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

Websites

alexlobo25.wixsite.com/imagesintheshadows

@images_in_the_shadows

 

Inspiring Portfolios

Anna Biret
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Svetlin Yosifov
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Shinji Ichikawa
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More Great Photographers To Discover

Kathryn Oliver
Kathryn Oliver
United States
Kathryn discovered a love for making pictures as a small child and developed a rich inner life of impressions. As she grew, creative aspirations led her to bring this inner world forward through art. Self taught, her creative journey has repeatedly taken her into the field of metaphor and myth as a way to express something eternal within herself. Her professional arts background of painting, theater and dance feeds the photography she does now as she blends hints of all these elements into her images. She currently creates and exhibits black and white fine art photography and photo encaustics, teaching workshops on the midcoast of Maine throughout the year. Drawn to the symbolic language of myth and archetypes, I am forever on a quest, seeking a visual narrative that evokes an internal recognition of nature — something in exile, lost, or hidden — yet leaves an impression inwardly known.About the series The Wild Garden Of Childhood: When I was a child the best part of me was wild. The Wild Garden Of Childhood is an exploration into the untamed vitality and sacred beauty of being young. That universality of raw spirit, where emotional authenticity reigns naturally and fiercely -- dancing on the edge of innocence. Arising from my own fragmented memories, inspired by the open innocence and un-self conscious freedom of my subjects, a world is conjured, somewhere between the real and imagined - where the fertile ground of being is at play. The most precious of stories are stored away for safe keeping, Somewhere In the wild garden of childhood awaiting becomingness
Dan Fenstermacher
Dan Fenstermacher
United States
1985
Dan Fenstermacher merges documentary storytelling, and street photography with both humor and activism. Fenstermacher was recently selected as the winner of the 2020 Miami Street Photography Festival International Series Contest and the 15th Annual Smithsonian Photo Contest for the American Experience category. Fenstermacher has photographic experience on four continents including a multi-media internship in Accra, Ghana, as a portrait photographer in Sydney, Australia, a Professor of Fine Arts at Xiangfan University in China, and as an artist-in-residence in San Ramon Costa Rica. His work about mental illness and stigma has been featured in The Huffington Post. He holds a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Photography from San Jose State University, is a member of the Bay Area Photographers Collective, Maverick Photographers, and teaches photography at West Valley Community College. About Food Chain Series Every day the fisherman from the seaside towns of Prampram, Cape Coast, and Ada, Ghana, head out to sea where they fish up to 40 kilometers offshore. For generations families of these communities have fished the Atlantic Ocean. What they catch will determine the livelihood of the community and their families. Rising early to push the canoes in the water and fight with the breaking waves, and after a pause for prayer; the 10-hour workday ensues. Back on land the selling, cleaning, and cooking of the fish is a lively affair. Working hand to mouth, the fish are sold and taken in baskets by families and prepared for frying in oil for the night’s dinner. Some days there are barely any fish from the day’s work. To make matters worse, due to overfishing by many big fleets from China there is a depleted supply of fish. Millions of dollars per year are reported to be taken from the Ghana economy by overfishing from foreign countries. Because of this the government of Ghana has implemented an annual one-month fishing ban on local fisherman. Many do not know how they will make a living for the length of this ban, and fish illegally risking fines in-order-to feed themselves. With supplies of fish dwindling and the broken food chain as a result, these communities have little to fall back on, and the future of the Ghanaian fishing occupation is in danger of being inundated.
Kimmo Sahakangas
Kimmo Sahakangas
United States
1958
