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FINAL DAYS TO WIN A SOLO EXHIBITION IN MAY 2026
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Lauren Stewart
Lauren Stewart
Lauren Stewart

Lauren Stewart

Country: United States
Birth: 1983

Lauren Stewart is a self-taught American documentary & street photographer. She graduated from the College of Charleston in 2005 with a degree in English. From 2017 to 2019 she lived in and traveled through China, Nepal, India and Thailand where she covered South East Asia. Her work focuses on documenting people’s daily lives to make global cross-cultural connections between the viewer and the subject. Her work has appeared in numerous international publications such as Suitcase Magazine, Electrify Magazine, Matador Network, NR Magazine as well as others. She was selected to be a part of the inaugural Women Street Photographers exhibit in 2018 in New York City and was also a finalist in the WSP exhibitions in 2019 and 2024. Her work has also been included in the PHOS Street Photography Days Exhibition in Bulgaria in 2018 and most recently in PHOTO SC’s Feminism exhibition in Columbia, South Carolina in 2024. She currently lives in the United States with her family while working on both street photography as well as long-term documentary projects revolving around the culture of the American South.
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Andre Cypriano
Brazil
1964
A native of Brazil, André Cypriano was born in 1964 and educated in São Paulo with a university degree in business administration. Concerned with environmental issues, he contributed time and effort as the administrator of "Salva Mar" Save the Sea - a Brazilian organization dedicated to save the whales in North Brazil.In 1990, one year after relocating to the U.S., André began to study photography in San Francisco. He has since completed several projects which have been exhibited in several galleries and museums in Brazil and the USA.André has been a recipient of the first place award in San Francisco City College's Photography Department of Scholarship (July 1992), first runner-up in the World Image Award Competition promoted by Photo District News in N.Y. (Dec. 1992), first place in New Works Awards - promoted by En Foco in N.Y. (July 1998), as well as first place in the Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography (Oct. 1998). As part of a long term project, Cypriano began to document traditional lifestyles and practices of lesser known societies in remote corners of the world with a slant toward the unique and unusual. Thus far, he has photographed the people of Nias, an island off the northwest coast of Sumatra (Nias: Jumping Stones), the dogs of Bali (Spiritual Quest), the infamous penitentiary of Candido Mendes, in Rio de Janeiro (The Devil's Caldron), as well as the largest shanty town in Latin America, Rio de Janeiro (Rocinha - An Orphan Town). His ongoing projects have been used in educational workshops.Currently, André Cypriano works as a free-lance photographer in New York and continues to be involved in social and cultural activities.
Formento & Formento
United States/United Kingdom
BJ Formento is the light. Richeille Formento is the pigment. This dynamic husband-wife team have made an art of their unique strain of photography. Exuding an eerie sensuality combined with a narrative cinematic sensibility, the ambiguous nature of the characters and scenarios remind us of David Lynch and Hopper-esque landscapes. They couldn’t have landed in the photographic landscape at a more opportune moment. With the enormous interest in their work—success is eminent. Vogue Italia has been a forerunner and loyal supporter of their work, as well as cutting edge magazines like Aesthetica, Blink, Musee and L’oeil de la Photographie. 2012 was a breakthrough year for F+F. They were nominated top finalist to American Vogue’s New Exposure Competition working with Bottega Venetta and Red Digital Camera. In 2014 their works were selected by Alessia Glaviano, photo editor of Vogue Italia and L’Uomo Vogue for a “Glimpse at Photo Vogue” at Carla Sozzani Gallery and in 2015 for “45 Frames from Photo Vogue” at Leica Milan Gallery. Amazing response from the shows at Art Basel Miami Beach, Aipad and Armory NYC. Solo exhibitions across Europe starting in Paris, London, Berlin, Stuttgart and Dusseldorf. Their work also been exhibited in New York at Edelman Arts Gallery in February 2013. The most notable event this year is the publication of their first coffee table book by YK editions, as well as a film to promote the book which has been shown this fall at the Pompidou in Paris. Fahey Klein Gallery has offered them the coveted summer slot and the inaugural exhibition of Japan Diaries. A Photo Shanghai booth dedicated to their works Circumstance, September 2014. The inaugural exhibition of “She is Cuba” at Art Miami 2014 was received with great applause as well as the celebrity studded opening at Miami Fahey Klein and Chrome Hearts during Art Basel 2014. BJ Formento was born in Hawaii and grew up in the Philippines, studied in San Francisco and moved to New York in 1999. Richeille Formento was born in London and attended the prestigious Central St. Martins College of Art before working as an art director and designer in the fashion industry. They split their time between NYC and Miami with their 3 siamese cats.
