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FINAL DAYS TO WIN A SOLO EXHIBITION IN MAY 2026
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Jason Au
Jason Au
Jason Au

Jason Au

Country: Hong Kong
Birth: 1994

Born in 1994, Jason Au is an award-winning street photographer based in Hong Kong. His black & white photography incorporates creative, geometric and balanced compositions with prominent use of contrasting light and shadows. He thinks black & white has the mesmerizing quality to transform ordinary things from everyday life into something dramatic and powerful, so he is intrigued to seize those fleeting street moments around.

In 2021, Jason's high-aesthetic works won him 2nd Place in LensCulture Street Photography Awards (Single Image), 1st Place in International Photography Awards (IPA) Street Photography Category, 1st Place in IPA - One Shot (Isolation Category), 1st Place in ND Awards Street Photography Category and 2nd Place in Fine Art Photography Awards Street Photography Category.

His street photography series "Geometric Hong Kong" comes with the compositional approach of isolating urban subjects, geometric elements and forms from the chaotic urban environment of his hometown. The series portrayed the way of life of different urban subjects in the context of their surrounding geometric environment, which were all culled from mundane everyday scenes. Nevertheless, those subjects look trapped and lost inside an artificial geometric labyrinth without realizing it - perhaps this series is also a metaphorical view of urbanity and the hectic contemporary way of life within a metropolis like Hong Kong.
 

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Marina Lauar
Brazil
1993
Marina Lauar is a Brazilian visual artist. She develops her artwork in Fine Art Photography, where she uses a pictorial language to construct of her narratives. As a plural artist she appropriates elements that expand formal photography and allow the mix of printed photography with other gestures and techniques. She finds in the portrait an appropriate field for her discussions and critical reflection, which she builds through minimalist and potent images. Her research currently circulates between the deconstruction of already rooted stereotypes and her own self-perception. About Plastic Portraits The project was born during my renaissance as an artist. After some time feeling completely blocked, hands, feet, head, and heart tied, I found myself in a huge need to express my concerns through photography. Fine Art Photography is a fertile field that allows the cultivation of reflections and dialogues, so I chose it as language, to be the home of my yearnings. I create portraits aiming to deconstruct beliefs, sometimes using satire, sometimes critical reflections and their depths, sometimes pure intimacy, things that will never be said. The atmosphere is reaffirmed by the way I work with the light. I seek minimalism so that only a key element fulfils its role as a critical factor in the image. My principal goal with this project is to traverse. Conceive feelings, make the feeling palpable. Build next to portrayed the script that will guide us in the production of the pictures, in the choice of the element, so that everything there in that image has great strength and meaning to the portrayed. To emanate with my eyes feelings that overflow in the other.
Esmeralda Ruiz
United States
Artist Statement: "My childhood was different then most. Growing up with nothing but artists was one thing, but having actually flat lined during a surgery after being diagnosed with a kidney infection changed my life forever. It wasn’t that it left me weak or prevented me from going outside and playing or even going to school with other children but the images that I saw when that moment occurred is what I strive to show in my work today. A wonderful world where the air was crisp and refreshing, with all of its flowers in bloom, my journey begins down a path with little yellow homes on each side. Beyond the path, a valley flowers appeared. On the right there were rocky mountains so enormous that clouds covered their midsection with their snow covered summits peering through. To my left the sound of the ocean was relentlessly crashing into a cliff. As I crossed my valley of flowers and ascended the cliff, I felt a cool yet, strong breeze off the ocean forcing me back. As I looked up into the vast skies above, I was overcome by the ever so omnipotent clouds with their glorious rays of sunlight beaming through. The feeling of leaping into the breeze and flying towards the light was more then overwhelming. Instead, I greeted it with a smile and made my way back to the valley. Relaxed, laying across its delicate wild flowers, my tranquil body curled up and fell into a deep sleep. Awaking to my mother at my bedside, disappointment overcame me with the realization that it was all just a dream. Weeks passed, the pain healed but my dream still reigned true. Numerous sketches and endless rants of my new world was all that was real. Having to transition from a world of such perfection to a life of obscurity seemed almost inconceivable. As such, a minor state of depression would set in as my life slowly began to drift back into its regular routine. During this time my only solace came from the amazing work found in books from various art movements and even my favorite childhood cartoons. However, as my healing process dragged on, much of what I know about color (and how I use it today) came from all the extra time spent in my parent’s studio. Watching them work and being surrounded by various mediums helped better understand art as a form of expression. This would inevitably forge my desire to show the world what I had experienced on that fateful day. As the years pass, my dream still lives within me. My thesis project has only driven my need to share my moment with the world in ways I never thought possible. After much soul searching and numerous critiques, I have come to the realization that my utopia isn’t just a dream; it is in the landscapes that have always surrounded me. Those three minutes had and will always have a tremendous impact on my life. If anything, I learned how fragile life is and to always appreciate the beautiful things in life. Photography has allowed me to show what stands out in my eyes by glorifying it in a photograph. It is the best way that I can communicate what I saw and what I felt at that particular moment. It is the bridge between my past and my present.Source: Esmeralda Ruiz Website
