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FINAL CALL TO ENTER AAP MAGAZINE PORTRAIT: PUBLICATION AND $1,000 CASH PRIZES
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Benjamin Barakat
Benjamin Barakat
Benjamin Barakat

Benjamin Barakat

Country: Lebanon/United Kingdom
Birth: 1987

Benjamin Barakat is a Lebanese/English astrophotographer born in England in 1987.
He hosts seminars, workshops & photography expeditions internationally around the world teaching others about the night sky and how to capture it.
He is based out of Switzerland where he is also a researcher at the highest observatory in Europe the Sphinx Observatory on top of Jungfraujoch at 3571m above sea level.
He began photography in 2018 and since then has won many awards and competitions around the world. In 2021 & 2022 he was titled Milky Way Photographer of the year!
His work has been featured by National Geographic, CNN, BBC, Forbes, Guardian, Vice and many more.
Benjamin's main focus has been in the Middle East, venturing to places others dare not to go. He wants to raise awareness and share the beauty of the middle eastern landscapes and night skies.
 

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(Arthur Fellig) Weegee
Austria/United States
1899 | † 1968
Weegee was the pseudonym of Arthur Fellig (June 12, 1899 – December 26, 1968), a photographer and photojournalist, known for his stark black and white street photography. Weegee worked in the Lower East Side of New York City as a press photographer during the 1930s and '40s, and he developed his signature style by following the city's emergency services and documenting their activity. Much of his work depicted unflinchingly realistic scenes of urban life, crime, injury and death. Weegee published photographic books and also worked in cinema, initially making his own short films and later collaborating with film directors such as Jack Donohue and Stanley Kubrick. Weegee was born Ascher (Usher) Fellig in Z?oczów (now Zolochiv, Ukraine), near Lemberg, Austrian Galicia. His name was changed to Arthur when he emigrated with his family to live in New York in 1909. There he took numerous odd jobs, including working as an itinerant photographer and as an assistant to a commercial photographer. In 1924 he was hired as a dark-room technician by Acme Newspictures (later United Press International Photos). He left, however, in 1935 to become a freelance photographer. He worked at night and competed with the police to be first at the scene of a crime, selling his photographs to tabloids and photographic agencies. His photographs, centered around Manhattan police headquarters, were soon published by the Herald Tribune, World-Telegram, Daily News, New York Post, New York Journal American, Sun, and others.In 1957, after developing diabetes, he moved in with Wilma Wilcox, a Quaker social worker whom he had known since the 1940s, and who cared for him and then cared for his work. He traveled extensively in Europe until 1968, working for the Daily Mirror and on a variety of photography, film, lecture, and book projects. In 1968, Weegee died in New York on December 26, at the age of 69.Weegee can be seen as the American counterpart to Brassaï, who photographed Paris street scenes at night. Weegee’s themes of nudists, circus performers, freaks and street people were later taken up and developed by Diane Arbus in the early 1960s. In 1980 Weegee’s widow, Wilma Wilcox, Sidney Kaplan, Aaron Rose and Larry Silver formed The Weegee Portfolio Incorporated to create an exclusive collection of photographic prints made from Weegee’s original negatives. As a bequest, Wilma Wilcox donated the entire Weegee archive - 16,000 photographs and 7,000 negatives - to the International Center of Photography in New York. This 1993 gift became the source for several exhibitions and books include "Weegee's World" edited Miles Barth (1997) and "Unknown Weegee" edited by Cynthia Young (2006). The first and largest exhibition was the 329-image “Weegee’s World: Life, Death and the Human Drama,” brought forth in 1997. It was followed in 2002 by “Weegee’s Trick Photography,” a show of distorted or otherwise caricatured images, and four years later by “Unknown Weegee,” a survey that emphasized his more benign, post-tabloid photographs. In 2012 ICP opened another Weegee exhibition titled, "Murder is my Business". Also in 2012, exhibition called "Weegee: The Naked City", opened at Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow.Source: Wikipedia
Eddy Verloes
Belgium
1959
