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Nicolas Castermans
Nicolas Castermans
Nicolas Castermans

Nicolas Castermans

Country: France
Birth: 1991

My name is Nicolas Castermans. I was born in the French Alps, in a little countryside village on the border with Switzerland. I turned 31 years old last June (2022).

At the age of 21, I went abroad. I did a Masters degree in International Business in China, where a real passion for traveling was born in me. I spent every spare moment that I had, with an amazing group of friends, discovering this huge country and South-East Asia. I explored this continent for about 3 years and this is where I lived my first real adventures, like Vietnam on motorbike, or traveling 14,000 km from Hong Kong to France, via the Trans-Siberian train.

During this trip, I had the chance to meet Izabela, a wonderful Polish traveler, who made me the honor of becoming my wife 5 years ago.

Together, we decided to go to South America, and after a year in Peru, we set up our own travel agency there.

While developing this activity and guiding our first clients, I started to photograph and document what I was experiencing. Slowly, photography became a real passion !

We’ve been now on the continent for about 6 years. I can’t stop being fascinated by the diversity of cultures and landscapes in the Andes.

Since February 2021, we’ve embarked on a motorcycle trip in Colombia that has taken us to Northern Argentina so far, while keeping organizing/guiding trips for our travel agency. I’ve also developed Photo Tours on the continent that I lead myself.

Who knows where all these adventures will take us in the near future...
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