Kimmo Sahakangas received a Bachelor of Architecture from Cal Poly Pomona and a Master of Architecture from UCLA. After higher education, he was awarded an architectural traveling fellowship which facilitated a year-long exploration of European urban spaces. It concluded in a slide show presented to an academic institution. Prior to architectural studies, photography was a passionate endeavor in the family along with vacation roadtrips. At age 19, he traveled the very first time to Las Vegas… stayed at a cheap motel and was keen on photographing the neon lights of Fremont Street and the strip… the visit would inspire architectural study and form an interest in photographing the built American landscape. Sahakangas contextualizes the vast American landscape with a focus on transitional places and spaces. Some of the more favored subjects are roadside business establishments which epitomize the road trip experience. Traveling off the interstate, he would find such visual matter in the landscape... on a two-lane road allowing a slower pace without a destination in mind. His observations exclude people, to portray isolation as a visual drama. And to frame the cultural, economic and social policies at hand. His work has exhibited nationally in a dozen private and public galleries including Praxis Gallery Photo Arts Center (Minneapolis), Black Box Gallery (Portland OR) and Torrance Art Museum. A self-published affair, titled "Roadside Testament", was available in 2021. It features several decades of photography.
Cory Johnson & Neil Kremer
Cory Johnson & Neil Kremer
United States
Character-based portraits and narrative-driven scenes are our thing. Large & complex productions are where we thrive, and we specialize in capturing authentic moments in even the most manufactured of settings. True collaborators at heart, we formed Kremer/Johnson to explore our combined creative vision. We share in all duties from ideation & pre-production through shooting & post. Together we create still & moving images for editorial, corporate, and advertising clients nationwide.
Laura Heyman
Laura Heyman
United States
Laura Heyman was born in Essex County, New Jersey. She received a B.F.A in photography from University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA, and an M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI. Heyman’s work has been exhibited at Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Deutsches Polen Institute, Darmstadt, DE, Ampersand International Arts, San Francisco, CA, Senko Studio, Viborg, DK, Silver Eye Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA, The Palitz Gallery, New York, NY, Light Work Gallery, Syracuse, NY, The Ghetto Biennale, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Philadelphia Photographic Arts Center, Philadelphia, PA, The Laguna Art Museum, Laguna, CA, The United Nations, New York, NY and The National Portrait Gallery, London, UK.In 2010, she was nominated for a John Guttman Photography Fellowship, and was awarded a Light Work Mid-Career Artist Grant. She has received the Silver Eye Fellowship, a Ragdale Fellowship and multiple NYFA Strategic Opportunity Stipends. Heyman has curated exhibitions and panel discussions at Vox Pouli, Philadelphia, PA, Wonderland Art Space, Copenhagen DK and the Clocktower Gallery, New York, NY, and her work has been reviewed and profiled in The New Yorker, Contact Sheet, Frontiers, and ARTnews.Pa Bouje Ankò: Don’t Move Again uses the studio portrait to explore embedded hierarchies between photographers, subjects and viewers. The work is driven in part by longstanding questions around photographic representation, specifically those involving the voyeurism and objectification of so-called “third world” subjects by “first world” artists. Seeking to examine these questions in depth, I established an outdoor portrait studio in the Grand Rue neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti in late November 2009. Advertisements circulated news about a photography studio in the area, where members of the local community could schedule appointments to have their portraits made for free. Working in black and white with an 8x10 camera, I photographed one hundred and twenty people over a period of two weeks.Three weeks later, the meaning of those images shifted with the earthquake. They became both records and memorials. That event also changed the focus of the project, which evolved to include various expanding populations in Port-au-Prince tied to future development and reconstruction.Issues of representation, visual sovereignty and cultural protocol, central to the project from the beginning, became more complicated after the earthquake. When I first arrived in Port-au-Prince, I imagined that positioning myself as a “studio photographer” would allow me to escape or subvert the complex tangle of hierarchies at play in Haiti, as well as in the exchange between photographer and subject. Neither has been the case. Instead, layers of meaning and intention continue to reveal themselves, expanding the project's framework and engaging the myriad contradictions and impossibilities present in the work’s original question.All about Laura Heyman:AAP: When did you realize you wanted to be a photographer?I began making photographs in high school, and knew I wanted to be a photographer before going to college.AAP: Where did you study photography?At University of the Arts in Philadelphia, I studied with Jack Carnell and Alida Fish. At Cranbrook Academy of Art, where I got my MFA, I studied with Carl Toth, and also Grant Kester, who taught Critical Theory at the school during my first year there.AAP:Do you have a mentor or role model?I don’t know that I’d say I have a mentor – there are peers I look to regularly for advice and feedback on my work.AAP: Do you remember your first shot? What was it?One of my first shots was the stream in my grandparent’s backyard in Phonecia, New York. My grandfather fished