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Cecil Beaton
Self Portrait
Cecil Beaton
Cecil Beaton

Cecil Beaton

Country: United Kingdom
Birth: 1904 | Death: † 1980

Born in 1904 in London and coming of age at the peak of the 20's, Cecil Beaton was in love with the worlds of high society, theater, and glamour. Beauty in his hands was transformed into elegance, fantasy, romance, and charm. His inspired amateurism led to a following among fashionable debutantes and eventually a full fledged career as the foremost fashion and portrait photographer of his day. He was so attunded to the changes of fashion that his career maintained its momentum for five decades; from the Sitwells to the Rolling Stones. Beaton died in 1980.

Source: Staley-Wise Gallery


Sir Cecil Beaton, in full Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton, photographer known primarily for his portraits of celebrated persons, who also worked as an illustrator, a diarist, and an Academy Award-winning costume and set designer. Beaton’s interest in photography began when, as a young boy, he admired portraits of society women and actresses circulated on picture postcards and in Sunday supplements of newspapers. When he got his first camera at age 11, his nurse taught him how to use it and how to process negatives and prints. He costumed and posed his sisters in an attempt to re-create the popular portraits that he loved.

In the 1920s Beaton became a staff photographer for Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines. He developed a style of portraiture in which the sitter became merely one element of an overall decorative pattern, which was dominated by backgrounds made of unusual materials such as aluminum foil or papier-mâché. The results, which combined art and artifice, were alternately exquisite, exotic, or bizarre, but always chic. Many of these portraits are gathered in his books The Book of Beauty (1930), Persona Grata (1953, with Kenneth Tynan), and It Gives Me Great Pleasure (1953).

During World War II, Beaton served in the British Ministry of Information, covering the fighting in Africa and East Asia. His wartime photographs of the siege of Britain were published in the book Winged Squadrons (1942). After the war Beaton resumed portrait photography, but his style became much less flamboyant. He also broadened his activities, designing costumes and sets for theatre and film. He won Academy Awards for his costume design in Gigi (1958) and for both his costume design and his art direction in My Fair Lady (1964). Several volumes of his diaries, which appeared in the 1960s and ’70s, were summarized in Self Portrait with Friends: The Selected Diaries of Cecil Beaton, 1926–1974 (1979). Beaton was knighted in 1972.

Source: www.britannica.com


© All photographs wer scanned and released by the Imperial War Museum on the IWM Non Commercial Licence. The work was created by Cecil Beaton during his service for the Ministry of Information during the Second World War as an official photographer of the Home Front.
Selected Books on Available on Amazon
Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World
Cecil Beaton's Fashionable World
Cecil Beaton
Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things
Cecil Beaton's Bright Young Things
Cecil Beaton
The New York Years
The New York Years
Cecil Beaton, Donald Albrecht

Galleries

Staley-Wise Gallery

Keith de Lellis Gallery

 

Cecil Beaton's Video

Selected Books

Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World
Cecil Beaton's Fashionable World
Cecil Beaton
Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things
Cecil Beaton's Bright Young Things
Cecil Beaton
The New York Years
The New York Years
Cecil Beaton, Donald Albrecht

Inspiring Portfolios

Anna Biret
© Anna Biret
Svetlin Yosifov
© Svetlin Yosifov
Shinji Ichikawa
© Shinji Ichikawa
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More Great Photographers To Discover

