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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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Susan Meiselas
Susan Meiselas
United States
1948
Susan Meiselas is a documentary photographer who lives and works in New York. She is the author of Carnival Strippers (1976), Nicaragua (1981), Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997), Pandora's Box (2001), Encounters with the Dani (2003) Prince Street Girls (2016), A Room Of Their Own (2017) and Tar Beach (2020). She has co-edited two published collections: El Salvador, Work of 30 Photographers (1983) and Chile from Within (1990), rereleased as an e-book in 2013, and also co-directed two films: Living at Risk (1985) and Pictures from a Revolution (1991) with Richard P. Rogers and Alfred Guzzetti. Meiselas is well known for her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America. Her photographs are included in North American and international collections. In 1992 she was made a MacArthur Fellow, received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), and most recently the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize (2019) and the first Women in Motion Award from Kering and the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d'Arles. Mediations, a survey exhibition of her work from the 1970s to present was recently exhibited at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Jeu de Paume, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Instituto Moreira Salles in São Paulo. She has been the President of the Magnum Foundation since 2007, which supports, trains, and mentors the next generation of in-depth documentary photographers and innovative practice. About Nicaragua Susan Meiselas became known through her photo reportages on the Nicaraguan revolution. From 1978 to 1982 she documented the uprising of the Sandinistas against the then president Anastasio Somoza Debayle. Some of her photographs, foremost among them the “Molotov Man”, became iconic media images and shaped the way the Latin American revolution was perceived in the West. About Carnival Strippers The role of women has been a focal point of Meiselas’ work ever since the 1970s. In her first major photographic essay entitled Carnival Strippers (1972-1975), she showcased the working conditions of women who earned a living working as strippers at fairs in New England. She combined her photographs with audio recordings of the women, their clients, and their managers. In this project Meiselas depicts the reality of life for these protagonists and lets them tell their own stories, thereby strengthening their feeling of self-worth and their personal identity. About Prince Street Girls For the series Prince Street Girls, she accompanied young girls in Little Italy, New York City over a period of seventeen years - from childhood to puberty and on into adulthood. The photographs illustrate the gradual changes in their lives, their bodies, and their place within society. About Archive of Abuse In her series Archive of Abuse Susan Meiselas addressed the issue of domestic abuse. In the early 1990s, the photographer was invited to support an awareness-raising campaign in San Francisco on the subject of domestic violence. Meiselas used material from police reports to focus on documenting the crimes, both visually and in text. The collages created in this way were posted in public spaces to raise people’s awareness of the many different forms of violence towards women as a structural phenomenon. About Kurdistan Meiselas’ starting point for her long-term project Kurdistan was the documentation of the genocide perpetrated against the Kurds by the Iraqi regime under Saddam Hussein in northern Iraq in 1988. She created an archive that preserves a people’s cultural memory and the chequered history of the Kurdish diaspora. The multimedia project comprises photographs, videos, documents, and oral accounts compiled by the artist over a period of more than thirty years.Source: Kunst Haus Wien
Lisa Holden
Lisa Holden
United Kingdom
1961
Lisa Holden is a British-born artist based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Her earlier visual work explores notions of the self as a series of estranged identities-guises adopted and appropriated, and dependent upon context. She combines digital imagery with hand-painted layers to create 'parallel realities', referring to the exploration of displacement, adoption and the reinvention of identity as a necessity for survival. Holden's large-scale, 'digitally flawed' painting-photographs interpret and react to our super-fast-paced, technologically driven society. The result is the artist's depiction of a psychological spiral into more personal fracturing of identity, multiple transformations, and a more isolated self and society. New works clearly bear the stamp of Holden's recent interest in Victorian painting and literature in which richly colored fantasies and hallucinations were often opiate-engendered. These influences manifest themselves in images of actual dreamscapes she recalls on waking--in other words, instinctual wishes of a body and mind desiring to get out. Source www.iphotocentral.com