Oksana Omelchuk
Ukraine
1983
Oksana Omelchuk is a Kyiv-based visual artist and fine-art photographer whose practice moves between photography, scanography, and digital art. Her journey began with fine art: she studied painting, drawing, sculpture, and applied arts for six years at an art school before pursuing a degree in economics. Photography came later, almost by accident: she first appeared in front of the camera as a model for a friend studying at the Kyiv School of Photography. Curious to learn how to see through the lens herself, she joined the school in 2021, just to take pictures for pleasure. But soon, photography became her main artistic language. She continues her studies at Form, an international educational platform for photographic education, based in France. Through experimentation, she discovered that her true signature lies in drawing: in the imaginative world she had as a child, now translated into contemporary visual form. Her works are not about the moment, but about emotion - each object, whether a flower, an X-ray, or a fragment of furniture, becomes a character carrying a feeling. Oksana creates intuitively, following emotion more than perfection, balancing analysis and spontaneity. Her process is like opening a piano lid before improvisation: uncertain, yet full of discovery. Inspired by music and Renaissance painting, she builds delicate color harmonies that reflect both control and freedom. Her recurring themes explore the anatomy of feelings and the dreamlike dialogue between tenderness and strength. Statement: Art has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. What began with painting in childhood has evolved into a visual language that moves between photography and digital art. I am drawn to the moment where reality dissolves into imagination. Instead of brushes, I use light, scans, and digital tools - painting emotions rather than objects, reinterpreting the visible world through the colors of my inner states. My process is intuitive, experimental, and deeply emotional. I often begin with a photograph and then layer it with digital textures, hand-drawn traces, or scanned materials, allowing the image to transform organically: from documentation into a state of feeling. I explore memory, transformation, and perception - how fragility and strength coexist in a single gesture. For me, art is a quiet dialogue with the world: a way to speak without words, to hold tenderness and truth in the same breath. Articles: AAP Magazine 51 Colors The Garden of My Tenderness
Lewis Carroll
United Kingdom
1832 | † 1898
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (27 January 1832 - 14 January 1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English writer of world-famous children's fiction, notably Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass. He was noted for his facility at word play, logic and fantasy. The poems Jabberwocky and The Hunting of the Snark are classified in the genre of literary nonsense. He was also a mathematician, photographer and Anglican deacon. Carroll came from a family of high church Anglicans, and developed a long relationship with Christ Church, Oxford, where he lived for most of his life as a scholar and teacher. Alice Liddell, daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, Henry Liddell, is widely identified as the original for Alice in Wonderland, though Carroll always denied this. Photography (1856–1880) In 1856, Dodgson took up the new art form of photography under the influence first of his uncle Skeffington Lutwidge, and later of his Oxford friend Reginald Southey. He soon excelled at the art and became a well-known gentleman-photographer, and he seems even to have toyed with the idea of making a living out of it in his very early years. A study by Roger Taylor and Edward Wakeling exhaustively lists every surviving print, and Taylor calculates that just over half of his surviving work depicts young girls, though about 60% of his original photographic portfolio is now missing. Dodgson also made many studies of men, women, boys, and landscapes; his subjects also include skeletons, dolls, dogs, statues, paintings, and trees. His pictures of children were taken with a parent in attendance and many of the pictures were taken in the Liddell garden because natural sunlight was required for good exposures. He also found photography to be a useful entrée into higher social circles. During the most productive part of his career, he made portraits of notable sitters such as John Everett Millais, Ellen Terry, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Julia Margaret Cameron, Michael Faraday, Lord Salisbury, and Alfred Tennyson. By the time that Dodgson abruptly ceased photography (1880, over 24 years), he had established his own studio on the roof of Tom Quad, created around 3,000 images, and was an amateur master of the medium, though fewer than 1,000 images have survived time and deliberate destruction. He stopped taking photographs because keeping his studio working was too time-consuming. He used the wet collodion process; commercial photographers who started using the dry-plate process in the 1870s took pictures more quickly.[62] Popular taste changed with the advent of Modernism, affecting the types of photographs that he produced. He died of pneumonia following influenza on 14 January 1898 at his sisters' home, "The Chestnuts", in Guildford. He was two weeks away from turning 66 years old. His funeral was held at the nearby St Mary's Church. He is buried in Guildford at the Mount Cemetery.Source: Wikipedia
