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Win a Solo Exhibition in April 2026 + An Exclusive Interview!
Win a Solo Exhibition in April 2026 + An Exclusive Interview!
Neal Menschel
Neal Menschel

Neal Menschel

Country: United States

Neal Menschel has been a photographer for over 25 years. He has photographed five presidents and traveled the world covering third world politics and development, and environmental issues. He began his career as a photographer for the Anchorage Daily News in Anchorage, Alaska.  

As a freelance photographer, Neal’s clients have included The New York Times, Newsweek, MIT, Tufts, Wellesley College, People, Geo, Front Line, Yankee, as well as other publications and numerous corporate clients.

Neal also worked as an associate producer and sound recordist on a series of award-winning documentary films for WGBH-Boston, and WBZ-TV, Boston, additionally teaching photography/documentary photography at Boston University. Neal was the Director of Photography and Senior Photographer for the Christian Science Monitor. He has traveled extensively, both nationally and worldwide, specializing in third world politics and development, environmental issues, domestic politics, humanitarian, social, and cultural issues, always with a focus on people and matters of the "human heart."

Neal was the Director of Photography for the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, a graduate and undergraduate training program in photography, radio, and writing, in Portland, Maine. Neal led their photography program for nine years before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area. Many of the students Neal has taught, mentored, and shared his passion for photography and visual storytelling are now successfully carrying on careers in photojournalism and fine art photography. Neal is currently working on a book about West Virginia culture.  He teaches in Stanford University's Continuing Studies Program while he continues his work as a photographer, journalist, teacher, and workshop instructor/leader.

