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Submit your Best Project to Win a Solo Exhibition this March!
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Lu Yanpeng
Lu Yanpeng
Lu Yanpeng

Lu Yanpeng

Country: China
Birth: 1984

Lu Yanpeng was born in 1984 in Fujian Province. He presently lives and works in Beijing. After graduating from the Art Institute of Fujian University in 2005, he has participated in numerous exhibitions both in China and internationally. Lu Yanpeng was nominated for the FOAM Paul Huf Award in the Netherlands in 2011 and received the top award at the 2011 Pingyao International Photography Festival for the Best Photographer for his work Open Air. He was the youngest artist to ever receive this award.

Lu Yanpeng is a magician as if he has Midas touch. His darkroom is his magician's cloth, where his photos are but a spectacular performance in the void. He uses his hands, a symbol of the mortal body, paintbrushes, a symbol of tools, and the material world, as represented by light and stones that become a medium for thoughts.

Although we are only able to recall from his work, we can easily imagine the details involved, because everything seems to have been done to perfection, which is in itself incredible. His darkroom skills and creative work have bypassed the barriers of human languages and tools. His strong awareness of his subjects carries him into an autonomous state. The artist in this state is not to be limited by his techniques; he is feeling the subjects spiritually without actually observing them.

Source: www.m97gallery.com

 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Lotte Ekkel
Netherlands
1988
Lotte Lisa Ekke is a self-taught photographer based in Amsterdam. She works without a fixed plan, capturing poetic and intuitive images using only natural light. She finds beauty in quiet, often overlooked moments, creating photographs that invite reflection. Light is both her subject and her guide. Photography captures light, yet light itself has no sense of time—it moves in a constant now. Time only takes shape when light touches something, enters an eye, or sparks a memory. Ekkel’s images exist in that moment, where light and the world come together to create meaning. Her compositions are precise and graphic, often with a painterly flatness that makes spaces feel abstract. She is drawn to in-between places, where time seems to pause and emptiness has a quiet presence. Her work explores the balance between what we see and what we sense, encouraging the viewer to slow down and notice fleeting beauty. Saurabh Sirohiya is a graphic designer by profession and a visual storyteller by passion, specializing in travel, street, and documentary photography. Despite living with hearing and speech impairments, he has self-taught and mastered the art of photography, particularly excelling in capturing the raw and spontaneous essence of streets and journeys. Saurabh believes that while every frame tells a story, creating a story within a frame is what truly brings an image to life. With a deep-rooted passion for travel, he continues to explore and document the diverse cultures, rituals, heritage, and traditions of India through his lens. His work has earned him more than 550 national and international photography awards, and his photographs have been featured in numerous prestigious newspapers and magazines worldwide. In recognition of his artistic excellence, Saurabh has been honored with several distinguished titles and accolades, including: EFIP, EFIAP/b, C*MoL, A.APG, M.NPS, SSS/W, IIG/S4, IIG/P5, GM.APS, E.CPE, E.SSP, GE.APU, B.WPAI, BE.APF, ES.CPE, Hon.CPE, Hon.PESGSPC, GPA.PESGSPC, Hon.Fellowship.APG, Hon.Fellowship.APF, Hon.Fellowship.FBCA
Bill Gekas
Australia
Australia-based photographer Bill Gekas has a real knack for portraiture, particularly the kind that results in an homage to many Old Masters of classic paintings, including artists like Vemeer and Rembrandt. Using his five-year-old daughter as the model, Gekas recreates many mid-18th century settings that are inspired by portraits of adults from famous paintings. He styles the environment and his daughter to fit the time period, and uses strobe lights to maintain the appearance of soft, natural lighting. The self-taught photographer learned on 35mm and has since turned to digital techniques. He uses post-processing to put the final touches on each of his photographs. Through hard work, experimentation, and a grand vision, the talented artist has successfully produced an extensive collection—a tribute to both the well-known artists as well as to his young daughter. As Gekas has evolved as a photographer, so has his unique style. He says "Don’t be scared of taking certain elements from different works and molding them into something to call your own. You might like the lighting from a photo you saw somewhere, a prop from another photo, colors from another. The key is not to limit yourself with the excuse, ‘It’s all been done before.’ Yes, many things have been done before, but with some careful thought you can adjust a concept to give it your signature. Experiment!”From www.billgekas.comMy name is Bill Gekas and I was born and live in Melbourne, Australia. A self taught photographer that learnt the technicals of photography using a 35mm film slr camera from the mid 90's and switched to digital in 2005, practicing the art of photography and constantly refining my style. Source: My Modern Met
Dominique Isserman
