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Win a Solo Exhibition in July 2026 + An Exclusive Interview!
Win a Solo Exhibition in July 2026 + An Exclusive Interview!
Denis Olivier
Denis Olivier

Denis Olivier

Country: France
Birth: 1969

My first encounter with photography took place when my parents performed some strange static dances with an object in front of their face. Later they would close themselves up in a special room under the house for long periods of time, and no one was allowed in. They diligently made sure that they were left to their own devices while inside. One day I was given permission to enter the room and allowed to stay, but on the condition that I didn't move or went out. I remember there was a unique chemical perfume and a red light.

I was bewildered: my parents appeared flashing a white light on a piece of paper using a strange apparatus. Then they dipped it into a clear liquid and Behold! I couldn't believe it, A miracle! They were wizards who created pictures.

In the following years I didn't really follow his experiments, I was too young to manipulate cameras and I preferred to draw. Photography, Architecture and Art was always present around us and I still remember the black and white exhibitions that we visited.

When I was a teenager, I continued to draw and started to paint a little. I even took part in some local exhibitions. At the age of 17 I began to take some photographs, I was especially fascinated by mineralogical micro mounts. I started studying biochemistry, but after 3 years I changed to Poitiers school of fine-arts, and took an interest in computer graphics and generated imagery.

While I was there I meet Alain Fleig who introduced me to art photography. I also felt a need to practice photography, and with a friend we spent a lot of time learning how to develop films and photographs. We did sessions with models, scenery, and discovered France.

The second year I had my first personal exhibition in a gallery, which was a great experience, then a training placement with Philippe Salaün, who was at this time Robert Doisneau's developer. Following this I did some jobs for organizations, shows and commissioned works. I then started in December 1995 working with computer graphics and made use of the Internet.

I worked in artistic direction for several years, then digital cameras came along and I found a way to work quickly and experiment without using too many resources such as film, chemicals, photo sensitive paper and of course the wonderful resource of water.

 

