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Win a Solo Exhibition in April 2026 + An Exclusive Interview!
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Alireza Sahebi
Alireza Sahebi
Alireza Sahebi

Alireza Sahebi

Country: Iran
Birth: 1994

Alireza Sahebi is an Iranian portrait photographer born in 1994. He became interested in photography as a teenager and when he started working in a photography studio. He then continued his studies in the field of visual communication at the University of Art and Architecture. He chose portrait photography because of his interest in exploring and recognizing the spirits and inner thoughts of human beings. He continues to photograph using different genres because it is a unique language with many dialects and it allows him to communicate with people around the world.

Statement
Have you heard a sound louder than the sound of your eyes? The eyes are alive٫ they understand٫ they talk٫ they fall in love٫ the eyes are all the existence and non-existence of people. The eyes have an identity card, and if they have the opportunity, they will ruthlessly expel all their presence and absence. I found photography as a way to discover and express the inner selves of human beings and I tried to find a non-verbal, universal and meaningful language and I did not find it except in my eyes
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Matthew Pillsbury
United States / France
1973
Matthew Pillsbury is a French-born American photographer, living in New York City. The Screen Lives series, inspired by Sugimoto's movie theater photos, features black and white, long-exposure photographs of family and friends sitting in their apartments interacting with their computer and television screens. In 2004 The New York Times Magazine commissioned him to do a portfolio of photos of New York museums after hours. One such photo was taken at the Guggenheim Museum: An installation in progress in the Ronald O. Perelman Rotunda (Oct. 1, 2004.) In addition to New York, he continued to shoot within museums in both London and Paris, including the Musée du Louvre. At the Louvre he photographed the Mona Lisa. The New York Times and the Aperture Foundation published New York Times Photographs in the fall of 2011, featuring one of his photos of the American Museum of Natural History's Rose Center For Earth and Space. In the Dec 11, 2011 issue of New York Magazine, Pillsbury's works were published as part of their "Reasons to Love New York 2011" feature. The photos included four shots from City Stages, which included Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zuccotti Park, as well as Jing Fong dim sum, Fausto in Washington Square Park and High Line. His series, City Stages initially ran from February 23, 2012 to April 28, 2012 at the Bonni Bunrubi Gallery in New York City. The exhibition opened in Atlanta, GA on September 13, 2012 and ran until November 17, 2012 at The Jackson Fine Art gallery. In September 2013, the Aperture Foundation published a monograph that includes a retrospective of his works, titled, City Stages. The New York Times Magazine published one of Pillsbury's City Stages photos as part of their Manhattanhenge feature in July 2013. Art Relish conducted an interview in October 2012 with him discussing his City Stages works. In the Oct 1, 2012 edition of Time Magazine, High Line photo, featuring a park in Manhattan constructed of abandoned train tracks, was highlighted as part of his exhibit at the Jackson Fine Art gallery. The Screen Lives series, inspired by Sugimoto's movie theater photos, features black and white, long-exposure photographs of family and friends sitting in their apartments interacting with their computer and television screens. On the CNN Photos Blog, Pillsbury's Screen Lives series was featured in a post about the School of Visual Arts "Myths & Realities" show, which took at the Visual Arts Gallery in New York, Aug 29-Sept 29, 2012. On November 27, 2011, New York Times Magazine featured two of Pillsbury's photos of Jane's Carousel from "City Stages." In April 2014, Pillsbury was one of 11 photographers awarded with the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Approximately 200 Fellowships are awarded each year through two annual competitions that receive between 3,500 and 4,000 applications. Guggenheim Fellowships are grants awarded to "advanced professionals in mid-career" who have demonstrated exceptional ability by publishing a significant body of work within the fields of natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and the creative arts, excluding the performing arts. In 2014, Pillsbury photographed various cities in Japan, with the focus being in and around Tokyo. Recent photographs from his work in Tokyo were revealed in a photo essay published on July 18, 2014 in The New York Times Magazine and include images from Tokyo Disneyland, Robot Restaurant and the CupNoodles Museum in Yokohama. In April 2014, The New York Times Magazine first ran a photo essay of Pillsbury's work that centered around the hanami parties that occur during the week when the cherry blossoms are at peak bloom. An exhibition of His new Tokyo work opened Sept 10, 2014 and closed November 15, 2014 in New York City at Benrubi Gallery. A portfolio of Pillsbury's new images was featured in The New Yorker in September 2015, and showcased locations that include the High Line, the American Museum of Natural History, Astoria Park Pool and the Coney Island Boardwalk. He has also widened the project's focus to include locations outside of Manhattan, after a move to Brooklyn in January 2015 that inspired him to shoot urban life in the outer boroughs. In a redesign and relaunch in the February 22, 2015 issue, The New York Times Magazine published a photograph Of his on its cover. The long exposure image featured an illuminated spinning globe, which he took in his basement. He is represented exclusively by Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York.Source: Wikipedia