Dominique Issermann (born April 11, 1947) is a French photographer. She works primarily with black and white photography, and is known for her works in portraits, fashion and advertising. She has shot campaigns for Sonia Rykiel, Christian Dior, Nina Ricci, Guess, Lancôme, La Perla, Tiffany, Chanel and many others. Her work has also been featured in the fashion supplements for The New York Times, Corriere Della Sera and Le Monde. Issermann is noted for having photographed Leonard Cohen over several decades. The two had a long relationship, and Cohen dedicated his album I'm Your Man to her.Source: Wikipedia Cinema has played a major role in the life and career of Paris-based photographer Dominique Issermann. This year’s recipient of the Lucie Award for Achievement in Fashion was majoring in literature at the Sorbonne when she moved to Rome with Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a student leader of the May 1968 protests in Paris, and French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard to work on films. In the Italian capital, she co-directed the avant-garde films Tamaout and Elettra with Marc’O. Upon Issermann’s return to Paris in 1973, she produced a series of photo essays for Zoom magazine on the movie sets of Federico Fellini’s Casanova and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Novecento. In these formative years, she photographed up-and-coming and now-legendary actors, including Catherine Deneuve, Gérard Depardieu and Isabelle Adjani. In 1979, designer Sonia Rykiel hired Issermann to collaborate with her on advertising campaigns for her fashion line, which put her front and center in the world of mode. Fashion editorials for periodicals from American Vogue to Elle soon followed. Her work continues to flow seamlessly between fashion, portraiture and advertising campaigns for major brands from Chanel, Christian Dior, Lancôme and Yves Saint Laurent to GUESS, Victoria’s Secret, Tiffany & Co., and Hermès. In addition to shooting or directing commercials and shorts for some of these fashion and beauty houses, Issermann has created music videos with her signature free-flowing, yet immaculately framed shots.Source: Digital Photo Pro Along the way she also applies her distinctive style onto moving images for which she still has a prominent taste, directing several music videos for Leonard Cohen, notably Dance me & Manhattan – and shooting TV commercials for many of her clients, including the memorable Eau Sauvage and Dune for Christian Dior and the Victoria’s Secret legendary commercial featuring Bob Dylan. Her recent music collaborations also include work with Nick Cave. Dominique Issermann has published several books – one of which Laetitia Casta achieves considerable success – and exhibits her work around the world with major retrospectives at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie at Arles and at the Paris Maison Européenne de la Photographie, and recently at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport where 80 of her most famous pictures were exhibited on 400 digital advertising panels throughout all terminals. Her unique style has been praised by many, Dominique Issermann invents, in the black studio, a white light that seems to glow from under the skin of the characters and that the schools of photography teach under the name of Light Issermann. Amongst the many accolades she has received for her work, Dominique Issermann is the first woman to receive the equivalent of an Oscar for her fashion photography at the 1987 French Fashion Awards. In January 2007, she was promoted to the rank of Officer of France’s Order of Arts and Letter and in March 2012, she was named to the National Order of Merit.Source: The Lucie Awards
Martine Franck
Belgium
1938 | † 2012
Franck was born in Antwerp to the Belgian banker Louis Franck and his British wife, Evelyn. After her birth the family moved almost immediately to London. A year later, her father joined the British army, and the rest of the family were evacuated to the United States, spending the remainder of the Second World War on Long Island and in Arizona. Franck's father was an amateur art collector who often took his daughter to galleries and museums. Franck was in boarding school from the age of six onwards, and her mother sent her a postcard every day, frequently of paintings. Ms. Franck, attended Heathfield School, an all-girls boarding school close to Ascot in England, and studied the history of art from the age of 14. "I had a wonderful teacher who really galvanized me," she says. "In those days she took us on outings to London, which was the big excitement of the year for me." Franck studied art history at the University of Madrid and at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris. After struggling through her thesis (on French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and the influence of cubism on sculpture), she said she realized she had no particular talent for writing, and turned to photography instead. In 1963, Franck's photography career started following trips to the Far East, having taken pictures with her cousin’s Leica camera. Returning to France in 1964, now possessing a camera of her own, Franck became an assistant to photographers Eliot Elisofon and Gjon Mili at Time-Life. By 1969 she was a busy freelance photographer for magazines such as Vogue, Life and Sports Illustrated, and the official photographer of the Théâtre du Soleil (a position she held for 48 years). From 1970 to 1971 she worked in Paris at the Agence Vu photo agency, and in 1972 she co-founded the Viva agency. In 1980, Franck joined the Magnum Photos cooperative agency as a "nominee", and in 1983 she became a full member. She was one of a very small number of women to be accepted into the agency. In 1983, she completed a project for the now-defunct French Ministry of Women's Rights and in 1985 she began collaborating with the non-profit International Federation of Little Brothers of the Poor. In 1993, she first traveled to the Irish island of Tory where she documented the tiny Gaelic community living there. She also traveled