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Bharat Patel
Bharat Patel
Bharat Patel

Bharat Patel

Country: United Kingdom
Birth: 1949

Bharat is an Indian born photographer living in Oxford, UK. At first embracing many genres of photography but since the last ten years he has been mainly involved in travel and documentary photography, some of these in collaboration with NGOs. Underlying influence in his photography is his upbringing in the British colonies and his exposure to different cultures and social structures. He has lived and experienced life in four different continents with vastly different life styles. From a young age his inclination to connect everything has had an influence on his photography. Mixed with this is his formal education as Electronic Engineer which exposed him to world of sub-atomic matter where order and hierarchy exist amongst the chaos, just like his experiences in real life.

Bharat considers his work as “Photography for a Purpose”. This can be seen in his long-term project on “Nomadic Tribes of India”, “Brick Workers” and “Women Workers in the Informal Sector”. Always looking to preserve these as documentaries to retain the importance of what is present and that which may inform the future.

Bharat uses both black and white and colour images depending on what he wants to portray. Without the distracting colours, his black and white images lay bare the subjects and show their inner selves.

In his words everything is waiting to be photographed and to be remembered, it is how you photograph it that counts.

Bharat is a member of the Royal Photographic Society.

Websites

@bharatpatelphotography

www.bharatpatelphotography.com

 

