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Rachel Nixon
Rachel Nixon
Rachel Nixon

Rachel Nixon

Country: United Kingdom/Canada

Rachel Nixon is a British-Canadian fine art photographer – and former journalist – based in Vancouver.

Having lived and worked across continents and cultures, she explores issues such as a desire for connection with one’s heritage, as well as secrecy, isolation and memory. She is intrigued by the visual poetry of everyday life and intuitively seeks out images speaking to beauty and broader messages in the seemingly mundane.

In 2019, Rachel graduated with honours from the VanArts professional photography program. Since then, her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and she has received a number of accolades including being a four-time category winner in the Julia Margaret Cameron Awards. In 2024, she was named among Dodho Magazine’s top 100 fine art photographers.

Rachel has earned attention for her series ''The Garden of Maggie Victoria'', which revives the story of her forgotten great-grandmother through collages integrating archive and contemporary images. In 2023, the series was selected for Blue Sky Gallery’s Pacific Northwest Drawers, and designated a finalist in Critical Mass and the Royal Photographic Society’s IPE 165.

Before committing full-time to visual art, Rachel had a 20-year career as a journalist in the UK, US and Canada for the BBC, CBC and Microsoft where she developed and ran digital news services that reached millions. Her passion for storytelling, love of innovation and experimentation, and drive for excellence now extend to her photographic work.

