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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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Vassi Koutsaftis
Vassi Koutsaftis has explored the globe for over 30 years, specializing in travel photography – of the extreme kind, especially in the mountainous regions of Himalayan, the Karakoram, Hindu Kush and other very remote areas of Asia. Born in 1952 in Athens, Greece and crossed the world’s oceans working on cruise ships and freighters. That was just the beginning for he continued to examine our planet traveling to remote areas on his own, then from the air, when he went on to study aeronautics and became a pilot in the U.S. He leads treks and exploratory tours in Afghanistan, Mongolia, Tibet, Nepal, Pakistan, Iran, Bhutan, Burma, Turkey and India, and he contributes essential research to unusual and remote itineraries for Geographic Expeditions one of the best and most respected expedition companies in the US. Vassi’s photographs have been published in a number of magazines including Geo (European edition), Photografos, USA Today, Asia Week, National Geographic Traveler, and Marin Magazine. He serves as Conde Nast’s Tibet expert and is well known for his compelling images of the Dalai Lama. His photographic and travel expertise has been instrumental in scouting for films including productions by CBS, PDI and Dreamworks and a number of independent filmmakers. Vassi’s work is included in the collections of U.C. Berkeley’s Blum Center, Steve Wynn Casinos, Stanford University’s Center for Buddhist Studies. Vassi has exhibited his work widely in a number of galleries in the United States and Overseas including The Hellenic American Union in Athens, Greece and enjoys giving presentations of his photographs while sharing stories of extensive travels around the world.
Guido Klumpe
Germany
1971
Guido Klumpe was born in 1971 in Germany. He's been taking photographs since he was sixteen years old. After graduating from high school, he traveled through Southeast Asia. From then on he was infected by street photography, without knowing that this genre even existed. He discovered the magic of the decisive moment. After his studies in social work, other art forms became interesting for him. He danced and acted in theatre. But in 2016 he rediscovered his passion for street photography. Since then, there is not a day when he is not involved in (street) photography. He is almost blind since birth on the left and have 25% vision on the right because the optic nerves don't pass on as much information to the brain. You can imagine it like an internet video with a low data rate. Through photography he go to and beyond the limits of his vision. Guido Klumpe won several awards, among others at the Paris Street Photography award, the German Streetfotografie Festival and the Minimalist Photography award. His work has been published in various international online and print magazines. My work combines three genres that influence each other: street photography, minimal photography and abstract photography. I see my city as an urban landscape. A landscape made up of shapes, colors, reflections and light. I can dissolve and reassemble these elements, limited only by the laws of optics, the possibilities of the camera and my imagination. The overarching theme is the tension between urban architecture and its inhabitants. In my ongoing series 'Loosing one dimension' I playfully explore the fragile moment of transition where three-dimensional architecture dissolves and abstracts into the two-dimensional. When the viewer loses orientation and can't tell for sure what they see, which parts of the image are in front, and which are behind, they experience a bit of how I sometimes lose my bearings in the world. To achieve this effect, I photographically superimpose different parts of the building. I often find my motifs on arterial roads, industrial areas or suburbs.
Hannah Villiger
Switzerland
1951 | † 1997
Capturing the essence of self, frequently in sensual sequences, Hannah Villiger employed her own body as both material and subject. She played a pivotal role in the artistic emancipation of women in the 1980s. Born in 1951 in Cham, near Zug, Villiger earned a diploma in sculpture from Lucerne’s Schule für Gestaltung at the age of twenty-three. Her early work swiftly garnered attention from critics, including Jean-Christophe Ammann, whose support catapulted her to recognition. Seeking her own artistic language, Villiger gradually transitioned to exclusive work in photography. Initially using a reflex camera and producing black-and-white images, her early work retained the influence of Land Art and Arte Povera. In 1980, she exclusively embraced Polaroid film, shaping her photography around a singular subject—her own body. Over a period of seventeen years, Villiger approached her body in a novel way, avoiding personal anecdotes and the allure of the flesh. Shamelessly and without narcissism, she focused solely on the volume and forms of her anatomy, manipulating and contorting it as one would with clay or a sculptor's chisel. The considerable size of these Polaroids, enlarged to be larger than life, imbued the images with a commanding physical presence. Yet, unlike some of her contemporaries associated with the Body Art movement, Villiger imposed no voyeurism on the viewer. In 1986, she settled in Paris, participating in the Venice Biennale in 1991 and the São Paulo Biennial in 1994, where she exhibited alongside Pipilotti Rist. Despite her premature death at the age of forty-six, Villiger left behind a bold and distinctive body of work, featured in public and private collections in Switzerland and abroad, notably in the United States. Institutional exhibitions featuring Hannah Villiger's work have been held at various venues, including the Centre culturel suisse, Paris (1986); Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (1988); Kunstverein Frankfurt (1991); and the 22nd Bienal de São Paulo (1994), where she showcased her art in the Swiss Pavilion alongside Pipilotti Rist. Posthumous solo exhibitions have been organized at Kunsthalle Basel (2001); Kunsthalle Bonn (2001); nGbK Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin (2002); MAMCO Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Geneva (2007); Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2008); and Centre culturel suisse, Paris (2012). Additionally, in 2020 and 2021, Villiger's work was featured in group exhibitions at Kolumba, Cologne, and the Museum zu Allerheiligen, Schaffhausen.
