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Win a Solo Exhibition in April 2026 + An Exclusive Interview!
Win a Solo Exhibition in April 2026 + An Exclusive Interview!
Marie-Laure Vareilles
Marie-Laure Vareilles
Marie-Laure Vareilles

Marie-Laure Vareilles

Country: France
Birth: 1966

- Testify to the variety of cultures on our planet.
Education: Interior architect. I travelled on all continents, camera in hand, to testify of the diversity of countries on our planet. Over the years I have experienced different cultures, landscapes, encounters … The cultures of the entire world are in constant evolution. My work is to serve the memory of the people and their countries all around the world.

- Creation of photo montage : imagine a universe of possibilities, elaborate the encounter of the unlikely. Mixing elements, transforming scale relations, rejecting logical constructions... Today I give a new life to the thousands of negatives taken, recreating imaginary worlds where poetry, dreams and surrealism alternate.

- Permanent exhibition : Marseille : galerie Massalia; Vaison la Romaine, in the old town : atelier ANSATU & MAILO


All about Marie Laure Vareilles:

AAP: When did you realize you wanted to be a photographer?
It was not my dream.

AAP:Do you have a mentor?
I remember about the first exhibition I have visited : it was Salgado with beautiful works in black and white. The subject he had worked on was men working by hand, all over the world... Beautiful.

AAP: How long have you been a photographer?
I took my first photo in 1985, while traveling in Turquey. It was my first trip alone abroad and I wanted to share my impresion with my family. Taking photos seemed to be the best medium for sharing places I had visited, people I had met.

AAP: What or who inspires you?
Since I am travelling and taking photos, I have realised how fast our world is changing. Faster and faster. Shooting is a way to keep testimony from a time which doesn’t exist any more : the more I travel, the more I realise that our differences are less and less visible.

AAP: How could you describe your style?
I shoot what I see, very quickly. But as soon as light is changing I shoot again ! Landscape, architecture, sky, people... many subjects can be interesting for the montages I create when I come back in my studio.

AAP: What kind of gear do you use? Camera, lens, digital, film?
Since the begining, I am working with Nikon cameras. During the last few years, I have definitly adopted digital camera. My last one is the D-800.

AAP: Do you spend a lot of time editing your images?
Not enough : after shooting, I spend a lot of time creating montages. For this reason I keep each photo, just in case ! But it might be a problem in the futur with hardware !

AAP: Favorite(s) photographer(s)?
They are so many. Editing a list would be a nightmare. Especially if I forgot to mention some of them.

AAP: Your best memory has a photographer?
I will never forget my experience in Bangladesh. I had never seen so many people working by hand, what ever they do, transport, create, make… they do not use use any machine. They work hard in bad conditions but they keep smiling!