O. Winston Link
O. Winston Link
United States
1914 | † 2001
Ogle Winston Link (December 16, 1914 – January 30, 2001), known commonly as O. Winston Link, was an American photographer, best known for his black-and-white photography and sound recordings of the last days of steam locomotive railroading on the Norfolk & Western in the United States in the late 1950s. A commercial photographer, Link helped establish rail photography as a hobby. He also pioneered night photography, producing several well-known examples including Hotshot Eastbound, a photograph of a steam train passing a drive-in movie theater, and Hawksbill Creek Swimming Hole showing a train crossing a bridge above children bathing. O. Winston Link and his siblings, Eleanor and Albert Jr., spent their childhood in the borough of Brooklyn, New York City, where they lived with their parents, Albert Link, Sr. and Anne Winston Jones Link. Link's given names honor ancestors Alexander Ogle and John Winston Jones, who had served in the U.S. House of Representatives in the 19th century. Al Link taught woodworking in the New York City Public School system, and encouraged his children's interest in arts and crafts, and first introduced Winston to photography. Link's early photography was created with a borrowed medium format Autographic Kodak camera. By the time he was in high school, he had built his own photographic enlarger. After completing high school, Link attended the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, receiving a degree in civil engineering. Before his graduation in 1937, he spoke at a banquet for the institute's newspaper, where he served as photo editor. An executive from Carl Byoir's public relations firm was present and was impressed by Link's speaking ability. He offered Link a job as a photographer. O. Winston Link worked for Carl Byoir and Associates for five years, learning his trade on the job. He adapted to the technique of making posed photographs looking candid, as well as creatively emphasizing a point. On his first major assignment, to photograph part of the state of Louisiana in the summer of 1937, he found himself in New Iberia, the location where Cecil B. DeMille's 1938 movie "The Buccaneer", about Jean LaFitte was being filmed. Here he met his future first wife, a former Miss Ark-La-Tex, now actress/model/body double, Vanda Marteal Oglesby, who stood-in for lead actress Franciska Gaal. They 'took a shine' to one another and later that year she posed for some of his photographs in the French Quarter of New Orleans. They eventually married in 1942, but later divorced. Some of Link's photographs from this time included an image of a man aiming a gun at a pig wearing a bulletproof vest, and one eventually known as What Is This Girl Selling? or Girl on Ice, which was widely published in the United States and later featured in Life as a "classic publicity picture. According to Thomas Garver, a later assistant to Link, during his employment at Byoir's firm, Link "clearly defined a point of view and developed working methods that were to shape his entire career." While in Staunton, Virginia, for an industrial photography job in 1955, O. Winston Link's longstanding love of railroads became focused on the nearby Norfolk and Western Railway line. N&W was the last major (Class I) railroad to make the transition from steam to diesel motive power and had refined its use of steam locomotives, earning a reputation for "precision transportation." Link took his first night photograph of the road on January 21, 1955, in Waynesboro, Virginia. On May 29, 1955 the N&W announced its first conversion to diesel and Link's work became a documentation of the end of the steam era. He returned to Virginia for about twenty visits to continue photographing the N&W. His last night shot was taken in 1959 and the last of all in 1960, the year the road completed the transition to diesel, by which time he had accumulated 2400 negatives on the project. Although it was entirely self-financed, Link's work was encouraged and facilitated by N&W officials, from President Robert Hall Smith downwards. Besides the locomotives, he captured the people of the N&W performing their jobs on the railroad and in the trackside communities. Some of his images were of the massive Roanoke Shops, where the company had long built and maintained its own locomotives. O. Winston Link's images were always meticulously set up and posed, and he chose to take most of his railroad photographs at night. He said "I can't move the sun — and it's always in the wrong place — and I can't even move the tracks, so I had to create my own environment through lighting." Although others, including Philip Hastings and Jim Shaughnessy, had photographed locomotives at night before, Link's vision required him to develop new techniques for flash photography of such large subjects. For instance, the movie theater image Hotshot Eastbound (Iaeger, West Virginia), photographed on August 2, 1956 [negative NW1103], used 42 #2 flashbulbs and one #0 fired simultaneously. Link, with an assistant such as George Thom, had to lug all his equipment into position and wire it up: this was done in series so any failure