Bettina Rheims
Bettina Rheims
France
1952
Bettina Rheims, born Bettina Caroline Germaine Rheims is a French artist and photographer. She began her career with a series of images of striptease dancers and acrobats, and over the years she became one of the most notable persons behind the lens. "I adore flesh. I am a skin photographer," she says famously, and that perfectly explains her work. It is raw and erotic, frequently involving nudity and stuffed animals, and she achieves a visceral emotion that captivates the audience. Some of her most well-known pieces raise problems of gender, androgyny, and transsexuality. Although Bettina Rheims began with obscure and marginalized subjects, her later assignments included advertising campaigns for fashion and major brands like Chanel and Lancôme, as well as prominent international magazines. Madonna, Charlotte Rampling, Catherine Deneuve, Kylie Minogue, Claudia Schiffer, and many others were photographed by Rheims. And there's something indisputably human and true in every photograph she takes, perhaps too natural and personal. I have always believed that whether the work is my idea or a commission, it is personal work.... In the end, as my old master Helmut Newton used to say, there are only two kinds of pictures: the good ones and the bad ones. -- Bettina Rheims Bettina Rheims was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. She is the daughter of the French Academy's Maurice Rheims. She began her career as a photographer in 1978, at the age of 26, after working as a model, a journalist, and running an art gallery. Initially, she accomplished a lot of commissioned work, such as record covers for Jean-Jacques Goldman and celebrity portraits. She devoted herself entirely to photography beginning in 1980. She created a series of images of strippers and acrobats, which were presented in two personal exhibits in Paris in 1981, at the Centre Pompidou and the Galerie Texbraun. Encouraged by her success, she began work on a series of plush animal portraits, which were shown in Paris and New York. In 1982, Rheims' Animal series allowed her to focus her lens on a different type of nudity: stuffed animals with fixed looks, "which seemed to desire to express something beyond death." "I had to capture their stare," the photographer claimed. The photographer questioned gender, androgyny, and transsexuality in Modern Lovers (1989-1990). Les Espionnes (1992) and Kim (1993) were two subsequent publications on the same subject (1994). At the same time she took portrait images for worldwide magazines and advertising campaigns (Well and Chanel), created her first fashion series, worked on cover sleeves, and film posters, and in 1986 directed her first advertising campaign. Her female portraits were published in a monograph, Female Trouble, in 1989, and exhibited in Germany and Japan. The next year, she created Modern Lovers, a series of portraits of androgynous youths that were presented in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as being published in book form. I still find myself having to justify being a woman taking pictures of naked women. It never occurred to me that there was something bizarre about it, it always felt very natural. -- Bettina Rheims Bettina Rheims began work on one of her major series, Chambre Close, in the early 1990s (1990-1992). This was her first color work, and it marked the beginning of her partnership with novelist Serge Bramly, in which her images were combined with the writer's fiction. Chambre Close is a parody of the first pornographic images in form — chambers with fading walls and old-fashioned wallpaper — but in substance, it attempts to stage amateur models in stances that play on the eroticism and misunderstanding between those looking and those displaying themselves. At the close of his presidential campaign in 1995, Jacques Chirac allowed Rheims to work behind the scenes on a series of images depicting the last moments of the election. Following the election, the French Republic's Presidency commissioned Bettina Rheims to create the official picture of Jacques Chirac. According to Libération, she intended to give the President "the easygoing look of the great heroes in westerns." The decade ended with the publishing of the book I.N.R.I. and its accompanying exhibition in 1999. I.N.R.I. constructs a philosophical debate on the history of the crucifixion through images of episodes from Christ's life, from the Annunciation to the Ascension, once again connecting the gaze of Rheims with the writing of Serge Bramly. Bettina Rheims advocated "modern illustrations, following the advent of photography, cinema, and advertising imagery, as if Jesus were to return today." The release of this work was highly contentious in France. During two long stays in Shanghai in 2002, Bettina Rheimsmade a series about the city. "The initial impressions of a visitor coming in Shanghai are of people with deep-rooted ancestral rituals and customs who have thrown themselves