All about photo.com: photo contests, photography exhibitions, galleries, photographers, books, schools and venues.
Win a Solo Exhibition in August! Juror Ann Jastrab, Executive Director, Center for Photographic Art
Win a Solo Exhibition in August! Juror Ann Jastrab, Executive Director, Center for Photographic Art
Pascal Mannaerts
Pascal Mannaerts
Pascal Mannaerts

Pascal Mannaerts

Country: Belgium
Birth: 1978

Pascal Mannaerts is a freelance photographer based in Brussels. Blessed with an artistic bent and wanderlust, he discovered photography during his student years. Sharing and recording his travel adventures became a priority. A first visit to India in 2000 revealed a deep admiration for the Subcontinent. This is the first of many return engagements. Travelling to Asia, Africa, Latin America, North Africa and the Middle East during the last 10 years has given Pascal the opportunity to portray humanity in its strongest forms. In the process of total immersion in every culture he discovers, he places the human being as the main focus in his photographic work, through photographs which tend to open dialogues, arouse emotions and questions.

Pascal has publication credits in National Geographic, BBC, Geo, The Guardian, Le Guide du Routard, Lonely planet, Médecins Sans Frontières and in many newspapers and magazines worldwide. Several exhibitions of his pictures were held in Paris, Belgium, Brazil and India by, among others, Alliance française, Amnesty International and Les Maisons du Voyage.
 

Inspiring Portfolios

Call for Entries
AAP Magazine #50: Shapes
Publish your work in AAP Magazine and win $1,000 Cash Prizes
 
Stay up-to-date  with call for entries, deadlines and other news about exhibitions, galleries, publications, & special events.