there, and my older sister and I used to run around and catch salamanders and frogs.AAP: What or who inspires you?Artists like Collier Schorr, An-My Lê, Roni Horn, Robert Adams, Mark Ruwedel, Pieter Hugo; David Shrigley, Jennifer Dalton Ai Wei Wei; Richard Mosse and Liz Cohen. I’m inspired by artists whose work makes me think, those using humor in their practice, and artists who really put themselves on the line. Books and essays, movies and performance – I’m inspired by a lot of different people and things.AAP: How could you describe your style?The visual style of my work changes according to the subject – a constant is subjects or projects that can and do express a layered viewpoint, or pose a series of questions.AAP: What kind of gear do you use? Camera, lens, digital, film?While I sometimes shoot digital, mostly I work analogue, with a medium or large format camera. Lately that has meant using Ilford HP5 black and white film with a Deardorff 8X10 camera and a 300 mm lens.AAP: Do you spend a lot of time editing your images?For me, editing (by which I mean deciding what images are included in a series, not post-production) is at least fifty percent of the job. I spend as much, if not more time editing a series as I do producing it.AAP: Favorite(s) photographer(s)?Collier Schorr, Robert Adams, Rineke Djikstra, Zoe Strauss, Luc DelahayeAAP: What advice would you give a young photographer?Know what you want. Shoot twice as much as you think you should. Be prepared to shoot and re-shoot until you get what you want.AAP: Your best memory as a photographer?A number of photographs I made of some friends while we waited in a car for the ferry. It was cold out, and we were all inside, smoking. The images captured the moment and the subjects very precisely – although this was over twenty years ago, they still have an immediacy that thrills me.AAP: Your worst souvenir as a photographer?A little while ago I was shooting some portraits on a very sunny day, and forgot to flag the lens. The negatives l ended up with were completely fogged and unusable.AAP: If you could have taken the photographs of someone else who would it be?Either Robert Adams What We Bought, or Collier Schorr’s Jens F. Both books have a real hold on me – I’m completely consumed every time I open one up. And after years of looking at them, they still surprise and fascinate me.
Elisa Migda
Elisa Migda
France
1981
Graduated from the Sorbonne and the University Paris X in Literature, Human Sciences and Visual Anthropology (Formation de Recherches Cinématographiques created by Jean Rouch) after studying photography, video and graphic design, she joined the International photojournalism festival Visa pour l'Image Perpignan in communication and coordination. In 2016, she is also responsible for the creation of the art book fair FILAF ARTBOOK FAIR within the FILAF festival as well as the curating of the exhibitions A L'Italia by Carine Brancowitz and Before Landing by Michel Houellebecq in Perpignan. Passionate about film photography but also after having assisted various fashion and reportage photographers and contributed to various audiovisual creations, she decided to join a traditional photography laboratory in Paris, which offers more particularly the realization of large formats in order to revive the practice of printing and its processes. Eighteen months ago, she set up her own laboratory in Seine et Marne in order to carry out a more experimental and personal photographic work, that she has been pursuing for about fifteen years. In 2019, she participates in the group exhibition Le Rêve d'un mouvement in Paris with Gilles Roudière, Damien Daufresne, Stéphane Charpentier, Grégory Dargent, Frédéric D. Oberland and Gaël Bonnefon and presents her solo exhibition Sweet Surrender in Arles during the month of July with the Bergger group. Statement "My photographic work is long-term and develops around a personal project: to capture images that revolve around my life, intimate experiences and, from these photographic episodes were born portraits, self-portraits, imprints of existence. It is an abandonment where bodies and faces waver in obscure clarity, plunge into dazzle, navigate between interior and exterior spaces, loneliness and erasure from the world. In this universe, a feeling of sweet melancholy often emerges around themes such as energy, destruction, dealing with both the eternal and the ephemeral, disappearance and metamorphosis. These are trembling moments, a collection of images with fleeting, spectral visions, sprinkled with imperfections just as in our daily lives or in our dreams. There remains a disturbing strangeness, a subjective territory, trying and pensive, where the eyes are closed, frozen, elusive..." -- Elisa Migda
Marco Cajazzo
Marco Cajazzo
Italy
1975
