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FINAL CALL TO ENTER AAP MAGAZINE SHADOWS: PUBLICATION AND $1,000 CASH PRIZES
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Silvia Alessi
Silvia Alessi
Silvia Alessi

Silvia Alessi

Country: Italy
Birth: 1975

I was born in Bergamo, Italy in 1975. I have worked as a hairstylist and make-up artist since I was 17. In 2004, while on a trip to Asia, I discovered an interest in reportage photography. I have since travelled extensively pursuing my passion for photography and “telling stories worthy of being told.” My process is a blend of artistic expression and reportage, inspired by an openness to diverse cultures and traditions.

Blending this openness with curiosity and artistic expression has allowed me to produce award-winning photography.

For many months before travelling to my chosen destination, I research and develop my concept, considering particularly the social context. I also consider deeply the question of finding the appropriate visual language to render the concept beautifully.
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Serena Dzenis
Australia
1984
Serena Dzenis is a lens-based artist from Australia who resides in Iceland. She uses her work to tell stories about science, conservation, environmental issues and the future of mankind. Serena’s photographs depart from the traditional, with a focus on capturing the otherworldliness that is sometimes associated with nature and human constructions on our own planet. The emphasis of her art is on storytelling within the landscape – connecting with the land and exploring the outcomes of human desires while immersing oneself in the rhythms and dangers associated with the living presence of this world. 2021 ± II: Utopia Broadcasting Do you think that the first space colony created by mankind will happen during your lifetime? Technology has advanced so quickly over the past few years. In the overall scheme of things, we’re just a flash in the pan and yet we’ve done so much to change our planet. Humankind is leaving a profound legacy on Earth, exploiting its resources to turn it into the sanctuary that we want it to be or perhaps farewelling a paradise that we’ve already lost. ‘2021 ± II: Utopia Broadcasting’ encapsulates everything about human construction, sheer curiosity, consumerism, as well as the wonders and dangers associated with science. The overall aim of this project is to utilise existing structures within the Icelandic landscape to transport the viewer’s imagination to another world that exists outside of time. In doing so, the hope is to invoke conversation around themes of futurism and dreams for a better life amidst the darker side of human ideals.
Ralph Milewski
Germany
1968
Ralph Milewski is an artist from Germany who works with photography. His work moves between documentary observation and conceptual approaches and engages with spaces, transitions, and traces of human presence. At the center of his artistic practice is the ongoing project Rear Seat Diaries. The images are created from the back seat of a VW Caddy and photographed through the side window. The window frame forms a constant visual system: the world moves through this fixed frame while the perspective remains unchanged. Within this structure, Milewski works with repetition and variation. Everyday situations, passing scenes, and fleeting encounters appear under the same visual conditions and gradually form a coherent body of work over time. Alongside these observational images, conceptual works also emerge within the project. They explore questions of movement, time, and perception and expand the original visual system. His working method is deliberately reduced. Milewski works with minimal equipment and uses existing situations and lighting conditions as the starting point for his images. His photographs emerge from scarcity, not from abundance. Rear Seat Diaries: Rear Seat Diaries is an ongoing photographic project that began in 2022 from a simple observation: the side window of my vehicle became the fixed frame of my images. Over time, this frame developed into a visual system. While places, situations, and light constantly change, the frame remains constant and structures each photograph. Within this system, both observed moments and deliberately staged situations emerge. Everyday encounters, interventions, experiments with movement, or longer exposures are brought together through the same fixed frame. Rear Seat Diaries is not a finished project but an open working process. The recurring frame becomes a constant structure within which different forms of observation, time, and intervention unfold.
Roman Vishniac
Russia/United States
1897 | † 1990
Roman Vishniac was a Russian-American photographer, best known for capturing on film the culture of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. A major archive of his work was housed at the International Center of Photography until 2018, when Vishniac's daughter, Mara Vishniac Kohn, donated it to The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at the University of California, Berkeley. Vishniac was a versatile photographer, an accomplished biologist, an art collector and teacher of art history. He also made significant scientific contributions to photomicroscopy and time-lapse photography. Vishniac was very interested in history, especially that of his ancestors, and strongly attached to his Jewish roots; he was a Zionist later in life. Roman Vishniac won international acclaim for his photos of shtetlach and Jewish ghettos, celebrity portraits, and microscopic biology. His book A Vanished World, published in 1983, made him famous and is one of the most detailed pictorial documentations of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe in the 1930s. Vishniac was also remembered for his humanism and respect for life, sentiments that can be seen in all aspects of his work. In 2013, Vishniac's daughter Mara (Vishniac) Kohn donated to the International Center of Photography the images and accompanying documents comprising ICP's Roman Vishniac Rediscovered travelling exhibition. In October, 2018, Kohn