into the frenzied race of the modern world." Rheims, blending into this 'alternative way of thinking,' offers us a fresh perspective on the enigma that is China's coexistence with its millenary traditions, avant-garde facet, official elements, and underground qualities. Rheims exhibited Héroïnes, a piece that was essentially an homage to sculpture, at the Galerie De Noirmont in 2005. On this occasion, the photographer worked with designer Jean Colonna to outfit the women in unique outfits. "Thus, old haute couture gowns were reassembled on each of these contemporary icons. These unusually beautiful women then toyed with a stone, which became their pedestal for a brief while." Bettina Rheims collaborated with Serge Bramly again at the end of the 2000s, and Rose, c'est Paris was shown at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in 2010. Bettina Rheims and Serge Bramly crafted a fictional thread from autobiographical parts for the photographic story. In this piece, Paris plays "the role of the muse more than the subject, and [appears] in an almost allegorical manner through the figures weaved into a story." A young woman we'll call B. is hunting for Rose, her twin sister who she thinks has vanished. Rose, c'est Paris is presented as a "great mysterious series," a genre beloved by surrealists, and is divided into thirteen episodes in which we discover, among other things, an unusual or obscure Paris that is voluntarily timeless." Exhibited in 2012 in Düsseldorf, the Gender Studies series pursues the questioning of gender representation. The device linking image and sound (by Frédéric Sanchez) presents 27 sound portraits of young men and women who responded to a request the photographer posted on Facebook. The photos are accompanied by interview clips and have featured in several exhibitions and a book. Rheims has also worked on advertising campaigns for fashion and big brands, such as Chanel and Lancôme, as well as taking portraits of famous women for international magazines. Rheims says that she has been inspired by Diane Arbus and Helmut Newton as well as by the work of early painters.
André Kertész
André Kertész
Hungary
1894 | † 1985
André Kertész, born Kertész Andor, was a Hungarian-born photographer known for his groundbreaking contributions to photographic composition and the photo essay. In the early years of his career, his then-unorthodox camera angles and style prevented his work from gaining wider recognition. Kertész never felt that he had gained the worldwide recognition he deserved. Today he is considered one of the seminal figures of photojournalism. Expected by his family to work as a stockbroker, Kertész pursued photography independently as an autodidact, and his early work was published primarily in magazines, a major market in those years. This continued until much later in his life, when Kertész stopped accepting commissions. He served briefly in World War I and moved to Paris in 1925, then the artistic capital of the world, against the wishes of his family. In Paris he worked for France's first illustrated magazine called VU. Involved with many young immigrant artists and the Dada movement, he achieved critical and commercial success. Due to German persecution of the Jews and the threat of World War II, Kertész decided to emigrate to the United States in 1936, where he had to rebuild his reputation through commissioned work. In the 1940s and 1950s, he stopped working for magazines and began to achieve greater international success. His career is generally divided into four periods, based on where he was working and his work was most prominently known. They are called the Hungarian period, the French period, the American period and, toward the end of his life, the International period. Source: Wikipedia André Kertész (1894–1985) has been hailed as one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century. Working intuitively, he captured the poetry of modern urban life with its quiet, often overlooked incidents and odd, occasionally comic, or even bizarre juxtapositions. He endeavored "to give meaning to everything" about him with his camera, "to make photographs as by reflection in a mirror, unmanipulated and direct as in life." Combining this seemingly artless spontaneity with a sophisticated understanding of composition, Kertész created a purely photographic idiom that celebrates direct observation of the everyday. Neither a surrealist, nor a strict photojournalist, he nevertheless infused his best images with strong tenets of both. "You don't see" the things you photograph, he explained, "you feel them." Born Kertész Andor in Budapest, he received his first camera in 1912 and immediately began to make intimate portraits of family and friends, studies of the Hungarian countryside, and scenes of daily life behind the battle lines of World War I. Seeking to make a living through photography, he moved in 1925 to Paris, where he established a successful career as a photojournalist. Buoyed by this accomplishment and inspired by the vibrant artistic community of the French capital, he created some of the most intriguing and celebrated images of the period. In 1936 Kertész relocated to New York in order to further his career. Captivated by the rich visual spectacle of the city and awed by its scale, he used the camera to record both his fascination with, and sense of alienation from, his new surroundings. The images attest to a complicated personal history borne through the political upheavals of two wars and life in three countries. He died at age ninety-one. This exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of Kertész's rich and varied career. Source: The International Center of Photography