would prevent a picture being taken at all; and in taking night shots of moving trains the right position for the subject could only be guessed at. Link used a 4 x 5 Graphic View view camera with black and white film, from which he produced silver gelatin prints. From 1960 until he retired in 1983 Link devoted himself to advertising. Among notable pictures taken during this period are those recording construction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and other views of New York Harbor including the great ocean liners. In retirement, Link moved to South Salem, Westchester County, New York. In 1996, Link's second wife, Conchita, was arrested for (and later convicted of) stealing a collection of Link's photographs and attempting to sell them, claiming that Link had Alzheimer's disease and that she had power of attorney. She served six years in prison. After being released, she again attempted to sell some of Link's works that she had stolen, this time using the Internet auction site eBay. She received a three-year sentence. Conchita was also accused of imprisoning her husband. However, this allegation is disputed by some, and it never led to any criminal charges against Conchita. The story of Winston and Conchita became the subject of the documentary "The Photographer, His Wife, Her Lover" (2005) made by Paul Yule. Link made a cameo appearance as a steam locomotive engineer in the 1999 film October Sky. He was actively involved with the planning of a museum of his work when he suffered a heart attack near his home in South Salem. He was transported to Northern Westchester Hospital in Mt. Kisco, Westchester County, NY where he died on January 30, 2001. Mr. Link was interred adjacent to his parents in Elmwood Cemetery, Shepherdstown, Jefferson County, West Virginia.Source: Wikipedia Link's reasons for shooting at night were simple. For one, it was more romantic and dramatic. For Link the trains were comparable to Garbo and Dietrich at their most glamorous. Secondly, steam from the trains against a night sky photographed white. Against a day sky it came out a dirty grey. Whatever the circumstances, Link's pictures were an intense labor of love. Indeed, he discovered, shortly after starting the Norfolk and Western project, that no one was much interested in photographs of a fast disappearing mode of transport. This was, after all, the beginning of the era of the great American car. At first Link's photographs were appreciated for their combination of nostalgia, technical virtuosity, and – partly due to Link's famously cranky character and disposition - almost outsider artist's vision. But as photography has moved on, Link's work is increasingly seen and appreciated for the degree to which he controlled, planned, and constructed each image, prefiguring such well known contemporary artists as Gregory Crewdson and Jeff Wall, both of whom willingly acknowledge their interest in and appreciation of Link's work. His work has been exhibited throughout the U.S., Europe and in Japan and is present in numerous major museum collections around the world. His rail photography is exhibited at the O. Winston Link Museum in Roanoke, Virginia, refurbished by the famous industrial designer, Raymond Loewy, which opened in 2004.Source: Danziger Gallery
Bettina Rheims
Bettina Rheims
France
1952
Bettina Rheims, born Bettina Caroline Germaine Rheims is a French artist and photographer. She began her career with a series of images of striptease dancers and acrobats, and over the years she became one of the most notable persons behind the lens. "I adore flesh. I am a skin photographer," she says famously, and that perfectly explains her work. It is raw and erotic, frequently involving nudity and stuffed animals, and she achieves a visceral emotion that captivates the audience. Some of her most well-known pieces raise problems of gender, androgyny, and transsexuality. Although Bettina Rheims began with obscure and marginalized subjects, her later assignments included advertising campaigns for fashion and major brands like Chanel and Lancôme, as well as prominent international magazines. Madonna, Charlotte Rampling, Catherine Deneuve, Kylie Minogue, Claudia Schiffer, and many others were photographed by Rheims. And there's something indisputably human and true in every photograph she takes, perhaps too natural and personal. I have always believed that whether the work is my idea or a commission, it is personal work.... In the end, as my old master Helmut Newton used to say, there are only two kinds of pictures: the good ones and the bad ones. -- Bettina Rheims Bettina Rheims was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. She is the daughter of the French Academy's Maurice Rheims. She began her career as a photographer in 1978, at the age of 26, after working as a model, a journalist, and running an art gallery. Initially, she accomplished a lot of commissioned work, such as record covers for Jean-Jacques Goldman and celebrity portraits. She devoted herself entirely to photography beginning in 1980. She created a series of images of strippers and acrobats, which were presented in two personal exhibits in Paris in 1981, at the Centre Pompidou