Mitch Rouse
United States
1940
Mitch was a transportation entrepreneur in Long Beach, and is now a photographer based out of Cody, Wyoming. Before Mitch shot aerial images, he was an avid self-taught landscape photographer. In the realm of aerial photography, he began with with high tech drones and evolved into flying fixed wing. Unsatisfied with the limitations of these methods, he has now found the sweet spot between the two, by developing a system that incorporates a Bell helicopter with a 150 MP Phase One Industrial camera, inside a Shot Over gimbal, mounted to its nose. Mitch most enjoys shooting abstract land patterns and beautiful farmlands throughout the western states. He is also interested in industrial sites including agriculture, transportation, shipping, ports, solar power, wind power, oil and gas. His current projects include Los Angeles - Long Beach Harbor, piers of California, highway interchanges, oil and gas fields in the Central Valley of California, agriculture in the Central Valley of California, and agriculture in the Palouse region Washington, Oregon and Idaho. Top Views of The Palouse Symmetrical farmscapes and the asymmetrical patterns of natural landscapes have always been intriguing to Mitch Rouse, a photographer based out of Cody, Wyoming. Over the last four years, his passion for landscape photography and his deep desire to capture a unique perspective, evolved into taking to the skies with the right technology to capture those exclusive scenes from above. The Palouse in SE Washington is one of his favourite places to explore. Due to its geological heritage, the rolling hills of grasses are an endless sea. Farmland is scattered over this peculiar dune-like landscape, which formed sometime during the last several ice ages, when glacial silt was blown across the region forming dunes called "loess". The farmers who settled on this land had to develop methods of successful harvesting, where to avoid the steep slopes becoming hazardous to their tractors and combines, they would plough along the contours of the hills, this led to the use of special self-levelling harvesters that can cut crops safely and efficiently by constantly adjusting to the different gradients of the slopes. As you can imagine, the lines and patterns that these farming techniques produce, combined with the already picturesque landscape, are captivating from the air. These aerial photographs of The Palouse captured by Mitch, resemble topographical maps where the colour contrasts, line patterns and contour shapes have become a distinctive form of art. Two seasons in The Palouse are equally magnificent in their colours and textures. Mitch enjoys capturing both the vibrant green silky grass seas of Springtime, and the golden brown rough textures of the Harvest. The most appealing thing about photographing The Palouse is this combination of classic features of farmland, spread across this canvas of ‘dunes', resulting in truly mesmerising endless lines in both linear, and in curved patterns, with the play of the light across those textures and gradients, creating shadows and variations in the colour spectrums of the greens and yellows or of the browns and the golds. The aerial perspective gives these abstract art forms a boldness that cannot be fully appreciated from the ground. Mitch's favourite lens to use is a 35mm. This is due to its versatility with 100mp resolution, he can crop in with fantastic detail, or leave it at a wide angle. We think you'll agree that these resulting shots are really stunning and showcase this truly individual area of American geography.
