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Enter AAP Magazine 54 Nature: Landscape, Wildlife, Flora & Fauna
Enter AAP Magazine 54 Nature: Landscape, Wildlife, Flora & Fauna
Inna Piskun
Inna Piskun
Inna Piskun

Inna Piskun

Country: Ukraine
Birth: 1974

Inna Piskun, born in 1974 and residing in the city of Dniepr, has pursued a unique journey that blends practical skills with artistic passions. She holds two degrees: one in economic cybernetics and another in landscape design. Despite her professional background, Inna has always yearned to express herself through art. Her creative journey was often interrupted by challenging periods, sometimes due to external circumstances, and other times to personal circumstances. Life required practical endeavors, but her desire to engage in art never faded.

It wasn’t until she was 35 that Inna began her foray into photography. Equipped with an old Canon 5D, a Hasselblad 501, and a Polaroid SX-70, she captures moments through both digital and analog formats. At home, she has created a small studio space, just 16 square meters, where most of her photographic work takes place. Her subjects are often her friends and family, with her daughter frequently stepping in as a model.

Through her photography, Inna Piskun has developed a distinctive style, characterized by intimate and thoughtful portraits. Despite the small scale of her studio and equipment, her work reflects an authentic connection to her subjects, exploring the subtleties of human emotion and the beauty of everyday life. Photography has become a profound outlet for her, allowing her to engage in the art she had long aspired to create.

Statement:
I am taking a series of portraits of people who have not left since the very beginning of the war. They understand that being with the Motherland in difficult times is real patriotism.