and the Galerie Texbraun. Encouraged by her success, she began work on a series of plush animal portraits, which were shown in Paris and New York. In 1982, Rheims' Animal series allowed her to focus her lens on a different type of nudity: stuffed animals with fixed looks, "which seemed to desire to express something beyond death." "I had to capture their stare," the photographer claimed. The photographer questioned gender, androgyny, and transsexuality in Modern Lovers (1989-1990). Les Espionnes (1992) and Kim (1993) were two subsequent publications on the same subject (1994). At the same time she took portrait images for worldwide magazines and advertising campaigns (Well and Chanel), created her first fashion series, worked on cover sleeves, and film posters, and in 1986 directed her first advertising campaign. Her female portraits were published in a monograph, Female Trouble, in 1989, and exhibited in Germany and Japan. The next year, she created Modern Lovers, a series of portraits of androgynous youths that were presented in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as being published in book form. I still find myself having to justify being a woman taking pictures of naked women. It never occurred to me that there was something bizarre about it, it always felt very natural. -- Bettina Rheims Bettina Rheims began work on one of her major series, Chambre Close, in the early 1990s (1990-1992). This was her first color work, and it marked the beginning of her partnership with novelist Serge Bramly, in which her images were combined with the writer's fiction. Chambre Close is a parody of the first pornographic images in form — chambers with fading walls and old-fashioned wallpaper — but in substance, it attempts to stage amateur models in stances that play on the eroticism and misunderstanding between those looking and those displaying themselves. At the close of his presidential campaign in 1995, Jacques Chirac allowed Rheims to work behind the scenes on a series of images depicting the last moments of the election. Following the election, the French Republic's Presidency commissioned Bettina Rheims to create the official picture of Jacques Chirac. According to Libération, she intended to give the President "the easygoing look of the great heroes in westerns." The decade ended with the publishing of the book I.N.R.I. and its accompanying exhibition in 1999. I.N.R.I. constructs a philosophical debate on the history of the crucifixion through images of episodes from Christ's life, from the Annunciation to the Ascension, once again connecting the gaze of Rheims with the writing of Serge Bramly. Bettina Rheims advocated "modern illustrations, following the advent of photography, cinema, and advertising imagery, as if Jesus were to return today." The release of this work was highly contentious in France. During two long stays in Shanghai in 2002, Bettina Rheimsmade a series about the city. "The initial impressions of a visitor coming in Shanghai are of people with deep-rooted ancestral rituals and customs who have thrown themselves into the frenzied race of the modern world." Rheims, blending into this 'alternative way of thinking,' offers us a fresh perspective on the enigma that is China's coexistence with its millenary traditions, avant-garde facet, official elements, and underground qualities. Rheims exhibited Héroïnes, a piece that was essentially an homage to sculpture, at the Galerie De Noirmont in 2005. On this occasion, the photographer worked with designer Jean Colonna to outfit the women in unique outfits. "Thus, old haute couture gowns were reassembled on each of these contemporary icons. These unusually beautiful women then toyed with a stone, which became their pedestal for a brief while." Bettina Rheims collaborated with Serge Bramly again at the end of the 2000s, and Rose, c'est Paris was shown at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in 2010. Bettina Rheims and Serge Bramly crafted a fictional thread from autobiographical parts for the photographic story. In this piece, Paris plays "the role of the muse more than the subject, and [appears] in an almost allegorical manner through the figures weaved into a story." A young woman we'll call B. is hunting for Rose, her twin sister who she thinks has vanished. Rose, c'est Paris is presented as a "great mysterious series," a genre beloved by surrealists, and is divided into thirteen episodes in which we discover, among other things, an unusual or obscure Paris that is voluntarily timeless." Exhibited in 2012 in Düsseldorf, the Gender Studies series pursues the questioning of gender representation. The device linking image and sound (by Frédéric Sanchez) presents 27 sound portraits of young men and women who responded to a request the photographer posted on Facebook. The photos are accompanied by interview clips and have featured in several exhibitions and a book. Rheims has also worked on advertising campaigns for fashion and big brands, such as Chanel and Lancôme, as well as taking portraits of famous women for international magazines. Rheims says that she has been inspired by Diane Arbus and Helmut Newton as well as by the work of early painters.
