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Luke Stambouliah
Luke Stambouliah
Luke Stambouliah

Luke Stambouliah

Country: Australia
Birth: 1989

Luke Stambouliah was born and raised in Sydney, Australia. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from the University of New South Wales, College of Fine Arts. He established his practice as a contemporary artist and commercial portrait photographer across the film, television and theatre industries.

Statement
"Growing up in a household where Super 8 was like another member of the family, Luke’s fascination with photography and cinema was nurtured. Intrigued by his father’s profession as a psychologist and his sister’s craft as an actor, he wanted to fuse the study of the mind with the power of expression. His exhibited works are imbued with a sense of cinematic storytelling suspended in the calm of a single image. Beyond the gallery walls, Luke continued his path into film and television, shooting editorial portraits and publicity stills for Australia’s leading actors, artists and productions."
 

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Dave Jordano
United States
1948
Dave Jordano was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1948. He received a BFA in photography from the College for Creative Studies in 1974. In 1977 he established a successful commercial photography studio in Chicago, IL, shooting major print campaigns for national advertising agencies. Since 2000, Jordano has concentrated on and established himself as an awarding winning mid-career fine art documentary photographer. He was awarded an honorable mention in the Houston Center for Photography’s Long Term Fellowship Project in 2003, and received the Curator’s Choice Award the following year for his documentary work on Small African American Storefront churches on the south side of Chicago. In 2006, 2008, 2013, and 2016 Jordano has been selected as a top 20 finalist in Photolucida's "Critical Mass" International Photography Competition. He was also selected for inclusion in "One Hundred Portfolios", a compilation featuring the work of 100 leading photographers from around the world and sponsored by Wright State University, Dayton, OH. A major exhibition of his work from the "Articles of Faith" project was held at the Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, Illinois in 2009. In 2014-15 he was a finalist in the LensCulture Exposure Awards for his documentary work on Detroit and was also included in the highly competitive Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. Most notably, Jordano won the prestigious Canadian AIAMI / AGO Photography prize for 2015, which included a $50,000 prize and a six week, fully paid residency anywhere in Canada which he fulfilled by documenting the northern arctic town of Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada. Jordano has exhibited both nationally and internationally and his work is included in several private, corporate, and museum collections. Most notably the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington DC, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL, The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The Detroit Institute of Arts, The Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, the Harris Bank Collection, and the Federal Reserve Bank. His second book, published by the Center for American Places at Columbia College, Chicago titled, "Articles of Faith, Small African American Community Churches of Chicago", released in April 2009. His most recent publication, "Detroit - Unbroken Down" documents the cultural and societal changes of his home town of Detroit and was published in the fall of 2015 by PowerHouse Books, Brooklyn, NY. His fourth coming publication "A Detroit Nocturne" with an essay by Karen Irvine, Co-Director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, will also be published by PowerHouse Books and has a launch date scheduled for April 2018. Dave Jordano currently lives in Chicago, Illinois.
Mark Steinmetz
United States
1961
Mark Christopher Steinmetz (born 1961) is an American photographer. He makes black and white photographs "of ordinary people in the ordinary landscapes they inhabit". Steinmetz's work was shown in a group exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1993/1994 and in solo exhibitions at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in 2015, the High Museum of Art in 2018 and at Fotohof in Salzburg, Austria in 2019. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Hunter Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Steinmetz was born in New York City and raised in the Boston suburbs of Cambridge and Newton until he was 12. He then moved to the midwest before, aged 21, he went to study photography at the Yale School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut. He left that MFA program after one semester and in mid 1983, aged 22, moved to Los Angeles in search of the photographer Garry Winogrand, whom he befriended. He moved to Athens, Georgia in 1999 and was still living and working there as of 2017. Marc Steinmetz makes photographs "of ordinary people in the ordinary landscapes they inhabit", and "in the midst of activity". Most of his work has been made in the USA but also in Berlin, Paris, and Italy. His books combine portraits (portrait-like but spontaneous) and candid photos of people, and also include animals and still life photos. He finds many of his subjects whilst walking around but he has also spent time at Little League Baseball and summer camps. Steinmetz predominantly works with black and white film, usually medium format, developed and printed in his own darkroom. He has mostly worked the same way with the same film, chemicals, and cameras since beginning in the mid 1980s.Source: Wikipedia Mark Steinmetz is an Athens, Georgia-based photographer whose work captures black-and-white images of Southern Americana as seen in urban, rural and suburban landscapes. “I like to stress the poetry and ambiance of a place, while still trying to be truthful,” he has remarked, and his candid shots of everyday life reflect this statement. Examples of this sentiment are strikingly portrayed in Steinmetz's new photo series Terminus, showing the everyday moments of people passing through airports. “At the airport, people from all over the world and from all walks of life can be found in the midst of their journeys,” Mark Steinmetz has said. “Though my main subject has been the passengers, I am also photographing the people who work at the airport, the interiors and exteriors of the planes, as well as the hotels, parking lots and neighborhoods that surround and support the airport.” Mark Steinmetz draws inspiration from a number of Southern artists whose talents extend beyond the realm of photography, and has remarked “the South has many great writers—William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers—and they've influenced me.” Surprisingly, Mark Steinmetz did not originate in the South. In fact, he attended high school in Iowa and received his MFA from Yale University in 1986. (Though he initially dropped out in 1983 in order to move to Los Angeles and work with photographer Garry Winogrand) It wasn’t until 1999 that he left shooting freelance in Chicago and moved south for a teaching job at the University of Tennessee. He has remained in the South ever since. “I love the South for the weeds growing through the cracks of its sidewalks, for its humidity and for its chaos,” he has said. Interestingly, Mark Steinmetz has worked with analog since the beginning of his career, and even uses the same camera, film and development process today as he did as a novice photographer. Mark Steinmetz’ monographs include South Central (2007), South East (2008), Greater Atlanta (2009) and Summertime (2012). He has also been published in Aperture, Blind Spot and DoubleTake magazines. In 1994, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1998 he participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence Program. Mark Steinmetz has taught at a number of institutions, including Harvard, Sarah Lawrence College, Emory University and Yale. Steinmetz’ photos can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.Source: Jackson Fine Art
Louise Dahl-Wolfe
United States
1895 | † 1989
Louise Dahl-Wolfe was an American photographer. She is known primarily for her work for Harper's Bazaar, in association with fashion editor Diana Vreeland. Louise Emma Augusta Dahl was born November 19, 1895 in San Francisco, California to Norwegian immigrant parents; she was the youngest of three daughters. In 1914, she began her studies at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Institute of Art), where she studied design and color with Rudolph Schaeffer, and painting with Frank Van Sloan. She took courses in life drawing, anatomy, figure composition and other subjects over the next six years. After graduating, Dahl-Wolfe worked in designing electric signs and interiors. In 1921, Dahl-Wolfe met with photographer Anne Brigman, who inspired her to take up photography. Her first dark-room enlarger was a makeshift one she built herself, which used a tin can, an apple crate, and a part of a Ghirardelli chocolate box for a reflector. She studied design, decoration and architecture at Columbia University, New York in 1923. From 1927 to 1928, Dahl-Wolfe traveled with photographer Consuelo Kanaga, who furthered her interest in photography. Her first published photograph, titled Tennessee Mountain Woman, was published in Vanity Fair (U.S. magazine 1913–36). In 1928 she married the sculptor Meyer Wolfe, who constructed the backgrounds of many of her photos. Dahl-Wolfe was known for taking photographs outdoors, with natural light in distant locations from South America to Africa in what became known as "environmental" fashion photography. Compared to other photographers at the time who were using red undertones, Dahl-Wolfe opted for cooler hues and also corrected her own proofs, with one example of her pulling proofs repeatedly to change a sofa's color from green to a dark magenta. She preferred portraiture to fashion photography. Notable portraits include: Mae West, Cecil Beaton, Eudora Welty, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Orson Welles, Carson McCullers, Edward Hopper, Colette and Josephine Baker. She is known for her role in the discovery of a teenage Lauren Bacall whom she photographed for the March 1943 