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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.
 

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Jo Ann Chauss
United States
1954
Jo Ann Chaus is an American photographer from and based in the New York metro area She holds two certificates from the International Center of Photography in New York City. In 2016 Jo Ann self-published "Sweetie & Hansom", a 60-image book with original text exploring family, relationships and loss. Her current body of work, "Conversations with Myself", is a collection of performative self-portraiture that explores women's roles and identity, currently under edit for publishing. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and she holds special recognitions and awards: Critical Mass Top 200 2020, 2019, 15th Julia Margaret Cameron Award for Women Photographers Winner Self Portrait Series, 14th Julia Margaret Cameron Awards Honorable Mention, Winner 13th Pollux Awards non-professional category, Critical Mass 2019 Top 200, Klompching Fresh 2019 Finalist, PDN Emerging Photographer Fall 2019 Winner, , Candela Unbound8! and 9! juried exhibitions, Permanent Collection in the Center for Creative Photography Qualities of Light Exhibition, Juror's Choice South East Center for Photography Portrait Exhibition 2019. Statement Jo Ann's work is a visual record of her interactions with and with-in her environment, and her curiosity to explore and discover personal truths, whether found or assembled, as metaphors for her inner landscape. She expresses the joys and pathos of a life, as seen and felt by the young girl within who became the woman, the mother, and the wife. Her perspective is through the eyes of an elder in our society, contemplating the challenges and incongruities of her own will, desire and constraints within a historical context. Heightened and enhanced by the literal light of day, it is an examination of life's ambiguities: the close and the distant, the beauty and the grit, the singular and the plural, satisfaction and longing, together and apart… all relentlessly seeking to understand and witness herself, past, present and future.
William Heick
United States
1916 | † 2012
William Heick (October 6, 1916 – September 13, 2012) was a San Francisco-based photographer and filmmaker. He is best known for his ethnographic photographs and documentary films of North American Indian cultures. W.R. Heick served as producer-director and chief cinematographer for the Anthropology Department of the University of California, Berkeley on their National Science Foundation supported American Indian Film Project. His photographs capture the life and culture of Native Americans from the Kwakiutl, Kashaya Pomo, Hupa, Navajo, Blackfoot and Sioux. He filmed a number of award winning films in this series along with the documentaries Pomo Shaman and Sucking Doctor, a Pomo doctoring ceremony considered by anthropologists to be one of the most complete and outstanding films of an aboriginal ceremony made to date. William Heick's career in photography began as a naval intelligence photographer during World War Two in the Pacific. After the war he studied photography at California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) under such notable teachers as Ansel Adams and Minor White. He became lifelong friends with Imogen Cunningham and Dorothea Lange and regards these two photographers as the primary influences on his photographic work. William Heick filmed two documentaries about Pacific Northwest Indian tribes, Blunden Harbour (1951) and Dances of the Kwakiutl (1951). W.R. Heick worked through most of the 1950s and 1960s as producer-director, assistant historian and cinematographer for the worldwide engineering firm of Bechtel Corporation. While with Bechtel he wrote and filmed documentaries of their major projects with special emphasis on ethnic and social consideration in remote areas of the Arctic, South America, Africa, Greenland, Europe, The Middle East, Australia, Indonesia and the islands of New Guinea and Bougainville. From 1956 to 1964 Heick was involved with C. Cameron Macauley in the American Indian Film Project, a project to document Native American cultures through film and sound recordings, working closely with Alfred Kroeber and Samuel Barrett. William Heick produced two documentaries for the Quakers. Beauty for Ashes documents the Quaker's project to rebuild 40 churches that had been burned by nightriders during Mississippi's racial strife in the turbulent 1960s. Voyage of the Phoenix documents the controversial voyage of the yacht Phoenix, which sailed through the American battle fleet during the Vietnam War to deliver medical supplies to North Vietnam when the bombing of that beleaguered country was at its peak. In the late 1960s and early 1970s W.R. Heick served as cinematographer on three feature films, all for the director/artist Fredric Hobbs: Troika (1969, co-directed by Gordon Mueller), Alabama's Ghost (1973), and The Godmonster of Indian Flat (1973). During the mid-1970s, working as an independent producer with Gordon Mueller, W.R. Heick produced the Indonesian Dance Series. This series, funded with grants from Caltex Pacific Indonesia and Pertamina, documents fourteen traditional dance performances from the islands of Java, Bali, Sumatra and Kalimantan. W.R. Heick's later films include The Other China, a four-part mini-series filmed on location in Taiwan in 1988 documenting the social and cultural fabric of Taiwan. His fine art photography has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, the de Young Museum, the Seattle Museum of Art, the Henry Gallery (University of Washington), the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and the University Art Gallery (Cal State at Chico) among others. His photographs have been selected for the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Smithsonian Institution, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art. In a published Art Scene review Monterey landscape artist and art critic Rick Deregon wrote: "The special qualities of W.R. Heick's images come from the simple relationship between the photographer and subject. With no agenda other than to capture the decisive inspirational moment and to illustrate the human parade Mr. Heick's work transcends straight journalism and aspires to an art of nobility and compassion."Source: Wikipedia William Heick was born October 6th, 1916. Spanning seven decades, Heick's career in photography and filmmaking has covered locations all over the world. Heick grew up in Kentucky and attended the University of Cincinnati. He married Jeanne Ridge in 1942, and served as a naval intelligence photographer in the Pacific during World War II. After the war, he continued his education at San Francisco State University. He also attended the California School of Fine Arts (now known as the San Francisco Art Institute), where he studied photography, painting, and sculpture under distinguished instructors such as Ansel Adams and Minor White. It was during this period that he met and made lifelong friends with photographers Imogen Cunningham and Dorothea Lange, both of whom he regards as primary influences on his photographic work. His fine art photography has been exhibited in institutions such as San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, DeYoung Museum, and Seattle Museum of Art, among many others. He has produced over 200 films and thousands of photographs. At the age of 94, when asked to sum up his prolific career, he simply stated, "it sure beats working!"Source: Peter Fetterman Gallery
