of its environment to illustrate meaning behind the centered characters. Through this work, Carruthers was recently crowned as Oneeyeland’s number 1 UK street photographer. His work continues to highlight one of the unseen crises at the heart of the UK, and in typical British style, to explore the humour, absurdity and beauty that are present in seaside communities across Devon and Cornwall. Statement: Imagine you’re on a Devon high street under the hot sun, or on the edge of a breakwater as the water strikes the stone. This is beautiful country, patchwork country. Fields knit together like coloured felt. Expensive boots strike against cobbles, or are stripped away and discarded in favour of sandy feet. The water is still; the water is uproarious. The locals wipe away a sheen of sweat. There is everything. Beauty and silence, underpinned by the absurdity of hordes of tourists descending upon a part of the world that for many years was home to nothing but fishermen, or, when times were bad, shipwreckers. Second homes sit dormant for most of the year. Industries strain under the pressure of the boom and bust of the holiday season. For an artist, this is a treasure trove. Nature and people both exist simultaneously in ideal form and under great stress. I’ve explored a number of projects over the years, from the horses of Carlisle Bay in Barbados, to Lost in Venice, but my greatest body of works lies in both my landscape series Devotion, and my street photography series Grockles. It is in these that I paint an honest picture of a region and its people.
Attar Abbas
Attar Abbas
Iran/France
1944 | † 2018
Attar Abbas, better known as Abbas, was an Iranian photographer known for his photojournalism in Biafra, Vietnam and South Africa in the 1970s, and for his extensive essays on religions in later years. He was a member of Sipa Press from 1971 to 1973, a member of Gamma from 1974 to 1980, and joined Magnum Photos in 1981. Attar, an Iranian transplanted to Paris, dedicated his photographic work to the political and social coverage of the developing southern nations. Since 1970, his major works have been published in world magazines and include wars and revolutions in Biafra, Bangladesh, Ulster, Vietnam, the Middle East, Chile, Cuba, and South Africa with an essay on apartheid. From 1978 to 1980, he photographed the revolution in Iran, and returned in 1997 after a 17-year voluntary exile. His book Iran Diary: 1971– 2002 (2002) is a critical interpretation of its history, photographed and written as a personal diary. From 1983 to 1986, he travelled throughout Mexico, photographing the country as if he were writing a novel. An exhibition and a book, Return to Mexico: Journeys Beyond the Mask (1992), which includes his travel diaries, helped him define his aesthetics in photography. From 1987 to 1994, he photographed the resurgence of Islam from the Xinjiang to Morocco. His book and exhibition Allah O Akbar, a journey through militant Islam (1994) exposes the internal tensions within Muslim societies, torn between a mythical past and a desire for modernization and democracy. The book drew additional attention after the September 11 attacks in 2001. The choice was to think of oneself either as a photojournalist or an artist. It wasn’t out of humility that I called myself a photojournalist, but arrogance. I thought photojournalism was superior. -- Attar Abbas When the year 2000 became a landmark in the universal calendar, Christianity was the symbol of the strength of Western civilization. Faces of Christianity: A Photographic Journey (2000) and a touring exhibit, explored this religion as a political, a ritual and a spiritual phenomenon. From 2000 to 2002 he worked on Animism. In our world defined by science and technology, the work looked at why irrational rituals make a strong come-back. He abandoned this project on the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks. His book, In Whose Name? The Islamic World after 9/11 (2009), is a seven-year quest within 16 countries : opposed by governments who hunt them mercilessly, the jihadists lose many battles, but are they not winning the war to control the mind of the people, with the "creeping islamisation of all Muslim societies?" From 2008 to 2010 Abbas travelled the world of Buddhism, photographing with the same skeptical eye for his book Les Enfants du lotus, voyage chez les bouddhistes (2011). In 2013, he concluded a similar long-term project on Hinduism with the publication of Gods I've Seen: Travels Among Hindus (2016). Most recently, before his death, Abbas was working on documenting Judaism around the world. Before his death, Abbas was working on documenting Judaism around the world. He died in Paris on 25 April 2018, aged 74. About his photography Abbas wrote: "My photography is a reflection, which comes to life in action and leads to meditation. Spontaneity – the suspended moment – intervenes during action, in the viewfinder. A reflection on the subject precedes it. A meditation on finality follows it, and it is here, during this exalting and fragile moment, that the real photographic writing develops, sequencing the images. For this reason a writer's spirit is necessary to this enterprise. Isn't photography "writing with light"? But with the difference that while the writer possesses his word, the photographer is himself possessed by his photo, by the limit of the real which he must transcend so as not to become its prisoner." Source: Wikipedia Abbas, as he referred to himself professionally, was known for dramatic black-and-white photographs delivered with a point of view, especially in his book Iran Diary: 1971– 2002 (2002), a collection of images and text presented as a sort of journal. When the events that resulted in the overthrow of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in 1979 began, Abbas supported change, but he soon became disillusioned with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who took over the government. “When the revolution started, it was democratic,” The Toronto Star quoted him as saying in 2013. “It was my country, my people and my revolution. Then, slowly, it was being hijacked.” A turning