Eddy Verloes, a Belgian photographer, has won numerous awards for his literary symbolic photography. He skillfully weaves visual narratives that blend realism and surrealism, capturing the essence of interiors, landscapes, and urban life. Verloes’ spontaneous approach allows him to seize fleeting moments of everyday life, infusing his work with a sense of wonder and mystery. His fascination with literature and philosophy drives him to explore the profound and the poetic, leaving viewers with a profound sense of awe and contemplation. He shoots with his soul, not with the camera. Eddy Verloes is Master of Linguistics and Literary Studies (magna cum laude) at the University of Louvain, Belgium. Studies in photography at the Louvain CVO, Belgium. 2015-2024: exhibitions in different galleries or special locations (solo or with other photographers, painters, poets, sculptors, musicians, composers, video artists, mixed media artists) in the USA, United Kingdom, Canada, United Arab Emirates, Brasil, Mexico, Russia, Germany, Greece, Crete, Malta, Hungary, Spain, Italy, Serbia, Austria, France, The Netherlands and Belgium. Photo books No time to Verloes (2015), Cuba libre (2016), Zeezuchten/Seasighs (2020), Buiten zinnen/Losing Our MInds (2021), Aardelingen/Earthlings (2022). Most important awards in 2020-2024 Selected as one of the best contemporary photographers worldwide by the American site All-About-Photo | Winner Life Framer Photo Contest 2020 (Theme: "Civilization") judged by Tate Modern's Curator of Intern. Art & Photography Emma Lewis | Travel Photographer of the Year 2020 (cat. People of the world) | Winner Pangea Prize Siena Creative Photo Awards 2021 (cat. Open Theme) | Winner Malta International Photo Travel Award 2020/2021 | 2nd Place MonoVisions Awards 2021 (Photojournalism), London (UK) | Finalist FOCUS Photo L.A. 2021, Los Angeles (USA) | Winner Siena International Photography Awards 2021 (Fascinating faces and characters) with my "Remarkable Artwork" | Winner 16th Annual Black & White Spider Awards 2021, Beverly Hills (California) | Winner of the Union of Lights 2021 World Photography Contest ("Street & Lifestyle") | 3rd Place Winner (Photojournalism) Monochrome Photography Awards 2021, London (UK) | Winner 17th Pollux Awards 2021 (Open Theme - series), Barcelona (Spain) | Winner of The Chelsea International Photography Competition 2021/2022, New York (USA), Exhibition @ Agora Gallery, NY, 2023, Jan 4-17 | Winner Fine Art Photography Awards 2021/2022 (Photojournalism), 8th edition, London (UK) | Gold Winner Muse Photography Award 2022 (Fine Art Photography - People) with my series 'Losing Our Minds', NY, (USA) | Gold Winner London Photography Awards 2022 (Black & White Photography - Religious) with my series 'Losing Our Minds', London (UK) | Gold Winner London Photography Awards 2022 (People Photography - Religious) with my series 'Losing Our Minds', London (UK) | Bronze Medal Paris International Street Photo Awards 2021- Category Black & White | Winner of the Intern. Black & White Photography Awards 2022 with my series 'Losing Our Minds', also awarded with a 'Special Mention' (Paris) | Overall Contest Winner @ the reFocus 'One Shot Contest' Awards 2022, honoring the most extraordinary photographers of our time | Photographer of the Year Winner (Amateur) with an 'Outstanding Achievement' @ the 17th B&W Spider Awards 2022, Beverly Hills (USA) | Silver Winner in Portfolio/Fine Art @ Budapest International Foto Awards 2022 with my series 'Losing Our Minds' | Silver Winner NY Photography Awards 2022 - Editorial Photography/Religious with my series 'Losing Our Minds' | Silver Winner NY Photography Awards 2022 - People Photography/Religious with my series 'Losing Our Minds' | Inductee to the Influx Gallery's Hall of Fame (London) - Merit of Excellence - 2023, January | Finalist Life Framer Humans of the World Competition (USA) - 2023, January | Winner of the 1st Salamander International Art Prize + exhibition @ Monteoliveto Gallery Paris (France) - 2023, February 23-28 | Gold Winner Muse Photography Award 2023 (People Photography - Couple) with my series 'Get connected', NY, (USA) | Silver Winner in Portraiture/Culture @ PX3 Prix de la Photographie Paris 2023 with my series 'Losing Our Minds' | Winner 1st Budapest Intern. Art Show artBIAS 2023, organized by Teravarna Art Gallery Los Angeles (USA) and Golden Duck Gallery Budapest | Grand Prize Winner of the Great Photo Awards 2023/ Black & White World Photo Competition, Athens (Greece) with 'Losing Our Minds' | Finalist Travel Photographer of the Year 2023 | Selected for the Xposure International Photography Festival @ Expo Center Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, 2024, Feb. 28 - March 5 | Platium, Gold & Silver Winner @ 2024 MUSE Photography Awards, New York | Bronze Winner in Architecture @ PX3 Prix de la Photographie Paris 2024 with my series 'The coal mine' | Finalist Travel Photographer of the Year 2024 | Winner of the 1ste edition of The B&W FotoNostrum Choice Awards Barcelona (Spain) + exhibition @ FotoNostrum Gallery Feb. 2025 | Winner and 'Discovery of the Year' + 'People's Vote Award' @ 2024 World Photo Annual Refocus Award (Cat. Film/Analog) | Grand Winner Paris International Street Photo Awards 2024 (Cat. Elder People Street) with my series ‘Cuba libre' Awarded Photographer of the Week - Week 52
Monica Testa
Italy
1967