Awarded Photographer of the Week - Week 40

Website

@in.piskun

 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Madame d’Ora
Austria
1881 | † 1963
Dora Philippine Kallmus, also known as Madame D'Ora or Madame d'Ora, was an Austrian fashion and portrait photographer. Born in Vienna, Austria, in 1881 to a Jewish family, into a privileged background and coming of age amidst the creative and intellectual atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Vienna, Kallmus was extremely well cultured. Her father was a lawyer. Her sister, Anna, was born in 1878 and deported in 1941 during the Holocaust. Although her mother, Malvine (née Sonnenberg), died when she was young, her family remained an important source of emotional and financial support throughout her career. At age 23 while on a trip to the Côte d’Azur, she purchased her first camera, a Kodak box camera. She became interested in the photography field while assisting the son of the painter Hans Makart, and in 1905 she was the first woman to be admitted to theory courses at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt (Graphic Training Institute), which in 1908 granted women access to other courses in photography. That same year she became a member of the Association of Austrian photographers. She was the first woman photographer in Vienna to open her own studio and in May 1906, she was listed in the commercial register as a photographer for the first time. She established her studio called the Atelier d’Ora or Madame D'Ora-Benda with Arthur Benda. The name was based on the pseudonym "Madame d'Ora", which she used professionally. Self-styled simply as d’Ora, she initially took portraits of friends and members from her social circle. In the autumn of 1909, an exhibition of her work received a lively response from the press. Critics both praised the artistic style of her portraits and emphasized the prominent individuals who streamed in to view the show. Over the course of her lifetime, d’Ora turned her lens on many artists, including Josephine Baker, Colette, Gustav Klimt, Tamara de Lempicka, and Pablo Picasso, among others. Alongside these commissions, she also photographed members of the Habsburg family and Viennese aristocracy, the Rothschild family, and other prominent cultural figures and politicians. D’Ora had close ties to avant-garde artistic circles and captured members of the Expressionist dance movement with her lens, including Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste. Fashion and glamor subjects were another important mainstay of her business. She regularly photographed Wiener Werkstätte fashion models and the designer Emilie Flöge of the Schwestern Flöge salon wearing artistic reform dresses. When d’Ora moved to Paris in 1925, she shifted her focus to fashion, covering the couture scene and leading lights of the period until 1940. She befriended key figures, such as the French milliner Madame Agnès and the Spanish designer Cristóbal Balenciaga, as well as the top fashion magazine editors of the day. She also helped create and sustain glamorous images for a variety of celebrities, including Cecil Beaton, Maurice Chevalier, and Colette. When the Nazis seized control of Paris in 1940, she was forced to close her studio and flee. She spent the war years in a semi-underground existence living in Ardèche in the southeast of France. Her sister Anna Kallmus, along with other family and friends, died in the Chełmno concentration camp. After World War II, d’Ora returned to Paris, profoundly affected by personal losses. While she lacked an elegant studio in Paris, d’Ora’s lasting connections to wealthy clients remained and many of them returned to her. While she accepted portrait commissions, mostly for financial stability, she also pushed into new, sometimes darker directions. Around 1948, she embarked on an astonishing series of photographs in displaced persons or refugee camps, which was commissioned by the United Nations. From around 1949 to 1958, d’Ora worked on a project, which she called “my big final work.” She visited numerous slaughterhouses in Paris, and amid the pools of blood and deathly screams, she stood in an elegant suit and a hat photographing the butchered animals hundreds of times. She died on 28 October 1963. Four years prior, she had sustained injuries after being hit by a motorcycle in Paris, resulting in her returning to Vienna.Source: Wikipedia
Nanci Milton
United States
1957
Nanci Milton is a primarily self-taught photographic artist. Her experience with the camera, film and image making began at an early age with the gift f an Instamatic from her father for whom photography was his passion though not his profession. Subsequent Christmas gifts of cameras followed, as well as access to his own various cameras. She was smitten. As the only child of artistic parents, both teachers as well, she was continually exposed to writing, image making, art viewing and inquiring into the creative process. As an only child of older parents, she also was included in many adult events, dinners, lectures, visits with artists of many arenas and backgrounds and absorbed the many layers of inspiration and process they possessed. She found it a gift to be an only child as it allowed her the access to a larger world early on and also left her to her own devices to imagine and make without the comparison or competition with a sibling. Everything was available and potent. The ''legacy'' of artists can be heavy though, and even as she continued to make images and write, she struggled to find a form that was her own. That form led to a detour into the performing arts, modern dance and theater which were her university studies. Ultimately, these fell short of what she had been immured in all her life, and the turn back o the photographic arts and writing was undeniable. The detour however undeniably informs her work with a sense of narrative and staging, in addition to a conceptual approach that pushes the images beyond the static. In a world that is in such flux, Milton is attracted to empty, vacated or in some way, disrupted spaces and how our intimately personal or common and archetypal experience layer on and stain that space, be it exterior or interior; she finds a landscape of both body and mind to reveal. There is redemption in that effort and the rescuing of the lost, and in both the symmetry and the chaos found there. Methodology and materials are less important and she utilizes any and all that will support the idea. Milton has been included in domestic and international exhibits at Praxis gallery, LA Noble Gallery, A Smith Gallery, The 9th Annual Koblenzanalog portfolio and exhibit, and was an Honorable Mention in the Fine Art category for the 17th Julia Margaret Cameron Awards.
Carolyn Drake
United States
Carolyn Drake works on long term photo-based projects seeking to interrogate dominant historical narratives and imagine alternatives to them. Her work explores community and the interactions within it, as well as the barriers and connections between people, between places and between ways of perceiving. Her practice has embraced collaboration, and through this, collage, drawing, sewing, text, and found images have been integrated into her work. She is interested in collapsing the traditional divide between author and subject, the real and the imaginary, challenging entrenched binaries. Drake was born in California and studied Media/Culture and History in the early 1990s at Brown University. Following her graduation from Brown, in 1994, Drake moved to New York and worked as a interactive concept designer for many years before departing to engage with the physical world through photography. Between 2007 and 2013, Drake traveled frequently to Central Asia from her base in Istanbul to work on two long term projects which became acclaimed bodies of work. Wild Pigeon (2014) is an amalgam of photographs, drawings, and embroideries made in collaboration with Uyghurs in western China. In 2018, the SFMOMA acquired the body of work and opened a six month solo exhibition of Wild Pigeon. Two Rivers (2013) explores the connections between ecology, culture and political power along the Amu Dary and Syr Darya rivers and was exhibited at The Pitt Rivers Museum, the Soros Foundation, the Third Floor Gallery, and the Photo Book Museum, among other venues. In Internat (2014-17), Drake worked with young women in an ex Soviet orphanage to create photographs and paintings that point beyond the walls of the institution and its gender expectations. The work was exhibited at the Houston Center for Photography in the US, and at Si Fest and Officine Fotografiche Roma in Italy. Drake returned to the US in 2014 and is now based in Vallejo, California, from where she is currently making work that upends perceptions of gender, community, and safety in her own community. Drake is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, the Lange-Taylor Prize, the Anamorphosis prize, an HCP fellowship, a Lightwork residency, and a Fulbright fellowship to Ukraine, among other awards. Her work has been published widely, in publications such as The New Yorker, Aperture, The New York Review of Books, Harpers, The New York Times Magazine, Prix Pictet, IMA, the British Journal of Photography, The Guardian, and Paris Review. She became a member of Magnum Photos in 2019. Source: carolyndrake.com
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