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Caras Ionut
Caras Ionut
Caras Ionut

Caras Ionut

Country: Romania

Born in February of the late 70s, I seemed to have taken passion in cooler weather as my inspirations for photography in my life as a romanian artist; so much of my work shows depictions of fall and winter and my mechanics entail several hues of blues and whites. Most people when considering dreams would think of good positive dreams, and I like to think I captured that in my work. I also seem to visit the darker side of what people may see of dreams, not necessarily what one would see as negative, but possibly a dream that one could not quite understand or may feel alone.

The definition of art can be quite broad, however one aspect of art that is widely explored is art through dreams. One’s perception of a dream is vast, which in comparison to the views of art, it helps to encompass what artists want from their viewers. That is the perception of many different opinions from their work. Art becomes most popular by both their similarities in view and also their differences. After all that is what art truly can be defined as, using such work in your own life because art is not useful without personal admiration and profess.

Source: carasdesign.com

 

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Tina Sturzenegger
Switzerland
1980
Tina Sturzenegger is a Swiss photographer specializing in food, still life, and visual storytelling. Her artistic practice explores the aesthetics of food and its cultural, social, and emotional significance. Two elements drive her fascination with this subject: the striking visual appeal of food in all its forms and its role in shaping societal structures. Influenced by the bold aesthetics of the 1970s and 80s, Tina blends elements of design, fashion, and nostalgia to create immersive, almost cinematic tableaus where food becomes both subject and symbol. By pushing boundaries and defying conventions, her work challenges perceptions, evoking a dialogue between indulgence and restraint, artifice and authenticity—always with a sense of playfulness woven throughout. After completing a business administration degree, Tina taught herself photography and high-end image retouching. Her work has been exhibited at the MIA Photo Fair in Milan, the Tokyo International Photo Awards, and Galerie Joseph in Paris, among others. She has collaborated with renowned national and international clients, including Denner AG, Farner Consulting, Nestlé Switzerland AG, UBS (Switzerland) AG, Michel Reybier Hospitality. Tina is represented in the DACH region by the Zurich-based agency Visualeyes Artists and has been a jury member of the Art Directors Club in Zurich since 2020. More about her work can be found at tinasturzenegger.com. About Series: Melt down This series delves into the complex relationship between food and society. It explores how our bodies become canvases for judgment, shaped by evolving dietary trends and societal norms. The work is a satirical examination of the pressures and contradictions surrounding modern consumption habits. The images are intentionally exaggerated, turning familiar items into provocative symbols. A blow dryer melts butter, evoking the artificial manipulation of natural elements. Heart-shaped lollipops adhered to legs highlight the clash between indulgence and imposed ideals of beauty. Mice leaping over a sandwich transform a simple meal into a staged battlefield of perceived nutritional good and evil. Through this visual narrative, the series critiques the demonization of carbohydrates, sugar, alcohol, and gluten. By presenting these dietary culprits in absurd scenarios, it challenges viewers to question societal obsessions with purity and perfection in food choices. The playful yet pointed approach invites reflection on the broader cultural and personal implications of what we consume. I styled, photographed and edited it. Awarded Photographer of the Week - Week 13
Sasha Stone
Russia/United States
1895 | † 1940
Sasha Stone was a Russian artist. A stateless photographer, he and his first wife, Cami Stone (born Wilhelmine Schammelhout 1892-1975), were successful photographers during the 1920s and 1930s. One of his most known work is the cover of Walter Benjamin's book One-Way Street published in 1928. Sasha was born as Aleksander Steinsapir to Jewish parents, Natan Steinsapir and Bella Meerson, in Saint Petersburg, Russia. He studied electrical engineering at Warsaw Technical Institute in Poland from 1911 to 1913. In 1913, he immigrated to New York and spent a few years working briefly at the Edison Company in New Jersey. In 1917, Sasha enlisted in the United States Army, served in WWI and was honorably discharged on June 14, 1919. While in the United States Army he was granted a stay at the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) Art Training Centre in Paris after the war. After his military discharge, Sasha lived in the Rue de Plantes, Paris, and worked as a sculptor. In 1918, Sasha and Cami moved to Berlin together and later married in 1922. When he moved to Berlin, he kept his studio in Rue de Plantes for his cousin Harry Ossip Meerson to use; however, Meerson failed to pay rent