Giles Duley
United Kingdom
1971
Giles Duley was born in 1971 in London. After 10 years as an editorial photographer in the fashion and music industries in both the US and Europe, Duley now focuses his work on humanitarian projects. Working with well respected charities such as Medecins sans Frontiers, IOM and UNHCR to highlight lesser known stories deserving of public attention and action. Although documenting challenging, and at times, horrific situations, Duley captures the strength of those who fight their adversity rather than succumb. His photographs draw the viewer to the subject, creating intimacy and empathy for lives differing from ours only in circumstance.In 2011, whilst on patrol with 75th Cavalry Regiment, United States Army in Afghanistan, Duley stepped on an improvised explosive device. He was severely injured, losing both legs and an arm.Source: www.gilesduley.com Artist Statement "In 2011 I was injured whilst working as a photographer in Afghanistan. I spent the next 46 days of my recovery fighting for my life in intensive care. During that period, I was often awake for days, unable to move or communicate as I was incubated and my remaining shattered hand was in a cast. My mind wandered, drifting on a mixture of morphine, exhaustion and fear and so battling to keep my sanity and to pass the dragging hours I’d challenge myself with mental exercises. My favourite was thinking of portraits I wished I could do, creating a list of the 100 people I most wanted to photograph. My first love in photography was portraiture. I love telling someone’s story through an image, trying to capture some essence of character in a frozen moment. For ten years I worked as a portrait photographer before cynicism with celebrity culture and a desire to document humanitarian issues took me in a different direction. I had always hoped to return to portraiture in time. Lying there, trapped in my body, I imagined all the portraits I wanted to take, aware that now I’d probably never get the chance. This wasn’t just a list of heroes or inspirations; more a collection of people who had shaped my cultural identity or whose large personas drew me in. Ben Okri whose writing first opened my eyes to Africa and storytelling; Tom Waits with his gnarled voice; Natalie Portman, hypnotic in the last film I’d seen before my accident; Don McCullin who inspired me to first pick up the camera. The list grew in my mind; eclectic, eccentric characters I wished I’d captured in frame. I resolved that if by some chance I made it through, I’d contact the names on my list and ask them to sit for a portrait. I would not waste my second chance at life. I have no idea where this project will lead, who will say yes, who will say no, or what I will learn about the people I meet and about myself. I’m aware I’ll face practical difficulties brought on by my injuries and the challenges of working within a celebrity culture, but through this journey I hope to develop my abilities in portraiture, to explore my own cultural identity and broaden my understanding of photography. Most importantly to fully regain my life and identity post accident, with more than a little fun along the way! As for the list? From PJ Harvey to Dead Prez, from Samantha Morton to Jean Paul Belmondo, the names on the list are united by a common trait. When I thought I was going to die and when I had to come to terms with my new life, one thing kept me going, my photography. It is my lifeblood. The sitters for my portraits may all be famous, but I believe they have become that because of what they do, not because they craved celebrity. I believe for each one their craft is also their lifeblood. So here I am. It’s taken two years, 30 operations and a long rehabilitation, but I’m ready to start. 100 Portraits Before I Die: A Photographers Odyssey..."
Alamsyah Rauf
Indonesia
1982
Alamsyah Rauf was born in a small district in south sulawesi precisely in Kab.Sinjai, maybe that's why this photographer is less known among photographers in Indonesia but his work has won dozens of world-class photo contest. After graduating high school, this man married in 2001 on the will of his parents, this makes him unable to continue college. After married Alamsyah worked in his parents' photo studio. Alamsyah Learning DSLR cameras just look at the camera manual and learn self-taught to techniques of composition, tone, and lighting via internet. In 2004 Alamsyah Rauf set up his own Photo Studio and hire 3 photographers. As a freelance photographer, Alamsyah takes part in various photography communities, photo exhibitions and participate in various national and international photo contest. Awards: 2nd Place (Best of Show) 2012 Photoshare Photo Contest (Baltimore USA) 2nd Price Sony WPO 2013 category National Award Best in Action at Australian Art Sales (Australia) FIAP GOLD MEDAL in Photo Salon Soul 2013 (Macedonia) FIAP Silver Medal 4th International Photo Exhibition Photo Focus 2013 (Russia) PAM Gold Medal at 2nd International exhibition of art photography SOUL 2014 (Macedonia) Second Winner General category HIPA 2014 Dubai 1st Place Portrait at 7th Annual Masters Cup 2014 (Beverly Hills USA) 1st Place (Portrait category) the 7th Annual International Color Awards 2014 FIAP Gold Medal at 38th EX HIBITION OF PHOTOGRAPHY "CHILD 2014" Serbia SALON praise 38th EXHIBITION OF PHOTOGRAPHY "CHILD 2014" Serbia FIAP Gold medal, FIAP Silver medal, PSA Gold Medal, PSA Ribbon in 2nd Cairo Int. Photographic Art Exhibition - CIPAE 2014 Awards (Cairo, Egypt) Ozone zone Gold Medal (Happiness), FIAP Ribbon (monochrome) Ozone zone International Photo Contest 2014 (Canada) RPS Gold Medal, 2nd Photovivo Singapore International Photography Award (PIPA) 2014 FIAP Silver Medal (Open Color) 1St GIFSAD INTERNATIONAL PHOTO CONTEST 2014 (TURKEY) Champaign 1 colorful alfaink photo contest nusantara 2015. "Grand Prize" Winner at The Shutterview International Photography Competition 2015 (Australia ) 2nd Place (people category) Fine Art Photography Award 2015 Grand Winner Xposure International photo contest 2016 (Sharjah UAE) First Place Proify Annual International Photography Awards 2016 Merit Medal Recipient "THE CHALLENGE" HIPA 2017 UAE 5th Place All About Photo Awards 2018