cover of Harper's Bazaar. One of her favorite subjects was the model Mary Jane Russell, who is estimated to have appeared in about thirty percent of Dahl-Wolfe's photographs. She was a great influence on photographers Irving Penn and Richard Avedon. One of her assistants was fashion and celebrity photographer, Milton H. Greene. From 1933 to 1960, Dahl-Wolfe operated a New York City photographic studio that was home to the freelance advertising and fashion work she made for stores including Bonwit Teller and Saks Fifth Avenue. From 1936 to 1958 Dahl-Wolfe was a staff fashion photographer at Harper’s Bazaar. She produced portrait and fashion photographs totaling 86 covers, 600 color pages and countless black-and-white shots. She worked with editor Carmel Snow, art director Alexey Brodovitch and fashion editor Diana Vreeland, and traveled widely. In 1950, she was selected for "America's Outstanding Woman Photographers" in the September issue of Foto. From 1958 until her retirement in 1960, Dahl-Wolfe worked as a freelance photographer for Vogue, Sports Illustrated, and other periodicals. Louise Dalhl-Wolfe lived many of her later years in Nashville, Tennessee. She died in New Jersey of pneumonia in 1989. The full archive of Dahl-Wolfe's work is located at the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) at the University of Arizona in Tucson, which also manages the copyright of her work. In 1999, her work was the subject of a documentary film entitled Louise Dahl-Wolfe: Painting with Light. The film featured the only surviving modern footage of Dahl-Wolfe, including extensive interviews. It was written and directed by Tom Neff, edited by Barry Rubinow and produced by Neff and Madeline Bell.Source: Wikipedia Born in Alameda, California, Dahl-Wolfe studied at the San Francisco Institute of Art. In 1921, while working as a sign painter, she discovered the photographs of Anne Brigman, a Pictorialist based in California and associated with the Stieglitz circle in New York. Although greatly impressed by Brigman's work, Dahl-Wolfe did not take up photography herself until the early 1930s. Travel with the photographer Consuelo Kanaga in Europe in 1927-28 piqued her interest in photography once again. In 1932, when she was living with her husband near the Great Smoky Mountains, she made her first published photograph, Tennessee Mountain Woman. After it was published in Vanity Fair in 1933, she moved to New York City and opened a photography studio, which she maintained until 1960. After a few years producing advertising and fashion photographs for Woman's Home Companion, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Bonwit Teller, she was hired by Carmel Snow as a staff fashion photographer for Harper's Bazaar in 1936. Dahl-Wolfe remained with the magazine until 1958, after which time she accepted freelance assignments from Vogue and Sports Illustrated until her retirement in 1960. Dahl-Wolfe was especially well-known during the infancy of color fashion photography for her exacting standards in reproducing her images. Her insistence on precision in the color transparencies made from her negatives resulted in stunning prints whose subtle hues and unusual gradations in color set the standard for elegance in the 1940s and 1950s. In addition, she pioneered the active yet sophisticated image of the "New Woman" through her incorporation of art historical themes and concepts into her photographs.Source: International Center of Photography "I believe that the camera is a medium of light, that one actually paints with light. In using the spotlights with reflecting lights, I could control the quality of the forms revealed to build a composition. Photography, to my mind, is not a fine art. It is splendid for recording a period of time, but it has definite limitations, and the photographer certainly hasn't the freedom of the painter. One can work with taste and emotion and create an exciting arrangement of significant form, a meaningful photograph, but a painter has the advantage of putting something in the picture that isn't there or taking something out that is there. I think this makes painting a more creative medium." — Louise Dahl-Wolf, 1984 Dahl-Wolfe preferred portraiture to fashion work, and while at Harper's she photographed cultural icons and celebrities including filmmaker Orson Wells, writer Carson McCullers, designer Christian Dior, photographer Cecil Beaton, writer Colette, and broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow. In addition to her Harper's responsibilities, Dahl-Wolfe was able to pursue her own vision in the studio and sometimes even while on assignment. For example, she asked a model to pose for the unpublished Nude in the Desert while on location in California's Mojave Desert shooting swimsuits that would appear in the May 1948 edition of Harper's. From 1958 until her retirement in 1960, Dahl-Wolfe worked as a freelance photographer for Vogue, Sports Illustrated, and other periodicals. Major exhibitions of her work include Women of Photography: An Historical Survey at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The History of Fashion Photography and Recollections: Ten Women of Photography at International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; and Portraits at the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson. Retrospectives include shows at Grey Art Gallery, New York University; Cheekwood Fine Arts Center, Nashville, Tennessee; and Louise Dahl-Wolfe: A Ninetieth Birthday Salute at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago. Louise Dalh-Wolfe lived many of her later years in Nashville, Tennessee, though she died in New Jersey of pneumonia in 1989.Source: International Center of Photography