AAP: Your worst souvenir has a photographer?
I had a bad time in Guinea. Working for an editor who wanted me to take photos from the Niger river and the every day life. The problem is I had to deal with blackmail from the people who were supposed to help me.
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Fern L. Nesson
United States
Fern L. Nesson is a graduate of Harvard Law School. She received an M.A. in American History from Brandeis and an M.F.A in Photography from the Maine Media College. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She practiced law in Boston for twenty years and subsequently taught American History and Mathematics. Nesson's photographs have been shown internationally in solo exhibitions at the Politecnico University in Torino, Italy, Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, France, Ph21 Gallery in Budapest, Hungary and at The University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. In the United States, Nesson has had solo exhibitions at the Griffin Museum of Photography, at MIT and Harvard, and at the Beacon Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts, the Pascal Gallery in Rockport, and Maine, and Through This Lens Gallery in Durham, NC. Additionally, her work has been selected for numerous juried exhibitions in the U.S., Barcelona, Rome and Budapest. Nesson's photobooks, Signet of Eternity and WORD, won the 10th and the 12th Annual Photobooks Award from the Davis-Orton Gallery. Her photography can be found at www.fernlnesson. Statement ''Art should not be copies of living things but... [itself] be [a] living thing – a real living form.'' Malevich (1916) My photographs capture the moment when mass becomes energy. My goal is to create living works of art that offer energy to the viewer. I shoot from reality; my images are never constructed, only sparingly edited. They distill a scene or an object it to its essence. Photographs that embody energy rely upon the camera to record a specific moment but, if they hit their mark, they escape and float free of it. The energy from the moment of capture enlivens these images. Like Cezanne's paintings, they are alive, they breathe. An energetic image expresses interconnectedness, visualizes movement and flow. It constitutes a moment of transcendence and teaches us that, although everything changes form, nothing is ever destroyed. It lives on, resonating with the past, celebrating the present, pointing to the future, embodying the universal, iconically representing the eternal. As Whitman’s wrote in Leaves of Grass, it can “chant the [viewer] into a new state of being, get him psychically airborne, boost him up to that height where he can identify with the past and commune with the future.”
Laurence Demaison
Having practiced various means of artistic expression (painting, drawing, sculpture) since childhood, and completing formal training in architecture in 1988, Laurence began her self-taught journey into photography in 1990. Particularly interested in the female portrait and nude, and finding it difficult to adequately convey her mental images into words and direction, she gave up on the use of models and began to use herself exclusively as the subject of her photographs. Freed from the burden of words and the presence of others, she embraced the solitude, silence and freedom, while struggling to confront the image of her own body. Rather than portraying her body as it was, she sought to conceal, modify, even destroy it and reconstruct it in a form more acceptable to her. The result is a series of self-portraits which expertly use the reflective and distortive qualities of her materials along with the shadowy effects of light and negative images to create "paper phantoms", ghosts of herself that are there, yet disappear in an instant. Laurence creates all of her images in camera and executes the silver gelatin prints in her own darkroom, with no alteration of the image after shooting. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors from European photographic organizations and her work has been exhibited extensively in Paris and elsewhere in France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Belgium. This is the first gallery exhibition of her work in the United States. Source: Galerie BMG
Kerry Mansfield
United States
Kerry Mansfield is a San Francisco based photographer whose work explores time and how it affects our perceptions of what we see and the world it envelops. Born in New Jersey in 1974, Kerry graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Photography from UC Berkeley and did further studies at CCA (California College of the Arts). Her work has been exhibited globally and garnered numerous honors including LensCulture’s Single Image Award, multiple PX3, World Photography Organization and IPA Awards, and as a Critical Mass Finalist for three years. A host of press and publications, ranging from Time Magazine's Lightbox to the New York Times LensBlog, have featured several bodies of her work. Kerry’s Expired series monograph was released in spring 2017 receiving high praise from The Guardian UK, Architectural Digest, BuzzFeed News, Hyperallergic and and winning the PX3 Bronze Book Award. She's now currently creating a new body of work focused on tidal shifts as a metaphor for how time alters memories. Aftermath As a photographer, I've spent most of my career looking deeply into the spaces we inhabit. The idea of Home - what it meant and how it felt, preoccupied my thinking. Almost all my pictures were of the spaces we live in or the things we live with. But at the age of 31, a diagnosis of breast cancer forced me to redefine my ideas of home. Needless to say it came as quite a shock. I had