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Win a Solo Exhibition in April 2026 + An Exclusive Interview!
Win a Solo Exhibition in April 2026 + An Exclusive Interview!
Alex Lobo
Alex Lobo
Alex Lobo

Alex Lobo

Country: Spain
Birth: 1978

I was born and raised in Madrid, Spain. Being passionate about all kinds of visual arts since an early age, I graduated from an audiovisual technical school and moved to London in 2005, where I soon developed a passion for photography that has also accompanied me to Japan, my home since 2013. I specialise in fine art and portrait photography.

Statement:
Art is for me a way of transforming reality with an expressive purpose. My favourite artworks are those that use the expressive tools of the chosen media form to materialise a very subjective vision of the human experience.

In my personal case, I have always been attracted to darkness. Exploring the murky corners of the human soul has always been more appealing to me than indulging in rosy views of it. I’ve also been passionate about films and their power to provoke the most intense emotions since I was a child. I originally wanted to become a filmmaker. With photography, I found a different way to tell stories through images while still delving into the shadows.

Maybe that explains why my work is dominated by dark key images and dramatic light, and why there seems to be a latent narrative component to them.
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Stéphan Gladieu
Stéphan Gladieu was born in 1969 and lives in Boulogne-Billancourt. He is represented by Olivier Castaing of the School Gallery in Paris and Artco Gallery in Germany, Cape Town and Joshua Tree. He began his career in 1989, covering war & social issues, travelling across Europe,Central Asia, the Middle East (Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Egypt, Pakistan) and Asia (India, Nepal, Vietnam, China, etc). Going back to his beginnings, he very quickly enriched his photographic writing by using portraiture to bear witness to the human condition in the world. His main focus is on his personal and artistic work through series of portraits in which DNA is colour and the play of contrast between subject and background in natural settings. Stéphan Gladieu plays on the iconic character of the frontal image and on the frontier between the real and the unreal. His portraiture has included covering the Saudi Princes, Princesses in Nepal, actors & directors behind the scenes at Cannes Film Festival, politicians, intellectuals, but also everyday people the world over. Stephan still realize international features and portraits series, for international magazines but he is mainly focused on is personal work: human story through colorful portrait collection. On the side of his journalist activity, Stephan is working with private company (LVMH, Danone, TOTAL…) and International institutions (World Bank, UNICEF) to work on their visual identity. Nowadays, Stephan Gladieu’s work is published in leading publications in France and internationally.Source: www.stephangladieu.fr Exclusive Interview with Stephan Gladieu
Benita Mayo
United States
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Benita Mayo is a visual artist based in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is a resident artist at the McGuffey Art Center and an active member of the Charlottesville Black Arts Collective. She holds a B.A. in Rhetoric and Communications from the University of Virginia (UVA). Mayo’s work is guided by curiosity and empathy, qualities that shape both her process and subject matter. Her photographs explore the collective female experience through the lens of a Black woman navigating grief, memory, ancestry, genealogy, and trauma. By weaving personal history with broader social narratives, she examines how inherited legacies shape identity and belonging. Rooted in storytelling and social commentary, her practice stands as both testimony and tribute—illuminating overlooked histories while creating space for dialogue, reflection, and connection across communities and generations. Mayo was a 2025 Critical Mass finalist. She was the winner in the 23rd Julia Margaret Cameron Award for "Women Seeing Women" category and received Honorable Mention in the portraiture category. Mayo’s work has been featured in publications including Zeke Magazine, Lenscratch, Cuba Seen Issue 9, Virginia Quarterly Review, Canvas Rebel, Portraits The 27 Fine Art Book, A Smith Gallery, SxSE Magazine, Library of Congress, C-Ville Weekly 434 Magazine, and Charlottesville Tomorrow. Her work has been exhibited at various galleries including the Griffin Museum of Photography, The Center for Photographic Art (CFPA), the Center for Fine Art Photography (C4FAP), A Smith Gallery, Filter Photo, Social Documentary Network and several galleries in the Mid-Atlantic region. Her work has been recognized internationally and is held in private collections.
Oriol Torra Segon
He was born in Manresa (Spain) in 1981. He studied photography at Catalan Institute of Photographic Studies (IEFC). He participated in several documentary workshops taught by Antoine d’Agata (Magnum Photos), Franco Pagetti (VII), Jose Manuel Navia (Agence Vu) or Arianna Rinaldo, among others. Since 2011 he is a freelance photographer. His photography focuses in human frailty and vulnerability. His photographic project Young Patriots has been has received the EXPOSURE AWARD 2014 of See Me (New York, United States), has been one of the photographic projects selected as Descubrimientos PhotoEspaña 2014 (Madrid, Spain), was exhitibted at the Emerging Photography PA-TA-TA Granada Festival (Granada, Spain) and will be exhibited at DOCfield 2014 Festival (Barcelona, Spain), La Kursala de la UCA gallery (Cádiz, Spain) , Backlight Festival (Findland) and Encontros da Imagem Festival (Braga, Portugal). Young Patriots was also published in CNN and Cicero Magazine (Germany). Currently he works on commercial assignments and he is also a contributor