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Patricia McElroy
United States
Patricia McElroy was born in Philadelphia and raised in Ireland, a duality that continues to shape both her life and work. After graduating from the National College of Art & Design in Dublin, she returned to the U.S., where she and her husband built a successful design business. While her career has moved fluidly between art, design, and entrepreneurship, photography has remained her most personal and enduring form of expression—a way to explore themes of memory, place, identity, and belonging. Between Then & Now Six years ago, McElroy’s 94-year-old mother came from Ireland for what was meant to be a short visit. Her deteriorating eyesight and dementia made it clear she could no longer live on her own and a new chapter quietly began for them both. At first, McElroy picked up her camera as a way to hold onto the mother she knew, but what started as a gesture of preservation soon became something more—a quiet reflection on how memory drifts, resurfaces, and reshapes itself over time. In many ways, her mother exists in both places even now—her memories drifting between both lands, echoing the family’s own migration story. McElroy realized that migration doesn’t just alter geography—it reshapes how we remember and where we feel we belong. Distance doesn’t erase the past, but reframes it, softening some details and sharpening others. This led McElroy to examine her own immigrant experience, using her mother’s life and their shared generational story as a lens to explore the complexities of memory, migration, cultural identity, family, and home. In doing so, she recognized that her past and present photographic work had long been rooted in these themes. Her growing archive—both personal and inherited—became part of the exploration, revealing a continuity in her artistic voice that had always been quietly present. For McElroy, immigration has never been a single moment, but a rhythm—an ongoing dance between two places, two cultures, and two selves. Her family has long carried two homes in their hearts, navigating the layered contradictions of belonging. Ireland is where their roots run deep, where legacy is woven into the land; America is where reinvention lives, where possibility expands. Over time, the boundary between the two became less defined—not a point of conflict, but a quiet acceptance of a life shaped by both. McElroy captures the fragile space where cultural and emotional threads bind past to present. Her images speak to love, loss, resilience, and the ways migration and remembrance shape who we are and where we feel we belong. In telling her own family’s story, she’s also telling a more universal story—of beauty found, and life lived fully in the journey Between Then & Now.
Stephanus Meyer
Zambia/United Kingdom
Stephanus Meyer was born in Zambia and spent most of his childhood in South Africa. He moved out of Africa at the beginning of the 1980s to live in Spain where he is now based. He is self-taught and always inspired by his obsession with light, shadows, contrasts and the way they come together in his images. Street, social, documentary and fine art photography are his great passion. He has lived in various environments and travelled to many different places, and his camera has taught him to see the world and how people live in it from a different perspective. Street photography has taught him to see. He is inspired by people who simply live their lives. He bought his first camera at the age of 16 and so the journey began; more than 40 years later it is still going strong. He has participated in numerous photographic events such as the official section of the international Biennial of Photography of Cordoba 2006 and the International Biennial of Photography and Audiovisual Arts of Granada, among others, and has been a finalist in several international competitions such as the Photography Masters Cup (USA), Chelsea International Photography Competition (New York), Fresh M.I.L.K. (New Zealand) and Festimage (Portugal), in addition to a large number of mentions and national awards. Statement Street photography is often seen as a simple capture of the everyday moments that unfold in the bustling streets of our cities. Yet, within each frame lies a profound narrative of our times, a visual testament to the lives we lead, the cultures we inhabit, and the stories we weave amidst the urban tapestry. In my pursuit of documenting the streets, I find myself drawn not just to the fleeting moments of beauty and serendipity, but also to the deeper layers of societal fabric that unfold before my lens. Each photograph serves as a time capsule, preserving not just the faces and places, but the essence of an era; a social document for future generations to decode and understand. Just as a historian might study the archives for insights into the past, I see my street photography as a form of contemporary historiography. Through the lens of my camera, I strive to capture not just the surface appearances, but the underlying currents of human existence – the way people dress, interact, and navigate the urban landscape. In this fast-paced world of ever-evolving trends and technologies, street photography offers a grounding force, reminding us of our shared humanity and collective journey. It is my hope that these snapshots of life on the streets will serve as a bridge across time, connecting us to the past, grounding us in the present, and inspiring us to shape a more compassionate and inclusive future. Series: Crossing the old city from within Córdoba, a city that was once a melting pot of religions and civilizations lies in the north-central section of the autonomous community of Andalusia in southern Spain. Córdoba was probably Carthaginian in origin and was occupied by the Romans in 152 BC. In 711 it was captured and largely destroyed by the Muslims. Abd al-Rahman I, a member of the Umayyad family, accepted the leadership of the Spanish Muslims rebuilt it and made Córdoba its capital in 756. The old city has one of the largest Jewish quarters in Europe with its narrow cobble- stone streets and white houses. It leads out towards the Great Cathedral-Mosque and crosses the Guadalquivir river through the Roman arch and bridge. I have been living here for almost 30 years, and have walked and crossed the old city with my camera many times. This series begins within the Great Cathedral-Mosque and takes us across the old city. As a passionate street photographer I try to capture the beauty and diversity of modern urban life in this ancient area. My style is unconventional and experimental, as I use a wide angle lens to create images that are distorted, dynamic, and dramatic. I simply walk and shoot and never engage with my subjects. I want the photos to be as natural as possible. In this series, in post-production, I used various filters to obtain that yellowish colour that for me creates the ancient mood the old city reminds me of when I walk its streets. I want the observer to feel the textures of the old stone, the mood, the pulse of daily life and the incredible light.