exercised and eaten correctly, and like many of my age, I felt indestructible, never thinking the most basic of dwellings could be lost. Faced with the nihilistic process of radical chemotherapy and surgery, my ideas of "where" I exist turned inward. As the doctors, with their knives and chemistry broke down the physical structure in which I lived, the relationship between the cellular self and the metaphysical self became glaringly clear. My body may not be me, but without it, I am something else entirely. I knew that my long held image of myself would be shattered. What would emerge would be a mystery. It was in that spirit of unknown endings, that I picked up my camera to self document the catharsis of my own cancer treatment. No one was there when these pictures were made, just my dissolving ideas of self and a camera. And what began as a story that could have ended in many ways, this chapter, like my treatment, has now run its course. While I can't say everything is fine now, I will say, "These are the images of my Home - as it was then", and with a little luck, there will be no more to come. AAP Competitions: All About Photo Awards 2019 Article: The Tidal Block
Yuyang Liu
China
1991
Yuyang Liu, b.1991, graduated from Department of History, East China Normal University. He is a freelancer photographer based in Guangzhou, China. When he was a high school student, he started to love taking photos and decided to be a photographer. His images focus on the change and connection of people in the changing society. He had won Magnum Foundation Human Rights & Photography Fellowship, Abigail Cohen Fellowship in Documentary Photography and Ian Parry Scholarship. His work was published on TIME, New York Times, the Guardian, NPR and BBC World Service. Awards Ian Parry Scholarship, 2015 Abigail Cohen Fellowship in Documentary Photography (Magnum Foundation/ChinaFile, 2015 National Geographic Photo Contest China, Honorable Mention, 2014 Magnum Foundation: The Human Rights & Photography Fellowship, 2014 ND Scholarship, 3rd Prize, 2014 2013 Shanghai Youth Art Exhibition, Shortlisted, 2013 5th Foundation of OFPiX Photo Agency, Shortlisted, 2012 Exhibitions & Events Magnum Foundation Human Rights & Photography Fellowship Program Forum: Inter Art Center and Gallery, Beijing, China, 2014 Home of Youth: High School No.7 Chengdu (multimedia):PhotoChina Original International Photographic Exhibition, Confucius’ Hall, Guiyang, China, 2014 Neither Here Nor There (multimedia): LOOKbetween 2014, Virginia, USA, 2014 Auspicious Things: Lishui International Photography Festival Hand-made Books Workshop, Pump Factory, Lishui, China, 2013 Auspicious Things: 2013 Shanghai Youth Art Exhibition, China Art Museum, Shanghai, China, 2013 About the project: At home with mental illness: In 2014 there were reportedly 16 million people in China living with severe mental illness. 80% of patients diagnosed did not receive sufficient or necessary treatment due to China’s flawed health care system. Most people who suffer from these illnesses are forced to live at home with their families or on their own. They are overlooked or often not recognized at all within society, they are invisible. So I decide to film these patients and families who have mental illness such as psychosis or dysgnosia. I’ve been to several towns and villages in Guangdong Province which is the richest region in southern China and filmed some mental illness at home. This project aims to explore the unique relationship between the mentally ill, their families, and society at large.
Jacob Riis
Denmark/United States
1849 | † 1914
Jacob August Riis was a Danish-American social reformer, "muckraking" journalist, and social documentary photographer. He contributed significantly to the cause of urban reform in America at the turn of the twentieth century. He is known for using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the impoverished in New York City; those impoverished New Yorkers were the subject of most of his prolific writings and photography. He endorsed the implementation of "model tenements" in New York with the help of humanitarian Lawrence Veiller. Additionally, as one of the most famous proponents of the newly practicable casual photography, he is considered one of the fathers of photography due to his very early adoption of flash. While living in New York, Riis experienced poverty and became a police reporter writing about the quality of life in the slums. He attempted to alleviate the bad living conditions of poor people by exposing their living conditions to the middle and upper classes. Riis had for some time been wondering how to show the squalor of which he wrote more vividly than his words could express. He tried sketching but was incompetent at this. Camera lenses of the 1880s were slow as was the emulsion of photographic plates; photography thus did not seem to be of any use for reporting about conditions of life in dark interiors. In early 1887, however, Riis was startled to read that "a way had been discovered to take pictures by flashlight. The darkest corner might be photographed that way." The German innovation, by Adolf Miethe and Johannes Gaedicke, flash powder was a mixture of magnesium with potassium chlorate and some antimony sulfide for added stability; the powder was used in a pistol-like device that fired cartridges. This was the introduction of flash photography. Recognizing the potential of the flash, Riis informed a friend, Dr. John Nagle, chief of the Bureau of Vital Statistics in the City Health Department who was also a keen amateur photographer. Nagle found two more photographer friends, Henry Piffard and Richard Hoe Lawrence, and the four of them began to photograph