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Andrea Bettancini
Andrea Bettancini
Andrea Bettancini

Andrea Bettancini

Country: Italy
Birth: 1966

I was born in a small seaside town in the northern Adriatic (Italy). A place crowded with tourists in the summer, deserted and abandoned in the foggy winters. In short, a place of contrasts. Contrast is what fascinates me the most in photography.

All of my schooling was focused on creativity, starting with attending an art high school and then studying fashion design at the European Institute of Design in Milan. I worked as a designer for several clothing brands in Milan and collaborated with an architecture magazine under the Mondadori publishing group. Photography has always been a passion of mine, starting from the days spent in the darkroom.

I prefer photojournalism, street photography, and in general, visual storytelling through the merging and contamination of images that develop a symbolic language rather than an analytical one. I am attracted to human interactions that generate unpredictable, complex, dramatic, or humorous situations. It often happens that people, even strangers, connect for a single moment, they are unaware, but a photograph can "freeze" that ephemeral moment, full of meaning.

I was a finalist in the professional documentary section of the Sony Awards 2022, winner of the ND Awards 2022 for long exposure photography, a finalist in the Urban Photo Awards 2022 and 2023 (portfolio), a finalist in the Siena Awards 2022, a finalist in the World Water Day 2022 contest, a finalist in the Siena Awards 2023, and a finalist in the Leica Street Photography Contest 2023 and All About Photo Awards 2023. I have also won Best Author at major Italian FIAF competitions (Follonica, Truciolo d'oro, Cameri, Murlo, Brugine, etc.)

Website

@andreabettancini

 

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Roman Vishniac
Roman Vishniac
Russia/United States
1897 | † 1990
Roman Vishniac was a Russian-American photographer, best known for capturing on film the culture of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. A major archive of his work was housed at the International Center of Photography until 2018, when Vishniac's daughter, Mara Vishniac Kohn, donated it to The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at the University of California, Berkeley. Vishniac was a versatile photographer, an accomplished biologist, an art collector and teacher of art history. He also made significant scientific contributions to photomicroscopy and time-lapse photography. Vishniac was very interested in history, especially that of his ancestors, and strongly attached to his Jewish roots; he was a Zionist later in life. Roman Vishniac won international acclaim for his photos of shtetlach and Jewish ghettos, celebrity portraits, and microscopic biology. His book A Vanished World, published in 1983, made him famous and is one of the most detailed pictorial documentations of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe in the 1930s. Vishniac was also remembered for his humanism and respect for life, sentiments that can be seen in all aspects of his work. In 2013, Vishniac's daughter Mara (Vishniac) Kohn donated to the International Center of Photography the images and accompanying documents comprising ICP's Roman Vishniac Rediscovered travelling exhibition. In October, 2018, Kohn donated the Vishniac archive of an estimated 30,000 items, including photo negatives, prints, documents and other memorabilia that had been housed at ICP to the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, a unit of the University of California at Berkeley's library system.Source: Wikipedia As the Nazis rose to power in Berlin, Vishniac photographed the ominous changes in the city and also worked to document Germany-Jewish relief and social service organizations. In 1935, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC) hired Vishniac to travel to Eastern Europe and take photographs documenting Jewish poverty and relief efforts to be used in its fundraising campaigns. In 1939, Vishniac pursued other AJDC assignments in Western Europe and worked as a freelance photographer there. After the German invasion of France, he was arrested and sent to an internment camp. With help from the AJDC and the remainder of his family’s resources, he secured the release and immigrated with his wife and two children to the United States via Portugal in December 1940. They settled in New York, where Vishniac worked as a photographer, making portraits and documenting Jewish refugees and American-Jewish community life. In 1947, Vishniac returned to Europe to document the aftermath of the war and the plight of refugees and those living in displaced persons camps. Back in the United States, Vishniac continued his work as