JJ Jordan
Poland
1973
JJ Jordan is a visual artist, graphic designer, and photographer based in Surrey, UK. Working with both digital and analogue photography he creates monochrome, blurred, layered, or multi-exposed visual metaphors that favour ambiguity over certainty. Jordan’s work is deeply informed by personal experience, influenced by the dreamlike narratives of Murakami, Schulz, and Kafka, and the surreal aesthetics. Artist Statement My work explores the fragile line between perception and reality, between what is seen and what is felt. Through experimental portraiture and conceptual photography, I aim to question visual certainty and challenge the camera’s claim to truth. Often working in monochrome, and drawing on both digital and analogue processes (while deliberately excluding AI), I construct images that blur, layer, or distort, embracing ambiguity over resolution. Themes of memory, identity, and absence run through much of my work. Figures appear half-seen or obscured, more like echoes than individuals, suggestive rather than declarative. A blurred face, a painted square, a fleeting gesture, each becomes a site of tension between presence and disappearance. I am less interested in documenting a subject than in evoking the trace they leave behind: a flicker, a feeling, a fragment. Influenced by the surreal visual languages of art history and by the dreamlike narratives of Murakami, Schulz, and Kafka, my photographs often borrow from the whimsical and the uncanny. I aim to create images that invite pause, a space for wonder, doubt, and emotional reflection. Born behind the Iron Curtain and shaped by time spent across cultures, my perspective is rooted in a sense of displacement and layered experience. My portraits are not confessions; they are invitations, open-ended and unresolved, like memories still in the making. Awarded Photographer of the Week - Week 24
August Sander
Germany
1876 | † 1964
August Sander was a German portrait and documentary photographer. Sander's first book Face of our Time (German: Antlitz der Zeit) was published in 1929. Sander has been described as "the most important German portrait photographer of the early twentieth century." Sander was born in Herdorf, the son of a carpenter working in the mining industry. While working at a local mine, Sander first learned about photography by assisting a photographer who was working for a mining company. With financial support from his uncle, he bought photographic equipment and set up his own darkroom. He spent his military service (1897-99) as a photographer's assistant and the next years wandering across Germany. In 1901, he started working for a photo studio in Linz, Austria, eventually becoming a partner (1902), and then its sole proprietor (1904). He left Linz at the end of 1909 and set up a new studio in Cologne. In 1911, Sander began with the first series of portraits for his work People of the 20th Century. In the early 1920s, he came in contact with the Group of Progressive Artists (Kölner Progressive) in Cologne, a group as Wieland Schmied put it, "sought to combine constructivism and objectivity, geometry and object, the general and the particular, avant-garde conviction and political engagement, and which perhaps approximated most to the forward looking of New Objectivity [...] ". In 1927, Sander and writer Ludwig Mathar travelled through Sardinia for three months, where he took around 500 photographs. However, a planned book detailing his travels was not completed. Pure photography allows us to create portraits which render their subjects with absolute truth, truth both physical and psychological. That is the principal which provided my starting point, once I had said to myself that if we can create portraits of subjects that are true, we thereby in effect create a mirror of the times in which those subjects live. -- August Sander Sander's Face of our Time was published in 1929. It contains a selection of 60 portraits from his series People of the 20th Century. Under the Nazi regime, his work and personal life were greatly constrained. His son Erich, who was a member of the left-wing Socialist Workers' Party (SAP), was arrested in 1934 and sentenced to 10 years in prison, where he died in 1944, shortly before the end of his sentence. Sander's book Face of our Time was seized in 1936 and the photographic plates were destroyed. Around 1942, during World War II, he left Cologne and moved to a rural area, allowing him to save most of his negatives. His studio was destroyed in a 1944 bombing raid. Sander died in Cologne in 1964. His work includes landscape, nature, architecture, and street photography, but he is best known for his portraits, as exemplified by his series People of the 20th Century. In this series, he aims to show a cross-section of society during the Weimar Republic. The series is divided into seven sections: The Farmer, The Skilled Tradesman, Woman, Classes and Professions, The Artists, The City, and The Last People (homeless persons, veterans, etc.). By 1945, Sander's archive included over 40,000 images. In 2002, the August Sander Archive and scholar Susanne Lange published a seven-volume collection comprising some 650 of Sander's photographs, August Sander: People of the 20th Century. In 2008, the Mercury crater Sander was named after him.Source: Wikipedia I never made a person look bad. They do that themselves. The portrait is your mirror. -- August Sander
Constance Jaeggi
Switzerland
1990
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Phil Stern
United States
1919 | † 2014
Phil Stern was an American photographer noted for his iconic portraits of Hollywood stars, as well as his war photography while serving as a U.S. Army Ranger with "Darby's Rangers" during the North African and Italian campaigns in World War II. Settling in Los Angeles after the war, Stern was staff photographer for Look magazine. He also worked for Life magazine and Collier's. He was present on numerous film productions as still photographer, and in that capacity took photographs of a huge cross-section of the film community. Stern's images of Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Marlon Brando and even musician Louis Armstrong have become widely recognized icons. A lifelong smoker, Stern died at the age of 95 in Los Angeles from COPD and congestive heart failure which he had been battling for over three and a half decades.Source: Wikipedia I’ve taken mountains and mountains of stuff, which I occasionally describe as mountains and mountains of shit. It so happens, there’s a little gem here and a little gem there. You dig out those gems. -- Phil Stern Phil Stern created portraits of stars of the silver screen – including James Dean, Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe – that were both iconic and intimate. His subjects looked natural, even self-absorbed or introverted. The lower half of his most famous portrait of James Dean (1955) is a black cable-knit jumper; the upper half reveals Dean’s face only from halfway up his ears. His eyes are rolled up, framed by straight eyebrows. The white plane of Dean’s forehead under a shiny shock of tousled hair, and the pale background, inevitably draw attention to those mischievous eyes, bisecting the frame and challenging the viewer. By contrast, one 1953 image of Marilyn Monroe shows her as wistful and withdrawn, looking into the distance with an air of abstraction, her hands nervously fingering the loosened bow at the waist of her gown. As Stern told Entertainment Weekly in 1993: “I was never interested in the glamour, I was interested in the tears and agony behind it.” His friendship with John Wayne gave him access to perhaps his most subversively casual image. It shows Wayne lighting up, eyeline going straight to a woman’s bared leg. But it’s not what he’s doing but what he’s wearing that draws the viewer’s eye: the cowboy hat and loose jacket conform to type, but below the waist the over-constricting gingham shorts, plump legs and girly espadrilles are a risible disaster. Stern’s pictures of musicians are very different in character. Formal ones – such as of the Rat Pack on stage in 1962 – are mainly of lineups. One senses his preference for the moodiness of Sinatra alone, shot from behind and dressed – as if by Raymond Chandler – in a hat and long mackintosh, pacing down a bleakly dirty corridor