Maggie Taylor
Maggie Taylor
United States
1961
Maggie Taylor received her BA degree in philosophy from Yale University in 1983 and her MFA degree in photography from the University of Florida in 1987. After more than ten years as a still life photographer, she began to use the computer to create her images in 1996. Her work is featured in Adobe Photoshop Master Class: Maggie Taylor’s Landscape of Dreams, published by Adobe Press in 2004; Solutions Beginning with A, Modernbook Editions, Palo Alto, 2007; and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Modernbook Editions, Palo Alto, 2008. Taylor’s images have been exhibited in one-person exhibitions throughout the U.S and abroad and are in numerous public and private collections including The Art Museum, Princeton University; The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; and The Museum of Photography, Seoul, Korea. In 1996 and 2001, she received State of Florida Individual Artist’s Fellowships. In 2004, she won the Santa Fe Center for Photography’s Project Competition. 2005 she received the Ultimate Eye Foundation Grant. She lives in Gaineville, Florida.From en.wikipedia.orgMaggie Taylor (born 1961 in Cleveland, Ohio) is an artist who works with digital images. She won the Santa Fe Center for Photography's Project Competition in 2004. Her work has been widely exhibited in the United States and Europe and is represented within the permanent collections of several galleries and museums. She is the third wife of American photographer, Jerry Uelsmann. She produces prints by scanning objects into a computer using a flatbed scanner, then layering and manipulating these images using Adobe Photoshop into a surrealistic montage.
Charles Harbutt
Charles Harbutt
United States
1935 | † 2015
Charles Henry Harbutt (July 29, 1935 – June 30, 2015) was an American photographer, a former president of Magnum, and full-time Associate Professor of Photography at Parsons School of Design in New York. Harbutt was born in Camden, New Jersey, and raised in Teaneck, New Jersey, and learned much of his photography skills from the township's amateur camera club. He attended Regis High School in New York City where he took photographs for the school newspaper. He later graduated from Marquette University. Harbutt's work is deeply rooted in the modern photojournalist tradition. For the first twenty years of his career he contributed to major magazines in the United States, Europe and Japan. His work was often intrinsically political, exhibiting social and economic contingencies. In 1959, while working as a writer and photographer for the Catholic magazine Jubilee, he was invited by members of the Castro underground to document the Cuban Revolution on the strength of three photographs he had published in Modern Photography. An editor at Jubilee while Harbutt was working there, Robert Lax, used photographs taken by Harbutt for the front and back cover of his first book of poetry, The Circus of the Sun. Harbutt joined Magnum Photos and was elected president of the organization twice, first in 1979. He left the group in 1981, citing its increasingly commercial ambitions and the desire to pursue more personal work. He taught photography workshops, exhibited in solo and group shows around the world, and joined the faculty of the Parsons School of Design at New School University as a full-time professor, in addition to serving as guest artist at MIT, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Rhode Island School of Design. Harbutt was a founding member of Archive Pictures Inc., an international documentary photographers' cooperative, and a member of the American Society of Magazine Photographers. His work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of American History, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the U.S. Library of Congress, George Eastman House, the Art Institute of Chicago, the International Center of Photography, the Center for Creative Photography, and at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Beaubourg, and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. In 1997, his negatives, master prints, and archives were acquired for the collection of the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona. He mounted a large