I was born in Mazara del Vallo (Sicily) in 1975. Now I live in Catania where I work as a SW engineer. I started studying photography in 2017 when a friend (who is passionate about street photography) pointed out that maybe I had a good visual sense (ironically I am visually impaired in the right eye). In the last years some of my photographs have been selected from digital magazines and important competitions in Italy and abroad (MiamiSPF, ItalianSPF, IstanbulSPF, Urban Photo Awards and so on). I won ImagOrbetello (category Street) in 2021 and Observa Street Photo Festival in 2023. STATEMENT I'm deeply in love with Elliott Erwitt's photography and I think that David Gibson’s “Street Photographer’s Manual” is a milestone book for anyone who wants to start street photography. My photos are simple, based on observing the world around me. I look for overlaps, coincidences, oddities, surreal situations: everything that can make the observer say “How is it possible?” or at least make him smile. Streets can be an incredible stage of beauty and humanity.
Cally Whitham
Cally Whitham
New Zealand
Taking an idealistic view of the world, Cally Whitham records the ordinary, transforming it into a surreal image, reflecting the way things are perceived and altered through nostalgia and memory. Driven by a desire to remember, Whitham uses her camera to collect images, which allows her to preserve her surroundings forever. At the age of 11, she spent Christmas using her first roll of film shooting her favourite things, including her aunt's farm, an old house she wanted to live in and a big tree at the beach. As an adult she returns to similar subjects recaptured in shadows of times past. Based in New Zealand, Whitham finds the subtle, forgotten and overlooked in these locations, which are touched with beauty through their ordinariness and familiarity. Layering her photographs with emotion, the works explore the ways in which personal milieus are captured. Source: www.cally.co.nz The New Zealand photographer Cally Whitham focuses her artistic research on the depiction of everyday life She began photography at 11 years old when accompanying her father who was a painter. He roamed the countryside to do sketches of forests and farms. From an early age she therefore had painting as an artistic reference and mastered the techniques of the Beaux Arts. Source: Yellow Korner Interview With Cally Whitham: AAP: When did you realize you wanted to be a photographer? "When I was about 16 I think. I took a class at school and was hooked." AAP: Where did you study photography? "I studied at the Design School, which has since become Unitech." AAP: How long have you been a photographer? "21 years, with a few years break in the middle." AAP: Do you remember your first shot? What was it? "The first photo I ever took was of my grandparents and brother at a beach. I couldn't believe I was allowed to take a photo!" AAP: What or who inspires you? "Light inspires me. When the quality of light is just right anything seems possible; the unworthy becomes photogenic." AAP: How could you describe your style? "Pictorialism" AAP: Do you have a favorite photograph or series? "Wow, too hard to choose!" AAP: Do you spend a lot of time editing your images? "Yes I do. The initial photo is just a part of the process in creating an image. Post production is the place where the image and the vision I had come together. I don't photograph reality but rather create a potential or ideal reality and that potential is added in post production." AAP: Favorite(s) photographer(s)? "Alfred steiglitz in his early days and Julia Margaret Cameron." AAP: What advice would you give a young photographer? "Have a back job to pay the bills - it's a tough industry now to try to pay a mortgage on." AAP: What mistake should a young photographer avoid? "Not understanding the business, tax and admin side of being a photographer." AAP: Your best memory has a photographer? "The moments I have realized I was on to something during a shoot."
Benoit Segalen
Benoit Segalen
France
1974
As a French amateur photographer, I've had a camera since I was 8 years old. However, it was only in 2011, when my work involved frequent travel, that I began capturing moments from around the world, especially in the streets. I am self-taught, learning through books and studying the works of renowned photographers. My passion lies in immortalizing human behaviors in their environments. I am always on the lookout for the decisive moment, patiently waiting to capture the photo that will endure.
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Latest Interviews

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Interview
Exclusive Interview with Anastasia Samoylova
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Interview with Maureen Ruddy Burkhart
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Exclusive Interview with Peter Ydeen
Winner of AAP Magazine #45 Travels, his series reflects this unique vision—capturing the spirit of place through subtle layers of light, color, and emotion. Whether traveling abroad or observing the rhythms of his own surroundings, Ydeen creates images that feel both grounded and enchanted, inviting viewers into a world where reality and reverie meet.
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Exclusive Interview with Ghawam Kouchaki
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Exclusive Interview with Tommi Viitala
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Exclusive Interview with Robert Mack
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