towards a dead end. Another Rat Pack member, Sammy Davis Jr, performed a rooftop diamond-shaped jump. Despite his tightly drawn up (and shiny) brogues, his white outfit and right-angled arms with their delicately spread fingers are reminiscent of a Hindu dancer (1947). Stern loved jazz, and he photographed Louis Armstrong in a coincidentally similar pose, not jumping but perched on a stool, trumpet upended on his knee as he looks down and laughs into his chest (1957). Stern enjoyed the image so much that he made a lifesize cardboard cutout of it, and had his own portrait taken alongside. A less artfully composed shot shows Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald together, in full swing, singing at a studio recording. There was more to Stern’s career than showbiz, however. He enlisted as a combat photographer in the second world war, and won a Purple Heart for his courage and willingness to risk his life picturing infantrymen under fire. Stern documented US troops advancing through north Africa, and was invalided home with severe shrapnel wounds to his arms and neck. In 1943 he returned to cover the Allied invasion of Sicily for Stars and Stripes, the US army magazine. According to his biographer, the journalist Herbert Mitgang: “His pictures of the invasion and its aftermath remain among the most outstanding documents in the annals of combat photography in any war, before or since.” The postwar decades saw a media boom: the heyday of photo magazines and blockbuster movies aimed at a predominantly young mass audience. Stern rode the publicity of a new generation of stars who became, at least in part through his attention, poster pinups. Interviewed later by the Los Angeles Times, he mused on his transfer from war to celebrity photography. “ [The war] very well might have helped me get access ... I don’t really know for sure, because some of them wanted publicity so bad that you didn’t have to have a Purple Heart for that. All you had to have was an expensive camera.”Source: The Guardian Look, Matisse I ain’t. 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Pierre De Vallombreuse
Pierre de Vallombreuse was born in Bayonne in 1962. In twenty-five years of travel to all continents, he made a photographic collection of 41 indigenous peoples, with more than 130,000 photographs, paying tribute to their diversity.In contact with Joseph Kessel, a French author and traveler, de Vallombreuse felt a very early desire to be a witness of his time. In 1984, he entered the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris with the idea of becoming a cartoonist. A trip to Borneo the next year, though, changed the course of his life. He shared his daily life with the Punans, the last nomads of the jungle. Normally a sedentary artist, de Vallombreuse decided to become a nomadic witness, and photography became his mode of expression. While still a student at the Arts Décoratifs in Paris, he took multiple trips to the Philippine jungle to stay with the Palawan people. In total, he lived with them for over two years. The first part of his work on this tribe was presented at the photographic festival Les Rencontres internationales de la photographie in Arles.De Vallombreuse was Secretary General of the Association of Anthropology and Photography (association Anthropologie et Photographie, Paris Diderot University). Since then, he has regularly collaborated with leading international magazines: GEO (France, Russia, Germany, Spain, South Korea, Japan), Sciences et Avenir, Le Monde 2, Le Figaro Magazine, Newsweek, El Mundo, El País, and La Stampa.About The Origins of Man (Hommes Racines)Encompassing five years of work, this project represents the commitment of a photographer with eleven indigenous peoples spread across the globe. Its main purpose is to show the intimate relationship between man and his environment. De Vallombreuse presented his work as a testament to the diversity of lifestyles, practices, and traditional knowledge that are embedded in very different environments. These cultures are repositories of knowledge essential to the preservation of biodiversity. De Vallombreuse aimed to promote a reflection on humanity sustainable whose corollary is the protection of nature.Whenever linked to a specific people, the project emphasizes the multiplicity of responses to living conditions imposed by nature and history. It is in this context that de Vallombreuse addresses this root concept. By meeting people entrenched in their territory and those who have been subjected to the test of uprooting, de Vallombreuse analyzed changes in life affecting our modernity. He worked to show how indigenous peoples are often the first victims of environmental disasters: food shortages, deforestation, global warming, pollution, and water war, crucial questions that, far from being local concerns, affect our mutual humanity.Since 2007, this project has resulted in 12 exhibitions and numerous publications.Souce WikipediaAbout SouverainesIn the West, feminists fight for equality with men. But elsewhere? In some traditional societies, women have a predominant social and spiritual part to play. There is equality, mutual respect and freedom for both genders. Amongst these people, women are recognized for their uniqueness and their skills.Pierre de Vallombreuse traveled to four South East Asian cultures where women play a crucial part in the family and in governance itself.In the matrilineal and matrilocal tribe of Khasi in the North-East part of India, children are given at birth the name of their mother and the youngest daughter inherits all the land and family properties.In the nonhierarchical tribe Palawan in the Philippines, men and women live in perfect equality, while emphasizing values such as goodwill, generosity and mutual assistance.In the southwestern part of China, status of women is unique in Moso, a population that practices all forms of matriarchy as children's education is entrusted with their maternal uncles.Finally in Malaysia, the Badjao abolish all forms of hierarchy and advocate for an egalitarian and libertarian civilization that is prominently in favor of women.
Ryotaro Horiuchi
Ryotaro Horiuchi was born in Tokyo in 1969. When he was a teenager, he started to work at the furniture studio as an assistant. During his time at the studio, he was asked to take photographs of furniture as its records. And that was the first time he felt his intention to focus on a thing in front of his eyes ''Through The Lends''. And that ''intention'' turned him into ''photo-holic'' by realizing the potential of photographs. Since then, he has been working on his works from Osaka University of Arts and while he was in Germany and till now. Now he is working with ''Descendants of Samurai'' and ''Roma Gypsy'' by taking their portraits. To do so, he keeps focusing on ''the identity'' of them and himself. Falling Waters When I faced the waterfall, my eyes were riveted on the falling waters. The waters kept changing and never became the same figure. I saw the vitality in its overwhelming energy. The waters looked so alive that I felt as if I were photo shooting creatures. These are not scenic photos but portraits of waterfalls. The waters kept moving vigorously with a roaring sound, however, I loved the silence behind it. Quiet Existence I have relatives who emigrated to a foreign country under a state-led migration policy during the pre-war period. They live as minorities in the country. Hearing stories about them as I grew up made me fascinated with people who are defined as minorities. When I was staying in Germany, I later learned that the people who had been closed to me were Roma. I had absolutely no knowledge about Roma at that time and their lifestyle looked just so mysterious to me. Since then, I had been drawn to their strong identity and I visited the area where many Romani people live. I met many other ethnic groups of people who live as minorities there. When I faced their lifestyles, I could see their quiet yet strong identity behind them, which strongly resonated with me. It might be impossible for minorities to maintain their culture without keeping their strong identity. What is identity? The question always makes me ask myself what kind of individuality I retain. Discover Descendants of Samurai
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