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
Jacqueline Walters
United Kingdom/United States
Born in Cambridge, England, Jacqueline Walters is a fine art photographer based in San Francisco. She received a master’s degree from San Francisco State University, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Both are in English Literature. It was through literature that she discovered photography. In her artistic practice, she explores the themes of transformation of place, layering of time and space, and memory. Since 2009 her work has been exhibited in the San Francisco Bay Area at Corden|Potts Gallery, Gray Loft Gallery, Rayko Photo Center, Santa Clara University, and The Center for Photographic Arts; in Oregon at LightBox Photographic Gallery; in New York at the SOHO Photo Gallery; in Massachusetts at the Griffin Museum of Photography; as well as many other galleries in the United States, and internationally at the Complesso Monumentale del San Giovanni, Catanzaro, Italy, and The 11th Shanghai International Photographic Festival: Invitation Exhibition, Shanghai, China. Her work has been published in LENSCRATCH, SHOTS, and AAP Magazine. Walters’ work is part of private collections nationally and internationally. She was a 2020 Griffin Museum of Photography solo exhibition awardee. About Learning Mandarin and the Language of Lumens "When I began learning Mandarin little did I realize how it would inform my artistic vision. This became evident when I began to experiment with Lumen printing. With the former, I discovered how a seemingly endless permutation of lines, dots, and dashes written within an imaginary square formed meaning through simple and complex forms. With the latter, my thoughts shifted from acquisition of craft to learning a language. In my Lumen prints, instead of ink, I used various biological materials to form bold strokes and elegant lines or whispers of dots and dashes. The imaginary square was transformed into rectangles or other shapes defining the space. The written language is both a means of communication and the art form that is calligraphy. Just as the defining characteristics of the calligrapher’s hand suggests a personality, so too each paper I use reveals a different latent color as if speaking to the personality of the paper. My project, “Learning Mandarin and the Language of Lumens,” is about learning a process that harkens back to photography’s beginnings, influenced by the visual poetry and rhythmic grace of an old writing system." -- Jacqueline Walters
Horst P. Horst
Germany/United States
1906 | † 1999
Horst P. Horst (born Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann), was a German-American fashion photographer. The younger of two sons, Horst was born in Weißenfels-an-der-Saale, Germany, to Klara (Schönbrodt) and Max Bohrmann. His father was a successful merchant. In his teens, he met dancer Evan Weidemann at the home of his aunt, and this aroused his interest in avant-garde art. In the late 1920s, Horst studied at Hamburg Kunstgewerbeschule, leaving there in 1930 to go to Paris to study under the architect Le Corbusier. While in Paris, he befriended many people in the art community and attended many galleries. In 1930 he met Vogue photographer Baron George Hoyningen-Huene, a half-Baltic, half-American nobleman, and became his photographic assistant, occasional model, and lover. He traveled to England with him that winter. While there, they visited photographer Cecil Beaton, who was working for the British edition of Vogue. In 1931, Horst began his association with Vogue, publishing his first photograph in the French edition of Vogue in December of that year. It was a full-page advertisement showing a model in black velvet holding a Klytia scent bottle. His first exhibition took place at La Plume d'Or in Paris in 1932. It was reviewed by Janet Flanner in The New Yorker, and this review, which appeared after the exhibition ended, made Horst instantly prominent. Horst made a portrait of Bette Davis the same year, the first in a series of public figures he would photograph during his career. Within two years, he had photographed Noël Coward, Yvonne Printemps, Lisa Fonssagrives, Count Luchino Visconti di Madrone, Duke Fulco di Verdura, Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, Princess Natalia Pavlovna Paley, Daisy Fellowes, Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark, Cole Porter, Elsa Schiaparelli, and others like Eve Curie. Horst rented an apartment in New York City in 1937, and while residing there met Coco Chanel, whom Horst called "the queen of the whole thing". He would photograph her fashions for three decades. He met Valentine Lawford, British diplomat in 1938, and they lived together until Lawford's