Lisa McCord
United States
1957
Lisa McCord is a fine art and documentary photographer from the Arkansas Delta who lives and works in Los Angeles and Arkansas. Focusing on her experiences on her family's cotton farm, her creative practice explores concepts of storytelling, memory, and the passage of time. McCord received her BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and earned an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. She also attended New York University, Le Contrejour, Paris, and The Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY. She taught photography at several high schools and universities in the LA area including Pepperdine University. She has exhibited her work in galleries and museums internationally, including SoHo Photo Gallery and Carrie Able Gallery in New York; Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins; Bruce Lurie Gallery, Building Bridges Art Exchange, Classic Photographs Los Angeles, and the Annenberg Space for Photography Museum in Los Angeles; FotoFever in Paris, and the Museum of Nature of Cantabria. McCord's work has been shown in in solo exhibitions at Fabrik Projects, Gallery 825, the Memphis Cotton Museum, Slow Exposures, and Leica Gallery LA in 2023. Her work has been featured in numerous publications including Black & White Photography (UK edition), Float Magazine, and Feature Shoot. She was a Critical Mass Finalist in 2015, 2016, and 2021. McCord's work is in the permanent collections of the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts and the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. ROTAN SWITCH 1978 - Present I began documenting life on my grandparents' cotton farm in 1978 when I was twenty-one. After forty years, I have come to realize all my photographs taken here are explorations of home, an idea that remains firmly rooted in the Arkansas land and people. I've also come to realize that the place I call home is not perfect. Rotan Switch takes its name from the community's central landmark - the railroad switch where farmers loaded their cotton bales onto trains headed out of the Delta. Although it hasn't been used in years, it remains a potent symbol of the complex intersections of industry and agriculture, of race and injustice. I realize the photographs are complicated when seen in the context of the socioeconomic structures of the rural South. Although the subjects are family to me, as a white photographer and the granddaughter of a farm owner, my photographs of the Black community implicate my own role in reinforcing these power structures. Coupled with the images, my own memories, as well as reflections by the subjects and their families, tell the story of Rotan and the Arkansas Delta's culture through the lens of personal experience. This combination of image and storytelling seeks to paint a fuller picture of a place with a complicated history that cannot be left unacknowledged if the project hopes to create a genuine empathetic encounter between the viewer and the subjects.
Louise Dahl-Wolfe
United States
1895 | † 1989
Louise Dahl-Wolfe was an American photographer. She is known primarily for her work for Harper's Bazaar, in association with fashion editor Diana Vreeland. Louise Emma Augusta Dahl was born November 19, 1895 in San Francisco, California to Norwegian immigrant parents; she was the youngest of three daughters. In 1914, she began her studies at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Institute of Art), where she studied design and color with Rudolph Schaeffer, and painting with Frank Van Sloan. She took courses in life drawing, anatomy, figure composition and other subjects over the next six years. After graduating, Dahl-Wolfe worked in designing electric signs and interiors. In 1921, Dahl-Wolfe met with photographer Anne Brigman, who inspired her to take up photography. Her first dark-room enlarger was a makeshift one she built herself, which used a tin can, an apple crate, and a part of a Ghirardelli chocolate box for a reflector. She studied design, decoration and architecture at Columbia University, New York in 1923. From 1927 to 1928, Dahl-Wolfe traveled with photographer Consuelo Kanaga, who furthered her interest in photography. Her first published photograph, titled Tennessee Mountain Woman, was published in Vanity Fair (U.S. magazine 1913–36). In 1928 she married the sculptor Meyer Wolfe, who constructed the backgrounds of many of her photos. Dahl-Wolfe was known for taking photographs outdoors, with natural light in distant locations from South America to Africa in what became known as "environmental" fashion photography. Compared to other photographers at the time who were using red undertones, Dahl-Wolfe opted for cooler hues and also corrected her own proofs, with one example of her pulling proofs repeatedly to change a sofa's color from green to a dark magenta. She preferred portraiture to fashion photography. Notable portraits include: Mae West, Cecil Beaton, Eudora Welty, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Orson Welles, Carson McCullers, Edward Hopper, Colette and Josephine Baker. She is known for her role in the discovery of a teenage Lauren Bacall whom she photographed for the March 1943 cover of Harper's Bazaar. One of her favorite subjects was the model Mary Jane Russell, who is estimated to have appeared in about thirty percent of Dahl-Wolfe's photographs. She was a great influence on photographers Irving Penn and Richard Avedon. One of her assistants was fashion and