photographer and scientist and became a pioneer in the new field of photomicroscopy. Vishniac’s photographs of Jewish life in prewar Eastern Europe gained renown in the aftermath of the Holocaust and were used to illustrate numerous books. Many people today are familiar with his work from his book A Vanished World (1983). However, the public saw only a small fraction of Vishniac’s work before his daughter, Mara Vishniac Kohn, entrusted his images to ICP and the Museum. This project makes them available to the public at large in hopes of learning more about the subjects of his photographs.Source: Unites States Holocaust Memorial Museum As an amateur photographer, Roman Vishniac took to the streets with his camera throughout the 1920s and ’30s, offering an astute, often humorous visual commentary on his adopted city and experimenting with new and modern approaches to framing and composition. Documenting the rise of Nazi power, he focused his lens on the signs of oppression and doom that soon formed the backdrop of his Berlin street photography. From 1935 to 1938, while living in Berlin and working as a biologist and science photographer, he was commissioned by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), then the world’s largest Jewish relief organization, to photograph impoverished Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe. On New Year’s Eve, 1940, he arrived in New York and soon opened a portrait studio. At the same time, he began documenting American Jewish communal and immigrant life and established himself as a pioneer in the field of photomicroscopy. In 1947, Vishniac returned to Europe and documented Jewish displaced persons camps and the ruins of Berlin. During this time, he also recorded the efforts of Holocaust survivors to rebuild their lives and the work of the JDC and other Jewish relief organizations in providing them with aid and emigration assistance.Source: International Center of Photography
Jennifer Little
Jennifer Little
United States
1977
Jennifer Little (b. 1977) lives in Oakland, California. Her current photographic work focuses on social and ecological concerns and documents intersections between the natural and the man made. Jennifer received a B.F.A. in Photography from Washington University in St. Louis and an M.F.A. from the University of Texas at Austin. She is a tenured Associate Professor at University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, where she teaches courses covering Digital Photography, Video Production, Documentary Photography, the History of Photography, and Web Design. Jennifer is Chair of the Art Department at University of the Pacific. Jennifer Little's new photographic series, 100 Years of Dust: Owens Lake and the Los Angeles Aqueduct, is receiving significant recognition from galleries, publications, and curators. It just won the prestigious 2014 Critical Mass Top 50 Award from PhotoLucida. This series has also been selected for a solo exhibition at University of the Arts' Sol Mednick Gallery in Philadelphia from March 20 - April 24, 2015. Jennifer has been invited to give a presentation about Owens Lake at the Society for Photographic Education (SPE) National Conference in New Orleans, LA, from March 12-15, 2015. She also presented at the SPE West Regional Conference in Los Angeles on November 15, 2014, with Kathy Bancroft, the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Lone Pine Paiute-Shoshone Reservation. Jennifer's series about Owens Lake won the 2014 "Dotphotozine Award for Excellence in Photography" and is featured in the September, 2014, issue of the magazine. This series also won first prize in an October - November, 2013, juried exhibition at Book and Job Gallery on Geary Street in San Francisco: The Human Impact: New Directions in Landscape Photography. Jennifer has exhibited her work at galleries and museums including Stanford University’s Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery; Tag Gallery in Bergamot Station Arts Center, Santa Monica, CA; Photo Center Northwest, Seattle, WA; Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA; The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery; The LAB, San Francisco; Viewpoint Photographic Art Center in Sacramento, CA; Eisentrager-Howard Gallery at The University of Nebraska at Lincoln; The Marin Museum of Contemporary Art in Novato, CA; The Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, CO; and Jay Etkin Gallery in Memphis, TN. Jennifer’s work has been published and reviewed in Dotphotozine, View Camera Magazine, ArtAscent Magazine, Camera Arts Magazine, and The Austin Chronicle. Jennifer has presented artist talks at Stanford University, San Francisco Art Institute, the Foto 3 Conference, Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA, and the Dimen Cultural Eco-museum Forum on