Rena Effendi
Rena Effendi
Azerbaijan
1977
Rena Effendi's early work focused on oil industry's effects on people's lives. As a result, she followed a 1,700 km oil pipeline through Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey, collecting stories along the way. This work was published in 2009 in her first book: "Pipe Dreams A chronicle of lives along the pipeline". In 2013, Rena Effendi published her second monograph "Liquid Land" where her images are paired with photographs of perished butterflies hunted by her father, a Soviet entomologist, who collected more than 30,000 butterflies in Soviet Union. Liquid Land punctuates the theme of fragility and environmental decay of Baku, the city where Effendi was born and grew up. Effendi has received many international awards including the Alexia 2018 Professional Grant, the Prince Claus Fund Award for Culture and Development, World Press Photo (for observed portraits in 2014), SONY World Photography Award (fine art category), Getty Images Editorial Grant and was short-listed for the Prix Pictet Award in Photography and Sustainability. Rena Effendi is represented by National Geographic Creative agency and ILEX Gallery. Rena Effendi's work has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide including at the Saatchi Gallery, Miami Art Basel, Istanbul Modern, and the 52nd Venice Biennial. She has worked on editorial assignments for the National Geographic, The New Yorker, Newsweek, TIME, The New York Times magazine, Vogue, Marie Claire, The Sunday Times, GEO and others.
Hilary Duffy
Hilary Duffy
United States
Hilary began her photography career in news and travel for The Tico Times while she lived in Costa Rica in the 1990's. Over the course of seven years, she immersed herself in the culture of Costa Rica as an educator and honed her photography skills. In 2000, Hilary graduated from the International Center of Photography's Documentary/PJ Program and later assisted the Maine Photo Workshops in Havana, Cuba. Compelled to share photography with local youth, she developed a photo library and directed the Havana Youth Photo course in 2003—sharing her passion for photography and educating a younger generation. As a recipient of the ICP/Johnson & Johnson Fellowship in 2002 and 2004, Hilary completed assignments for Johnson & Johnson's corporate social responsibility at the U.S.-Mexico border, then India and Vietnam. This led to subsequent assignments for NGOs in the U.S., Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and tsunami-affected regions. Hilary's international work and experience provided the opportunity to document the plight and rehabilitation of street children for Covenant House/Latin America. Her project Young Lives at Risk on the Streets was featured on Media Voices for Children, PhotoPhilanthropy and socialdocumentary.net. These collaborations have allowed Hilary to strengthen her passion as a socially concerned photographer and led to a permanent exhibit at Covenant House Headquarters in New York City. In addition, Hilary has exhibited in Costa Rica, Cuba, Guatemala and the U.S. And her stock photography has been represented in Aurora, Corbis and the National Geographic Image Collection. Hilary's curiosity, honesty, compassion and cultural sensitivity are reflected in her imagery.
