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Benjamin De Diesbach
Benjamin De Diesbach
Benjamin De Diesbach

Benjamin De Diesbach

Country: France/Switzerland
Birth: 1967

Franco-swiss, Benjamin de Diesbach was born in 1967 in Paris. He studied history and political sience. History remains a stong passion for him. As a photographer he started to work in the nineties for the record industry. At the same time, He worked on a series of photographs called "barocco portraits" ("protraits baroques"). These series were inspired by the painting of the fifteen century. Precise in his composition, Benjamin seeks to dramatize extreme situation and extract their inherent beauty. While trying to reflect the tensions felt at the time of the shot, he freezes, like a painter, the instant. Last year, Benjamin was honored by the american magazine Graphis "platinum winner".

His works were published by several magazines in France, switzerland and Sweeden. Benjamin de Diesbach photography is described as "Neo classic".
 

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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
Craig Varjabedian
United States
1957
"Craig Varjabedian's photographs of the American West would be the perfect illustrations to a Cormac McCarthy book. They have a surreal beauty and poetic emptiness that border on the fictional. It's as if this isn't the real West, but the West of tall tales and American dreams." Claire O'neill, "The Picture Show," National Public Radio Craig Varjabedian is an award-winning photographer, author, and teacher. His stunning photographs of the people and places of the American West are critically acclaimed, not only for their powerful imagery and artistic composition, but also for their ability to transcend the commonplace-immanently engaging the viewer with scenes that passionately reflect the artist's connection to his subjects. Varjabedian achieves this goal through a skillful visionary acuity and intuition, allowing him to make photographs that expand awareness. As a result, viewers are presented with new ways of seeing and experiencing this region so integral to our collective imagination and our unique American identity. Varjabedian's gift lies in his ability to blend both technical expertise and illustrative narrative-depicting lyrical images that reveal the humanity and character of a vast sometimes barren country known for its legendary beauty and dramatic heritage. Varjabedian's photographs tell contemporary stories that continue to inspire today what has historically been recognized as the "spirit of the Great American West." Craig graduated from the University of Michigan witha Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, and received his Master's degree from the prestigious Rochester Institute of Technology. As a fine art photographer for over forty years, Varjabedian has been widely praised for his masterful images ranging from awe-inspiring, expansive landscapes, to intimate soul-revealing portraits. He is also the director of Eloquent Light Photography Workshops in Santa Fe. In further recognition of his work, Varjabedian has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the McCune Charitable Foundation, and the New Mexico Humanities Council. His photographs have been exhibited in, and his prints collected by, museums around the country, including the William Benton Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Albuquerque Museum of Art. In 1991, Craig received an Emmy Award for his collaboration with award-winning filmmaker Karl Kernberger on the PBS documentary En Divina Luz: The Penitente Moradas of New Mexico. Photographs from this project were published in a 1994 book by the same name. Craig's other books include By the Grace of Light: Images of Faith from Catholic New Mexico (1998), Four & Twenty Photographs: Stories from Behind the Lens (2007); Ghost Ranch and the Faraway Nearby (2009), which received the prestigious Wrangler Award for Outstanding Photography Book from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum; and Landscape Dreams, A New Mexico Portrait (2012), released to coincide with the New Mexico State Centennial. Varjabedian's latest book, Into the Great White Sands, a photographic celebration of White Sands National Monument, was published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2018. The book received a prestigious New Mexico/Arizona Book Award. Craig Varjabedian's Interview
Maynard Switzer
Maynard Switzer was born in Los Angeles and is a professional freelance travel and documentary photographer. He is a graduate of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and a former assistant to legendary photographer Richard Avedon. He has taught at the International Center of Photography in New York City and has written many magazine articles about travel photography. His love of foreign cultures and their fascinating customs has been the main catalyst for Maynard’s photography around the globe. Maynard has had his photography published in National Geographic Traveler Magazine, Geo Magazine, Afar Magazine and the prestigious Fine Art Spanish Magazine Art Fotografico. Statement There are approximately 195 independent countries in the world and an estimated 6,800 different languages spoken, and often times there is a breakdown in communication. Some caused by language barriers, other times lost or inadequate translation and sometimes a woeful attempt at hand signals. However, images are universally understood. The cliché "a picture is worth a thousand words" certainly rings true. Pictures speak a thousand words to a thousand different people in a thousand different ways. This global understanding has been the main reason that I have been documenting various cultures around the world. Over the past 20+ years I have concentrated on photographing people and their various ways of life that seem to have been left behind by the world's rush to modernize. Certain aspects of these various cultures seem to be in a time warp, many within their own country. The photographs presented here are part of a long-term project photographing some of these people that live and work in challenging environments that time seems to have forgotten and whose way of life may never be seen again.
Xiaoping Lin
China
1972