Ray K. Metzker
United States
1931 | † 2014
Ray K. Metzker (10 September 1931 – 9 October 2014) was an American photographer known chiefly for his bold, experimental B&W cityscapes and for his large "composites", assemblages of printed film strips and single frames. His work is held in various major public collections and is the subject of eight monographs. He received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and Royal Photographic Society. Metzker was born in Milwaukee and lived in Philadelphia from the 1960s until his death. He was married to the photographer Ruth Thorne-Thomsen. He was a student of Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at the Institute of Design in Chicago. He taught for many years at the Philadelphia College of Art and also taught at the University of New Mexico. After graduate studies at the Institute of Design in Chicago, Metzker travelled extensively throughout Europe in 1960-61, where he had two epiphanies: that "light" would be his primary subject, and that he would seek synthesis and complexity over simplicity. Metzker often said the artist begins his explorations by embracing what he doesn't know.Source: Wikipedia After a career that spanned five decades and saw him pioneer a new and singular visual idiom, Ray K. Metzker has been recognized as one of the great masters of American photography. Characterized by composites, multiple-exposures, solarization, the superimposition of negatives, and the juxtaposition of images, Metzker’s work pushed the boundaries of what seemed formally possible in black and white photography. Metzker enrolled at the Institute of Design, Chicago in 1956, a school which at that time was being referred to as the New Bauhaus, where he studied with fellow modernist photographers Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. After obtaining a master’s degree from the Institute in 1959, Metzker’s work began to garner increasing attention and critical regard, first and foremost from Edward Steichen, who, at that time, was the curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Metzker’s first solo show would happen at the Museum of Modern Art in 1967. Retrospectives of his work were organized in 1978 by the International Center of Photography in New York and in 1984 by the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, a show which then traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the International Museum of Photography, Rochester, and the National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC. In 2011 a major career retrospective of Metzker’s work was organized by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, which traveled to the The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Henry Art Museum in Seattle. Ray K. Metzker died in October of 2014, at 83 years of age, in the city of Philadelphia.Source: Howard Greenberg Gallery Metzker has dedicated his career to exploring the formal potentials of black-and-white photography, but they are not his exclusive concern. "When you look at the multiples, you are aware of patterning and so forth," he says, "but there is still identifiable subject matter; frequently there are people there; there is a rhythm to those people." Metzker's 1959 thesis project, My Camera and I in the Loop, takes downtown Chicago as its subject, but renders it in experiments that tell more about photography than they do about the city. The pictures from this project were exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago (1959-1960), and included in the issue of Aperture devoted to the students and professors of the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago (1961). Ray Metzker's images question the nature of the photograph and photographic "reality." 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There are no diptychs in the book, though the woman in sunglasses at the bottom of Untitled (1969) is included as a solo picture. In a July 1992 letter, Metzker wrote the following about two untitled Sand Creatures pictures from 1969: "The photograph of the double image is from the series entitled Couplets and predates the single image by a number of years. Both pictures were made at beaches along the New Jersey coast: the couplet at Atlantic City, the single frame at Cape May. With both, my camera was an Olympus half-frame, a small amateurish piece of equipment that let me move about freely. The choice of the camera was essential to the development of the series."Source: Museum of Contemporary Photography
Shulan Wang
China
1994
Shulan Wang is a fine art photographer hailing from Hangzhou, China. She holds an M.A. in Photography from Spéos International School of Photography, an M.A. from the University of Westminster, and a B.A. from the China Academy of Art. Employing innovative creative approaches, she integrates a variety of techniques—digital darkroom processing, the soft immediacy of Polaroid, paper textures, visual installation, and the emerging language of artificial intelligence photography —each medium a thread in her visual tapestry. Rooted in the timeless motifs of time and nature, she turns her lens into a translator, rendering the quiet tension and profound resonance of life visible through every frame. Statement “Golden Dreams” exists between the ebb and flow of being and nothingness, where dreams offer balance between rationality and sensibility: 'I fantasize, I exist; I dream, I exist.’ Golden Dreams was born of the spirit’s eternal need for sanctuary, which hopes to repair the rift between past and present. The gold accents on top of the black and white photographs express the tension of dreams in life, including illusion and reality, spiritual and bodily, brightness and darkness, destruction and reconstruction, and harmony and disharmony、Yin (negative) and Yang (positive). The combination of modern photography and traditional Chinese gold powder painting provides a blurred feeling between past and present, balancing the conflict between delicate, gentle craftsmanship and calm, objective photographic techniques. Digital photography was often considered to be infinitely copyable, Shulan subverted this notion. By printing photographic works on Chinese rice paper and applying gold powder by hand, each piece bears a singular paper texture and distinct brushstrokes. Technically, she has broken through the boundaries between digital photography and the handmade darkroom, allowing objective photography to possess the freedom and variability of painting within the container of ideas. All About Photo Competitions Photographer of the Week 22, 2026