Ray Knox
United Kingdom
1960
I am a documentary photographer based in London. After studying Graphic Design at the University of Ulster, I moved to London to start my career as an Art Director. Working as a creative in various advertising agencies, I’ve been fortunate to have collaborated with, and learned from, some inspirational photographers. Encouraged by those photographers, I began making documentary projects and I now divide my time between photographing my personal projects and my advertising creative work. Close To Home "I started this photography project shortly after the introduction of the first Covid-19 lockdown as a way of alleviating my restlessness from being confined to home all day. I would venture out on my neighbourhood walks just after dusk when the streets were deserted and eerily quiet. Initially, I stuck quite close to home but over time I kept increasing the distance I covered on my meandering strolls around North London. The solitude I found wandering the streets was an almost meditative experience of simply observing as I walked. It gave me the chance to explore my local surroundings more intently and notice things. I had overlooked for years. What a revelation, streets so familiar during the day were completely transformed after dark. I discovered an alluring beauty photographing under streetlights casting their individual hues, transforming a mundane space by creating a surreal, dreamlike quality and inducing an air of mystery. Artificial light is much more controlled, and you can almost see more clearly because the light focuses your attention on a certain feature or colour. It also illuminates a scene in much the same way you would light a still life or a stage set. I get excited when I have the opportunity to photograph in fog as this gives light a wonderful cinematic quality, reminiscent of film noir. I believe there are an infinite number of interesting pictures to be made on our doorstep, but you have to search for them. Looking ahead I hope to continue this project through capturing the quiet beauty of my neighbourhood at night, which often goes unnoticed."
Felice Beato
Italy / United Kingdom
1832 | † 1909
Felice Beato, also known as Felix Beato, was an Italian–British photographer. He was one of the first people to take photographs in East Asia and one of the first war photographers. He is noted for his genre works, portraits, and views and panoramas of the architecture and landscapes of Asia and the Mediterranean region. Beato's travels gave him the opportunity to create images of countries, people, and events that were unfamiliar and remote to most people in Europe and North America. His work provides images of such events like the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the Second Opium War, and represents the first substantial body of photojournalism. He influenced other photographers, and his influence in Japan, where he taught and worked with numerous other photographers and artists, was particularly deep and lasting. A death certificate discovered in 2009 shows that Beato was born in Venice in 1832 and died on 29 January 1909 in Florence. The death certificate also indicates that he was a British subject and a bachelor. It is likely that early in his life Beato and his family moved to Corfu, at the time part of the British protectorate of the Ionian Islands, and so Beato was a British subject. Because of the existence of a number of photographs signed "Felice Antonio Beato" and "Felice A. Beato", it was long assumed that there was one photographer who somehow photographed at the same time in places as distant as Egypt and Japan. In 1983 it was shown by Chantal Edel that "Felice Antonio Beato" represented two brothers, Felice Beato and Antonio Beato, who sometimes worked together, sharing a signature. The confusion arising from the signatures continues to cause problems in identifying which of the two photographers was the creator of a given image. Photographs of the 19th century often now show the limitations of the technology used, yet Beato managed to successfully work within and even transcend those limitations. He predominantly produced albumen silver prints from wet collodion glass-plate negatives. Beato pioneered and refined the techniques of hand-coloring photographs and making panoramas. He may have started hand-coloring photographs at the suggestion of Wirgman, or he may have seen the hand-colored photographs made by partners Charles Parker and William Parke Andrew. Whatever the inspiration, Beato's colored landscapes are delicate and naturalistic and his colored portraits, more strongly colored than the landscapes, are appraised as excellent. As well as providing views in color, Beato worked to represent very large subjects in a way that gave a sense of their vastness. Throughout his career, Beato's work is marked by spectacular panoramas, which he produced by carefully making several contiguous exposures of a scene and then joining the resulting prints together, thereby re-creating the expansive view. The complete version of his panorama of Pehtang comprises seven photographs joined together almost seamlessly for a total length of more than 2 meters (6 1/2 ft). Although Beato was previously believed to have died in Rangoon or Mandalay in 1905 or 1906, his death certificate, discovered in 2009, indicates that he died on 29 January 1909 in Florence, Italy.Source: Wikipedia In a peripatetic career that spanned five decades, the photographer Felice