Xiaoping Lin, a Chinese bird photographer, has been involved in photography since 1992. He has won numerous honors, including the 2025 CEWE Winner, 2022 XPOSURE First Place, 2023 HIPA Merit Medal, 2023 BigPicture Winner, and 2024 NBP Winner. His photographic works have been exhibited in photography shows around the world and published in various magazines and books. His works accurately capture vivid details of bird ecological behavior from a unique perspective, while interpreting the meaning of life through the language of the lens. These images not only inspire audiences to engage in profound philosophical reflections on the laws of nature but also prompt the public to rediscover the majestic charm of the natural world, evoking deep inquiries into the essence of life and the mysteries of nature. He always hopes to convey the beauty of nature through the lens, awaken the public’s deep understanding and aesthetic resonance of nature, and then cherish the ecological environment and fulfill the responsibility of protection. Statement: The scene of “opening the gate to release the tide and egrets catching fish” is a major attraction of Yundang Lake in Xiamen, China. Xiamen has long pursued sustainable ecological civilization, improving bay water dynamics and protecting the marine ecosystem, with the lake area’s environment greatly improved. Every time the tide rises, the gates of the West Embankment in Xiamen are opened to let seawater into Yundang Lake. It is often seen that small fish are rolling and leaping in the surging seawater, and egrets in the air and big fish in the lake are competing for the small fish at the gate - a spectacular sight of "egrets and fish flying together". The series of photography works titled "The Epic of Survival in the Waves - The Life Struggle Between Egrets and Fish" was captured between 2022 and 2025. The speed at which egrets and large fish compete for small fish is so fast that a shutter speed of at least 1/2000 and a high-speed continuous shooting rate of 20 frames per second are required to freeze the thrilling moments. This speed is beyond the reaction time of the human eye. This series of photography works records the most primitive competition in nature from a nearly cold perspective, allowing me to see the most genuine form of life: not the cold law of the survival of the fittest, but the survival epic that every living being is writing with all their might. Those that sparkle in the waves are both the cruel truth of nature and the brilliant light of life that never compromises. I hope these photography works can prompt the audience to deeply reflect on the mysteries of nature and the essence of life, and thereby cherish the ecological environment and fulfill the responsibility of protection. AAP Magazine AAP Magazine 54 Nature
Ruth Bernhard
Germany / United States
1905 | † 2006
Ruth Bernhard (October 14, 1905 – December 18, 2006) was a German-born American photographer. She was born in Berlin to Lucian Bernhard and Gertrude Hoffmann. Lucian Bernhard was known for his poster and typeface design, many of which bear his name and are still in use. Bernhard's parents divorced when she was 2 years old and she only met her mother twice after the divorce. She was raised by two schoolteacher sisters and their mother. Bernhard's father Lucian was a major proponent of Ruth's work, and advised her frequently. Bernhard studied art history and typography at the Berlin Academy of Art from 1925 to 1927 before moving to New York City to join her father. She worked as an assistant to Ralph Steiner in Delineator magazine, but he terminated her employment for indifferent performance. Using the severance pay, Bernhard bought her own camera equipment. By the late-1920s, while living in Manhattan, Bernhard was heavily involved in the lesbian sub-culture of the artistic community, becoming friends with photographer Berenice Abbott and her lover, critic Elizabeth McCausland. Her first realization that she was attracted to other women occurred on New Year's Eve 1928 when she met the painter Patti Light. She wrote about her "bisexual escapades" in her memoir. In 1934 Bernhard began photographing women in the nude. It would be this art form for which she would eventually become best known. In 1935, she chanced to meet Edward Weston on the beach in Santa Monica. She would later say: "I was unprepared for the experience of seeing his pictures for the first time. It was overwhelming. It was lightning in the darkness ... here before me was indisputable evidence of what I had thought possible—an intensely vital artist whose medium was photography." Bernhard was so inspired by Weston's work that, after meeting him in 1935, she moved to California (where he lived). In 1939, Bernhard moved back to New York for eight years, during which time she met photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Bernhard was inspired by the small things in her life. In an interview from 1999 with Photographers Forum, Ruth states, "I’m most interested in—the little things that nobody observes, that nobody thinks are of any value". In the same interview she stated that, "Everything is universal" and that she was "very much aware of that". This idea of minimalism drove her passion for photography. In 1934 Ruth received a commission from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to photograph works for the Machine Art exhibition catalog. Her father Lucian Bernhard set up the meeting with MoMA for her. By 1944 she had met and became involved with artist and designer Eveline (Evelyn) Phimister. The two moved in together, and remained together for the next ten years in Carmel, California. Here, Bernhard worked with Group f/64. Soon, finding Carmel a difficult place in which to earn a living, they moved to Hollywood where she fashioned a career as a commercial photographer. In 1953, they moved to San Francisco where she became a colleague of photographers such as Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Minor White, and Wynn Bullock. Most of Bernhard's work is studio-based, ranging from simple still lifes to complex nudes. In the 1940s she worked with the conchologist Jean Schwengel. She worked almost exclusively in black-and-white, though there are rumors that she had done some color work as well. She also is known for her lesbian themed works, most notably Two Forms (1962). In that work, a black woman and a white woman who were real-life lovers are featured with their