death in 1991. Horst adopted a son, Richard J. Horst, whom they raised together. In 1941, Horst applied for United States citizenship. In 1942, he passed an Army physical, and joined the Army on July 2, 1943. On October 21, he received his United States citizenship as Horst P. Horst. He became an Army photographer, with much of his work printed in the forces' magazine Belvoir Castle. In 1945, he photographed United States President Harry S. Truman, with whom he became friends, and he photographed every First Lady in the post-war period at the invitation of the White House. In 1947, Horst moved into his house in Oyster Bay, New York. He designed the white stucco-clad building himself, the design inspired by the houses that he had seen in Tunisia during his relationship with Hoyningen-Huene. Horst is best known for his photographs of women and fashion, but is also recognized for his photographs of interior architecture, still lifes, especially ones including plants, and environmental portraits. One of the great iconic photos of the Twentieth-Century is "The Mainbocher Corset" with its erotically charged mystery, captured by Horst in Vogue’s Paris studio in 1939. Designers like Donna Karan continue to use the timeless beauty of "The Mainbocher Corset" as an inspiration for their outerwear collections today. His work frequently reflects his interest in surrealism and his regard of the ancient Greek ideal of physical beauty. Lighting is more complex than one thinks. There appears to be only one source of light. But there were actually reflectors and other spotlights. I really don’t know how I did it. I would not be able to repeat it. -- Horst P. Horst, on his 1939 photograph Mainbocher Corset His method of work typically entailed careful preparation for the shoot, with the lighting and studio props (of which he used many) arranged in advance. His instructions to models are remembered as being brief and to the point. His published work uses lighting to pick out the subject; he frequently used four spotlights, often one of them pointing down from the ceiling. Only rarely do his photos include shadows falling on the background of the set. Horst rarely, if ever, used filters. While most of his work is in black & white, much of his color photography includes largely monochromatic settings to set off a colorful fashion. Horst's color photography did include documentation of society interior design, well noted in the volume Horst Interiors. He photographed a number of interiors designed by Robert Denning and Vincent Fourcade of Denning & Fourcade and often visited their homes in Manhattan and Long Island. After making the photograph, Horst generally left it up to others to develop, print, crop, and edit his work. One of his most famous portraits is of Marlene Dietrich, taken in 1942. She protested the lighting that he had selected and arranged, but he used it anyway. Dietrich liked the results and subsequently used a photo from the session in her own publicity. In the 1960s, encouraged by Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, Horst began a series of photos illustrating the lifestyle of international high society which included people like: Consuelo Vanderbilt, Marella Agnelli, Gloria Guinness, Baroness Pauline de Rothschild and Baron Philippe de Rothschild, Helen of Greece and Denmark, Baroness Geoffroy de Waldner, Princess Tatiana of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg, Lee Radziwill, Duke of Windsor and Duchess of Windsor, Peregrine Eliot, 10th Earl of St Germans and Lady Jacquetta Eliot, Countess of St Germans, Antenor Patiño, Oscar de la Renta and Françoise de Langlade, Desmond Guinness and Princess Henriette Marie-Gabrielle von Urach, Andy Warhol, Nancy Lancaster, Yves Saint Laurent, Doris Duke, Emilio Pucci, Cy Twombly, Billy Baldwin, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Amanda Burden, Paloma Picasso and Comtesse Jacqueline de Ribes. The articles were written by the photographer's longtime companion, Valentine Lawford, a former English diplomat. From this point until nearly the time of his death, Horst spent most of his time traveling and photographing. In the mid-1970s, he began working for House & Garden magazine as well as for Vogue. Horst's last photograph for British Vogue was in 1991 with Princess Michael of Kent, shown against a background of tapestry and wearing a tiara belonging to her mother-in-law, Princess Marina, who he had photographed in 1934. He died at his home in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida at 93 years of age.Source: Wikipedia I don’t think photography has anything remotely to do with the brain. It has to do with eye appeal. -- Horst P. Horst
Colby Deal
United States
1988