Lenka Klicperová
Czech Republic
1976
Journalist and photographer. She obtained a master's degree at the University of Hradec Králové and immediately after that started working as a journalist. From 2004 to 2018 she was the editor-in-chief of the leading Czech travel magazine Lidé a Země. Since 2018 she has been working as a freelance reporter and photographer focused on war zones. She has worked in a number of African countries, including conflict zones of Democratic Republic of Congo. She visited Afghanistan several times, as well as Somalia, plagued by several decades of war. Since 2014, she has focused on the issue of the war with the ISIS in Iraq and Syria. She is the co-author of several documentaries (Tears of the Congo, Latim – the Circumcised, Iraqui Women, Women in the Land of Taliban, Unbroken) and a number of television reports. She has won a number of prizes and nominations in the Czech Press Photo competition - both for photography and video. In 2020 she was included in the prestigious Women Photograph database, she was shortlisted for the International Women In Photo Association Award. She is the co-author of nine books about Africa and about the wars in the Middle East and Nagorno Karabakh. Her work from Syria resulted in two books entitled In Sight of the Islamic State I and In Sight of the Islamic State II, which were co-authored by Markéta Kutilová. Together with Kutilová she also wrote other books on the wars in Syria and Iraq: In the War (2018) and War is My Fate (2020). In 2019, a book called AK47 was published, which depicts the dramatic life of the world-famous Czech war photographer Antonín Kratochvíl. Klicperová wrote the text of the book based on Kratochvíl's narration. In September 2020, war broke out in Nagorno Karabakh. Lenka Klicperová and Markéta Kutilová quickly moved to the center of events. The war in the Caucasus was captured by both reporters in many reports, but also in a book The Last One Sets the Village on Fire (2021). Klicperová cooperates with a number of Czech media. She also lectures at the University of Hradec Králové. Statement Twelve years ago I first came to a war zone, to the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. My goal was to document the drastic effects of the protracted war on women. The local militias are committing mass rape of women and children; rape is a weapon of war. It was my first encounter with war. I understood that I wanted to bear witness to the injustices of this world, the way they fall on innocent victims who have nothing to do with them. I returned to the Congo several times and started working in Afghanistan. Then the war in Syria and Iraq started. I spent six years traveling to these areas watching and documenting how the Islamic State terrifies the world. And how it is gradually being defeated with the generous contribution of the Syrian Kurds. The city of Kobani, the center of the Kurds, has been indelibly engraved in my heart, defending itself against the enormous superiority of the Islamists. At the cost of high casualties. I have been on the front lines, in refugee camps, documenting the lives of the wives of ISIS fighters and their children. I managed to get in the prison where ISIS fighters who survived the fighting are being held. When the war broke out in Nagorno Karabakh, I knew I had to go there immediately. I followed the war to the end and documented the lives of civilians sentenced to live suddenly in a war zone. I saw their exodus. War zones have thus become a part of my life... Lost War
Helga Paris
Germany
1938
Helga Steffens, daughter of Gertrud Steffens and typesetter Wilhelm Steffens, was born just over a year before the outbreak of the Second World War in Gollnow, a small town then in the north of Germany. In May 1945 she celebrated her seventh birthday, while the war ended in defeat for Germany. Her father and two brothers were still away, but in the meantime frontier changes mandated by the victorious powers and large scale ethnic cleansing forced Helga's mother to flee with her two daughters. They ended up in Zossen, a small town a little to the south of Berlin. There she was raised by a community of mostly women, many of whom worked. She is introduced to photography by her aunts who take many photographs. In Zossen she went to school and successfully passed her School leaving exams in 1956. After this, till 1960, she studied fashion design at the School of Engineering for the Clothing Industry ("Berlin Ingenieurschule für Bekleidungsindustrie") in Berlin and undertook, still in Berlin, an internship at VEB Treffmodelle. After this she worked as a fashion lecturer and as a commercial artist. In 1960 she starts to take photographs with a 6x6 Flexaret camera. It was during this time that she met the painter Ronald Paris. They were married between 1961 and 1974. Through her husband she was now quickly able to establish contacts in the East German