of the Echo Photo Agency.About Young Patriots: “Young patriots documents the daily life in a military summer camp for children and teenagers focusing on the fragility of the atendees, in transition between from the childhood to the adulthood”The military summer camp in Mogyoród, Hungary, is a private project which each year sees the arrival of hundreds of children and teenagers between 10 and 15 years old. Some came attracted by the fascination of the military way of life, a militarism which is omnipresent in Hungarian society thanks to its imperial past and the memories of both the Nazi and the Communist periods. Others are brought here by their parents (mostly Hungarian nationalists) so as to introduce them to the unforgiving adult world where emotions are rarely permitted and life must be faced with rectitude and discipline.For a week they will live in tents, will receive military training from experienced soldiers who are still active, will acquire notions regarding Order and the Homeland, will endure long nights on guard duty without sleep, will learn how to use old out of service AK-47s built in Czechoslovakia (with blanks) and will even simulate being under teargas attacks.It will be a week of screamed orders during which intense physical exercise, educational behaviorism and precooked food will prevail; a place where any vulnerabilities and all questioning of military methods are simply overlooked, silenced and inwardly repressed.The young soldiers who had previously already felt the call of the Homeland will live the week’s activities impregnates wit epic airs. On the other hand, the skeptical protagonists, increasingly desensitized, more obedient, more docile, will have been transformed into disciplined young patriots of the great Hungary which one day will go back to being what it once was.All the images of this project were taken in Mogyoród, Hungary in the first week of July, 2013.
John Divola
United States
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John Divola is an American contemporary visual artist born in 1949 in Los Angeles, CA. He received a B.A. from California State University, Northridge in 1971 and later received an M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1974. He has held residencies at many institutions including the California Institute of the Arts. He has held the position of Professor in the art department at the University of California Riverside since 1988. His work has been featured in many solo exhibitions across the United States, Europe, Japan, and Australia. He participated in 1978, 1989, and 2000 Museum of Modern Art group exhibitions and in the 1981 Whitney Biennial. Divola received awards as Individual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1973, 1976, 1979, 1990 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986. He published four books: Continuity, Isolated Houses, Dogs Chasing My Car In The Desert, and Three Acts. In Zuma project, he has described being interested in the relationship between real artworks and representations of them, and the issues of the natural and the artificial. Divola said "I attempted ... to develop a practice in which there could be no distinction between the document and the original." In his series of photographs from 1977, he used deserted houses on Zuma Beach and covered their walls in graffiti. He photographed the ocean from the house's interior through windows and cracks. Divola states: "On initially arriving I would move through the house looking for areas or situations to photograph. If nothing seemed to interest me I would move things around or do some spray painting. The painting was done in much the same way that one might doodle on a piece of paper. At that point, I would return to the camera and explore whatever new potentials existed." These cyclical images skillfully juxtapose romantic skies and sunsets with a seaside structure that, frame by frame, deteriorates into ruin as it is vandalized by the artist and others who eventually set it on fire. Divola's works trace a schematic desire for escape, movement, and transcendence. "My acts, my painting, my photographing, my considering, are part of, not separate from, this process of evolution and change. These photographs are not so much about this process as they are remnants from it. My participation was not so much one of intellectual consideration as one of visceral involvement." Dogs Chasing My Car In The Desert are images of dogs in the desert captured in the midst of running wildly after the car. Emphasizing the grain of the image, these black and white photographs capture a haunting moment in which there is a duality between a sense of absence and presence. The behavior of the dogs suggests a lack of previous stimuli, and loneliness at the same time as an all-consuming reaction to the now, a presence. "It could be viewed as a visceral and kinetic dance. Here we have two vectors and velocities, that of a dog and that of a car and, seeing that a camera will never capture reality and that a dog will never catch a car, evidence of devotion to a hopeless enterprise". In the Dark Star series, dark circles have been painted on the walls of an abandoned house. Creation and destruction are held in a delicate equilibrium, the white rooms of the house, are tattered and derelict. The domestic ruins suggest social collapse, secret renditions of something darkly sinister illuminating our conflicted recent history, updating Zuma and Vandalism for our age of foreclosure. In the As Far As I Can Get project, he made photographs by pushing the self-timer button on his camera. An exposure is made in 10 seconds. John Divola currently lives and works in Riverside, CA. Divola works in photography, describing himself as exploring the landscape by looking for the edge between the abstract and the specific.Source: Wikipedia
Mauro De Bettio
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AAP Magazine #56 Shadows
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