celebrity photographer, Milton H. Greene. From 1933 to 1960, Dahl-Wolfe operated a New York City photographic studio that was home to the freelance advertising and fashion work she made for stores including Bonwit Teller and Saks Fifth Avenue. From 1936 to 1958 Dahl-Wolfe was a staff fashion photographer at Harper’s Bazaar. She produced portrait and fashion photographs totaling 86 covers, 600 color pages and countless black-and-white shots. She worked with editor Carmel Snow, art director Alexey Brodovitch and fashion editor Diana Vreeland, and traveled widely. In 1950, she was selected for "America's Outstanding Woman Photographers" in the September issue of Foto. From 1958 until her retirement in 1960, Dahl-Wolfe worked as a freelance photographer for Vogue, Sports Illustrated, and other periodicals. Louise Dalhl-Wolfe lived many of her later years in Nashville, Tennessee. She died in New Jersey of pneumonia in 1989. The full archive of Dahl-Wolfe's work is located at the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) at the University of Arizona in Tucson, which also manages the copyright of her work. In 1999, her work was the subject of a documentary film entitled Louise Dahl-Wolfe: Painting with Light. The film featured the only surviving modern footage of Dahl-Wolfe, including extensive interviews. It was written and directed by Tom Neff, edited by Barry Rubinow and produced by Neff and Madeline Bell.Source: Wikipedia Born in Alameda, California, Dahl-Wolfe studied at the San Francisco Institute of Art. In 1921, while working as a sign painter, she discovered the photographs of Anne Brigman, a Pictorialist based in California and associated with the Stieglitz circle in New York. Although greatly impressed by Brigman's work, Dahl-Wolfe did not take up photography herself until the early 1930s. Travel with the photographer Consuelo Kanaga in Europe in 1927-28 piqued her interest in photography once again. In 1932, when she was living with her husband near the Great Smoky Mountains, she made her first published photograph, Tennessee Mountain Woman. After it was published in Vanity Fair in 1933, she moved to New York City and opened a photography studio, which she maintained until 1960. After a few years producing advertising and fashion photographs for Woman's Home Companion, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Bonwit Teller, she was hired by Carmel Snow as a staff fashion photographer for Harper's Bazaar in 1936. Dahl-Wolfe remained with the magazine until 1958, after which time she accepted freelance assignments from Vogue and Sports Illustrated until her retirement in 1960. Dahl-Wolfe was especially well-known during the infancy of color fashion photography for her exacting standards in reproducing her images. Her insistence on precision in the color transparencies made from her negatives resulted in stunning prints whose subtle hues and unusual gradations in color set the standard for elegance in the 1940s and 1950s. In addition, she pioneered the active yet sophisticated image of the "New Woman" through her incorporation of art historical themes and concepts into her photographs.Source: International Center of Photography "I believe that the camera is a medium of light, that one actually paints with light. In using the spotlights with reflecting lights, I could control the quality of the forms revealed to build a composition. Photography, to my mind, is not a fine art. It is splendid for recording a period of time, but it has definite limitations, and the photographer certainly hasn't the freedom of the painter. One can work with taste and emotion and create an exciting arrangement of significant form, a meaningful photograph, but a painter has the advantage of putting something in the picture that isn't there or taking something out that is there. I think this makes painting a more creative medium." — Louise Dahl-Wolf, 1984 Dahl-Wolfe preferred portraiture to fashion work, and while at Harper's she photographed cultural icons and celebrities including filmmaker Orson Wells, writer Carson McCullers, designer Christian Dior, photographer Cecil Beaton, writer Colette, and broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow. In addition to her Harper's responsibilities, Dahl-Wolfe was able to pursue her own vision in the studio and sometimes even while on assignment. For example, she asked a model to pose for the unpublished Nude in the Desert while on location in California's Mojave Desert shooting swimsuits that would appear in the May 1948 edition of Harper's. From 1958 until her retirement in 1960, Dahl-Wolfe worked as a freelance photographer for Vogue, Sports Illustrated, and other periodicals. Major exhibitions of her work include Women of Photography: An Historical Survey at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The History of Fashion Photography and Recollections: Ten Women of Photography at International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; and Portraits at the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson. Retrospectives include shows at Grey Art Gallery, New York University; Cheekwood Fine Arts Center, Nashville, Tennessee; and Louise Dahl-Wolfe: A Ninetieth Birthday Salute at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago. Louise Dalh-Wolfe lived many of her later years in Nashville, Tennessee, though she died in New Jersey of pneumonia in 1989.Source: International Center of Photography
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