Source: nealmenschel.photoshelter.com

 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Armineh Johannes
United States/France
I was born in Tehran, Iran and studied in England where I obtained a Journalism Diploma, and later in France, where I obtained a B.A. in History and a B.A in English. I started my photography career in 1986 with my first assigned in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. My work has been mainly on the Middle East and ex- Soviet Union countries. I started working on various assignments in Armenia since 1989 and continue to do so up to this day. In 1989, a year after the earthquake in Armenia, I went there for the first time. I am Armenian born and raised in Iran. Setting foot on the land of my ancestors for the first time brought great emotion for me. Since that first trip to Armenia and the deep connection I felt with the people and the land, I have continued to make regular trips to all corners of Armenia and Artsakh, depicting the lives of my fellow Armenians. In 1989-1990, I made my first trip to Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) and photographed the first Nagorno-Karabakh conflict; I was one of the few photojournalists who managed to travel to the village of Getashen and the villages of the Shahumyan/Shahoumyan region (northern Artsakh) just before Operation Ring in 1991. I continued to travel across Armenia for decades and my humanitarian photo stories have been widely published in magazines and newspapers around the world, such as Los Angeles Times (USA), Washington Post, Newsweek, Le Monde, Peuples du Monde, Libération, L 'Express, Révolution (France), Photo Reporter, France - USSR, UN Multimedia, Foto Pratica (Italy), l'Autre Journal, Marie Claire (Italy), Pop Eye (Japan), Asahi Graph (Japan), Asahi Magazine ( Japan), AIM (USA), Photography (England), etc. In 1997 I decided to go to Armenia and stay there for one year in order to have a more profound understanding of their lifestyle and customs. That period was one of the most enriching and interesting experiences of my life… During the past thirty years I has been documenting the life of Armenians in Armenia, in Karabagh as well as in the Middle East and around the world. I held several exhibitions in France in Portugal and in the United States. In 1990, the prestigious French Newspaper “Le Monde” organized a solo photo exhibition of my work in its halls in Paris. I currently work as a freelance documentary photo-journalist but also collaborate with “Les Nouvelles d’Armenie Magazine”, an Armenian magazine published in France. I am working on having a photo book published of my work on Armenia and Artsakh (Karabagh). I started travelling to Armenia since 1989. I am of Armenian origin (born in Iran) and have continued to travel there on regular basis depicting the lives of Armenians. I travelled to Artsakh (H. Karabagh) several times starting in 1990 and covered the first conflict with Azerbaijan which ended in 1994. During my travels to Artsakh I also photographed moments of their daily lives.
Rania Matar
Lebanon/United States
Rania Matar was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. in 1984. As a Lebanese-born American woman and mother, her cross-cultural experience and personal narrative inform her photography. Matar's work has been widely published and exhibited in museums worldwide, including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Carnegie Museum of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, and more. A mid-career retrospective of her work was recently on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, in a solo exhibition: In Her Image: Photographs by Rania Matar She has received several grants and awards including a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in-residency grant at the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College, 2011 Legacy Award at the Griffin Museum of Photography, 2011 and 2007 Massachusetts Cultural Council artist fellowships. In 2008 she was a finalist for the Foster Award at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, with an accompanying solo exhibition. Her work is in the permanent collections of several museums, institutions and private collections worldwide. So far, she has published the following books: L'Enfant-Femme, 2016; A Girl and Her Room, 2012; Ordinary Lives, 2009, and more recently, SHE, 2021. She is currently an associate professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. SHE: As a Lebanese-born American woman and mother, my background and cross-cultural experiences inform my art. I have dedicated my work to exploring issues of personal and collective identity through photographs of female adolescence and womanhood - both in the United States where I live and the Middle East where I am from - in an effort to focus on notions of identity and individuality, within the context of the underlying universality of these experiences. In my continuous exploration of what it is like to be a girl and a woman today, in a world that poses endless questions on girls and women of all backgrounds, I am focusing in this project on young women in their late teens/early twenties. They are the ages of my daughters - they are leaving the cocoon of home, entering adulthood and facing a new reality they are often not prepared for, a humbling reality most often harder than they expected and less glamorous than what is portrayed on social media. Whereas in A Girl and Her Room, I photographed young women in relationship to the curated and controlled environment of their bedrooms, I am photographing them here in the larger environment they find themselves in after they leave home, the more global backdrop that now constitutes their lives in transitions. I want to portray the raw beauty of their age, their individuality, their physicality, their mystery, and the organic relationship they create with their environment, being in the lush landscapes of rural Ohio, or the textured backdrops of Beirut. I want to photograph them, the way I, a woman and a mother, see them: beautiful, alive. I want to create a personal narrative with them. The process is about collaboration and empowerment, and the photo session always evolves organically as the women become active participants in the image-making process. My work addresses the states of 'Becoming' - the beauty and the vulnerability of growing up - in the context of the visceral relationships to our physical environment and universal humanity. By collaborating with women in the United States and in the Middle East - and while still looking to reveal the individuality of each young woman - I focus on our essence, our physicality and the commonalities that make us human, ultimately highlighting how female subjectivity develops in parallel forms across cultural lines. Articles: Find out more about Becoming Where Do I Go?
Sean Du
United States
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Andre Cypriano
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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.
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United States
1959
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George Dian Balan is a multi-award winning fine art wildlife photographer, scientist, author, inspirational speaker and world records discoverer, specialised in world record and world class individuals in iconic megafauna species. He creates timeless images by using an immersive approach, portraying as never seen before giants that have captured our imagination. The resulting frames are cinematic, of the kind that one expects from a Jurassic Park opening scene. He pays much attention not only to the subject selection, perspective and composition, but also to body postures. The artistic question he asked himself is: “if a Statue, a Monument were to be raised to a species, what would that look like?” Dian innovates a lot and uses a plethora of photography techniques, including remotes and camera traps. He is the first to take several award-winning images of elephants as seen from inside a baobab tree. He was a member of the jury of the Golden Turtle Photography Awards (2023) and the Jackson Wild Film Festival (2022) and the curator of the exhibition Europe's Wild Heart (Brussels, 2019). He also was a three-time contributor to Prints for Wildlife, the world’s most financially successful fundraising of its kind, and one of his Asian Super Tusker images was a lead visual for the 2025 campaign. Dian has over 11 years of artistic, scientific and conservation experience working with big-tusked African and Asian elephants. About 35 of his images with big-tusked elephants were distinguished in prestigious photography competitions (usually multiple times) such as the Mono Awards Australia (Winner, 2025), Fine Art Photography Awards London (Second Prize, 2025), Memorial Maria Luisa (Honourable Mention, 2025), Monochrome Awards (Highly Honoured, 2025), MontPhoto (Second Prize, 2024), GDT European Wildlife Photographer of the Year (Highly Commended, 2024), Nature’s Best Washington (Highly Honored, 2014), reFocus Awards (Nominee, 2024), MonoVisions Awards (Honourable Mention, 2024), Monochromatic Awards (Finalist, 2024), Black and White Awards (Finalist, 2024), HIPA (Dubai, Finalist, 2024), Px3 Paris (Silver Medal, 2023) or again FAPA (Finalist, 2018). In addition, Dian won Photographer of the Year: Wildlife in reFocus Awards (New York, 2024), he was a First Prize Winner (Montier-en-Der, 2020) and Grand Winner (Untamed, 2018). His pictures are standard-setting, exquisite and compelling. They were published among others by Australian Photography, Nat Geo, BBC Earth, GEO, Forbes, Geographical, It’s Colossal, Luxury Travel, Professional Photo, Wanderlust Travel, Wild Planet Photo Magazine, Asian Geographic, Africa Geographic, Cranium, Ancient Origins, Nat'Images, Peta Pixel and Pachyderm, including several times as covers. Furthermore, Dian is the author of the award-winning book The World As It One Was (2020), which combines arresting visuals with solid science, and of the seminal study The World Records in Asian Elephants (2024). Dian is an accomplished speaker on biodiversity and environmental issues at events in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. For him, a thorough research is key when choosing his photographic subjects or deciphering the megafauna science. This is how he became the world leading expert in big tusked elephants, discovering for the first time in more than 100 years two New World Records: the longest Asian elephant tusk (almost 3.3 m) and thickest Asian elephant tusk (58 cm). AAP Magazine AAP Magazine 54 Nature
Fran Forman
United States
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