exhibition of his work at the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City in December 2000 and received the medal of the City of Perpignan at a retrospective of his work there in 2004. He died in Monteagle, Tennessee, on June 30, 2015, at the age of 79. He had emphysema.Source: Wikipedia Charles Harbutt’s early fascination with magic and the elusive line between perception and reality steered him toward journalism and its documentary role, first as a writer. But he altered his course in 1959, when he was 23, after being invited by Cuban rebels to document the Castro revolution. Immersing himself in Havana’s convulsive and euphoric newfound freedom, he recalled, “I soon understood that I could get closer to the feel of things by taking pictures.” Mr. Harbutt went on to become an accomplished photojournalist for major magazines and the renowned agency Magnum Photos. “He and Burk Uzzle took photojournalism and pushed it in a direction away from literalism or classicism,” Jeff Jacobson, a former colleague, told The New York Times, referring to a contemporary whose pictures of the Woodstock music festival in 1969 gained wide attention, “away from certainly the European paradigm of Cartier-Bresson, and away from the narrative paradigm of Gene Smith to something very, very different, very involved with metaphor.” But Charles Harbutt became disillusioned with his craft, questioning the veracity of the events he was covering, particularly after witnessing undercover government agents provoke violence at a rally in New Haven in 1970 in support of jailed Black Panthers. “The kinds of stories I chose to do, I later realized, were mostly about American myths,” he wrote in his last book, Departures and Arrivals (2012). “I photographed small towns, immigrants, the barrio in New York, and then the enormous changes that came with the ’60s. I tried to be a witness as well as show my feelings about all of this. But maybe I had a sell-by time — expiration date — for being a witness,” he continued. “In the early ’70s, I started questioning this reportage for myself. A host of manipulators had so corrupted and warped public events, I could no longer trust the authenticity of what I was seeing. I realized that I was more interested in pajamas on a bed one Brooklyn morning, or a Dublin woman hauling groceries to her house, than I was in the machinations of politics and history ‘writ large.’ ” Mr. Harbutt experimented with surreal composition and juxtaposition of quotidian forms in a style he described as personal documentary and facetiously branded “superbanalisms.” Among his most famous black-and-white photographs was one of a blind boy, seemingly trying to transcend his sightlessness by reaching for a ribbon of light on a wall. In another, a bride in a flowing white gown poses pensively below exposed pipes and empty tables in a large basement before her wedding reception. Charles Harbutt’s own favorite, called “Mr. X-Ray Man,” was shot through a car window on the Rue du Départ near the Montparnasse train station in Paris, where fragments of the cityscape and even of the photographer himself can be seen reflected in the glass. What made it special was that it was unexpected, he explained in Arrivals and Departures. “What I like best,” he wrote, “is that however the picture is made, it’s a surprise to me when I see the photo come up in the developer.”Source: The New York Times
Arja Katariina Hyytiäinen
Arja Katariina Hyytiäinen
Finland
1974
Arja Katariiina Hyytiäinen was born in 1974 in Turku, Finland. She is a graduate of the Department of Documentary Photography at FAMU (Prague, Czech Republic). Hyytiäinen is interested in self-experienced stories. Thanks to her classical documentary background, her works often reflect a combination of self-experienced subjective reality and fictional intuitive storytelling. She has published two books ‘Distance Now’ and ‘Arja Hyytiäinen – Cahiers’. She is the recipient of the Critical Photography Prize, Prix Kodak in France 2006, as well as the Grand Prix at the 2007 Lodz Festival. Since 2006, Arja Hyytiäinen’s work has been distributed by Agence VU’. She has been based in La Rochelle, France, since 2010.Source: EPEA For the Finn Arja Hyytiäinen photography is a means of entering into the lives of others. It is an echo of personal experiences that help enlarge her understanding – and ours. The often sombre black and white photographs that she took in the port city of Marseille underscore the feeling that she got there, as if the residents had an almost permanent mental hangover. She shows the disfigured faces of people in illegal bars, she evokes the sound of fans, wind and footsteps that echo against shuttered windows, and depicts the restless energy of the night, which shades into a day where the heat envelopes your body like a second skin. The city, she says, left an emotional mark behind on her soul. With her subjective images she does the same for the viewer. In the space of only a couple years Arja