the Preservation and Development of Ancient Villages, Dimen, Guizhou, China.About Owens Lake and the Los Angeles AqueductThis project documents the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s (LADWP) legally mandated dust mitigation program at Owens Dry Lake in Southern California. It is the latest chapter in a century of legal battles over water rights and air quality in Owens Valley. Owens Lake lies in Southern California's eastern Sierra, about 200 miles northeast of Los Angeles. This 110-square-mile lake began to dry up in 1913 when the City of Los Angeles diverted the Owens River into the Los Angeles Aqueduct. The new water supply allowed Los Angeles to continue its rapid growth and turned the arid San Fernando Valley into an agricultural oasis, but at a tremendous environmental cost. By 1926, Owens Lake was a dry alkali flat, and its dust became the largest source of carcinogenic particulate air pollution in North America.1
Tom McGahan
Tom McGahan
United KIngdom
Tom McGahan is an UK based photographer. McGahan's personal projects are based on our perception of places objects, the passing of time and our relationship with the land. His images aim to engage the viewer by challenging them to contemplate and reflect on their own sense of reality. "I constantly engage myself in this process which is always evolving my personal understanding of my preconceived view of the places I choose to photograph." McGahan's images are created using natural light and with Medium and Large format film cameras. Staying present is always a part of the process of creating the his work which brings a more mindful and considered approach to the images. Shortlisted 2020 British Journal of Photography, 1854 Media, Portrait of Humanity Awards Winner Feature Shoot Emerging Photographer 2019 for the series 'Landscape of Lament' exhibited at Aperture Gallery, New York. Winner 2017 Feature Shoot Print Swap, 'Slieve Coillte' from the series Echoes exhibited in Group show Ambient Landscapes at Black Eye Gallery, Sydney. His Take Refuge was nominated as on of the top rated entries in the 2016 Magnum Awards. Discover the book 'I Am Always Here'
Ray K. Metzker
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." Through cropping, multiple imagery, and other formal inventions, his work explores options for transforming the vocabulary of the photograph. Untitled from 1969 illustrates the simple method of manipulating objective information through juxtaposition: two distinct women on the beach enter into a yin-yang relationship of line and gesture. The photograph is part of a series of pictures made from 1968 to 1975 of beach-goers in New Jersey. "The more fashion conscious probably go to other beaches, but what Atlantic City has – and what attracted me to it – is diversity," Metzker said. Of the content of the pictures and his working method, Metzker added, "What appears in the pictures was the subject's decision, not mine. I took what they presented – delicate moments – unadorned and unglamorous, yet tender and exquisite." Metzker used a 1975 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship to pull the series together as Sand Creatures, later published as a book in 1979. 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
Stephan Vanfleteren
Stephan Vanfleteren
Belgium
1969
Stephan Vanfleteren studied photography at Lucas Institute in Brussels (1988-1992). From 1993 to 2009, he worked as a free-lance photographer for the Belgian Journal De Morgen and always worked and invested in his own personal projects. Actually, Stephan works for museums, he's publishing his portraits in foreign journals and several foreign magazines. He's cofounder of Hannibal Publishing and Cannibal Publishing. Stephan Vanfleteren is art-director for the two publishing houses. PRICES 1996 - World Press Photo Award - Sports, third prize stories - Boxing in Cuba 1997 - World Press Photo Award - Daily Life, first prize stories - Aids, Kenia 1998 - European Fuji Awards 2000 - World Press Photo Award - Arts and Entertainment, third prize stories, Elvis & Presley 2001 - World Press Photo Award - Children's Award, prize singles - Afghanistan 2001 - European Fuji Award 2007 - Nikon Press Photo Award 2009 - Louis Paul Boon award - Belgium 2010 - Lead Awards: 'Portätfotografie des Jahres', Germany 2011 - Henri Nannen Price, Germany - Tomi Ungerer 2012 - Vijfjaarlijkse Cultuurprijs voor de Provincie West-Vlaanderen 2012 - National Portrait price of the Netherlands - Rem Koolhaas, Dutch architect 2013 - World Press Photo Award - Staged Portraits, first prize stories, People of Mercy 2019 - Henri Nannen Price, Germany - Angels of the Sea - Mare Publication. BOOKS 1999 - Elvis&Presley, with photographer Robert Huber (Switserland) 2000 - Buren, with Mark Power & Eva Leitolf 2003 - Tales from a Globalizing