Colby Deal is a photographic artist born (b. 1988) and raised in Houston, Texas. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in the practice of photography from The University of Houston. Within his practice, he explores the culmination of elements of the psychological environment as well as the physical. He shows the dynamic range of family, community and the individual by combining street photography and portraiture to capture vibrant communities. In recent years he has incorporated the medium of sculpture and public art as a means of preserving cultural characteristics that are being erased and positively influencing his community and others alike. Colby is directly inspired by his upbringing through getting to see his family’s photographs that were mostly taken by his father. This appreciation for slowing down and concentrating on photographing what’s right in front of him, “The Now”, has led him to be more in touch with using analog photography. Colby Deal is an alumni of Project Row Houses residency, Red Line Contemporary Art Center residency in Denver, Colorado and in 2020, was awarded an exhibition at the Houston Museum of African American Culture. Colby became a Magnum nominee member in 2020.Source: Magnum Photos Colby Deal is a firm believer in the potential of photography to be a transformative medium. “Especially now with Covid and how it is separating people, imagery is so important” he says, over video call from outside his home in Houston’s Third Ward, where he has been photographing with the intention to uplift cultural representations of the predominantly Black neighborhood. “People of color and people from under-resourced communities are always shown negative images about themselves,” says Deal, whose practice involves pasting his images onto abandoned buildings and derelict shopfronts. “Imagine being a kid, waking up, getting on the school bus, and seeing yourself displayed monumentally in a positive manner. That can have a strong psychological effect on the way you think about yourself and others. Like seriously, just a glance at an image can change your thought patterns — it can change your whole life.” Adopting a participatory approach, Deal’s process involves a lot of talking and walking. On a typical day, he will drag his large format camera on a wagon, stopping at people’s doorsteps and porches for a drink, smoke, and conversation, about their lives and the condition of their community. “I don’t want to call it a story because I sound like a fucking news reporter,” he laughs, “but what I’ll do is walk around, find things I like, and shoot around it”. The culmination of these excursions is Beautiful, Still, an ongoing collection of over 1,000 black-and-white negatives of street photographs and portraits. The ability to layer these historical, personal, and social contexts in a single image can be cited back to Deal’s childhood and evolution as an artist. Deal was initially self-taught, later enrolling in the Photography BFA at The University of Houston, mostly for “the network,” he says, and to “learn how to better articulate what I was doing”. The documentary photographer, who last month became a Magnum nominee, is also a sculptor, carpenter, graphic designer, and painter. “As a child, everything I found joy in was about art,” says Deal, who was drawing from the age of three, and later developed an obsession with breaking down objects and piecing them back together. “That aspect has played a huge part in what I do today, which is looking at an idea, concept, or message that I want to get across, then starting from the root, and working from there.”Source: British Journal of Photography
Peter Ydeen
United States
1957
Peter Ydeen is a photographer and artist currently living in Easton, Pennsylvania, working in New York City, and frequently traveling abroad. He works within the now-established tenet of Urban Landscape Photography, celebrating the complexity and beauty of the mundane world. Although his work draws inspiration from New Topographics, his photographs depart from its stoic aesthetic, embracing the ethereal layering typical of a romantic. His work is introspective and pictorial in nature, and has found inspiration in the poetics of George Tice, the playful lyricism of Paul Klee, the readymades of Marcel Duchamp, and the eccentric energy of Charles Burchfield—elements that seem to bring the work together as if in the setting of an E.T.A. Hoffmann tale. The thrust of Ydeen’s work has been the night series Easton Nights; however, he has also created several other series, including Waiting for Palms, shot in Egypt and Morocco; Commuter Motions, a motion study of his commute from Easton to New York City; Black White and Gray, a more traditional monochrome series also shot along the Interstate 78 corridor from Easton to New York; Valley Days and its subset Valley Days Rondels, a series of daylight shots in the Lehigh Valley; and finally, the ongoing series Away, which studies urban landscapes Ydeen encounters on his travels. All of these works have found their way into many books and publications, as well as into numerous creative exhibitions. Ydeen received his BA in painting and sculpture at Virginia Tech under Ray Kass, and his MFA in painting and sculpture at Brooklyn College (Fellowship) under Robert Henry, Phillip Pearlstein, and Alan D’Arcangelo, followed by a scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and a fellowship to the Sculpture Center in NYC. Following his education, he made his way as a technician in a number of fields, including technical illustration, industrial set construction, display, architectural drafting, and model making. He was the Director of Joseph Zelvin Models, where he built finished models for many