Hyytiäinen (Finland, 1974) has made a name for herself as a contemporary street photographer, with a subjective, cinematographic style. She spent considerable time in Eastern Europe and was awarded the Kodak Prize for Critical Photography and the Polish Fotofestival Grand Prix. Hyytiäinen lives by turns in Paris and Berlin.Source: Noorderlicht "Completely contemporary, free and demanding, the work of Arja Katarrina Hyytiäinen is part of the today’s school, from the tradition of the street photography, and that has replaced its form to claim the author status. Saying its necessity and its singularity, devoting itself to subjectivity, and influenced by cinematographic aesthetic, the whole work, extremely respectful for representing people, is from a new contemporary humanism," according to Christian Caujolle. In just a few years, she has acquired a reputation throughout Europe, particularly where she has lived in Eastern Europe, and become known through her solo exhibitions (Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Moldavia, Slovenia). In 2006 she was awarded by the Kodak Prize for Critical Photography and the Fotoestiwal (Poland) Grand Prix in 2007.Source: Agence VU
David Zimmerman
David Zimmerman
United States
David Zimmerman is an American photographer and filmmaker living in New Mexico and India. Zimmerman was based in New York City for many years prior to shifting his work to the New Mexico high desert. Zimmerman's studio in New Mexico is entirely solar powered. He is an honors graduate of Brooks Institute (BFA, 1982). Zimmerman's work has been exhibited internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions including, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, Netherlands; Art on Paper, New York City; Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Turin, Italy; AIPAD, New York City; Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, Spain; Thessaloniki Cultural Museum, Thessaloniki, Greece; FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon, France; Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles; Hearst Photography Biennial, New York City; Paris Photo LA, Los Angeles; Context Art Miami; Sous les Etoiles Gallery, New York City and A. Galerie, Paris, France, among others. Zimmerman is the recipient of numerous awards including the Sony World Photography Awards, L'Iris D'Or Prize for his Desert work. Zimmerman is co-founder of the Himalayan Art Centre - a free school dedicated to teaching visual storytelling through photography and filmmaking in remote and underserved regions of the Indian Himalayas. Zimmerman's recent monograph, One Voice; Portraits from the Tibetan Diaspora, has been published by Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany.
Justine Kurland
Justine Kurland
United States
1969
Justine Kurland was born in Warsaw, New York. She earned her B.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts in 1996. She went on to Yale University and graduated with an M.F.A. in 1998. Kurland first gained public notice with her work in the group show Another Girl, Another Planet (1999), at New York's Van Doren Waxter gallery. The show included her large c-print staged tableau pictures of neo-romantic landscapes inhabited by young adolescent girls, half-sprites, half juvenile delinquents. This was her first exhibition of a photographic interest that lasted from 1997, when she began taking pictures of her mentor Laurie Simmons's babysitter and her friends, to 2002. Altogether, Kurland published 69 pictures of girls in a series called Girl Pictures. The staged photos take place in urban and wilderness settings, with girls depicted as though to imply they are runaways, hopeful and independent. As landscapes, she chose the "secret places" of late childhood; wasteland on the edges of suburbia, "owned" only by a feral nature and unsupervised children. Her book Spirit West (2000) featured similar work on a more ambitious scale. In early 2001 Kurland spent several months in New Zealand, where she created similar work with schoolgirls there. In her show Community, Skyblue (2002), Kurland turned to document the utopian communes of Virginia and California, highlighting the unworldly aspirations of the communards by having them appear naked in her pictures and showing them as only distant figures in their landscape. In 2003 she had European solo shows Golden Dawn (London) and Welcome Home (Vienna), based around these series of commune images. Old Joy (2004) turns to men. She shows visionaries trekking naked into the wilderness, where they undergo spiritual experiences. In her 2004 show Songs of Experience, she explored medieval and Biblical imagery. In 2005 she had a solo show in Japan. After having a son, Kurland began to photograph pregnant women and new mothers (Mama Baby, 2004-2007). Her son's interest in trains would lead her to photograph hobos and trains from 2007 to 2011 (This Train Is Bound for Glory); as he grew up, she became interested in American masculinity, and