Giorgio Di Maio
Giorgio Di Maio
Italy
1963
Giorgio Di Maio (1963, Naples) begins to take photos during his Architectural studies (1990),where he understood the strength of the photography as a mean to extrapolate from the reality a piece of the reality itself, independent in the shape and in the substance having a own narrative meaning. The expositive activity (since 1992) and the professional one (since 1993) went forward together, and every kind of restructuring activity is an opportunity for linguistic research. In 2003 he held a Master in "Fotografia dello spettacolo" by Silvia Lelli, At European Institute of Design in Milano, that introduced him to a deep research into the American Photography. Between 20017 and 2010, in Basilicata, he developed the series "Paesaggi lucani" and tried in the same period the digital photo machine. In Di Maio, then, woke up his environmental soul that bring the artist in 2011 to a new exhibition "Non è Napoli" dedicated to his own city and its beauty during the rubbish scandal. Since 2013 he slowed down the architect profession starting to study philosophy as theorical support to the practical photography, going from Naples to Milan very often, and vice versa. Then he creates" Armonia nascosta", from his studies, that is written with a specific modus operandi, aware of his reasons and purpose. Starting form Heraclitus, the Hidden Harmony show the transmigration of the mystical and philosophical roots of Paul Klee e Vassilij Kandinskij's abstract art til the photography, transforming it into a growth process both spiritual and social of a man, who goes through the evidence of the visual data looking for the Hidden Harmony as it appears today. Some projects "I sentieri dell'acqua e Chiaroscuro" (2013-2014), "Feminine, Photokina" (2016), "Cristianesimo Arte e Paganesimo" (2017), "Correspondances" (2018), "Milano in Armonia" (2018), "Il mare di Leopardi (2020), always continuing his studies of the immaterial in the material world. In 2017 he published his Photographic-philosophic web site of his research, that will be considered by different international photographic magazines. Then he started an intense exhibitions period, among public exhibition and festivals, having so many positive feedbacks from the public but also from the sector critical. In 2019, the Prof. Guido Ferraro, full professor of "Semiotica e Teoria della narrazione" at Torino's University, named Di Maio's research with those by Franco Fontana, Luigi Ghirri and Mario Giacomelli. Giorgio di Maio goes from a city to another, looking for the Hidden Harmony in nowadays reality. About Hidden Harmony The project that I would represent is the mystical and philosophical roots of Abstract Art transmigration into the Photography. The Art as knowledge tool to understand the sense. Going over the phenomenon, the appearances, searching for the law that create each event, for everyone also individual or being part of a whole. Basically there is the rejection of materialism, the faith in progress and particularly the faith in the spiritual progress of the men helped from the artist which "has in himself a mysterious visionary force....to see and to show". The photographer artist isn't a perfected camera who think that the knowledge and the experiences are only a replica of reality, who limit to reproduction of the exteriority, closed from the barriers of the phenomenon, but he know and must to express an ethical content which he gets from the sensitive data. The equilibrium that comes out from the tens and integration of differences, where the opposites converge completing themselves and the materiality falls to leave space to the spiritual presence, transform every shot in a travel through the space-time instances, instead of being the static representation of the place. In the Photography the language remain the same, using shape and color like the musical notes that touch the soul when you press a key and the human spirit vibrate. The research is the Harmony: to identify in the reality different elements in contrast with each other but in a unitary composition to create a mutual stimulating of the sense of balance and rest. The Peace. The expressionism of Der Blaue Reiter started in the of age of the new spirituality. Instead the wars and the extermination camps comes. It doesn't mean that the materialism has won but only a wrong idea of the temporal date. We don't know how much time need to achieve the spiritual progress of the humanity, maybe thousands of years or more. The important thing is that each era made a new step in right direction and in the contemporary era the Photography could be the most powerful means to give a contribution in this way.