Rachel holds a first-class degree from the University of Oxford in Modern Languages. Her wide-ranging international experience offers a unique perspective on identity, place and belonging, and the connections we share despite polarized times.
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Ian Teh
United Kingdom
1971
Ian Teh has published three monographs, Undercurrents (2008), Traces (2011) and Confluence (2014). His work is part of the permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) and the Hood Museum in the USA. Selected solo shows include the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York in 2004, Flowers in London in 2011 and the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam in 2012. Teh has received several honours, in 2018 he was awarded a travel grant from the Pulitzer Centre for Crisis Reporting and presented his work on climate change at the prestigious 2018 National Geographic Photography Seminar. He is also the recipient of the International Photoreporter Grant 2016 the Abigail Cohen Fellowship in Documentary Photography 2014 and the Emergency Fund 2011 from the Magnum Foundation. In 2013, he was elected by the Open Society Foundations to exhibit in New York at the Moving Walls Exhibition. In 2015, during the COP21 Paris climate talks, large poster images of his work were displayed on the streets of Paris as a collaborative initiative by #Dysturb and Magnum Foundation. He is a co-exhibitor in Coal + Ice, an environmental group show of acclaimed photographers and curated by Susan Meiselas. It was exhibited at the Official Residence of the US Ambassador to France during COP21. Teh’s work has been published internationally in magazines such as National Geographic, The New Yorker, Bloomberg Businessweek and Granta. Since 2013, he has exhibited as well as conducted masterclasses at Obscura Festival of Photography, Malaysia’s foremost photo festival. He is a tutor at Cambodia's Angkor Photo Festival since 2014. Teh is a member of the British agency, Panos Pictures.Source: www.ianteh.com Artist Statement: "Much of my artistic creativity stems from my interests in social, environmental and political issues. I imagine my work as a series of short films made out of stills. They are narratives that are built on moments of time collected over extended periods. Each story is a woven fabric of compositional and colour threads that come together to create a particular ambience intended to both emphasize my perspective on the subject matter and to, hopefully, encourage the viewer to take the narrative beyond the limits of my frame, into a direction that makes the experience of those images more vivid. My photographs have been widely exhibited and featured in several international publications such as, Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker and The Independent Magazine. I was recently awarded the 2011 EF grant from the Magnum Foundation and also received a high commendation for the 2009 Prix Pictet award. In 2001 I was part of the Joop Swart Masterclass. With some friends I founded Deep Sleep Magazine an online publication and recently we founded our own imprint Deep Sleep Editions to have more control of the publishing process. I have published two monographs, Undercurrents (2008) and Traces (2011)."
Yousuf Karsh
Canada
1908 | † 2002
Yousuf Karsh is the most renowned portrait photographer of our time. He has perceptively photographed the statesmen, artists, and literary and scientific figures that have shaped our lives in the 20th century. Known for his ability to transform "the human face into legend," many of the portraits that he created have become virtually the image of the great man or woman they portray, whether Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Einstein, Georgia O'Keefe or Helen Keller. In other words, "to experience a Karsh photograph is to feel in the presence of history itself." His photographs are in major private and public collections throughout the world, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston holding the largest collection in the US.Source: Weston Gallery Yousuf Karsh was an Armenian-Canadian photographer and one of the most famous and accomplished portrait photographers of all time. ousuf or Josuf (his given Armenian name was Hovsep)[citation needed] Karsh was born in Mardin, a city in the eastern Ottoman Empire (present Turkey). He grew up during the Armenian Genocide where he wrote, "I saw relatives massacred; my sister died of starvation as we were driven from village to village." At the age of 16, his parents sent Yousuf to live with his uncle George Nakash, a photographer in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada. Karsh briefly attended school there and assisted in his uncle’s studio. Nakash saw great potential in his nephew and in 1928 arranged for Karsh to apprentice with portrait photographer John Garo in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. His brother, Malak Karsh, was also a photographer famous for the image of logs floating down the river on the Canadian one dollar bill. Karsh returned to Canada four years later, eager to make his mark. In 1931 he started working with another photographer, John Powls, in his studio on the second floor of the Hardy Arcade at 130 Sparks Street in Ottawa, Ontario, close to Parliament Hill. When Powls retired in 1933, Karsh took over the studio. Karsh's first solo exhibition was in 1936 in the Drawing Room of the Château Laurier hotel. He moved his studio into the hotel in 1973, and it remained there until he retired in 1992. Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King discovered Karsh and arranged introductions with visiting dignitaries for portrait sittings. Karsh's work attracted the attention of varied celebrities, but his place in history was sealed on 30 December 1941 when he photographed Winston Churchill, after Churchill gave a speech to Canadian House of Commons in Ottawa. The image of Churchill brought Karsh international prominence and is claimed to be the most reproduced photographic portrait in history. In 1967, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada and in 1990 was promoted to Companion. Of the 100 most notable people of the century, named by the International Who's Who [2000], Karsh had photographed 51. Karsh was also the only Canadian to make the list. Karsh was a master of studio lights. One of Karsh's distinctive practices was lighting the subject's hands separately. He photographed many of the great and celebrated personalities of his generation. Throughout most of his career he used the 8×10 bellows Calumet (1997.0319) camera, made circa 1940 in Chicago. Journalist George Perry wrote in the British paper The Sunday Timesthat "when the famous start thinking of immortality, they call for Karsh of Ottawa." Karsh had a gift for capturing the essence of his subject in the instant of his portrait. As Karsh wrote of his own work in Karsh Portfolio in 1967, "Within every man and woman a secret is hidden, and as a photographer, it is my task to reveal it if I can. The revelation, if it comes at all, will come in a small fraction of a second with an unconscious gesture, a gleam of the eye, a brief lifting of the mask that all humans wear to conceal their innermost selves from the world. In that fleeting interval of opportunity the photographer must act or lose his prize." Karsh said "My chief joy is to photograph the great in heart, in mind, and in spirit, whether they be famous or humble." His work is in permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada, New York's Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the National Portrait Gallery of Australia and many others. Library and Archives Canada holds his complete collection, including negatives, prints and documents. His photographic equipment was donated to the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa. Karsh published 15 books of his photographs, which include brief descriptions of the sessions, during which he would ask questions and talk with his subjects to relax them as he composed the portrait. Some famous subjects photographed by Karsh were Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Muhammad Ali, Marian Anderson, W. H. Auden, Joan Baez, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Humphrey Bogart, Alexander Calder, Pablo Casals, Fidel Castro, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, Joan Crawford, Ruth Draper, Albert Einstein, Dwight Eisenhower, Princess Elizabeth, Robert Frost, Clark Gable, Indira Gandhi, Grey Owl, Ernest Hemingway, Audrey Hepburn, Pope John Paul II, Chuck Jones, Carl Jung, Helen Keller and Polly Thompson, Grace Kelly, Jacqueline Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, Peter Lorre, Pandit Nehru, Georgia O'Keeffe, Laurence Olivier, General Pershing, Pablo Picasso, Pope Pius XII, Prince Rainier of Monaco, Paul Robeson, the rock band Rush, Albert Schweitzer, George Bernard Shaw, Jean Sibelius, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Andy Warhol, Frank Lloyd Wright, and, arguably his most famous portrait subject, Winston Churchill. The story is often told of how Karsh created his famous portrait of Churchill during the early years of World War II. Churchill, the British prime minister, had just addressed the Canadian Parliament and Karsh was there to record one of the century's great leaders. "He was in no mood for portraiture and two minutes were all that he would allow me as he passed from the House of Commons chamber to an anteroom," Karsh wrote in Faces of Our Time. "Two niggardly minutes in which I must try to put on film a man who had already written or inspired a library of books, baffled all his biographers, filled the world with his fame, and me, on this occasion, with dread." Churchill marched into the room scowling, "regarding my camera as he might regard the German enemy." His expression suited Karsh perfectly, but the cigar stuck between his teeth seemed incompatible with such a solemn and formal occasion. "Instinctively, I removed the cigar. At this the Churchillian scowl deepened, the head was thrust forward belligerently, and the hand placed on the hip in an attitude of anger." The image captured Churchill and the Britain of the time perfectly — defiant and unconquerable. Churchill later said to him, "You can even make a roaring lion stand still to be photographed." As such, Karsh titled the photograph, The Roaring Lion. However, Karsh's favourite photograph was the one taken immediately after this one where Churchill's mood had lightened considerably and is shown much in the same pose, but smiling. In the late 1990s Karsh moved to Boston and on July 13, 2002, aged 93, he died at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital after complications following surgery. He was interred in Notre Dame Cemetery in Ottawa. Source: Wikipedia
Janet Sternburg
United States
1943