point, he said, was the execution of four generals after a secret trial. He photographed their corpses in a morgue. “Something that we learned,” he said, “is that the extremists always win. That was my main lesson from the revolution. The extremists were prepared to kill, imprison, torture — everything. So they won.” Abbas was born in 1944 in a part of Iran near the Pakistan border. When he was a boy his family relocated to Algeria; he said that growing up during that country’s war of independence sparked his interest in documenting political events. He taught himself to use a camera, and among his earliest jobs was working for the International Olympic Committee at the 1968 Summer Games in Mexico. He would return to Mexico in the mid-1980s, taking pictures throughout the country over three years and producing the 1992 book Return to Mexico: Journeys Beyond the Mask (1992). In the 1970s he worked for the French agencies Sipa and Gamma. Early in that decade he was in Africa, covering the aftermath of the Biafran war in Nigeria and other events. He then found himself back in Iran. “My family is from Iran,” he told Vice in 2015, “but it isn’t as if I felt particularly Iranian back then. But I did feel that things had to change — you can’t just have some shah making all the important decisions for an entire country.” As the situation became more unstable and it became clear to him that the revolutionaries were no better than the regime they were replacing, he faced pressures from friends. “They urged me not to show the revolution’s negative side to the world,” he said. “The violence was supposed to come from the shah, not the protesters. I told them that it was my revolution as well, but I still needed to honor my duty as a journalist — or a historian, if you will.” He left the country in 1980 and did not return for 17 years. The revolution, though, had instilled in him an interest in what people throughout the world were doing in the name of God. “It was obvious after two years that the wave of Islamism was not going to stop at the borders of Iran,” he said in a video interview with The British Journal of Photography in 2009. “It was going much beyond the borders.” There are two ways to think about photography: one is writing with light, and the other is drawing with light. -- Attar Abbas He began by examining that phenomenon, resulting in the book Allah O Akbar: A Journey Through Militant Islam (1994), which recounted his travels through 29 Islamic countries. “When you’ve started with God you might as well stay with him,” he said, explaining why he went on to look at Christianity, paganism, Buddhism and more. It was an examination not of personal faith, he said, but of how faith can be deployed and twisted in other spheres. “What I’m interested in is the political, social, economic, even psychological aspects of religion,” he said, adding, “More and more, nations are defining their identities referring to religion.” If his work often put him in the middle of trouble spots, Abbas was not necessarily interested in images of blood and weaponry. “Most photographers, when they say they’re war photographers, they’re not really war photographers; they’re battle photographers,” he said in the video interview. “War does not limit itself to boom-boom, to the battle itself. Wars are very, very complex phenomenons, because they have a source, and it takes a while to come up, then it happens, and there are consequences. I’m more interested in the why and the afterwards of the wars.” He played down the part of his work that involved putting himself in harm’s way. “They say ‘courage’ — O.K., you have to be courageous,” he said. “But for me courage is a lack of imagination. You cannot imagine that it’s going to happen to you, therefore you go to the battle.”Source: New York Times
Soumya Sankar Bose
Soumya Sankar Bose
India
1990
I am a documentary photographer based in India. I did my Post graduate diploma in photography from Pathshala South Asian Media Institute.Born in 1990 Midnapore - Lives and works in KolkataAwards and Fellowships: The Toto-Tasveer Emerging Photographer of the Year. India foundation for the Arts grant for the Project "Let's Sing an Old Song". Magnum Foundation's Photography and Social Justice Fellowship for the Project "Full Moon in a Dark night"Publications: The Telegraph, The Indian Express , Better Photography, Kindle Magazine, Mint Lounge, The Caravan, Wired, A’int-Bad Magazine, Platform, Harmony . As well as online portals such as Scroll.in, The Huffington Post, BBC Online, Gallery Carte Blanche, F-Stop Magazine, Galli Magazine, Fltr , Medium and etc. AAP: Do you have a mentor or role model? Yes, Shahidul Alam who is the principal of Pathshala .And Morten Krogvold was one of my mentor during Chobimela VII .AAP: Do you remember your first shot? What was it?I don't remember my first shot exactly but when I was 7-8 years old, I got a Kodak KB10 from my mother and then I started to capture each and everything around me.AAP: What or who inspires you?My Parents ,Friends, Barnali But mostly my Grand father whose photographs inspire me to become a photographer in my childhood.AAP: How could you describe your style?Once one of my mentor Hasib Zakaria told me that my work is about hyper real. "Hyper reality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins."AAP: What kind of gear do you use? Camera, lens, digital, film?I like to shoot only on 35mm Prime lens in Film and Digital both.AAP: Do you spend a lot of time editing your images? For what purpose?I don't spend lot of time in editing my pictures but what I keep in mind during my editing is that I should not off-tracked.AAP: Favorite(s) photographer(s)?Alec Soth, Stfan bladh, Graciela Iturbide, Diane Arbus, Dayanita Singh and so on.AAP: What advice would you give a young photographer?I am also a young Photographer.AAP: What are your projects?My project documents retired Jatra artists (Jatra is four hundred years old Bengali folk theater which is disappearing day by day) or who have been working in Jatra for more than 25-30 years.AAP: Your favorite photo book?Calcutta Ladies by Dayanita Singh, Fauna and Flora by Dietmar Busse and so on.