Paul Fusco
Paul Fusco
United States
1930 | † 2020
John Paul Fusco (August 2, 1930 – July 15, 2020) was an American photojournalist. Fusco is known in particular for his photographs of Robert F. Kennedy's funeral train, the 1966 Delano Grape strike and the human toll of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Fusco began his career as a photographer for Look magazine, and was a member of Magnum Photos from 1973 until his death in 2020. Paul Fusco was born in Leominster, Massachusetts, and started pursuing photography as a hobby at the age of 14. During the Korean War, from 1951 to 1953, he gained more experience while he worked as a photographer for the United States Army Signal Corps. He first studied at Drake University and in 1957 received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in photojournalism from Ohio University. He then moved to New York City to work professionally as a photographer. Fusco first worked for Look Magazine in New York City. While working there, in 1968, he took what would become a well-known series of photographs of mourners along the route of Robert F. Kennedy's funeral train. His photography often documented social issues and injustices, such as poverty, ghetto life, the early days of the HIV crisis, and cultural experimentation across America. His 1966 photos of California's Delano grape strike documented migrant farmworkers' struggles to form a union, supported by Caesar Chavez. The photos were released as a book, with text by George D. Horowitz, titled La Causa: The California Grape Strike. Fusco moved to Mill Valley, California in the 1970s. In 1973 he became an associate of Magnum Photos and a full member a year later. Over the years, Fusco also contributed to such publications as Life, Mother Jones, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Psychology Today, and TIME Magazine. Fusco also worked internationally covering events in Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. In the late 1990s, he spent two months making photographs of the lingering effects of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Belarus, eventually published in the book Chernobyl Legacy, which featured a foreword by Kofi Annan. In the early 2000s, Fusco pursued a personal project he called Bitter Fruit, documenting the funerals of US service members killed in the Iraq War. He left Mill Valley for New Jersey in 1993, but later returned to California, in 2009, to live in Marin County. Fusco died on July 15, 2020, aged 89, in San Anselmo, California. Many of his photographs are in the Magnum Photos archive currently held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Two hundred of his photographs of the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee and Caesar Chavez, taken during a farm worker's strike in Delano, California, are held by the Library of Congress, as are 1,800 Kodachrome slides taken in June 1968 from the funeral train carrying Robert Kennedy's body from New York City to Washington, D.C., for burial in Arlington National Cemetery.Source: Wikipedia
José Ney Milá Espinosa
José Ney Milá Espinosa
Cuba
1959
José Ney Milá Espinosa, of Cuban nationality, was born in Havana on March 4, 1959. He is a self-taught photographer, recognized within documentary photography and auteur photography since the mid-1980s. Initially trained as a technical drawer, artisan artist, civil designer, and finally abandoned his career in architecture for photography. He received several awards in his country in drawing, painting, applied arts and photography, but his greatest achievements were from the early 90s, in international photography salons, achieving numerous awards and distinctions throughout his career. Much of his work is in permanent collections such as the Southeast Museum of Photography Daytona; Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; Houston Museum of Fine Arts; Lehigh University Art Galleries / Museum Operation, Bethlehem, PA; Inés María Galerie, Houston; Mother Jones International. Fund for Documentary Photog, San Francisco; Fotofest, Houston, USA; Museum of Fine Arts of Santo Domingo. Dominican R.; Toscano Photographic Archive, Italy; UNESCO / ACCU, Tokyo. Japan; World Press Photo Foundation. Holland; University of La Rabida, Huelva. Spain; Media Library, INAH, Mexico; Galerie Bilderwelt Reinhard Schultz. Berlin Germany; National Museum of Photography, Pachuca, Mexico, and Fototeca de Cuba among others. His dedication and innovation in the chemical processes of analog photography led him to develop new formulas for film development that surpassed the results and practices of the Black and White laboratory, of the avant-garde of the time such as Tetenal, Ilford, and Kodak. . He presented his inventions at the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office and marketed them at Casanova Profesional (specialized store in Barcelona) in partnership with Luis Casademunt (photographer) in 1997 and later in 1998, with Isaac Donoso (businessman in Madrid) to guarantee industrial production by a commercial contract signed with the international company JOBO, well known for its laboratory instruments (Labortechnik, GmbH & Co. KG. Gmbh) of Cologne, Germany. His new formulas were published in the catalog of the year of JOBO products as New fine art line “The new generation fine art B / N chemistry” Page 70 and back cover, presented during the International Festival "FOTOKINA 2000" Kolonia, Germany, with the technical support of various specialists on the subject, such as the English John Tisley and the North American, John Sexton among others. In addition, various tests were published in various specialized magazines of the time, such as SCHWARZWEISS 27 (Das magazin für fotografie) "Auf anderer Wellenlänge", November, Germany. 2000; F.V. Nº 149. “Jobo: new Classic Line products”, Spain. 2001; Super Photo. No. 67. "Diary of a personalized development" Spain. 2001 and Super Photo. No. 70. "Diary of a personalized development (II)", Spain. 2001.
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