Ernest Cole
South Africa
1940 | † 1990
Ernest Cole was born in South Africa’s Transvaal in 1940 and died in New York City in 1990. During his life he was known for only one book: House of Bondage – published in 1967. In 2011, the Hasselblad Foundation produced a follow-up: Ernest Cole: Photographer. Cole’s early work chronicled the horrors of apartheid and in 1966 he fled the Republic of South Africa becoming a ‘banned person’. He was briefly associated with Magnum Photographers and received funding from the Ford Foundation and Time-Life. In North America, he concentrated on street photography in primarily urban settings. Between 1969 and 1971, Cole spent an extensive amount of time on regular visits to Sweden where he became involved with the Tiofoto collective and exhibited his work. From 1972, Cole’s life fell into disarray and he ceased to work as a photographer, losing control of his archive and negatives in the process. Having experienced periods of homelessness, Cole died aged forty-nine of pancreatic cancer in 1990. In 2017, more than 60,000 of Cole’s negatives missing for more than forty years were discovered in a Stockholm bank vault. This work is now being examined and catalogued.Source: Magnum Photos Ernest Cole (1940–1990)—one of South Africa’s first black photo-journalists—created powerful photographs that revealed to the world what it meant to be black under apartheid. With imaginative daring, courage, and compassion, Cole portrayed the everyday lives of blacks as they negotiated apartheid’s racist laws and oppression. Apartheid, which means “apartness” in Afrikaans (the language of South Africa’s white minority of Dutch descent), was an often brutally enforced legal policy that separated people by race in all aspects of life, within a white supremacist hierarchy of power. Born in Eersterust, a black freehold township in Pretoria, Cole was forcibly relocated with his family to nearby Mamelodi in the late 1950s. While still a teenager, he began working as a darkroom assistant at Drum, a black lifestyle magazine in Johannesburg. There he mingled with young black South African photographers, journalists, jazz musicians, and leaders of the burgeoning anti-apartheid movement. Inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photo-essays, Cole embarked on a life mission to produce a book that would awaken the rest of the world to apartheid’s corrosive effects. House of Bondage was published in New York in 1967. Although it was immediately banned in South Africa, contraband copies spurred on the country’s emerging activist photographers. Cole’s images are hard-hitting and incendiary, yet often subtle and even elegant. He frequently worked clandestinely with a hidden camera to capture scenes he was forbidden to photograph, employing striking perspectives and framing. Many of the prints on view here are displayed for the first time uncropped, as he originally intended, and often accompanied by House of Bondage’s incisive captions. In 1966 Cole was arrested by the South African police. Fleeing to Europe, he took with him little more than the layouts for his book. He spent the remaining 23 years of his life in painful exile between Sweden and the United States; after 1975 he was often destitute, living on New York City streets and in the subway. In 1990 he died of cancer at the age of 49—one week after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. Nearly all his possessions were lost; fortunately, he had given some prints to Tio Fotografer, a Swedish photographers’ association, which later donated them to the Hasselblad Foundation. Bringing this remarkable artist’s works to the international stage, Ernest Cole Photographer commemorates his pioneering efforts to capture the complex truths of day-to-day, lived experiences during harrowing times. Critiquing institutionalized segregation and celebrating human resilience, Cole challenged the status quo, and his work continues to speak eloquently and forcefully to contemporary issues of poverty and racial inequality in the United States and worldwide.Source: Grey Art Gallery, NYU
Damien Aubin
France
1984
A graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts, Damien Aubin develops a photographic language at the intersection of architectural study and sociological reflection. His process is rooted in rigorous technical standards, primarily utilizing the 4x5 large format camera and medium format digital systems. This choice of equipment dictates a specific relationship with time—a deliberate slowness that allows him to deconstruct the complexity of the structures he observes. By using a large format camera, he doesn’t merely capture an image; he constructs a perspective where geometric precision dialogues with the silence of space. His work questions the individual’s place. within monumental systems, seeking in every frame the fragile balance between built ambition and the inertia of the urban landscape.. Civilization is an ongoing body of work, conceived as an open and evolving series. Civilization This series explores environments shaped by human ambition, where structures operate at a scale that exceeds individual presence. Whether meticulously maintained, fully operational, or marked by abandonment, these spaces persist. I do not seek to document decay, but rather to observe how these architectural forms continue to impose their systemic logic, even when human activity has withdrawn. In these images, human presence recedes in favor of massive, organized structures. Within this apparent coherence, a subtle form of decoherence emerges — a misalignment between monumental scale and lived experience, between operational systems and the tangible reality of the body. I approach these environments from a distance, observing how structure prevails over function. The act of photographing becomes a way of remaining within this tension — of confronting what both attracts and unsettles me. What remains is not decay as an end, but inertia — a quiet persistence of civilization beyond its visible utility.
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