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He quickly became immersed in his work and taught classes three days a week, lectured on art of local students, reviewed exhibitions for the local newspaper and delivered a weekly radio broadcast about activities at the Art Center. In his spare time he traveled throughout the region, taking photographs of the landscape, farms and small town buildings. He also wrote his first article on photography, "When is Photography Creative?," which was published in American Photography magazine two years later. White resigned from the Art Center in late 1941 and returned to Portland where he intended to start a commercial photography business. That year three of his photographs were accepted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York for inclusion in their "Image of Freedom" exhibition. At the close of the exhibition the museum purchased all three prints, the first time his images entered a public collection. 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At one of their meetings White wrote in his journal that he expressed his doubt that he was ready to become a serious photographer. He wrote that Stieglitz asked him "Have you ever been in love?" White answered "yes," and Stieglitz replied "Then you can photograph." During this time, White met and became friends with some of the major photographers of the time, including Berenice Abbott, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, and Harry Callahan. Steichen, who was director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art, offered White a curatorial position at the museum, but instead White accepted an offer from Ansel Adams to assist him at the newly created photography department at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) in San Francisco. White moved to San Francisco in July and lived in the same house as Adams for several years. 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Three in particular showed his continuing struggles with his sexuality. Song Without Words, The Temptation of St. Anthony Is Mirrors, and Fifth Sequence/Portrait of a Young Man as Actor all depict "the emotional turmoil he feels over his love and desire for men." In 1949 White purchased a small Zeiss Ikonta camera and began a series of urban street photographs. Over the next four years he took nearly 6,000 images, all inspired by his newfound interest in the poetry of Walt Whitman. The project, which he called City of Surf, included photographs of San Francisco's Chinatown, the docks, people on the streets and various parades and fairs around town. The period of 1951-52 is one of the formative times in White's career. He participated in a Conference on Photography at the Aspen Institute, where the idea of creating a new journal of photography was discussed by Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, Frederick Sommer and others. Soon after Aperture magazine was founded by many of these same individuals. White volunteered for and was approved as editor, and the first issue appeared in April 1952. Aperture quickly became one of the most influential magazines about photography, and White remained as editor until 1975. Near the end of 1952 White's father, from whom he had been estranged for many years, died in Long Beach, California. In 1953 Walter Chappell introduced White to the I Ching, an ancient Chinese book of philosophy and divination, and White continued to be influenced by and refer to this text throughout the rest of his life. He was especially intrigued by the concepts of yin and yang, in which apparently opposite or contrary forces may be conceived as complementary. Later that same year a reorganization at CSFS resulted in White's teaching role being cut back, and as a result he began to think about a change in his employment. Concurrently, Beaumont Newhall had recently become the curator at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and Newhall invited White to work with him there as a curatorial assistant. He exhibited September 28 - November 3 1954 at Limelight Gallery in New York and was included in that gallery's Great Photographs at the end of that year.[16] Over the next three years White organized three themed exhibitions[where?] that demonstrated his particular interests: Camera Consciousness, The Pictorial Image and Lyrical and Accurate. In 1955 he joined the faculty at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), where he taught one day a week. White's photographic output declined during this time due to his teaching and editorial work, but he continued to produce enough images that by the end of 1955 he had created a new sequence, Sequence 10/Rural Cathedrals, which included landscape images from upstate New York that were shot on regular and infrared film. By 1955 White was fully engaged in teaching, having been appointed as instructor at the new four-year photography program at RIT as well as conducting classes and workshops at Ohio University and Indiana University. Walter Chappell moved to Rochester later in the year to work at the George Eastman House. Chappell engaged White in long discussions about various Eastern religions and philosophies. White began practicing Zen meditation and adopted a Japanese style of decoration in his house. Over the next two years the discussions between White and Chappell metamorphosed into lengthy discourses about the writing and philosophy of George Gurdjieff. White gradually became an adherent of Gurdjieff's teachings and started to incorporate Gurdjieff's thinking into the design and implementation of his workshops. Gurdjieff's concepts, for White, were not just intellectual exercises but guides to experience, and they greatly influenced much of his approach to teaching and photography throughout the rest of his life. During this same period White began making his first color images. Although he is better known for his black-and-white photography, he produced many color photographs. His archive contains nearly 9,000 35mm transparencies taken between 1955 and 1975. In 1959 White mounted a large exhibition of 115 photos of his Sequence 13/Return to the Bud at the George Eastman House. It was his largest exhibition to date. It later traveled to the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. White was invited to teach a 10-days', all-expense paid workshop in Portland to accompany the exhibition. He took advantage of the funding to photograph landscapes and did nature studies across the country. From his experience in Portland he developed the idea for a full-time residential workshop in Rochester in which students would