World 2005 - Flandrien - Cannibal Publishing 2007 - Belgicum - Hannibal Publishing 2009 - Portret 1989-2009 - Lannoo 2012 - En avant, marche! - Hannibal Publishing 2013 - Façades & Vitrines (Limited edition 666 exp) - Hannibal Publishing 2014 - MMXIV - De Red Devils - Cannibal Publishing 2014 - Atlantic Wall - Hannibal Publishing 2015 - Charleroi, il est clair que le gris est noir - Hannibal Publishing 2018 - SURF TRIBE - Hannibal Publishing 2019 - PRESENT - Hannibal Publishing 2019 - ONUITGESPROKEN - Hannibal Publishing About PRESENT Stephan Vanfleteren is mainly known to the general public for his penetrating black & white portrait photography, but over the past decades his work has ranged to documentary, artistic and personal pictures. From street photography in world cities like New York to the genocide of Ruanda, from storefront façades to the mystical landscapes of the Atlantic wall, from still lifes to intense portraits. The iconic images sit side by side with unknown treasures in this heavy tome containing no less than 505 photographs. In the very personal accompanying text, Vanfleteren reflects on how his own work and the photography genre as a whole have evolved in recent decades. You get a close-up look at his intriguing career from the very beginning, when he travelled the world with an appetite for action. He also photographed his home country: all of the headline news stories of the 1990s appeared before his lens. Around the Millennium, Vanfleteren started to focus on that which is disappearing. With painstaking attention to nuance he created a visual archive of his homeland and of his fellow Belgians, in his own inimitable style. In the last few years Vanfleteren has brought the world inside, to his daylight studio, resulting in many encounters and portraits. This book includes two new series – not previously published – which were born in the intimacy of his studio: an exploration of the still life and a study of nude photography, both in colour. Present is an impressive overview of Vanfleteren's oeuvre that provides a complete picture of him as a photographer, an artist, and above all a human being who faces life with empathy, wonder, and curiosity. More about PRESENT
Abelardo Morell
Abelardo Morell
Cuba
1948
Abelardo (Abe) Morell (born 1948 in Havana, Cuba) is a Boston-based photographer. Morell and his family fled Cuba in 1962, moving to New York City. Morell earned a Bachelor of Arts from Bowdoin College in 1977, and a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University School of Art in 1981. He received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Bowdoin in 1997. Morell is well known in the photographic community for creating camera obscura images in various places around the world and photographing these. Morell was awarded the Cintas Foundation fellowship in 1992 and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1993. Morell is currently a professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art. He is represented by Bonni Benrubi Gallery, NYC. A documentary on elements of Morell's life and work, Shadow of the House, was released in 2007. Source: Wikipedia He has received a num­ber of awards and grants, which include a Cin­tas grant in 1992 a Guggen­heim fel­low­ship in 1994 a Rap­pa­port Prize in 2006 and an Alturas Foun­da­tion grant in 2009 to pho­to­graph the land­scape of West Texas. He was the recip­i­ent of the International Center of Photography 2011 Infin­ity award in Art. His work has been col­lected and shown in many gal­leries, insti­tu­tions and muse­ums, includ­ing the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hous­ton Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Victoria and Albert Museum and over sev­enty other muse­ums in the United States and abroad. A ret­ro­spec­tive of his work orga­nized jointly by the Art Insti­tute of Chicago, The J. Paul Getty Museum and the High Museum in Atlanta will be on view start­ing in the sum­mer of 2013. His pub­li­ca­tions include a pho­to­graphic illus­tra­tion of Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land (1998) by Dut­ton Children’s Books, A Cam­era in a Room (1995) by Smith­son­ian Press, A Book of Books (2002) and Cam­era Obscura (2004) by Bulfinch Press and Abelardo Morell (2005), pub­lished by Phaidon Press. Recent pub­li­ca­tions include a lim­ited edi­tion book by the Museum of Mod­ern Art in New York of his Cliché Verre images with a text by Oliver Sacks. He lives with his wife, Lisa McE­laney, a film­maker, and his chil­dren Brady and Laura in Brook­line, Massachusetts. Film­maker Allie Humenuk has made a film enti­tled Shadow of the House, an in-depth doc­u­men­tary about Morell’s work and expe­ri­ence as an artist. Source: www.abelardomorell.net
Robert Demachy
Robert Demachy
France
1859 | † 1936