to Tibet and Nepal, and with the help of Marilyn Silverstone photographed the education system of the Tibetan Tulkus monks. In 2003 and 2004 she returned to Paris to document the work of theater director Robert Wilson who was staging La Fontaine's fables at the Comédie Française. Nine books of Franck's photographs have been published, and in 2005 Franck was made a chevalier of the French Légion d'Honneur. Franck continued working even after she was diagnosed with bone cancer in 2010. Her last exhibition was in October 2011 at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie. The exhibit consisted of 62 portraits of artists "coming from somewhere else" collected from 1965 through 2010. This same year, there were collections of portraits shown at New York's Howard Greenberg Gallery and at the Claude Bernard Gallery, Paris. Franck was well known for her documentary-style photographs of important cultural figures such as the painter Marc Chagall, philosopher Michel Foucault and poet Seamus Heaney, and of remote or marginalized communities such as Tibetan Buddhist monks, elderly French people, and isolated Gaelic speakers. Michael Pritchard, the Director-General of the Royal Photographic Society, observed: "Martine was able to work with her subjects and bring out their emotions and record their expressions on film, helping the viewer understand what she had seen in person. Her images were always empathetic with her subject." In 1976, Frank took one of her most iconic photos of bathers beside a pool in Le Brusc, Provence. By her account, she saw them from a distance and rushed to photograph the moment, all the while changing the roll of film in her camera. She quickly closed the lens just at the right moment, when happened to be most intense. She cited as influences the portraits of British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, the work of American photojournalist Dorothea Lange and American documentary photographer Margaret Bourke-White. In 2010, she told The New York Times that photography "suits my curiosity about people and human situations." She worked outside the studio, using a 35 mm Leica camera, and preferring black and white film. The British Royal Photographic Society has described her work as "firmly rooted in the tradition of French humanist documentary photography." Source: Wikipedia Born in Belgium, Martine Franck (1938-2012) grew up in the United States and in England. She studied art history at the University of Madrid and at the École du Louvre in Paris. In 1963, she went to China, taking her cousin's Leica camera with her, and discovered the joys of documenting other cultures. Returning home via Hong Kong, Cambodia, India, Afghanistan and Turkey, and bought her first camera while on the trip. Returning to France, she worked as a photographic assistant at Time-Life where she developed her own technique. In 1966, Franck met Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose photographs epitomized Magnum's tradition of humanitarian photography. Franck was adamant that she would neither bask in his reflection nor disappear in his shadow and she joined the Vu agency in 1970. Her first solo exhibition was planned for the ICA in London that year; when she saw that the invitations were embossed with the information that her husband would be present at the launch, she cancelled the show. With Vu's demise, Franck co-founded the Viva agency in 1972. It also collapsed and it was not until 1980 that Franck joined Magnum, becoming a full member in 1983. She was one of the few women to be accepted into the agency and served as vice-president from 1998 to 2000. Eschewing the war/human tragedy reportage that characterized Magnum's reputation, Franck continued her projects on marginal or isolated lives throughout the rest of her life. Source: Howard Greenberg Gallery
Zhou HanShun
Singapore
1975
Born 1975, and raised in Singapore, Zhou HanShun is a Photographic Artist, Printmaker and Art Director.After graduating from Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts Singapore and RMIT University, he went on to make a living as an art director, and continues to pursue his passion as a visual storyteller and photographer.He uses photography as a way to explore, investigate and document the culture and people in the cities he lived in.HanShun has exhibited at the Tumbas Cultural Center in Thessaloniki, Greece for Photoeidolo (2017), the Molekyl Gallery in Sweden, for the Malmo Fotobiennal (2017), the Gallery under Theater in Bratislava, Slovakia for The Month of Photography Bratislava(2017), the Czech China Contemporary Museum in Beijing for the SongZhuang International Photo Biennale(2017), the PhotoMetria "Parallel Voices" exhibition in Greece (2016), the Addis FotoFest in Ethiopia (2016), among others.HanShun was awarded a Special Mention at the Balkan Photo Festival (2016), Shortlisted for the Hariban Award (2017) and was a finalist of Photolucida Critical Mass (2016), among others.About Frenetic City To say life moves fast in a city is an understatement. People go through life in an uncompromising, chaotic pace, overcoming and absorbing anything in their path. Time in the city seem to flow quicker, memories in the city tend to fade away faster. Nothing seems to stand still in a city. I use photography as a way to explore, investigate and document the culture, society and people in the cities that I have lived in. Using Hong Kong as a starting point, this project aims to be a documentation of our increasingly overpopulated world. When I first landed, I was immediately confronted by a society that is in fierce competition for physical and mental space. I decided to capture and re-create the tension and chaos that I experienced in photographic form, using multiple exposures on B&W negatives. The creation of each photograph requires me to be fixed at a specific location from between 5 to 7 hours per session. Through the viewfinder of an old Hasselblad, I created each photograph by overlapping selected individuals or groups of people within the 6 x 6 frame. The resulting photograph is not of a singular moment in time, but a multitude of moments in time captured in a single frame.