learn through both formal sessions and, following a combination of thinking from Gurdjieff and from Zen, through an understanding gained by the discipline of such tasks as household chores and early morning workouts. He would continue this style of residential teaching until he died. In the early 1960s White also studied hypnosis and incorporated the practice into some of his teachings as a way of helping students experience photographs. White continued to teach extensively both privately and at RIT for the next several years. During this time he traveled across the U.S. in the summers taking photographs along the way. In his journal he referred to himself during this period as "The Wanderer," which had both literal and metaphorical meanings due to his search for understanding life. In 1962 he met Michael Hoffman, who became a friend, colleague and, later, assumed the editorship of Aperture magazine. White later named Hoffman to be the executor of his will. In 1965 White was invited to help design a newly formed program in visual arts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Boston. After being appointed as a Visiting Professor, White moved to the Boston area and purchased a 12-room house in suburban Arlington so he could increase the size of his residential workshops for selected students. Soon after moving to the Boston area, he completed a different kind of sequence called Slow Dance, which he would later integrate into his teachings. He continued to explore how people understand and interpret photography and began to incorporate techniques of Gestalt psychology into his teachings. In order to help his students experience the meaning of "equivalence," he started requiring them to draw certain subjects as well as photograph them. White began to experience periodic discomfort in his chest in 1966, and his doctor diagnosed his ailment as angina. His symptoms continued throughout the rest of his life, leading him to intensify his study of spiritual matters and meditation. He turned to astrology in an attempt to increase his understanding about life, and his interest in it became so significant that he required all of his current and prospective students to have their horoscopes completed. By this point in his life White's unorthodox teaching methods were well established, and students who went through his workshops were both mystified and enlightened by the experience. One student who later became a Zen monk said "I really wanted to learn to see the way he did, to capture my subjects in a way that didn't render them lifeless and two-dimensional. I didn't realize that Minor was teaching us exactly that: not only to see images, but to feel them, smell them, taste them. He was teaching us how to be photography." White began writing the text for Mirrors, Messages, Manifestations, which was the first monograph of his photographs, in late 1966, and three years later the book was published by Aperture. It included 243 of his photographs and text, including poems, notes from his journal and other writings. Peter Bunnell, who was one of White's early students and then Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, wrote a lengthy biography of White for the book. During this same time White completed Sequence 1968, a series of landscape images from his recent travels. During the next several years White conceived of and directed four major themed photography exhibitions at MIT, starting with "Light7" in 1968 and followed by "Be-ing without Clothes" in 1970, "Octave of Prayer" in 1972 and "Celebrations" in 1974. Anyone could submit images for the shows, and White spent a great deal of time personally reviewing all of the submissions and selecting the final images. White continued to teach extensively and make his own photographs even though his health was declining. He devoted more and more time to his writing and began a long text he called "Consciousness in Photography and the Creative Audience," in which he referred to his 1965 sequence Slow Dance and advanced the idea that certain states of heightened awareness were necessary to truly read a photograph and understand its meaning. In order to complete this work he applied for and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1970, and Consciousness in Photography and the Creative Audience became required reading for a new course he taught at MIT called "Creative Audience." in 1971 he traveled to Puerto Rico to explore more of his color photography, and in 1974 and 1975 he journeyed to Peru to teach and to further his own Gurdjieff studies. In 1975 White traveled to England to lecture at the Victoria and Albert Museum and to teach classes at various colleges. He continued on a hectic travel schedule for several weeks, then flew directly to the University of Arizona in Tucson to take part in a symposium there. When he returned to Boston after nearly six weeks of travel, he suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized for several weeks. After this White's focus turned even more inward, and he photographed very little. He spent much of his time with his student Abe Frajndlich, who made a series of situational portraits of White around his home and in his garden. A few months before his death White published a short article in Parabola magazine called "The Diamond Lens of Fable" in which he associated himself with Gilgamesh, Jason and King Arthur, all heroes of old tales about lifelong quests. On June 24, 1976, White died of a second heart attack while working at his home. He bequeathed all of his personal archives and papers, along with a large collection of his photographs, to Princeton University. He left his house to Aperture so they could continue the work he started there. Source: Wikipedia
Zhou HanShun
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Amira Al-Sharif
Amira Al-Sharif
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1982