Robert Demachy (1859–1936) was a prominent French Pictorial photographer of the late 19th and early 20th century. He is best known for his intensely manipulated prints that display a distinct painterly quality. Léon-Robert Demachy was born in the home of his grandmother in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, on the outskirts of Paris, on 7 July 1859. His parents, Charles Adolphe Demachy (1818–1888) and Zoé Girod de l’Ain (1827–1916), had two other sons, Charles Amédée (1852–1911) and Adrien Édouard (1854–1927), and a daughter, Germaine (1856-1940?). The elder Charles had started the highly successful financial enterprise of Banque Demachy, and by the time Demachy was born the family was very wealthy. He had no need to earn a living, and there is no record of his having ever been employed anywhere. He dropped the first part of his name in his childhood and was always known as "Robert". After his birth his family returned to their mansion at 13 Rue François Premier in Paris, where Demachy continued to live for the next fifty years. His early years were quite idyllic, and each year his family would spend several months at their summer villa near Villers-sur-Mer in Normandy. The rest of the year he was educated in Jesuit schools in Paris, and he became fluent in English by the time he was a teenager. His education also included extensive musical lessons, and he became an accomplished violin player. About 1870, Demachy, his mother and his siblings left Paris for Brussels due to the increasing dangers of the Franco-Prussian War. His father stayed in Paris as part of the Commune and the Banque Demachy played an important role in financing the resistance efforts. When he turned eighteen Demachy briefly served a year as an army volunteer, but he soon returned to his life of comfort. In the mid-1870s he began frequenting the artists’ cafés and, perhaps in rebellion to his gentrified life, he became involved in the growing bohemian culture that was beginning to take hold in Paris. He began making sketches of café patrons and people on the street, a practice he continued throughout his life.Source: Wikipedia Robert Demachy was considered by many to be the most influential Pictorialist photographer across the whole of Europe. He was a man of independent means allowing him to focus completely on photography and international travel for it. He was a strong advocate of gum bichromate to enhance Pictorialist photography, for which he coined the term ‘ Photo-Aquatint’ associating it with intaglio printmaking. It is obvious when studying his work closely that his enjoyment of this process was from the artistic freedom it gave him. His gum prints were very successful, with their greatly softened detail quite deliberately reminiscent of impressionist art. Demachy became a strong and vocal defender of manipulated printing techniques. He is most famous for the prominent brushstrokes and rough-textured papers. Although these were greatly manipulated, he was able to bring an air of naturalism and poise to his work. He wrote “Do not say that nature being beautiful, and photography being able to reproduce its beauty, therefore photography is Art. This is unsound. Nature is often beautiful, of course, but never artistic ’per se’, for there can be no art without intervention of the artist in the making of the picture. Nature is but a theme for the artist to play upon. Straight photography registers the theme, that is all - and, between ourselves, it registers it differently” Quoted in Robert Demachy: Photographs and Essays. Bill Jay, 1974. Robert Demachy was a leader in French Pictorialist photography at the turn of the last century. He was elected to the Société française de photographie in 1882 and co-founded the Photo-Club de Paris with Maurice Bucquet in 1888. He had his first exhibition of gum prints in 1895 at the Photo-Club de Paris, which helped to promote his increasingly international status: the same year he was elected to The Linked Ring in London and made an honorary member of the Royal Photographic Society.Source: Edward Draper
Demetrio Jereissati
Demetrio Jereissati
Brazil
I started shooting in 2013, at age 53, on a family trip to Patagonia, Chile. Months later, one of the photos I took on this trip won the bronze medal in the international competition Brasília Photo Show.br> I am a civil engineer, and shapes, lights, and shadows seduce me sometimes more than the subject of the photo.br> Photography connects and expands the feelings of those who photograph and visualize the image, giving their own interpretation.br> The essay Machu Picchu (A Personal Journey) was done in two moments: morning and late afternoon, when, alone on the site, away from the morning crowds, I could perceive the energy of the place and feel transported to a past still so present in the buildings.