Mark Mann
United States
1970
Mark Mann is a celebrity and advertising photographer. He was born in Glasgow, where he lived until he went to study in the prestigious photographic program at Manchester Polytechnic. Before long, the recent graduate was assisting innovative fashion photographers Nick Knight and Miles Aldridge, learning the ropes and building his own body of work. Three years later, Mark started shooting on his own, relocating to New York City. Mark’s editorial work has appeared in Esquire, Men’s Health, Vibe, Spin, Fortune, Billboard, Parade and Complex, among others. He has shot countless celebrities, including Robert Redford, Michael Douglas, Iggy Pop, Jack Black, the Black Eyed Peas, Jerry Seinfeld, Dave Chappelle, Rihanna, Queen Latifah, Simon Baker, Stevie Wonder, Bradley Cooper, Willie Nelson, Sean Connery, John Hamm and Jennifer Hudson. Mark has amassed a sizable advertising portfolio, as well. His clients run the gamut: Reebok, Adidas, Hennessy, Bombay Sapphire, Pepsi, Gillette, Vitamin Water, NHL, Zumba, Ford, Chrysler and Svedka to name a few. Mark has just completed a yearlong project for Esquire Magazine, The Life of Man. He shot 80 American men ages 1 through 80, to celebrate 80 years of Esquire Magazine. This project took Mark to the White House where he was honored to shoot the sitting president, as well as former President Clinton. He also shot numerous other notable people and celebrities all across the country.Source: www.markmannphoto.com Because so many of Mark Mann’s striking celebrity portraits are taken from just a few feet away, he’s often asked, “Why so close?” “I’m not exactly sure where that idea of getting so close to my subjects came from. The simple answer is that I don’t like to have to shout to talk to people so—over the years—I’ve moved closer and closer. If you’re more than a few feet from someone, the nuances of what you are saying can be lost. And I always try to have a conversation to help make a connection with everyone I am photographing.” He may start out four or five feet away from a subject but “bobs and weaves” or “creeps” (as he terms it) closer to three feet or so while chatting and shooting. “That means the camera can be just 24 inches from a person’s face, or smelling distance,” says Mann. He never uses a tripod because he’s always moving, changing his distance and angles. He also shoots close up because he enjoys shooting wide open, explaining that helps give a "dimension” to his images. “They have a shallow depth of field, but I like that they almost feel three-dimensional,” he says. “There’s another reason I like shooting close,” says Mann. “I just love faces. I love looking at them. I can inspect every detail, every angle of a face when I’m just a few feet from someone as I look through my lens. I could never get that close without the camera in front of me.”Source: PPA
Graham Hobart
United States
1960
Graham Hobart grew up in a British colony in Africa. After living for a while in England, Hobart moved to the US and supported his family as a commercial photographer before deciding that he wanted to move from shooting to please a client to doing something that fulfilled his artistic passions. Hobart began exploring many different forms of expression from video to sculpting in bronze but settled on wildlife and nature photography. He chose infrared photography in particular because it allowed him to break away from the mundane and create a look that was uniquely his. Currently he is known for two very distinct styles that you may be able to differentiate when studying his images. One style, "In Search of White” allows as much of the paper to show through with a minimalistic approach akin to a pencil or ink sketch. The other style, darker and more ominous, is called “Out of Obscurity”. Before seeking commercial gallery representation Hobart established a firm foundation for his new career by having his work exhibited in major institutions like National Geographic, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the Booth Western Art Museum and other institutions. Now Hobart is represented in several galleries here in the US as well as abroad. Artist’s Statement : Regaining what has been lost. Some activist photographers use shock and guilt as tools to bring attention to the plight of the natural world. Equally dismaying are photos depicting pristine images of Nature at its most beautiful, which can leave the viewer with the mistaken notion that all is well. Harnessing the unique qualities of infrared photography, Hobart creates images reminiscent of old Victorian lithographs by explorers like Thomas Baines from the late nineteenth century. Hobart’s images evoke a haunting nostalgia for a bygone era by transporting us to a time to when animals roamed freely. His work challenges us to give the overly stressed wild areas the space to heal as we learn to reestablish our coexistence with the natural world. Hobart believes we never fully experience life without first getting close to nature. He implores us to tread lightly where we walk and listen carefully to all the plants and creatures around us. “Each of us must acknowledge that we must share this beautiful world with all its inhabitants or lose it.” — Graham Hobart AAP Magazine AAP Magazine 54 Nature
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AAP Magazine #55 Women
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