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She has also participated in scores of photography exhibitions and festivals in Europe, the MENA region, and across the world, from India to South Korea, and Cambodia to the United States.In 2010, she studied photojournalism and documentary photography at the International Center of Photography in New York, and later returned to her home city of Sana’a, Yemen, to teach visual storytelling to hundreds of aspiring photographers. Since fleeing Yemen in 2018, due to the wartime constraints on her work and life, Amira has completed a two-year-long artist residency at Cité Internationale des Arts and is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Art at the Beaux-Arts de Paris. With her five-year French Talent Passport for artistic and cultural professionals, she has also launched a Paris-based company for her art practice. Artist Statement People often comment that they do not see war in my beautiful pictures of Yemen, where the world’s worst humanitarian crisis continues to cast a tremendous, even inescapable shadow across the landscape. But, since the war began nearly eight years ago, the vast majority of the scenes that I have captured in my beloved motherland have put my life at risk. Even if the outcome looks beautiful — schoolchildren or fishermen smiling in the north, newlyweds or goatherders smiling in the south, women young and old with fighting spirits from north to south — destruction, destitution, and danger often lurk just beyond the frame. War makes my beautiful pictures war pictures. There are an untold number of bloody scenes from Yemen that only exist in my mind. Mental images that I cannot publish in a newspaper or hang on a gallery wall. They are the scenes that I did not want to photograph, to remember more than I already do. For me, just like my sister Hayat, who is also a photographer, flashing back to the stories and scenes that epitomize how ugly the war has been to us, and how much it has scattered us in all directions, is like free-falling into the darkness. We want to be in the light, to move on with our ambitions and dreams. That is why the word “move” has been dominant in my thoughts and speech over the last couple of years. In spite of the challenging conditions and hardships, we need to keep moving. We need to let go of that which imprisons our souls in all of the unfortunate things that have happened and are still happening to us. Sadly, we cannot stop this war. I often ask myself if people who live in peaceful countries and regions could better identify with the beautiful pictures — seeing themselves in us, their lives in ours — rather than the bloody ones that commonly inundate the international media, from Syria at present to Vietnam in the past. As a photographer with over sixteen years of experience on the ground in Yemen, I have come to the realization that the logic of “blood is to war as beauty is to peace” is flawed, incomplete. And the reason my work tends to focus on the beauty of my suffering country is simple, relatable: like people everywhere, regardless of their context of war or peace, Yemenis appreciate love and life. We, too, wish to live our loves and our lives before that unavoidable moment called “death.” -- Amira Al-Sharif About A Love Song to Socotra Island Documentary photography series (2014) Socotra is an isolated Yemeni island, and UNESCO World Heritage site, that lies between the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea. Described as “one of the most distinctive places on Earth,” or the “jewel of Arabia,” this special, almost secret, place is where I made A Love Song to Socotra Island, my first long-term documentary photography series. One Socotran woman in particular, Saadiya, lit up my imagination, and so for months at a time, I shadowed her days, just like the birds of the island. When I met Aunt Saadiya, as I affectionately call her, the mother of seven was locked in a near decade-long struggle against local tribesmen who were after her inherited plot of land, which sustains and shelters her family and dozens of animals. “I have a fighting spirit,” she told me one day. “Whatever happens, I am not leaving my land. I fear nobody.” From mountaintop to seaside, I documented Aunt Saadiya’s radiant life force, relatively free from the everyday constraints and fears of the conflict-ravaged mainland. After we rose with the sun, she greeted the birds and the trees, tended to her goat herd, taught her children to swim, and defended her family’s right to survive. In our last months together, a local court declared her “the rightful owner of the land.”
Jack Montgomery
Jack Montgomery
United States
1950
"I am a photographer living on the coast of Maine, USA. I have photographed with some seriousness for many years, first with film and then transitioning (in part) to digital. My focus at present is making images by photogravure although I have employed many processes through the years including gelatin-silver, inkjet and palladium. My images are part of the permanent collection of a number of museums. A monograph of the photographs was published by Galerie Vevais (Germany) a few years ago. My images have appeared as book covers for Random House and other international publishers. A full biography and list of exhibitions and publications can be found at my website." -- Jack Montgomery
James Peaslee
James Peaslee
United States
1952
James M. Peaslee (Jim) is an art photographer living in New York City. He grew up in New York City and its suburbs, Los Angeles, and France. He has been taking pictures for 50 years. His formal photography education started at age 17 in 1970, in a course taken in the Yale Art Department from the venerable Walker Evans. Peaslee has a substantial portfolio of black and white pictures (taken with a medium format camera) from that time. The need to earn a living then put a temporary damper on artistic endeavors. He went to law school, and was a tax lawyer for many years with the international law firm Cleary Gottlieb. Good tax lawyers are known for their creativity, but admittedly the artistry is light on color, tones, and shapes. In 2018, Peaslee retired from the law and attended the Rocky Mountain School of Photography Summer Intensive Program. Much of his time since the beginning of 2018 has been devoted to photography, and his portfolio is growing. Statement Peaslee admits to having a dark side. Many of the pictures he takes are stark or consciously simplified. A picture that is stark or simple offers the viewer a chance to ask what is missing, or what happens next. Many images show individuals who seem isolated. Pictures of buildings usually show no people, or only figures in silhouette or shadow. One artist Peaslee cites as an influence is Edward Hopper. Walker Evans, his first photography teacher, also helped set the tone.
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Exclusive Interview with Jan Janssen
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Exclusive Interview with Josh S. Rose
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Exclusive Interview with Peter Ydeen
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Exclusive Interview with Julie Wang
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Exclusive Interview with Ghawam Kouchaki
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