and was evicted. In Berlin, Sasha was associated with the sculptor Aleksandr Archipenko, and was a contributor to the magazine G-Material für elementare Gestaltung. His work was published in Die Form, Das Kunstblatt, UHU, Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, Der Querschnitt, Gebrauchsgraphik, and Die Dame as well. In 1924, Sasha and Cami opened their own studio in Berlin, named Atelier Stone, meaning “Studio Stone”. In 1928, he officially changed his name to Sasha Stone and became a painter. He had little success as an artist. Due to an economic downturn in Europe during this period, Sasha focused on photography as a main source of income. Sasha had become an extremely versatile photographer, working with portraits, journalism, feature images, advertising, property, fashion, and architecture photos. His photos appeared in Adolf Behne's edition of Berlin in Bildern, and Paul Cohen–Portheim's travel guide Paris. Sasha took images for surrealist journals like Varietés in Belgium and Bilfur in Paris. His work was presented in the first international photography exhibition called Fotografie der Gegenwart in Essen, Germany, and Werkbund's exhibition Film und Foto in Stuttgart, Germany. In 1931, Sasha and Cami moved to Brussels, Cami's hometown, where they lived until they divorced. In 1933, the couple were part of the Exposition Internationale de la Photographie in Brussels. A collection of nudes by Sasha and Cami Stone was published in Les Femmes through the French magazine Arts et Metiers Graphique in 1933. Throughout this time Sasha was connected with artists, celebrities and intellectuals of that period. Sasha and Cami divorced on February 15, 1939. They continued to work together until Sasha remarried. On April 29, 1939, Sasha Stone remarried, to Lydia Edens (born Alida Anna Edens). Sasha, Lydia and other families fled the German attack on Brussels on May 14, 1940. Their goal was to reach Spain and then go to the United States for safety. The group was en route through the Pyrénées in Perpignan, France. On August 6, 1940, Sasha died in Perpignan due to a serious ailment. The exact location of his grave is unknown. The only thing left is the graveyard book entry.Source: Wikipedia Best known for his photomontage reproduced on the cover of Walter Benjamin's book One-Way Street (1928), Stone was closely associated with the New Objectivity movement of the 1920s in Germany. From 1924 to 1931, he operated a successful photographic studio in Berlin. He contributed photo reportage to many of the major illustrated magazines, including Uhu, Die Dame, and Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung and was celebrated for his innovative advertising work. In 1933 the French magazine Arts et Metiers Graphique published Femmes, a portfolio of Stone's studies of female nudes, as the first in a series of three planned portfolios on the human body. (The other two, Hommes and Adolescents, were never realized.) Stone's photographs, with their fragmented figures, angular compositions, and use of raking light, are superb examples of avant-garde photographic aesthetics in Europe between the world wars.Source: The Met
Jiri Sneider
Czech Republic
1979
Jiří Šneider was born in 1979 and bred in Český Krumlov where my home is. Photography started to fascinate me around the year 1997. I have always been attracted by black & white photography, hence this constitutes of two thirds of my work. I've focused on portrait and travellers documentary. Recently I have developed more thanks to travelling (Ukraine, Bangladesh, Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, Japan...). These destinations brought up many topics and situations of people at home, at work, going out, in streets, at religious rituals... Hard Workers The Gulf of Bengal, with a population of more than 156 million, keeps its economy running on hard human labour every day. Across the age, gender... older children take care of young children and infants, while parents earn money for daily survival, medical care, housing and other daily necessities. In such working conditions where the human body is exposed to dust, polluted water, fumes from machines and cars for a long time. So that families do not have to waste time commuting to work, they live in simple shelters around the shipyard, the port, or directly in the areas where bricks are made and baked, in villages where they also manually model clay bowls and bake them in primitive kilns. Even whole families work on a landfill, where they sort and recycle garbage for sale to make a living. Brave young people travel west to work in Arab countries near the Persian Gulf to make many times more money in services, auxiliary work and gastronomy, which they regularly send to their families in Bangladesh. The Hard workers project introduces you to black and white photographs of workers who work hard every day for a very small wage. For a journalist photographer and documentary filmmaker, this country is rough but full of many friendly people.
Jana Šantavá
Slovakia
1978
