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Denis Church
Denis Church
Denis Church

Denis Church

Country: United States
Birth: 1949

I grew up on an Iowa (USA) farm and drove trucks, tractors, and heavy machinery at a very young age. I loved being out in the weather and open-air fields. One of my earliest memories is riding with my parents when they took a drive to look at area agricultural crops freshly planted and growing in the springtime. These trips inspired my current desire to make car trips to see the world. I studied psychology and sociology in college and was planning a career as a counseling psychologist. These experiences formed my inclination to photograph in public outdoor areas and investigate how the world is “painted and put together”.

I acquired a very good expensive camera on a total whim a long time ago, and something radical shifted for me. I left graduate school six credits shy of a master’s degree to pursue the art of photography, which I intuitively felt was my path to truth, instead of the science. I have held many jobs: farm hand, gas station attendant, auto dealer parts manager, car salesman, government employee in two different states, free-lance commercial photographer, real estate investor, landlord, property developer, and photography instructor.

Photography has been my main energizing activity for fifty years, for both commercial clients and for myself, pursuing and refining my personal vision of the world. My photographic aesthetic is based on observational street/documentary photography. I currently have several self-assigned documentary projects that I am pursuing. My interest is producing photo-books as a depository for my work, that have availability to future generations.

AMERICOLOR - Exploring Urban Color Fields
The series or project is a retrospective look at my work from 2007 to 2024. I saw a large exhibition of Color Field painters in early 2024 at The NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, Florida. A painting by Frank Stella particularly enthralled me and I was puzzled why it had such a strong hold on me. A few days later while I was editing photographs I came across my photograph, Bonita Springs, Florida 2012, and I immediately felt a connection and the reason why the Stella painting was so entrancing. I found that many of my photographs have a similar feel with layered subjects and a planar feel: some more, some less. I decided to edit a group of photographs into a book paying homage to the color field painters, therefore my title, AMERICOLOR: Exploring Urban Color Fields. Recently in 2024, I published this book in collaboration with Palm Beach Atlantic University where I also presented an exhibition of about one third of the 116 photographs in the book.

Website

www.dennischurch.com

 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Luigi Avantaggiato
Luigi Avantaggiato
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Born in Zurich in 1984, Luigi Avantaggiato is a Rome based freelance photographer specialized in documentary, editorial, and cross-media project. He started working as a documentary photographer after his doctoral studies in Visual Studies, which helped him to develop a profound interest in global social and environmental issues. Because of his work he has visited several countries in the world in state of emergency: Lebanon, Iraq, Colombia, Greece, Kosovo. His images have been published in several newspapers and magazines, such as Il Corriere della Sera, D di Repubblica, Panorama, VICE, Lensculture and others. His works took part in several international exhibitions, such as Photomed Festival (Sanary-sur-Mer, 2017), FotoGrafia – International Festival of Photography of Rome XI ed. (Rome, 2012), Fotografia Europea (Reggio Emilia, 2014), Juraplaz (Bienne, 2014) Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (Firenze, 2015) and others. He teaches at Sapienza – University of Rome and in several private academies. He is author of book essays and papers about photography, cinema and visual arts.About Dove tramonta l’Occidente (Where the West Sets) In the past few years, international governments, institutions, and media have used the expression “refugee crisis” to describe rising numbers of undocumented individuals and families fleeing to Europe from countries such as Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, where they face harsh challenges, including war, poverty, persecution, and human rights violations. Hoping to start a new life in Europe and looking for a new identity, thousands of refugees have braved the Mediterranean Sea on board of inflatable boats and makeshift vessels, driven by an idea of Europe as the land where their dreams will be realized. Some of these people decide to cross the sea illegally only to become refugees and to enjoy the benefits of this status. Where the West Sets is a documentary project that attempts to chronicle this crisis as it plays out on the northern Aegean Islands and in mainland Greece – the same territories where Western Culture and its system of values were born. The aesthetics of my work lies on an approach that had me go to those places not as a reporter looking for facts but as a documentarist trying to verify facts. The series of photographs reflects the consequences that the refugee crisis is having on the cradle of civilization, whereas the traditional value of respecting other human beings is meeting feelings of hostility, fear, and xenophobia among the Greeks. In the same country that gave birth to philosophy, science and anthropology, people are living among refugees in an uncertain and disordered way, holding tightly to their self- referential and contradictory values, belonging to a Europe that is now diminished but that is frantically trying to redefine its own identity.
Elena Donskaya
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Denis Olivier
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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
John Francis
John Francis
United States
1949
John Francis grew up in the midwestern town of Independence, Missouri. He is a husband and father living a quiet life in Boise, Idaho. John studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and then went on to receive a BS degree at the University of Cincinnati and received his MS degree in Communication from Florida State University. He taught at Boise State University and the College of Idaho and still teaches photography. John is interested in exploring the parameters of landscape photography and pushing the boundaries of how it is viewed, not only as a physical space but a cultural one. John has shown work throughout the United States, Japan, and Germany. He has exhibited nationally and internationally and won numerous awards for his photography. Work Explanation: I create images that touch on the less than serious side of myself-too much in life seems serious enough. The simple purpose of these photographs is to reflect a wink and the suggestion of a smile from within my deeper self. The work is an open response to the unexpected or incongruous that I encounter, the visible surprises in life. The images represent a happenstance or an oddity I found in a particular place or situation. They collectively add up to a world view that may be a little askew; but I hope an uplifting one. Shadows often play into my imagery, the added ingredient of mystery.
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