Beato (1832–1909) covered a wide swath of East Asia. Following in the wake of Britain's vast colonial empire, he was among the primary photographers to provide images of newly opened countries such as India, China, Japan, Korea, and Burma. A pioneer war photographer, Beato recorded several conflicts: the Crimean War in 1855–56, the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny in 1858–59, the Second Opium War in 1860, and the American expedition to Korea in 1871. His photographs of battlefields, the first to show images of the dead, provided a new direction for that genre. Catering to a Western audience, Beato produced an exceptionally diverse oeuvre: topographical and architectural views, including panoramas, as well as portraits and costume studies of the countries he visited or in which he resided. From Beato's series on domestic Japanese society, the full-length portrait shown here depicts the traditional armored costume of the samurai, the soldier of noble class who served the powerful rulers of Japan. Beato spent more than 20 years in Japan (1863–84), his longest residency in one country and the most prolific period of his career. There he witnessed one of the most turbulent eras in Japan's history, known as the Bakumatsu period (1853–68), when the Tokuga shogunate gave way to the Meiji reign. During his time in Japan, Beato employed the wet-collodion method, which reduced the length of exposure to seconds rather than minutes. The use of photography began to spread in Japan in the mid-1850s, and Beato's work rapidly achieved success as he offered the first hand-colored photographs and photographic albums in the country. Despite restrictions on foreigners' travel, Beato developed a remarkable and rare visual record of Japan. This photograph depicts the monumental sculpture of the Dai Bouts (Great Buddha), which had been the centerpiece of a temple that was destroyed by a typhoon. It was an important attraction at Kamakura, and Beato was the first Westerner to photograph it. He posed himself in the scene, sitting on the stairs, while local men climbed the statue. Beato left Japan in 1884, but his photographs continued to circulate with the successive sales of his negatives to different studios.Source: The J. Paul Getty Museum
Manuello Paganelli
Dominican Republic/United States
1960
I was born in the Dominican Republic and growing up in the 1960s I watched my parents devote time to help others, exposing me to the inequality of wealth, education, and the lack of mind and body wellness prevalent on our small island. It was hard for me to understand why poor children would be on the streets instead of in a warmer, safer place. I saw school-age boys like me but barefoot and shining the fancy shoes of businessmen. Scruffy kids with open hands asking for pennies. Running, begging for anything to eat, fending for themselves, and surviving on their wits alone. None of my parents' words made it better, or helped me understand what led to my country's socio-economic crisis. With my parents' humanistic influence, I figured I would become an attorney like my father or a missionary doctor. In 1972, I arrived in the US for high school without speaking any English. By my last year of college in Tennessee, I lost all desire to become a doctor, My father stopped supporting me. I found work on the assembly lines and loading docks of the local McKee Baking Company. In 1982 I bought my first camera as a way to forget my doomed career. While browsing in a bookstore I learned about a man named Ansel Adams. A few glances at Adams' powerful black-and-white landscapes left me hypnotized. Within days, I was on the telephone with Ansel. It was an innocent call but that first conversation with Ansel Adams led to many more, until we established a warm mentoring relationship that lasted until he passed away in 1984. My break into professional photography began when I was hired as a staff photographer for The Chattanooga Times in 1982. While that photojournalism experience was invaluable, I soon left for the Washington, DC area, where I began a freelance editorial photography career and from there migrated into humanistic photography. In 1989, I began traveling to Cuba to find long-lost relatives. There I learned about the social issues of the island and the survival spirit of the Cuban people, becoming increasingly aware of the socio-political climate I continued to travel there. My documentary photos from my Cuban project culminated in an exhibition in 1995, where a Washington Post columnist wrote: "Paganelli's Cuban photographs are a brilliant window on a land and people too long hidden from North American eyes... Paganelli brings an artist's eyes and a native son's sensibility to his superb photographs." My current essay project, which started in 1994, explores Black Cowboys across the USA, examining cultural and regional influences within this well developed sub-culture. Statement I never planned on becoming a professional photographer. I always thought I'd be a doctor, but during my senior year in college I began to have doubts about a career in medicine. It was around that time that I bought a Canon camera. Despite years in the business, I still possess that same excitement for the craft that gripped me the first time I picked up a camera. And, too, I maintain a passion for sharing my subjects' stories through documentary photography. My influences are the things that my eyes capture from the moment I get up, see, sense and experience and everything else beyond that with the elements of sounds , shadows and light. But I've always admired the work of Walker Evans, Henry Cartier Bresson and most notably the works of W.Eugene Smith and Robert Frank. I also love the landscape of Ansel Adams and the beautiful magical touches of the portraits done by Irving Penn.
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