Robert Bergman
United States
1944
Over more than 50 years, largely outside the mainstream, Robert Bergman has pursued a vision of advancing psychological and philosophical depth in photography and of transcending the boundaries between painting and photography. In Toni Morrison's words in her introduction to his classic 1998 book A Kind of Rapture, his color portraits are "... a master template of the singularity, the community, and the unextinguishable sacredness of the human race." In his Epilogue to that book, the pre-eminent art historian, Professor Meyer Schapiro, wrote, "... his recent color portraits ... have no forerunners in photography. ... he has introduced the processes of unification, as in painting, with the search for harmony, movement, variety and distinction within it, beyond what I have ever seen in a photograph.... His finest works bring to mind some of the greatest painted portraits. ... truly profound works of art." Placing Bergman in the context of other, better known master American photographers, John Yau, poet, critic, and author of The United States of Jasper Johns, has said, "Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, and William Eggleston. ...he is certainly in their league. ... One day Bergman will get credit for the richness of his photographs, the way they transcend image." Robert Bergman is currently producing a limited edition KEY SET of new master prints of 150-200 photographs that, together with the 51 A Kind of Rapture prints, will reveal the organic unity, the arc, of his creative journey: black & white street work of people and cityscapes; black & white portraits in nursing homes; black & white abstracts; hundreds of color portraits on the streets of American cities; and most recently, large-scale color abstracts. Bergman has had solo exhibitions at The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, MoMA/P.S.1 in New York, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Yossi Milo Gallery in New York, and Michael Hoppen Contemporary in London. Group shows include the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, MoMA, the Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and the "Come Together: Surviving Sandy" exhibition in Brooklyn, NY. In addition to the collections of the Hill Art Foundation and Agnes Gund, President Emerita, MoMA, and numerous other individual's collections, Robert Bergman's work is in the permanent collections of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, which recently acquired a vintage set of the 51 A Kind of Rapture color portraits, the Cleveland Museum, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The National Gallery of Art, the 21C Museum in Louisville, KY. His work has also been highlighted in books, magazines, and newspapers in the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany as well as on National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System. He received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2017.
Peter van Agtmael
United States
1981
Peter van Agtmael (born 1981) is a documentary photographer based in New York. Since 2006 he has concentrated on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their consequences in the United States. He is a member of Magnum Photos. Van Agtmael's photo essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, TIME Magazine, The New Yorker and The Guardian. He has published three books. His first, 2nd Tour Hope I Don't Die, was published by Photolucida as a prize for winning their Critical Mass Book Award. He received a W. Eugene Smith Grant from the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund to complete his second book, Disco Night Sept. 11. His third, Buzzing at the Sill, was published by Kehrer Verlag in 2016. He has twice received awards from World Press Photo, the Infinity Award for Young Photographer from the International Center of Photography and a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Van Agtmael was born in Washington D.C. and grew up in Bethesda, Maryland. He studied history at Yale, graduating in 2003. He became a nominee member of Magnum Photos in 2008, an associate member in 2011, and a full member in 2013. After graduation he received a fellowship to live in China for a year and document the consequences of the Three Gorges Dam. He has covered HIV-positive refugees in South Africa; the Asian tsunami in 2005; humanitarian relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina's effects on New Orleans in 2005 and after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the filming of the first season of TV series Treme on location in New Orleans in 2010; the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and its aftermath, Nabi Salih and Halamish in the West Bank in 2013 and the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict and its aftermath. Since 2006 he has concentrated on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their consequences in the United States. He first visited Iraq in 2006 at age 24 and has returned to Iraq and Afghanistan a number of times, embedded with US military troops. Later he continued to investigate the effects of those wars within the US. In 2007 his portfolio from Iraq and Afghanistan won the Monograph Award (softbound) in Photolucida's Critical Mass Book Award. As part of the prize Photolucida published his first book, 2nd Tour, Hope I Don’t Die. With work made between January 2006 and December 2008, this "is a young photojournalist’s firsthand experience: the wars’ effects on him, on the soldiers and on the countries involved." The 2012 W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography provided $30,000 to work on his second book, Disco Night Sept. 11, which "chronicles the lives of the soldiers he has met in the field and back home."Source: Wikipedia
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