Cristina de Middel
Cristina de Middel
Spain
1975
Cristina de Middel (born 1975) is a Spanish documentary photographer and artist living and working in Uruapan, Mexico. De Middel self-published The Afronauts in 2012, a photobook about the short-lived Zambian space program in Southern Africa. The book quickly sold out and the work was met with critical acclaim. She was nominated for the 2013 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for The Afronauts. In 2013, de Middel received the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography. In 2017 she became a nominee member of Magnum Photos and in 2019 an associate member. Source: Wikipedia Cristina de Middel investigates photography’s ambiguous relationship to truth. Blending documentary and conceptual photographic practices, she plays with reconstructions and archetypes in order to build a more layered understanding of the subjects she approaches. Working from the premise that mass media is reducing our real understanding of the world we live in, De Middel responds to an urgency to re-imagine tired aesthetic tropes and insert opinion in place of facts. Her impulse for an unconventional angle developed after a 10-year career as a photojournalist when De Middel stepped outside of straight documentary and produced the acclaimed series The Afronauts (2012). It explored the history of a failed space program in Zambia in the 1960s through staged reenactments of obscure narratives, challenging the traditional depiction of the African continent. De Middel’s ongoing project Gentleman’s Club (which began in Rio de Janeiro in 2015 and has now expanded to every continent around the globe bar Australasia) focuses on prostitution’s less documented side: the male clients. Her intimate portraits of these men subvert the paradigms of the status quo to provide new sources of insight and understanding. As well as her acclaimed personal projects, De Middel has worked on commission for clients including The Nobel Peace Foundation, Christian Dior, Vanity Fair USA, Vogue USA and FC Barcelona. De Middel was born in Spain and is based between Mexico and Brazil. She became a Magnum nominee in 2017.Source: Magnum Photos
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Interview
Exclusive Interview with Manuela Federl
Manuela Federl is a journalist and documentary filmmaker with over 15 years of experience. She studied languages, economics, and cultural studies, focusing on the Mapuche people in Chile, which became the subject of her published thesis. In 2016, she founded her company, bergjournalisten, and has since created award-winning documentaries like 100 Hours of Lesbos and THE GAME. Gambling Between Life and Death. For the past two years, she has traveled extensively, documenting social issues through photography and storytelling. Her series The Roma Princesses earned her the January 2024 Solo Exhibition.
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Exclusive Interview with Dona Ann McAdams about ’Black Box’
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Dona Ann McAdams about 'Black Box'
Black Box, a memoir by award-winning American photographer Dona Ann McAdams, combines fifty years of black and white photography with the photographer’s own short lyric texts she calls “ditties.” The book brings together McAdams’ striking historical images with personal reflections that read like prose-poems. Her photographs, taken between 1974 and 2024, document astonishing moments and people across decades of American life.
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