More Great Photographers To Discover

Maynard Switzer
Maynard Switzer was born in Los Angeles and is a professional freelance travel and documentary photographer. He is a graduate of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and a former assistant to legendary photographer Richard Avedon. He has taught at the International Center of Photography in New York City and has written many magazine articles about travel photography. His love of foreign cultures and their fascinating customs has been the main catalyst for Maynard’s photography around the globe. Maynard has had his photography published in National Geographic Traveler Magazine, Geo Magazine, Afar Magazine and the prestigious Fine Art Spanish Magazine Art Fotografico. Statement There are approximately 195 independent countries in the world and an estimated 6,800 different languages spoken, and often times there is a breakdown in communication. Some caused by language barriers, other times lost or inadequate translation and sometimes a woeful attempt at hand signals. However, images are universally understood. The cliché "a picture is worth a thousand words" certainly rings true. Pictures speak a thousand words to a thousand different people in a thousand different ways. This global understanding has been the main reason that I have been documenting various cultures around the world. Over the past 20+ years I have concentrated on photographing people and their various ways of life that seem to have been left behind by the world's rush to modernize. Certain aspects of these various cultures seem to be in a time warp, many within their own country. The photographs presented here are part of a long-term project photographing some of these people that live and work in challenging environments that time seems to have forgotten and whose way of life may never be seen again.
Mariska Karto
Netherlands
Mariska Karto is an artist/ fine art-photographer born in Suriname (South-America) and raised in the Netherlands. In this age of rapidity and technical development, in which human is exposed to impersonal detachment of current technical era, Mariska Karto creates the vulnerable and intensive dimensions of human feelings and emotions. This all happens in the dreamworld she has created with her technique in which past and present have found their way to each other, in this era of transformation.She talks to you in a language without words using symbolism in a dreamworld of historic paintings atmosphere.Mystique, tragic and erotic are the keywords for her work. Her work are like old stories escaped from an old world of eternal dreams, eternal emotions and eternal feelings that existed for hundred of years but still repeats themselves as in a pattern of an earthy rite, in this new modern contemporary era.Her works are like poems and thoughts, restless ones but are also like whispers of thoughtless experiences, floating in a centuries long movement in time.Artist Statement"My work is based on a period in which photography did not exist, It was not until the end of the 18th century that it was invented. As a result of this, people thought that photography would make the art of painting disappear, especially in the post modern era, the traditional art had to make way for new technical developments. In my work I seek and found a respectful connection of technique and traditional craft through a striking contradiction. Painters in the Baroque/renaissance time were trying to paint as true-to-life with painting-techniques and color applications. What a camera does is portray the world in its realistic colors. That’s the contradiction in my work, it’s the other way around. I shoot realistic images and through an intensive transformation process, the work is changed, true-to-life in the characteristic Baroque colors and style of that time. Eventually, this says nothing about photography and technique, but more about the great masters of that gone era, they were able to be as realistic and accurate as possible with brush and paint the world in all its reality… That’s the great contradiction in my work, I’m leaving the visible reality of our current time, and bring the invisible realism of the past forward in my work. As a result of this, I pull away present time from its structure and then time appears to be just a definition, which slowly fades away, when current and past becomes interwoven with each other.” More background info: "I mix skills from different worlds together. It is a blend of skills of my (I'm originally a painter and sketcher, textiles - I was a textile artist some years ago, photography and image processing) that ultimately meets each other in this form of art. A main factor are also social emotional influences in my life which developed how I see, learn and finally understand things in an essential (psychological) way. All these (artistic) elements from different areas and personal influences come together in a work of mine."
Lotta Lemetti
Finland
1995
Lotta Lemetti is a photographer with a unique vision that embraces the beauty of the simple and mundane. Her minimal aesthetic carries through the diverse work she loves to make and she's not afraid to use alternative processes, mixed media and graphic design in her image making. The native of Finland obtained her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from the NewYork Film Academy, and was also the recipient of the highly prestigious Fulbright undergraduate award in 2015, one of only 3 Finnish winners that year and the only grantee in the field of arts. Her work has since been exhibited in galleries around the world, including New York, Los Angeles, Italy, and Finland. Lotta is constantly sought after by leading artists in her field, and has worked alongside many, including award-winning photographer and visual artist Amanda Rowan, named Chromatic Photographer of the Year 2018 for her achievements in color photography and Photo District News' The Curator Fine Art competition in Still Life in 2019, whose work has been exhibited in Photo LA, and Paris Photo as well as the Wall Street Gallery and the Leica Gallery in Los Angeles, and on display at the Palms with Damien Hirst, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, and Takashi Murakami, and Photographer/Visual Artist Naomi White, winner of Photo District News' Objects of Desire award and has exhibited throughout North America and Europe, including with Tobey Fine Arts, Christopher Henry Gallery and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in New York. In 2018, Lemetti's latest photography series Kekta won the title of Latitude Life APS Photographer of the Year. Kekta was then exhibited in New York and the city of Pravisdomini, Italy. Ms. Lemetti's work has been featured in FAYN Magazine, U+I Magazine, NewBeauty Magazine, PhotoVogue and FLOAT Magazine. Kekta is an exploration of cultural blending and national identity. These photographs originate from her own experience of living between two cultures. She created scenes that are inspired by the immemorial beliefs of unity between humans and nature, and cultural traditions that have been passed on for generations in the form of oral folk tales about Finnish mythology. The stories are hand picked from the Finnish national epic Kalevala, which is a book of poems collected from different regions of Finland and then stitched together into one cohesive story. I took these individual stories and photographed them in a variety of American landscapes, with people from different ethnic backgrounds, creating a new narrative of polycultural identity. Today, we live in a global age, which means that we must reconsider the old ways of thinking about national identity. People are no longer bound by the geographical borders of countries and only a few places on earth can be said to remain monocultural. Bigger metropolis cities are starting to resemble a ‘human mosaic' in which we are moving from multiculturalism, which emphasises the coexistence of different individual cultures to polyculturalism, which indicates the integratedness of the cultures.
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
Advertisement
AAP Magazine #50 Shapes
Win a Solo Exhibition this August
AAP Magazine #50: Shapes