artistic scene of the time. By now she had also acquired a passion for photography. Like many of the German Democratic Republic's leading photographers, Helga Paris is often described as self-taught. She herself believes that much of her photographic passion and skill was acquired from two aunts who were themselves, enthusiastic photographers, constantly taking pictures through the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, which now Paris herself keeps carefully stored in a collection of show boxes adapted for the purpose. Paris began taking photographs seriously around 1967. She was influenced by the work of Edvard Munch, Max Beckmann, Francis Bacon, and Werner Held. Between 1967 and 1968 she worked in the photo laboratory of Walli Baucik. Her first freelance job, in 1969, was to photograph slaughtering at a home in Thüringen; in 1970 she shot fashion photographs for the youth magazine neues leben. In 1972 she joined the National Association of Visual Artists, which was virtually a prerequisite for success in what was now her chosen career. Her professional work is wide-ranging. In 1975 she photographed scenes from productions by Benno Besson at the Berlin Volksbühne ("People's Theatre"). She presented her first personal exhibition in 1978, in Dresden at the Fine Arts Academy. By the 1980s her work was concentrated increasingly on people and streetscapes, initially in Berlin where many of her subjects were neighbours and friends. She encountered greater difficulty when undertaking an equivalent project in Halle where the people she photographed were strangers and reacted with hostility. She then took time to talk to people and ask before photographing them. Under those circumstances, citizens of Halle agreed to be photographed, though there was still reluctance to be photographed with Halle streets as background at a time when a major and long-running redevelopment project scheme involving extensive destruction of old houses was leaving the centre of the city looking badly damaged. Her 1986 exhibition Buildings and Faces: Halle 1983-1985, planned for the city's Marktschlößchen Gallery was cancelled a few days before the scheduled opening date because her pictures gave publicity to the city's misguided building policy. By the time it was cancelled a catalogue and exhibition labels for the photographs had already been printed. Her career as a free-lance photographer survived the changes of 1989/90 which led to the end of the German Democratic Republic, formally in October 1990 with German reunification, and for some commentators and others her photographs from the East German period have gained a wider interest as the period they depict has receded into history. Since 1996 Helga Paris has been a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts. In 2003 her twelve-part exhibition Self images 1981-1988 in the context of the Art in the German Democratic Republic exhibition drew much interest.Source: Wikipedia Buildings and Faces “I’ll take Halle” was Helga Paris’s spontaneous reaction when, at a meeting with colleagues and artists in East Berlin in the early 1980s, fellow photographer Arno Fischer came up with the idea of photographing East Germany systematically as photographers had done in the 1930s and 1940s for the Farm Security Administration on behalf of the US government. Helga Paris rose to the challenge and began to document Halle on her own initiative. The self-taught photographer had previously carried out several photo stories on themes relating to urban and neighborhood life as part of a personal project. She drove from East Berlin to Halle many times between 1983 and 1985. As her daughter lived there at the time, she had developed an affinity to the town. Helga Paris was fascinated by the endangered former beauty of the buildings and considered it her duty to preserve it in pictures before it disappeared completely. She decided to photograph Halle as if it were a “foreign town in a foreign country”. In doing so, she looked at it through the eyes of an explorer, who is inspired and galvanized by a new environment. She started off taking snapshots of urban life, focusing on streets with houses and passers-by. However, the local people, who felt exposed in their “everyday misery”, did not always react favorably. This prompted her to reconsider her approach and eventually to divide the project into portraits of buildings and portraits of people. Helga Paris consciously limited the moment between making contact with her subjects and pressing the shutter to ensure that their gazes were as open as possible. As a result, they seem to be poised in the very second in which they briefly pause for the photographer, but have not yet engaged mentally with the photographic situation. At the time, Halle was primarily putting money into building modern apartments, and the old town center offered a desolate picture with crumbling facades, including those of listed buildings, half-untiled roofs, and ramshackle roads and squares. All this is revealed in Helga Paris’s photographs in high-contrast black-and-white, although it was never her intention to denounce the state of things. However, the SED party leadership found that the picture of the town conveyed in Helga Paris’s images was too negative. As a result, she was barred from opening her exhibition Buildings and Faces at the last minute. Not until 1990, after German reunification, was it allowed to be shown in Halle.Source: Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation
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Exclusive Interview with Anastasia Samoylova
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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