Ghawam Kouchaki
Ghawam Kouchaki
United States
1991
Ghawam Kouchaki is a filmmaker and photographer based out of Los Angeles. After completing his first short film, his passion for cinema grew and sent him down a path to follow in the footsteps of filmmakers he’s admired like Edward Yang, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Michael Mann, and Toshiaki Toyoda. His photography has been exhibited in Tokyo at Gallery Conceal and at Grainmaker Studios in Los Angeles. He likes to get up-close and personal to his subjects. Ghawam is currently working on a photobook based on his last trip to Japan titled, Tokyo No-No.
Vincent Soyez
Vincent Soyez
France
1960
© Vincent Soyez I got into photography after experiencing the magic of the dark room. In my case, my grandpa was the one who tricked me into it. He used to always carry an empty slide mount inside his wallet. And if he did not have a camera with him, he’d level the slide mount to his eye, and frame the world that way. That memory has stayed with me. I do not use an empty slide mount. The apparatus is now small enough to be with me most of the time. In 1996 I moved from Paris to Brooklyn to work as a commercial photographer, specializing in the music industry, sports and men fashion. Currently, I am focusing on personal work in New York and South East Asia. ARTIST STATEMENT "I’ll reverse partly the psalm 27:1 by saying the light is my lord and who knows, may even be my salvation. My modus operandi is simple: follow the light. This is what guides me, makes me take a left or a right turn in seeking for places of colors and shadows in the pursuit of my next elusive ideal frame. At this point I pray and summon serendipity."
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Publication
Exclusive Interview with Luca Desienna and Laura Estelle Barmwoldt
For over seven years, Of Lilies and Remains has explored the depths of the goth and darkwave underground, unfolding in Leipzig—a city long associated with a vibrant and enduring subcultural scene. Moving between iconic gatherings such as Wave-Gotik-Treffen and more intimate moments on the fringes, the project offers a rare and immersive glimpse into a world often misunderstood, yet rich in expression and community. Created by Luca in collaboration with Laura Estelle Barmwoldt, the work embraces a cinematic and deeply personal approach. Rather than documenting from a distance, it moves within the scene itself, capturing its atmosphere, its codes, and its quiet contradictions. The title Of Lilies and Remains hints at this duality—where beauty and darkness, fragility and strength coexist. As the book prepares for its release, we spoke with both artists about the origins of the project, their process, and what it means to document a subculture that continues to evolve while remaining true to its spirit.
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Exclusive Interview with Matthew Finley
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Matthew Finley
American photographer Matthew Finley turns inward, using photography as a way to explore identity, memory, and emotional truth. Based in Los Angeles, his practice moves between performance, gesture, and found imagery, creating a visual language that is both intimate and deeply personal
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Exclusive Interview with Jan Janssen
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Jan Janssen
Dutch photographer Jan Janssen explores universal human experiences through his long-term project It Matters, winner of the May 2025 Solo Exhibition. Begun in 2016, the series captures intimate moments of everyday life—love, loss, connection, and belonging—across Central and Eastern Europe. Working in countries such as Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, Janssen spends extended time within communities, building relationships based on trust and respect. His approach allows him to move beyond observation, revealing deeply human and authentic moments. Rooted in travel and personal discovery, It Matters reflects Janssen’s search for what connects us all in an increasingly divided world. The project is ongoing and will culminate in a photobook scheduled for publication in 2026.
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Exclusive Interview with Henk Kosche
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Henk Kosche
German photographer Henk Kosche turns his lens toward the streets of Halle an der Saale, capturing everyday life in the late years of the former German Democratic Republic. At the time, Kosche was studying design and exploring the city with his camera, drawn to the atmosphere of its industrial landscape and the quiet rhythms of daily life. His series Street Photography at the End of the 80s, selected as the Solo Exhibition for July 2025, revisits a body of work created just before a period of profound change. Rediscovered decades later in a small box of 35mm negatives, these photographs offer glimpses of a city and its people at a moment suspended between the familiar and the unknown.
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