Jana Šantavá is a visual artist and fine art photographer based in Bratislava, Slovakia. Her work explores themes of introspection, identity, and the space between reality and dream, often through staged, cinematic imagery that invites the viewer into layered narratives. Using mirrors, duplicated figures, and subtle surreal elements, she creates photographs that function as both visual poetry and metaphorical self-portraits of the human psyche. Her photographs have been exhibited internationally in cities such as Paris, Milan, New York, Venice, Arles, Budapest, and Athens, as well as across Slovakia. She has received multiple awards, including the Gold Medal at the Budapest International Foto Awards 2023, Silver at the World Photo Annual 2023, and recognition from PX3 de la Photographie Paris 2023. In 2024, she presented her solo exhibition Echoes of Identity at the Slovak Institute in Berlin. In 2025, her works are featured at ImageNation London and ImageNation New York, continuing her presence on the international fine art photography scene. Through her distinctive visual language, Šantavá challenges the boundaries between staged reality and dreamlike fiction, offering viewers a space for reflection, emotion, and self-discovery. Artist Statement In my work, I explore silence, introspection, and the space between reality and dream. I am fascinated by the idea of the doppelgänger – the second self – reflecting our inner divisions and untold stories. In my photographs, a figure often turns away, gazes through a curtain, or into a mirror. This moment of indirect gaze becomes a key to intimacy – opening a space for the viewer to become the co-author of the narrative. I stage scenes where I work with mirrors, duplicated figures, and strong color contrasts. My aim is not only aesthetic but also metaphorical – a reflection of our inner dialogues, desires, and contradictions. Each photograph is, for me, a visual trace of an emotional movement that cannot be captured in words. My goal is to create images that awaken questions rather than provide answers, opening an inner conversation about what might be hidden behind an apparent calm. Awarded Photographer of the Week - Week 34, 2025
Attar Abbas
Iran/France
1944 | † 2018
Attar Abbas, better known as Abbas, was an Iranian photographer known for his photojournalism in Biafra, Vietnam and South Africa in the 1970s, and for his extensive essays on religions in later years. He was a member of Sipa Press from 1971 to 1973, a member of Gamma from 1974 to 1980, and joined Magnum Photos in 1981. Attar, an Iranian transplanted to Paris, dedicated his photographic work to the political and social coverage of the developing southern nations. Since 1970, his major works have been published in world magazines and include wars and revolutions in Biafra, Bangladesh, Ulster, Vietnam, the Middle East, Chile, Cuba, and South Africa with an essay on apartheid. From 1978 to 1980, he photographed the revolution in Iran, and returned in 1997 after a 17-year voluntary exile. His book Iran Diary: 1971– 2002 (2002) is a critical interpretation of its history, photographed and written as a personal diary. From 1983 to 1986, he travelled throughout Mexico, photographing the country as if he were writing a novel. An exhibition and a book, Return to Mexico: Journeys Beyond the Mask (1992), which includes his travel diaries, helped him define his aesthetics in photography. From 1987 to 1994, he photographed the resurgence of Islam from the Xinjiang to Morocco. His book and exhibition Allah O Akbar, a journey through militant Islam (1994) exposes the internal tensions within Muslim societies, torn between a mythical past and a desire for modernization and democracy. The book drew additional attention after the September 11 attacks in 2001. The choice was to think of oneself either as a photojournalist or an artist. It wasn’t out of humility that I called myself a photojournalist, but arrogance. I thought photojournalism was superior. -- Attar Abbas When the year 2000 became a landmark in the universal calendar, Christianity was the symbol of the strength of Western civilization. Faces of Christianity: A Photographic Journey (2000) and a touring exhibit, explored this religion as a political, a ritual and a spiritual phenomenon. From 2000 to 2002 he worked on Animism. In our world defined by science and technology, the work looked at why irrational rituals make a strong come-back. He abandoned this project on the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks. His book, In Whose Name? The Islamic World after 9/11 (2009), is a seven-year quest within 16 countries : opposed by governments who hunt them mercilessly, the jihadists lose many battles, but are they not winning the war to control the mind of the people, with the "creeping islamisation of all Muslim societies?" From 2008 to 2010 Abbas travelled the world of Buddhism, photographing with the same skeptical eye for his book Les Enfants du lotus, voyage chez les bouddhistes (2011). In 2013, he concluded a similar long-term project on Hinduism with the publication of Gods I've Seen: Travels Among Hindus (2016). Most recently, before his death, Abbas was working on documenting Judaism around the world. Before his death, Abbas was working on documenting Judaism around the world. He died in Paris on 25 April 2018, aged 74. About his photography Abbas wrote: "My photography is a