Janet Sternburg is a fine art photographer, a writer of literary books, a maker of theatre and films, and an educator. Since 1998 when she began taking photographs, her work has appeared in Aperture (2002), that same year on the cover of Art Journal, and in 2003 in The Utne Reader (“A New Lens,” 2003), in which she was selected as one of forty international artists and writers who “with depth, resonance, ideas and insights, challenge us to live more fully.” A monograph of her photographs, Overspilling World: The Photographs of Janet Sternburg, was published in 2016–17 by Distanz Verlag with a Foreword by Wim Wenders, in which he writes, “Photographers don’t have eyes in the back of their heads. Janet Sternburg does.” A second monograph followed in 2021, also from Distanz, I’ve Been Walking: Janet Sternburg Los Angeles Photographs, taken by Sternburg during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her photography has been exhibited in solo shows in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Milan, Munich, Mexico, and Korea, where she received a commission for a full-building installation at Seoul Institute of the Arts. In 2018, the USC Fisher Museum of the Arts presented her solo show LIMBUS. She pioneered in the use of disposable cameras to create images in which elements interpenetrate, a visual world without borders. Her literary books include the classic two volumes of The Writer on Her Work (W.W. Norton, 1981 and 1991), called “landmarks” and “groundbreaking” by Poets & Writers magazine; her papers for that book are now archived at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas. Other critically praised books followed, among them Phantom Limb (University of Nebraska American Lives Series, 2002) and White Matter (Hawthorne Books, 2016), both using a hybrid form of memoir and essay to probe family, neurology, and history, as well as a collection of poetry, Optic Nerve: Photopoems (Red Hen Press, 2005). Other creative work includes her film, El Teatro Campesino, a feature-length documentary on the Chicano theatre troupe (1969) selected for the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center; her film Virginia Woolf: The Moment Whole (1971), broadcast on National Educational Television and winner of a Cine Golden Eagle, as well as her play, The Fifth String (2011–2014), about Arab and Jewish expulsions throughout history, produced in Berlin, New York, and Los Angeles. Sternburg lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and also has a residence in Downtown Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo. She has been the recipient of numerous grants, fellowships, and artist residencies, among them from the National Endowment for the Humanities and MacDowell. She has taught in the Graduate Media Program at The New School University and in the Critical Studies School at the California Institute of the Arts. In 2016, she was co-recipient of the REDCAT Award, given to “individuals who exemplify the creativity and talent that define and lead the evolution of contemporary culture.”
Bryan Adams
Canada
1959
Adams works as a photographer as well as musician, aside from being published in British Vogue, L'uomo Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Esquire, Interview magazine and i-D, among others, he has also shot advertising campaigns for Guess Jeans, Sand, Converse, Montblanc, John Richmond, Fred Perry, and more recently for Escada. He has won Lead Awards twice in Germany for his fashion work, most recently June 2012 and previously in 2006. Other photographic endeavours include founding the art fashion Zoo Magazine, based in Berlin, Germany for which he shoots for regularly. His first book of photos will be released by Steidl in 2012 entitled Exposed. Previous published collaborations include; American Women June 2005, for Calvin Klein in the United States; proceeds from this book went to Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center in New York City for their breast cancer research for programs, and Made in Canada December 1999 for Flare Magazine in Canada; proceeds went to the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation. Both books were dedicated to his friend Donna, who died of the disease. As a photographer, Adams has worked with many of his musical peers, including Lana Del Rey, The Who, Sting, Shania Twain, Mick Jagger, Arcade Fire, Ray Charles, Tina Turner, Rod Stewart, Robert Plant, Take That, Joss Stone, Plácido Domingo, Sarah McLachlan, Celine Dion, Billy Idol, Moby, Lindsay Lohan, Amy Winehouse, Annie Lennox, Peter Gabriel, Bryan Ferry, Lenny Kravitz, Die Antwoord, and Morrissey to name a few. On 27 November 2000 Adams played onstage with The Who at the Royal Albert Hall. A DVD of the concert was issued. Adams photographed the band and his photos appear in the DVD booklet. In 2002, Adams was invited, along with other photographers from the Commonwealth, to photograph Queen Elizabeth II during her Golden Jubilee; one of the photographs from this session was used as a Canadian postage stamp in 2004 and again in 2005 (see Queen Elizabeth II definitive stamp (Canada)), another portrait of both Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip is now in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Adams supports the Hear the World initiative as a photographer in its aim to raise global awareness for the topic of hearing and hearing loss. He photographed Michael J. Fox and Tatjana Patitz in the 2011 Carl Zeiss AG company calendar in New York City in the summer of 2010. The focus was about the size difference of the subjects in a comedic presentation. In 2011, Adams provided the cover art for Lioness: Hidden Treasures, a posthumous release by Amy Winehouse.Source: Wikipedia Rock Icon Bryan Adams' lifelong interest in photography turned into a vocation when he began shooting for fashion magazines and advertisers more than a decade ago. But it's not all models and celebrities: He most recently turned his lens on 40 British soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. His series Wounded: The Legacy of War, the subject of a 2013 book from Steidl and an exhibit at London’s Somerset House on display this month through Jan. 25, showcases the brutal (and all too common) injuries incurred in battle. "I didn't like the fact that people were getting so badly hurt, so many people were killed, were displaced, forgotten. This is my statement," says Adams, 55. On the legacy of the images, he says, "I hope [people] realize that these guys made an incredible sacrifice. War is disgusting and this is the result of what happens when we decide to beat each other up."Source: Billboard
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