Shortly after my art studies, I started working as a fashion designer for a large company, which allowed me to deepen my knowledge and work in the world of graphics and style. It was a challenging and rewarding job, thanks to which I had the opportunity to travel a lot around the world, meeting people from various ethnic backgrounds, enriching myself enormously from a cultural and personal point of view. I had always been passionate about photography and to such an extent that I could no longer do without it. After taking several courses and studying the greatest photographers in history, I decided to enrol at the Italian Institute of Photography in Milan: a constructive experience that made me grow a lot, both on a technical and creative level. I truly enjoy observing people and also studying their psychological side. That's why I especially love working on portraits and telling the stories of those I meet, always keeping a careful and respectful eye, tiptoeing into situations that I find interesting. I delve into them, I make them my own. I use photography to express how I feel, how I see, how I perceive and absorb the flow of life around me. I transform my thoughts and my feelings into images, thus aiming to become a same part of the image I portray. The River Text from "Monica’s Diary (Benin 2019):" Today we reached a small village flooded by the abundant rains of recent days. The tribe that lives there is accustomed to this situation and in effect they live in real palafittes suspended on the water; and so we reached the village in the only way possible ... by canoe. We brought t-shirts for the children, eggs for snacks and, more importantly, mosquito nets which, given the area they live in, particularly humid and infested with mosquitoes, are essential. The landscape was spectacular and my eyes saw incredible realities... all so far from our daily life! The school was small and very crowded, obviously they had been warned of our arrival and especially the children were waiting for us with trepidation. Compared to other villages we had visited the previous days, the people who live here are quite aggressive. They were a little agitated, they all talked loudly, they pushed us constantly. The adults looked at us with curiosity and the children with shyness: it was noticeable that they were not used to seeing people of a different color in their village. For this we were escorted by the local police, in case the situation deteriorated. But everything went well and another day passed ... lived as if it were a whole life. Face to Face Form zero to one hundred This is an ambitious project, started in 2017 and not yet finished. The idea would be to photograph portraits of people of different ages, sex and ethnicity, who in some way fascinated me and consequently I asked them to pose for me. I would like to get to a hundred photos, a different one for each age from zero to one hundred years.
Sam Haskins
United Kingdom
1926 | † 2009
Sam Haskins, was a British photographer, born and raised in South Africa. He started his career in Johannesburg and moved to London in 1968. Haskins is best known for his contribution to in-camera image montage, Haskins Posters (1973) and the 1960's figure photography trilogy Five Girls (1962), Cowboy Kate & Other Stories (1964) and November Girl (1967), plus an ode to sub-Saharan tribal Africa African Image (1967). Cowboy Kate & Other Stories was probably the first book to deliberately explore black-and-white photographic grain as a medium for expression and image design. It was highly influential at the time, sold roughly a million copies worldwide and won the Prix Nadar in France in 1964. It continues to influence contemporary photographers, filmmakers, fashion designers, and make-up artists. Cowboy Kate & Other Stories or 'Kate' as the book is often referred to, had its place in photographic history cemented in 2005 when the International Center of Photography in New York included the book in their exhibition The Open Book: A History of the Photographic Book from 1878 to the Present. November Girl contained key image collages which formed the basis of many graphic and surrealist experiments in the 1970s and 1980s. African Imagewas a visual homage to the indigenous people, culture, landscape and wildlife of sub-Saharan Africa. The images represent a lifelong interest in photographing graphically stimulating environments and formally document his passion for the indigenous craft. He broke bones on river rapids and wrote off two Volvo saloon cars on African dirt roads while shooting the book. Despite its international award, this meticulously constructed book, celebrating a love for sub-Saharan Africa, is probably the least known of his major creative projects, but it is coveted by serious collectors of African art and photography. In 1968, Haskins moved to London and ran a studio in Glebe Place just off the King's Road. He worked as an advertising photographer for international consumer brands Asahi Pentax, Bacardi, Cutty Sark whisky, Honda, BMW, Haig whisky, DeBeers, British Airways, Unilever and Zanders, and specialised in the art direction and shooting of calendars, especially for Asahi Pentax in Japan. Although he endorsed Hasselblad for a short period in the late 1960s and early 1970s, his loyalty to the medium format 6x7 camera and lenses from Asahi resulted in a rare long-term association between a camera manufacturer and photographer. From 1970 to 2000, Asahi Optical (later Pentax) produced 30 calendars, of which Haskins shot and art-directed 15 editions including the millennium calendar. No other photographer was invited to contribute more than once. He is still involved with the Pentax Forum Gallery in Tokyo, which hosts his exhibitions. His first contact came in 1967, when Asahi Optical presented him with a 35 mm camera after hearing that