created photographs of cars and mechanics (Sincere Auto Care, 2014-2015). Kurland's work appears on the cover and liner notes of French electronic/shoegaze group M83's 2004 album Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, as well as the covers of the EP releases for the album. In an article in ArtForum (April 2000) she talked of her inspirations: "I'm always thinking about painting: nineteenth-century English picturesque landscapes and the utopian ideal, genre paintings, and also Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs. I started going to museums at an early age, but my imagery is equally influenced by illustrations from the fairy tales I read as a child." Selections from her work Highway Kind were published in the book The Open Road: Photography & the American Road Trip by David Campany.
Tom McGahan
Tom McGahan
United KIngdom
Tom McGahan is an UK based photographer. McGahan's personal projects are based on our perception of places objects, the passing of time and our relationship with the land. His images aim to engage the viewer by challenging them to contemplate and reflect on their own sense of reality. "I constantly engage myself in this process which is always evolving my personal understanding of my preconceived view of the places I choose to photograph." McGahan's images are created using natural light and with Medium and Large format film cameras. Staying present is always a part of the process of creating the his work which brings a more mindful and considered approach to the images. Shortlisted 2020 British Journal of Photography, 1854 Media, Portrait of Humanity Awards Winner Feature Shoot Emerging Photographer 2019 for the series 'Landscape of Lament' exhibited at Aperture Gallery, New York. Winner 2017 Feature Shoot Print Swap, 'Slieve Coillte' from the series Echoes exhibited in Group show Ambient Landscapes at Black Eye Gallery, Sydney. His Take Refuge was nominated as on of the top rated entries in the 2016 Magnum Awards. Discover the book 'I Am Always Here'
Claire Droppert
Claire Droppert
Netherlands
"My name is Claire Droppert, 35 yrs. A freelance photographer/graphic designer based in Rotterdam. In my work, I'm inspired by combinations of simplicity and minimalism, special places, and new editing techniques. My activities: digital art, digital imaging, digital photography, graphic design and photo manipulation." About Dutch Mountains series: The Netherlands is an extreme flat country where mountains barely exist. Why not have descent mountains in the Netherlands? Size doesn’t matter. Dutch mountains is a series of photographs that visualizes big piles of coal storage, located in an industrial port area in The Netherlands. Each mountain is named after its altitude in millimeters. The dramatic atmosphere you find in these series were inspired by dark volcanic rock sceneries, combined with shapes often to be found on places where flood basalts have occurred.
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Interview
Exclusive Interview with Henk Kosche
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Exclusive Interview with Anastasia Samoylova
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Anastasia Samoylova is an American artist whose photographic practice is shaped by close observation and a deep attentiveness to place. Working between documentary and formal exploration, she photographs landscapes, architecture, and everyday scenes with a sensitivity to light, structure, and atmosphere. Since relocating to Miami in 2016, her work has increasingly focused on how environments—both natural and built—carry social, cultural, and emotional traces. We asked her a few questions about her practice and her way of seeing, to better understand the thoughts and experiences that shape her work—while allowing the images themselves to remain open and speak in their own time.
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Exclusive Interview with Marijn Fidder
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Marijn Fidder is a Dutch documentary photographer whose work powerfully engages with current affairs and contemporary social issues. Driven by a deep sense of social justice, she uses photography to speak on behalf of the voiceless and to advocate for the rights of those who are most vulnerable. Her images have been widely published in major international outlets including National Geographic, CNN Style, NRC Handelsblad, Volkskrant, GUP New Talent, and ZEIT Magazin. Her long-term commitment to disability rights—particularly through years of work in Uganda—culminated in her acclaimed project Inclusive Nation, which earned her the title of Photographer of the Year 2025 at the All About Photo Awards. She is also the recipient of multiple prestigious honors, including awards from World Press Photo and the Global Peace Photo Award. We asked her a few questions about her life and work.
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Exclusive Interview with Josh S. Rose