the slums. Their first report was published in the New York newspaper The Sun on February 12, 1888; it was an unsigned article by Riis which described its author as "an energetic gentleman, who combines in his person, though not in practice, the two dignities of deacon in a Long Island church and a police reporter in New York." The "pictures of Gotham's crime and misery by night and day" are described as "a foundation for a lecture called 'The Other Half: How It Lives and Dies in New York.' to give at church and Sunday school exhibitions, and the like." The article was illustrated by twelve-line drawings based on the photographs. Riis and his photographers were among the first Americans to use flash photography. Pistol lamps were dangerous and looked threatening, and would soon be replaced by another method for which Riis lit magnesium powder on a frying pan. The process involved removing the lens cap, igniting the flash powder, and replacing the lens cap; the time taken to ignite the flash powder sometimes allowed a visible image blurring created by the flash. Riis's first team soon tired of the late hours, and Riis had to find other help. Both his assistants were lazy and one was dishonest, selling plates for which Riis had paid. Riis sued him in court successfully. Nagle suggested that Riis should become self-sufficient, so in January 1888 Riis paid $25 for a 4×5 box camera, plate holders, a tripod and equipment for developing and printing. He took the equipment to the potter's field cemetery on Hart Island to practice, making two exposures. The result was seriously overexposed but successful. For three years, Riis combined his own photographs with others commissioned of professionals, donations by amateurs and purchased lantern slides, all of which formed the basis for his photographic archive. Because of the nighttime work, he was able to photograph the worst elements of the New York slums, the dark streets, tenement apartments, and "stale-beer" dives, and documented the hardships faced by the poor and criminal, especially in the vicinity of notorious Mulberry Street. A particularly important effort by Riis was his exposure of the condition of New York's water supply. His five-column story "Some Things We Drink", in the August 21, 1891, edition of the New York Evening Sun, included six photographs (later lost). Riis wrote: "I took my camera and went up in the watershed photographing my evidence wherever I found it. Populous towns sewered directly into our drinking water. I went to the doctors and asked how many days a vigorous cholera bacillus may live and multiply in running water. About seven, said they. My case was made." The story resulted in the purchase by New York City of areas around the New Croton Reservoir, and may well have saved New Yorkers from an epidemic of cholera. Riis tried hard to have the slums around Five Points demolished and replaced with a park. His writings resulted in the Drexel Committee's investigation of unsafe tenements; this resulted in the Small Park Act of 1887. Riis was not invited to the eventual opening of the park on June 15, 1897, but went all the same, together with Lincoln Steffens. In the last speech, the street cleaning commissioner credited Riis for the park and led the public in giving him three cheers of "Hooray, Jacob Riis!" Other parks also were created, and Riis was popularly credited with them as well.Source: Wikipedia
Sarah  Ketelaars
United Kingdom
Sarah Ketelaars is a British photographer from Brighton, UK. She has a BA and an MA degree in English Literature from Jesus College, Cambridge, an MSc in Social Science from the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen and a Diploma in photography from City College, Brighton. She began her career as a journalist and her images have appeared on book, CD and magazine cover. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is represented by Trevillion Images & Getty, and by 35 North Gallery in Brighton. In 2021 she was selected as one of the Lensculture Critics’ Choice winners for her project ‘Windows’ shot during lockdown in Houston, Texas and in 2024 she was selected as a finalist for her project ‘The 544’ in the Lensculture Art Photography Awards. The 544 This ongoing project is a memorial to 544 psychiatric patients murdered by the Nazis in 1941 in Latvia. The figurative images I’ve made are all cyanotypes. Eventually there will be one for each man, woman and child killed. My grandmother was working at the hospital from where the patients were taken. I have visited the hospital and found that although the story is known no memorial exists. The only official record seems to be a short paragraph in the Nuremberg report. So far I have found no record of the names. Using a historic photographic process feels fitting for a project examining a historical event. An ancient pagan Latvian folk symbol is drawn on by hand in gold ink to each piece. It is impossible for me to look at these images without thinking about how the lives of these people ended. However, the project is primarily intended as a memorial. I wanted the images to hint at some more celebratory moments, to remember the lives lived before these people entered the hospital; before they died. Not knowing anything about the identities of the dead, I have tried to imagine each one as a unique, precious being, and give each back a little of the character stripped from them when they were murdered and reduced by history to a number on a list of nameless victims. The project is the second in a trilogy looking at my family history, examining themes of cultural inheritance, identity and intergenerational trauma.
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