he had shot African Image with various competitors' products. In 1972, he produced his first colour book, Haskins Posters. The large-format publication contained pages printed on one side using thick stiff paper and a soft glue perfect binding allowing the pages to be removed and used as posters. Haskins and Alida successfully published the book internationally through their own company, Haskins Press. The book won a gold award at the New York One Show. At the time the best-known image from Haskins Posters, a girl's face superimposed on an apple with a bee near the stem, appeared on the cover or in editorials of almost every major photographic magazine around the world. This image was part of a well-publicised visual and graphic experimentation with the apple theme in the 1970s that for a while resulted in photographic journalists nicknaming him 'Sam the Apple man'. He suffered a stroke on 19 September 2009 the opening day of his exhibition to launch Fashion Etcetera at Milk Gallery in New York, and died at home in Bowral, Australia, nine weeks later.Source: Wikipedia
Edwin Carungay
United States
1969
Alice Boughton
United States
1866 | † 1943
Alice Boughton (14 May 1866 - 21 June 1943) was an early 20th-century American photographer known for her photographs of many literary and theatrical figures of her time. She was a Fellow of Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession, a circle of photographers whose artistic efforts succeeded in raising photography to a fine art form. Alice Boughton was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 14 May 1866. Her parents were Frances Ayres and William H. Boughton, a lawyer in New York. As educational opportunities were made more available in the 19th-century, women artists became part of professional enterprises, including founding their own art associations. Artwork made by women was considered to be inferior, and to help overcome that stereotype women became "increasingly vocal and confident" in promoting women's work, and thus became part of the emerging image of the educated, modern and freer "New Woman". Artists then, "played crucial roles in representing the New Woman, both by drawing images of the icon and exemplyfying this emerging type through their own lives." In the 1880s, Boughton began studying art and photography at the Pratt School of Art and Design. It was there that she met fellow student Gertrude Käsebier, with whom she later studied in Paris. Käsebier also employed her an assistant in her studio, most likely at the same time Boughton was studying at Pratt. In 1890, she opened her own portrait studio on East 23rd Street in New York, which she maintained for the next forty years. In 1904, she sent a letter to William Butler Yeats that listed a studio address on Madison Avenue, indicating that she established or used more than one studio for at least a brief period. Around 1901, Boughton studied art in Rome and photography in Paris, where she worked in Käsebier's summer studio. She won an honorable mention for her work at the Turin International Decorative and Fine Arts Exhibition in 1902. It is not known when she met Alfred Stieglitz, but it is clear he knew of and admired her work by 1902 when he included two of her works in the inaugural exhibition at his Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in New York City. Four years later, in 1906, Boughton was appointed by Stieglitz as a Fellow of the Photo-Secession. The following year Stieglitz gave her, along with fellow photographers C. Yarnall Abbot and William B. Dyer, an exhibition at the Little Galleries. In 1909 she had six of her photographs and an essay called "Photography, A Medium of Expression" published in Stieglitz's journal Camera Work (No 26, April, 1909). During this same period, her photographs were included in major exhibitions around the world, including shows in London, Paris, Vienna, The Hague and New York. Boughton became one of the most distinguished portrait photographers of New York, although she did many landscapes in this country and Europe including the famous Rockefeller estate Kykuit at Pocantico Hills, New York. She produced studies of children, as well as female nudes in allegorical or natural settings. Among her more famous works are portraits of Eugene O'Neill, Albert Pinkham Ryder, George Arliss and Robert Louis Stevenson. Her portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson was an inspiration for John Singer Sargent's own portrait of the writer. From at least 1920 until her death, Boughton shared her residences with artist and art teacher Ida C. Haskell (1861-1932). Haskell is known to have been an instructor at Pratt while Käsebier and Boughton studied there. When Boughton traveled to Europe in 1926, Haskell, her partner, accompanied her on the trip. In 1931, Boughton closed her studio and discarded thousands of prints. She moved permanently to the home in Brookhaven, Long Island, that she shared with Haskell. Boughton died of pneumonia on 21 June 1943. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British National Portrait Gallery, the U.S. National Portrait Gallery, the George Eastman House and other important museums.Source: Wikipedia
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