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Josh S. Rose is a multidisciplinary artist working across photography, film, and writing. His practice bridges visual and performing arts, with a strong focus on movement, emotion, and the expressive potential of the image. Known for his long-standing collaborations with leading dance companies and performers, Rose brings together authenticity and precise composition—a balance he describes as “technical romanticism.” His work has been commissioned and exhibited internationally, appearing in outlets such as Vogue, at the Super Bowl, in film festivals, and most recently as a large-scale installation for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. A sought-after collaborator, he has worked with major artists, cultural institutions, and brands, following a previous career as Chief Creative Officer at Interpublic Group and the founder of Humans Are Social. We asked him a few questions about his life and work.
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Interview
Interview with Maureen Ruddy Burkhart
Photographer Maureen Ruddy Burkhart brings a quietly attentive and deeply human sensibility to her exploration of the world through images. Shaped by a life immersed in photography, film, and visual storytelling, her work is guided by intuition, observation, and an enduring interest in the emotional undercurrents of everyday life. With a practice rooted in both fine art traditions and documentary awareness, she approaches her subjects with sensitivity, allowing subtle moments to emerge naturally rather than be imposed. Her series Til Death, selected as the Solo Exhibition for February 2025, reflects this long-standing commitment to photography as a space for reflection rather than spectacle. Drawn to moments that exist just outside the expected frame, Burkhart’s images suggest narratives without resolving them, leaving room for ambiguity, humor, and quiet connection. We asked her a few questions about her life and work.
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Exclusive Interview with Peter Ydeen
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Peter Ydeen
Winner of AAP Magazine #45 Travels, his series reflects this unique vision—capturing the spirit of place through subtle layers of light, color, and emotion. Whether traveling abroad or observing the rhythms of his own surroundings, Ydeen creates images that feel both grounded and enchanted, inviting viewers into a world where reality and reverie meet.
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Exclusive Interview with Julie Wang
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Julie Wang
Chinese-born photographer Julie Wang brings a poetic, contemplative sensitivity to her visual exploration of the world. Having lived for nearly equal parts of her life in China, Europe, and the United States, she approaches her subjects with the nuanced perspective of someone shaped by many cultures. This blend of distance, curiosity, and emotional resonance infuses her work with a quiet depth, allowing her to reveal the fragile beauty and subtle tensions that often pass unnoticed.
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Exclusive Interview with Ghawam Kouchaki
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Ghawam Kouchaki
American photographer Ghawam Kouchaki brings a sharply observant and introspective gaze to the streets of Japan’s capital. Based in Los Angeles, he approaches Tokyo with the distance — and curiosity — of an outsider, allowing him to uncover the city’s subtle contradictions, quiet tensions, and fleeting gestures that often go unnoticed. His series Tokyo no no, selected as the Solo Exhibition for December 2024, explores the hidden undercurrents of urban life: the unspoken rules, the small ruptures in routine, the poetic strangeness found in everyday moments. Through muted tones, instinctive timing, and meticulous framing, Kouchaki reveals a Tokyo that exists somewhere between reality and imagination — both intimate and enigmatic. We asked him a few questions about his life and work.
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Exclusive Interview with Tommi Viitala
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Tommi Viitala
Tommi Viitala, winner of AAP Magazine #44: Street, is a Finnish photographer celebrated for his striking and cinematic street photography. With a keen eye for atmosphere and composition, he captures fleeting urban moments that reveal the poetry of everyday life. His work often explores the tension between solitude and connection within contemporary cityscapes, blending documentary realism with artistic sensibility. Viitala’s photographs have been exhibited internationally and recognized for their strong visual storytelling and emotional depth. We asked him a few questions about his life and work.
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Solo Exhibition April 2026
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