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FINAL CALL TO ENTER AAP MAGAZINE PORTRAIT: PUBLICATION AND $1,000 CASH PRIZES
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Matteo Bastianelli
Matteo Bastianelli
Matteo Bastianelli

Matteo Bastianelli

Country: Italy
Birth: 1985

Matteo Bastianelli (b. 1985) is a documentary photographer and filmmaker based in the Metropolitan City of Rome, Italy. He is a National Geographic Magazine contributor and a member of Italy's National Order of Journalists. Above all he works on personal projects and commissions related to social, environmental and human rights issues with a keen interest in the themes of memory, identity, inclusion and sustainability.

His photographic and film projects have been regularly published and commissioned by Al Jazeera, CNN, Internazionale, The New York Times, National Geographic, Newsweek, The Guardian, Voice of America, Washington Post, among others. Since 2016 he has also been working on commission for NGOs such as Amnesty International, AVSI, Doctors Without Borders/MSF, Human Rights Watch and International Committee of the Red Cross. His projects have been widely shown in group and solo exhibitions and screenings around the world. A selection of Bastianelli’s accolades includes National Geographic Society’s Covid-19 Emergency Fund for Journalists, Emerging Talent Award at Reportage by Getty Images, AP32- American Photography Awards, PDN’s Photo Annual, Canon Young Photographers’ Award, Italian Doc Screenings Development Award for best documentary film and "Vittorio de Seta" prize for the director of the best documentary film at BIF&ST.

He spent almost five years working in the former Yugoslavia, where he produced his early series. In 2012 was released his first monograph and documentary film, "The Bosnian Identity". In 2013 he started working on "Souls of Syrians", an ongoing project which stems from the concern to document the personal story of a Syrian youth who fled his country in search of salvation in Europe. In 2018 Bastianelli documented the world’s worst humanitarian disaster caused by the ongoing civil war in Yemen, focusing his attention on the resilience of civilians trapped in a life of violence and disease. His documentary film "Yemen Unveiled" was screened during the 2019 Human Rights Film Festival in Berlin, Germany and has been included in the Official Selection of the Health for All Film Festival 2020, organized by the World Health Organization in Geneva. In recent years, he has been continuing his research work on personal and small stories that, by synecdoche, represent a mosaic of contemporary history: from immigration to climate change, from social inclusion to the metamorphosis of the contemporary landscape.


Movies:
The Bosnian Identity
Mal di Mare
 

Matteo Bastianelli's Video

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Ralph Milewski
Germany
1968
Ralph Milewski is an artist from Germany who works with photography. His work moves between documentary observation and conceptual approaches and engages with spaces, transitions, and traces of human presence. At the center of his artistic practice is the ongoing project Rear Seat Diaries. The images are created from the back seat of a VW Caddy and photographed through the side window. The window frame forms a constant visual system: the world moves through this fixed frame while the perspective remains unchanged. Within this structure, Milewski works with repetition and variation. Everyday situations, passing scenes, and fleeting encounters appear under the same visual conditions and gradually form a coherent body of work over time. Alongside these observational images, conceptual works also emerge within the project. They explore questions of movement, time, and perception and expand the original visual system. His working method is deliberately reduced. Milewski works with minimal equipment and uses existing situations and lighting conditions as the starting point for his images. His photographs emerge from scarcity, not from abundance. Rear Seat Diaries: Rear Seat Diaries is an ongoing photographic project that began in 2022 from a simple observation: the side window of my vehicle became the fixed frame of my images. Over time, this frame developed into a visual system. While places, situations, and light constantly change, the frame remains constant and structures each photograph. Within this system, both observed moments and deliberately staged situations emerge. Everyday encounters, interventions, experiments with movement, or longer exposures are brought together through the same fixed frame. Rear Seat Diaries is not a finished project but an open working process. The recurring frame becomes a constant structure within which different forms of observation, time, and intervention unfold.
Philippe Chancel
Over the past twenty years Philippe Chancel’s photography has explored the complex, shifting and fertile territory where art, documentaries and journalism meet. His is a constantly evolving project, focusing on the status of images when they are confronted with what constitutes “images” in the contemporary world.Born in 1959, Philippe Chancel now works and lives in Paris. He was introduced to photography at a very young age, took an economics degree at the University of Paris (Nanterre) followed by a post-graduate diploma in journalism at the Cfpj in Paris.Philippe Chancel’s work has been widely exhibited and published in France and abroad in a number of prestigious publications. These include « Regards d’artistes » – portraits of contemporary artists –, « Souvenirs » – a series of portraits of great capital cities (Paris, London, New York, Tokyo, Brussels) glimpsed through shop windows - produced in collaboration with Valérie Weill, and, lastly, his North Korean project, which brought him international recognition.« DPRK », in which Chancel offers a revealing and original vision of North Korea, was first shown in 2006 at the « Rencontres d’Arles », then at the C/O Berlin. It was also exhibited at the Photographers’ Gallery in London, as part of the Deutsche Borse photography prize exhibition, where it won the visitors’ poll. « DPRK » also appeared in book form, published by Thames and Hudson. His Emirates project was initially presented at the 53rd Venice Biennale in the Abu Dhabi pavilion, curated by Catherine David, and was part of the « Dreamlands » exhibition at the Pompidou Centre from May 2010 followed by many others all over the world. « Desert sprit » published by Xavier Barral and « Dubai » published by be-pôles already present this project in book form. « Workers Emirates », published by Bernard Chauveau Editeur, is his latest photo essay book.Philippe Chancel is currently working on a new long-term project entitled « Datazone » that aims to explore the many-faceted aftermaths within the documentary field, revealing some of the world’s most singular lands which are recurrently in the news or, conversely, hardly ever picked up by the media radar. This visionary quest has already taken him from Port au Prince to Kabul via Fukushima, Niger's delta, Pyongyang or Astana. His work is included in many permanent public collections as well as private collections.
Alex MacLean
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Zhou HanShun
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AAP Magazine #57 Portrait
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