nude bodies pressed against one another. In 1967, Bernhard began a teaching career. This same year, Bernhard met United States Air Force Colonel Price Rice, an African American man ten years younger than her, and the two became lovers. They would remain together until his death in 1999. In her 90s, Bernhard cooperated with biographer Margaretta K. Mitchell in the book Ruth Bernhard, Between Art and Life, publicly revealing her many affairs with women and men throughout her lifetime. A departure was a collaboration with Melvin Van Peebles (as "Melvin Van"), then a young cable car gripman (driver) in San Francisco. Van Peebles wrote the text and Bernhard took the unposed photographs for The Big Heart, a book about life on the cable cars. In the early 1980s, Bernhard started to work with Carol Williams, owner of Photography West Gallery in Carmel, California. Bernhard told Williams that she knew there would be a book of her photography after her death, but hoped one could be published during her lifetime. Williams approached New York Graphics Society, and several other photographic book publishers, but was advised that "only Ansel Adams could sell black-and-white photography books." Bernhard and Williams decided to sell five limited edition prints to raise the necessary funds to publish a superior quality book of Ruth Bernhard nudes. The ensuing edition was produced by David Gray Gardner of Gardner Lithograph, (also the printer of Adams's books) and was called The Eternal Body. It won Photography Book of the Year in 1986 from Friends of Photography. This book was often credited by Ruth Bernhard as being an immeasurable help to her future career and public recognition. The Eternal Body was reprinted by Chronicle Books and later as a deluxe limited Centennial Edition in celebration of Ruth Bernhard's 100th birthday in October 2005. Carol Williams credited Ruth Bernhard with encouraging her to venture into book publishing, and later published several other photographic monographs. In the 1980s Bernhard also started to work with Joe Folberg. Folberg bought Vision Gallery from Douglas Elliott (who founded it in 1979) in San Francisco in 1982. Bernhard and Folberg worked together until Folberg's death. The gallery split with Debra Heimerdinger taking over operations in North America and Folberg's son Neil moving the "Vision Gallery" to Jerusalem. In 1984 Ruth worked with filmmaker Robert Burrill on her autobiographic film entitled, Illuminations: Ruth Bernhard, Photographer. The film premièred in 1989 at the Kabuki Theater in San Francisco and on local PBS station KQED in 1991. Bernhard was inducted into the Women's Caucus for Art in 1981. Bernhard was hailed by Ansel Adams as "the greatest photographer of the nude". Bernhard died in San Francisco at age 101.Source: Wikipedia
Robert Capa
United States
1913 | † 1954
Robert Capa (born Endre Friedmann; October 22, 1913 – May 25, 1954) was a Hungarian war photographer and photojournalist as well as the companion and professional partner of photographer Gerda Taro. He is considered by some to be the greatest combat and adventure photographer in history. Capa fled political repression in Hungary when he was a teenager, moving to Berlin, where he enrolled in college. He witnessed the rise of Hitler, which led him to move to Paris, where he met and began to work with Gerta Pohorylle. Together they worked under the alias Robert Capa and became photojournalists. Though she contributed to much of the early work, she quickly created her own alias 'Gerda Taro' and they began to publish their work separately. He subsequently covered five wars: the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II across Europe, the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, and the First Indochina War, with his photos published in major magazines and newspapers. During his career he risked his life numerous times, most dramatically as the only civilian photographer landing on Omaha Beach on D-Day. He documented the course of World War II in London, North Africa, Italy, and the liberation of Paris. His friends and colleagues included Ernest Hemingway, Irwin Shaw, John Steinbeck and director John Huston. In 1947, for his work recording World War II in pictures, U.S. general Dwight D. Eisenhower awarded Capa the Medal of Freedom. That same year, Capa co-founded Magnum Photos in Paris. The organization was the first cooperative agency for worldwide freelance photographers. Hungary has issued a stamp and a gold coin in his honor. Source: Wikipedia On 3 December 1938 Picture Post introduced 'The Greatest War Photographer in the World: Robert Capa' with a spread of 26 photographs taken during the Spanish Civil War. But the 'greatest war photographer' hated war. Born Andre Friedmann to Jewish parents in Budapest in 1913, he studied political science at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik in Berlin. Driven out of the country by the threat of a Nazi regime, he settled in Paris in 1933. He was represented by Alliance Photo and met the journalist and photographer Gerda Taro. Together, they invented the 'famous' American photographer Robert Capa and began to sell his prints under that name. He met Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway, and formed friendships with fellow photographers David 'Chim' Seymour and Henri Cartier-Bresson. From 1936 onwards, Capa's coverage of the Spanish Civil War appeared regularly. His picture of a Loyalist soldier who had just been fatally wounded earned him his international reputation and became a powerful symbol of war. After his companion, Gerda Taro, was killed in Spain, Capa travelled to China in 1938 and emigrated to New York a year later. As a correspondent in Europe, he photographed the Second World War, covering the landing of American troops on Omaha beach on D-Day, the liberation of Paris and the Battle of the Bulge. In 1947 Capa founded Magnum Photos with Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, George Rodger and William Vandivert. On 25 May 1954 he was photographing for Life in Thai-Binh, Indochina, when he stepped on a landmine and was killed. The French army awarded him the Croix de Guerre with Palm post-humously. The Robert Capa Gold Medal Award was established in 1955 to reward exceptional professional merit. Source: Magnum Photos
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