Mario Algaze
Cuba / United States
1947
Mario Algaze (born 1947 in Havana, Cuba) is a Cuban-American photographer whose work celebrates the culture of Latin America. At the age of thirteen he was forced to exile Cuba in 1960 and relocated to Miami, Florida. Miami offered a rich cultural mecca and a vibrant melting pot of culture which encouraged him to travel to Central and South America where he worked as a freelance photojournalist for national and international publications. These trips allowed him a glimpse of belonging within a familiar culture. In finding his identity after exile, he began photographing Latin America in the 1970’s while reconnecting with the feeling of home. His photographs embody the everyday of Latin life. Between his travels in the late 70’s, Algaze studied visual art at Miami Dade College. Algaze’s masterful command of light illuminates his street scenes that detail the struggles and victories of Latin culture. Mario Algaze is the recipient of various acclaimed awards, including the Florida Artist Fellowship from the Florida Arts Council (1985), the Cintas Foundation Fellowship in Photography (1991), the Visual Arts Fellowship and the SAF Artist Fellowship sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1992, he received the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Photography. A retrospective collection of his work is showcased in the important monograph, Mario Algaze: Portfolio, published by Di Puglia Publisher, 2010. Additional monographs by the artist include, Mario Algaze: Portafolio Latinamericano, Mario Algaze: Cuba 1999-2000, and A Respect for Light: The Latin American Photographs: 1974-2008. Algaze's documentary work is highly sought after by institutions and collectors worldwide. His work can be found in permanent collections at every corner of the world including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Santa Barbara Museum; Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, DePaul University, Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art.Source: PDNB Gallery Mario Algaze was born in Havana, Cuba but emigrated to the United States in 1960, settling in Miami, Florida. In 1971, at the age of 24, he began a career as a freelance photojournalist. Although Algaze left Cuba as a teenager he has frequently turned to Latin America as the subject of his photographs, traveling extensively throughout the region. In his carefully composed black and white photographs, he captures people alone or in small groups on the streets and in cafes and parks. Many of his photographs of these everyday settings are infused with a soft light and marked by shadows, giving them a serene or mysterious quality, or evoking the passage of time. The region's conflicts and political activities, frequent subjects of photojournalism, are largely absent in his imagery; instead, he lends quiet insight into the cultural diversity of Latin America and the shape of daily life in countries as far spread as Mexico, Ecuador, and Argentina.Source: Museum of Contemporary Photography
Jaroslav Rössler
Czech Republic
1902 | † 1990
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John Dominis
United States
1921 | † 2013
John Dominis was an American documentary photographer, war photographer and photojournalist. Dominis was born 1921 in Los Angeles. He studied cinematography at the University of Southern California. In 1943 he enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces. After the war, he worked as a freelance photographer for several publications, such as Life magazine. In 1950 he went to Korea as a war photographer in the Korean War. Later he worked in Southeast Asia, in America, Africa and Europe, including President John F. Kennedy's 1963 West Berlin speech. Dominis went to six Olympic Games. One of his best-known pictures was shot during the 1968 Summer Olympics when Dominis pictured Tommie Smith and John Carlos during their Black Power salute. Dominis worked for Life magazine during the Vietnam war and later also went to Woodstock. In the 1970s he worked for People magazine. From 1978 to 1982 he was an editor for Sports Illustrated. He often pictured stars like Steve McQueen or Frank Sinatra, and these photo series were later published as illustrated books. Together with Giuliano Bugialli he published several books about Italian cuisine, with Dominis being responsible for the food photography. In John Loengard's book LIFE Photographers: What They Saw, Dominis reported about the staging of his picture A leopard about to kill a baboon. The picture was shot in 1966 in Botswana when a hunter had brought a captured leopard to a bunch of baboons. Most fled immediately but one faced the leopard and was killed subsequently. Dominis was heavily criticized after the staging became public and apologized for it. He mentioned that during the 1960s the staging of pictures was very popular and he wouldn't use this method today. Dominis died on December 30, 2013, in New York City of complications from a heart attack. He was 92.Source: Wikipedia After an Air Force tour in Japan, John Dominis wanted to remain in that country and work. Freelance work was illegal there in 1946, but his photographer colleagues helped him stay and get his start. He would return many times to Asia to cover wars. Back home, he shot sports (he had played end for USC in the 1944 Rose Bowl), politics, celebrities, even food. He spent three months trailing Sinatra to witness him in his element, among swank and boozy stars. That experience of tracking a subject helped the stalwart Dominis on his famous The Great Cats of Africa. The series won him an award even as he was still in the bush—and even though he orchestrated his famous baboon-leopard encounter (the feline was a rental dropped in among the simians)—Dominis had never suggested otherwise. “Frankly, it was set up,” he said. “In those days we were not against setting up some pictures that were impossible to get any other way.” On the occasion of Sinatra’s soth birthday, Dominis went to Florida, where he was performing. Dominis ended up spending three months with him, resulting in an unrivaled set of images of the entertainer. “Steve McQueen was really a nice guy, but he’s another of the ones who didn’t really want to have even one picture taken, even though he’d agreed to the story… I had done quite a lot of sports-car racing when I lived in Hong Kong, so for fun I rented a Jaguar. I knew he had a Jaguar, and I thought it would help a little bit… He drove my car and I drove his. I started shooting a few pictures. I didn’t hang around him a long time, maybe three weeks, and finally, he relaxed.”Source: Life
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