architects, including Philip Johnson, Michael Graves, and Robert Stern, and for several years ran the model shop for the visionary architect Emilio Ambasz, with many of Ydeen’s models being published and exhibited. This period of exacting craftsmanship later became an important foundation for his immersive three-dimensional photography installations and hand-built framing techniques applied to his many exhibits. After meeting his wife, the art dealer Mei Li Dong, and with the help of African art dealer and scholar Marc Leo Felix, they opened the gallery Arts du Monde Inc. in New York City, selling African, Chinese, and Tibetan art and presenting a number of important exhibitions. This experience furthered his knowledge of display, working with designers such as Joaquin Carter, as well as enabling him to handle a vast cross-section of art daily, providing a humbling lesson in the aesthetics and history of those traditions. Easton Nights Easton Nights is a story which grew from the unique and uncommon valley in which the city lies; and is told with the images of unpeopled landscapes taken at night. Here, in the small hours, the world we see as mundane, cascades into dream. Like a surreal scene from a Guillermo del Toro film, trash bins and Toyotas, stop signs and doorways; all become animated. They lean; they stretch, and emanate, all with umbrageous hues, which seem to exhale from the nights own personal color wheel. Scattered signs give the words, marking our place in time, while the geometries show our relentless effort to arrange our world in a box. These are our stages, with the houses our beehives, the machines our toys, and the doors our portals. Complete they are a mimesis of our daily life, as can only shown in the mystical emptiness of night. Then with the dawn comes the beginning, where we all wake, then act; all while these magical and romantic worlds return to sleep. WAITING FOR PALMS Waiting for Palms is a series of urban landscape photographs taken in two corners of North Africa—Morocco and Egypt—that reflect their contrasting peoples and places with a gestalt that is private and colorful, foreign yet familiar, and often fiercely guarded. The photographs capture a world brought inward only to reemerge through the landscapes' 'spirit of place,' where every corner is layered with an unusual elegance and underlying beauty—a waiting and wanting—all presented to us as if the seen world is built on top of a myriad of swallowed dreams. BLACK WHITE and GRAY Black White and Gray is a series of urban landscape photographs shot along the eighty mile I-78 corridor, beginning in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, traveling through a cross section of both desolate and urbanized New Jersey, and then landing in the core of New York City. These are Images living in the mid tones, which find their origins in the stoic tenets of New Topographics only to wander towards a more romantic embrace of the animism of our places; a quality so often unseen in our daily life. This is a Lewis Baltz industrial park with a Bertolucci perspective, or a Robert Adams trailer topped with a Fragonard Cloud. Here, geometry melds with movement, sometimes contorted. cluttered or even stretched like a rubber band, while still presenting a respect of the classic, formal and academic qualities of our built environment. There is an overlay of chimerical wonderment which reflects the dreams and concerns of the countless stream of unobservant passersby who traverse these spaces daily. Gray, both in tone and subject matter, this is a study built with tensions which then lay us down in an elegant romance, interacting with both the monumental shapes and structures which move from simplicity into the cacophony of our urban landscape. Commuter Motions Traveling from the industrial town of Easton, Pennsylvania, through sparsely populated western New Jersey, and into the cacophony of New York City, Commuter Motions is a photography series that develops from the experiential capture of an eighty-mile commute. By opposing the usual fixity of photography, the series attempts to capture the energy and movement of that commute using an almost Bergsonian approach, which, through time-lapse, builds images from segments of a continuous dynamic. These photographs are not about the specificity of a “decisive moment” but are more in line with the thoughts and theories of late 19th and early 20th-century artists, who were immersed in the concepts of perpetuity, fleeting moments, change, chance and dynamism. Time surfaces as a fourth verity, adding to Robert Adam’s three: geography, biography and metaphor. It is that fourth that which gives us not a moment in time, but instead, a cross-section of a continuum. The usually narrow focus of our memory is substituted with an accumulation of peripheral vision, which creates an image reflecting the gestalt of these movements, a gestalt we perceive and experience but do not visually remember. Through this unusual form of capture, Commuter Motions frames the labyrinth of oscillating movements of our highways, bridges, and cities into photographs that reflect the élan vital of our daily commute. Winner AAP Magazine 45 Travels
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