Latest Interviews

Exclusive Interview with Chris Yan
Chris Yan is a Beijing-based photographer and Creative Director whose work focuses on street and documentary photography. His series Beijing Story, which earned him a solo exhibition in October 2024, offers a nuanced look at daily life in the city. In this interview, he discusses his photographic approach, creative influences, and the ideas behind the project.
Exclusive Interview with Meg McKenzie Ryan
California-based photographer Meg McKenzie Ryan has followed an unconventional and deeply personal path into the world of photography. From chance beginnings in Hong Kong to a life shaped by travel, education, and immersion in vastly different cultures, her work reflects a deep curiosity about the world—and the people who inhabit it. Her solo project, The Lives of Others, awarded the March 2024 Solo Exhibition, is rooted in a documentary approach that feels both intimate and unflinching.
Exclusive Interview with Evan Murphy
At just 25, Evan Murphy’s work immediately stood out for its depth and maturity. A self-taught photographer originally from Las Vegas and now based in New York City, Evan blends raw emotion with a strong visual voice shaped by years of creative exploration. His series I.D. earned him a solo exhibition in July 2024, marking an impressive early milestone in a career that promises to go far.
Exclusive Interview with Lydia Panas
Lydia Panas, winner of AAP Magazine #38: Women, is an American photographer, known for her powerful and introspective portraiture. With a background in visual arts and philosophy, she uses photography to explore identity, vulnerability, and human connection—often drawing from personal experience to create images that are both intimate and thought-provoking. Her work has been widely exhibited and published, and is part of numerous permanent collections. We asked her a few questions about her life and work.
Exclusive Interview with Hana Hana Peskova
Hana Peskova is a passionate self-taught photographer whose journey began at Škola kreativní fotografie in Prague. In 2021, she was awarded the prestigious EFIAP distinction by the Fédération Internationale de l'Art Photographique, recognizing her artistic excellence. Based in Český Krumlov, Czech Republic, she explores the world through street and documentary photography, capturing the beauty of fleeting moments and untold stories. Drawn to forgotten places and lives lived on the margins, her work reflects both emotional depth and creative vision. In April 2024, she won a solo exhibition with her powerful series Child Labour, further cementing her commitment to socially engaged photography.
Exclusive Interview with Shinji Ichikawa
Shinji Ichikawa, winner of AAP Magazine 39: Shadows, was born into a family of photographers in Shimane Prefecture, Japan, where he grew up surrounded by cameras and prints. After graduating from Tokyo Visual Arts, he began his career in commercial photography before moving to New York in 1999 to explore a more personal, surreal approach to image-making. His work often investigates themes of space and presence. Now back in Shimane, he continues to create and exhibit his photography while managing his family’s studio. We asked him a few questions about his life and work.
Exclusive Interview with Eric Davidove
Eric is addicted to street photography — and he’s been chasing its highs since 2014. Logging thousands of miles through city streets, he captures quirky, satirical, and often humorous moments that reflect the absurdities of modern urban life. His recent series, Life Is But a Dream, won him a solo exhibition and challenges viewers to look up from their screens and truly observe the world around them. Through his lens, the ordinary becomes extraordinary — and sometimes, even a wake-up call.
Interview with Anna and Jordan Rathkopf: On Seeing Ourselves Through Illness
Visual storytellers Anna and Jordan Rathkopf didn’t set out to make a book, an exhibition, or a lecture series. When Anna was diagnosed with HER2-positive breast cancer at 37, their shared creative language—photography—became a way to stay connected, grounded, and emotionally present. Nearly a decade later, that body of work has evolved into HER2: The Diagnosed, The Caregiver, and Their Son—a book and traveling exhibition that blends fine art, writing, and lived experience to explore how illness reshapes marriage, identity, and family. The exhibition opens June 7 at Photoville Festival in New York City and will travel through Czechia beginning in Fall 2025. Below, Anna and Jordan reflect on how they shaped the project, how their perspectives stayed distinct, and how it became the first major initiative of their nonprofit, the Patient Caregiver Artist Coalition (PCAC).
Exclusive Interview with Jackie Mulder
Amsterdam-based artist Jackie Mulder took an unconventional path into photography. After working in fashion and graphic design, she shifted her creative focus later in life—graduating from the Fotoacademie in Amsterdam at the age of 60. Since then, she’s embraced photography not as an end but as a beginning: a base layer in a deeply personal and tactile artistic process that blends images with wax, embroidery, and drawing.
Call for Entries
Win A Solo Exhibition in August
Get International Exposure and Connect with Industry Insiders