reflection, which comes to life in action and leads to meditation. Spontaneity – the suspended moment – intervenes during action, in the viewfinder. A reflection on the subject precedes it. A meditation on finality follows it, and it is here, during this exalting and fragile moment, that the real photographic writing develops, sequencing the images. For this reason a writer's spirit is necessary to this enterprise. Isn't photography "writing with light"? But with the difference that while the writer possesses his word, the photographer is himself possessed by his photo, by the limit of the real which he must transcend so as not to become its prisoner." Source: Wikipedia Abbas, as he referred to himself professionally, was known for dramatic black-and-white photographs delivered with a point of view, especially in his book Iran Diary: 1971– 2002 (2002), a collection of images and text presented as a sort of journal. When the events that resulted in the overthrow of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in 1979 began, Abbas supported change, but he soon became disillusioned with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who took over the government. “When the revolution started, it was democratic,” The Toronto Star quoted him as saying in 2013. “It was my country, my people and my revolution. Then, slowly, it was being hijacked.” A turning point, he said, was the execution of four generals after a secret trial. He photographed their corpses in a morgue. “Something that we learned,” he said, “is that the extremists always win. That was my main lesson from the revolution. The extremists were prepared to kill, imprison, torture — everything. So they won.” Abbas was born in 1944 in a part of Iran near the Pakistan border. When he was a boy his family relocated to Algeria; he said that growing up during that country’s war of independence sparked his interest in documenting political events. He taught himself to use a camera, and among his earliest jobs was working for the International Olympic Committee at the 1968 Summer Games in Mexico. He would return to Mexico in the mid-1980s, taking pictures throughout the country over three years and producing the 1992 book Return to Mexico: Journeys Beyond the Mask (1992). In the 1970s he worked for the French agencies Sipa and Gamma. Early in that decade he was in Africa, covering the aftermath of the Biafran war in Nigeria and other events. He then found himself back in Iran. “My family is from Iran,” he told Vice in 2015, “but it isn’t as if I felt particularly Iranian back then. But I did feel that things had to change — you can’t just have some shah making all the important decisions for an entire country.” As the situation became more unstable and it became clear to him that the revolutionaries were no better than the regime they were replacing, he faced pressures from friends. “They urged me not to show the revolution’s negative side to the world,” he said. “The violence was supposed to come from the shah, not the protesters. I told them that it was my revolution as well, but I still needed to honor my duty as a journalist — or a historian, if you will.” He left the country in 1980 and did not return for 17 years. The revolution, though, had instilled in him an interest in what people throughout the world were doing in the name of God. “It was obvious after two years that the wave of Islamism was not going to stop at the borders of Iran,” he said in a video interview with The British Journal of Photography in 2009. “It was going much beyond the borders.” There are two ways to think about photography: one is writing with light, and the other is drawing with light. -- Attar Abbas He began by examining that phenomenon, resulting in the book Allah O Akbar: A Journey Through Militant Islam (1994), which recounted his travels through 29 Islamic countries. “When you’ve started with God you might as well stay with him,” he said, explaining why he went on to look at Christianity, paganism, Buddhism and more. It was an examination not of personal faith, he said, but of how faith can be deployed and twisted in other spheres. “What I’m interested in is the political, social, economic, even psychological aspects of religion,” he said, adding, “More and more, nations are defining their identities referring to religion.” If his work often put him in the middle of trouble spots, Abbas was not necessarily interested in images of blood and weaponry. “Most photographers, when they say they’re war photographers, they’re not really war photographers; they’re battle photographers,” he said in the video interview. “War does not limit itself to boom-boom, to the battle itself. Wars are very, very complex phenomenons, because they have a source, and it takes a while to come up, then it happens, and there are consequences. I’m more interested in the why and the afterwards of the wars.” He played down the part of his work that involved putting himself in harm’s way. “They say ‘courage’ — O.K., you have to be courageous,” he said. “But for me courage is a lack of imagination. You cannot imagine that it’s going to happen to you, therefore you go to the battle.”Source: New York Times
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