donated the Vishniac archive of an estimated 30,000 items, including photo negatives, prints, documents and other memorabilia that had been housed at ICP to the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, a unit of the University of California at Berkeley's library system.Source: Wikipedia As the Nazis rose to power in Berlin, Vishniac photographed the ominous changes in the city and also worked to document Germany-Jewish relief and social service organizations. In 1935, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC) hired Vishniac to travel to Eastern Europe and take photographs documenting Jewish poverty and relief efforts to be used in its fundraising campaigns. In 1939, Vishniac pursued other AJDC assignments in Western Europe and worked as a freelance photographer there. After the German invasion of France, he was arrested and sent to an internment camp. With help from the AJDC and the remainder of his family’s resources, he secured the release and immigrated with his wife and two children to the United States via Portugal in December 1940. They settled in New York, where Vishniac worked as a photographer, making portraits and documenting Jewish refugees and American-Jewish community life. In 1947, Vishniac returned to Europe to document the aftermath of the war and the plight of refugees and those living in displaced persons camps. Back in the United States, Vishniac continued his work as photographer and scientist and became a pioneer in the new field of photomicroscopy. Vishniac’s photographs of Jewish life in prewar Eastern Europe gained renown in the aftermath of the Holocaust and were used to illustrate numerous books. Many people today are familiar with his work from his book A Vanished World (1983). However, the public saw only a small fraction of Vishniac’s work before his daughter, Mara Vishniac Kohn, entrusted his images to ICP and the Museum. This project makes them available to the public at large in hopes of learning more about the subjects of his photographs.Source: Unites States Holocaust Memorial Museum As an amateur photographer, Roman Vishniac took to the streets with his camera throughout the 1920s and ’30s, offering an astute, often humorous visual commentary on his adopted city and experimenting with new and modern approaches to framing and composition. Documenting the rise of Nazi power, he focused his lens on the signs of oppression and doom that soon formed the backdrop of his Berlin street photography. From 1935 to 1938, while living in Berlin and working as a biologist and science photographer, he was commissioned by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), then the world’s largest Jewish relief organization, to photograph impoverished Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe. On New Year’s Eve, 1940, he arrived in New York and soon opened a portrait studio. At the same time, he began documenting American Jewish communal and immigrant life and established himself as a pioneer in the field of photomicroscopy. In 1947, Vishniac returned to Europe and documented Jewish displaced persons camps and the ruins of Berlin. During this time, he also recorded the efforts of Holocaust survivors to rebuild their lives and the work of the JDC and other Jewish relief organizations in providing them with aid and emigration assistance.Source: International Center of Photography
Meg McKenzie Ryan
United States
Los Angeles resident Meg McKenzie Ryan married young, before graduating from college. Her husband's job involved flying to Hong Kong, so one day Meg surprised him by flying there. Asking friends what she should shop for there, buying a camera was the unanimous suggestion. So that's what happened. She didn't know how to use it, so she enrolled in a not-for-credit class at the University of California, Los Angeles. Jerry McMillan was her instructor there and later at California State University, Northridge where she earned her Bachelor in photography. In the early 70s, McMillan was active in the Los Angeles art scene, and he was particularly interested (it seemed) in helping photography to be recognized as an art form. Non-traditional subjects and alternative presentations were encouraged. I was game. Then, Meg remarried and moved to Burkina Faso, a country in West Africa, and then to neighboring Lome, Togo where her daughter was born. The culture there was incredibly different than her Los Angeles home. Religion, work and working conditions, poverty, homes, clothing, food, etc. were all new. It was a lot to digest, and more than she was prepared to face with her camera. Next, the young family moved to Bloomington, Indiana where Meg was able to study for a Masters degree in photography. Jeff Wolin was her primary instructor, and he was shooting an 8" x 10" field camera, so Meg decided to acquire one. Mostly she shot landscapes at the time. Wolin, on the other hand, was shooting beautiful shots of the rock quarries around Bloomington, and later did a project on Holocaust survivors and later still on homelessness. Moving again to the lower desert of California (city of El Centro), Meg landed a full-time photography job at the local daily newspaper. It was excellent experience for the young and somewhat shy photographer because she learned to shoot pictures of people. And this was the start of her project featured here, The lives of others. Her home was just ten miles north of the Mexicali, Mexico border town and capital of the state of Baja California, Mexico. It was easy (at the time) to cross the border, find the poorer neighborhoods, and ask to shoot their pictures. It's no accident that her photography became more documentary-like at its heart. The newspaper work and living in such a foreign place as West Africa pulled her in that direction. And at some point she realized that photos of people interested her the most. The work was wonderful, rewarding, and rich with experience and learning. Meg hopes you'll take time to look at the photos here.
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Call for Entries
AAP Magazine #56 Shadows
Publish your work in our printed magazine and win $1,000 cash prizes