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Enter AAP Magazine 54 Nature: Landscape, Wildlife, Flora & Fauna
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Philip Metcalf
Philip Metcalf
Philip Metcalf

Philip Metcalf

Country: United States

Philip Metcalf was born in the Finger Lakes area of central New York State. He is a photographer who focuses mainly on the landscape, shooting in black & white infrared. The Fire Ghosts portfolio explores the devastation and unexpected beauty caused by the 2011 Las Conchas forest fire in New Mexico.

In 2013, a photo from this portfolio was selected for the Art of Photography show, curated by Julia Dolan, the Curator of Photography at the Portland Art Museum and hung in the San Diego Art Institute. Also in 2013, he was a Nominee in the Black & White Spider Awards. In 2014, another photo from the portfolio was selected for the cover of Black & White Magazine (issue # 104).

A graduate of Princeton University, Philip and his wife, photographer Patricia Galagan, live in Santa Fe, New Mexico.


Interview with Philip Metcalf
AAP: Where did you study photography? With Whom?
Two most important teachers were Charles Harbutt and Kate Carter back in the 1970’s.

Harbutt’s class at The Maine Photo Workshops was ostensibly about the camera, but the real message was the difference between how your eye sees the world vs how a camera sees the world.

Like many young photographers, I started with a couple of camera bodies and several lens. Accordingly, much of one’s time and attention was spent on thinking about equipment combinations. In Ireland with Kate, I was bemoaning the lack of great results. Kate said something was elegantly simple and utterly true: “Remember, it’s all about the light.” That afternoon I went shooting with one body and one lens, a practice that I have followed ever since.

AAP: What or who inspires you?
Nature, especially the wide-open spaces of the Western United States. When I lived on the East Coast, I asked a friend visiting from the West what he thought of the Eastern part of the US. He said it was fine except that he couldn’t see anything. I never really understood what he meant until moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico. The vast expanses of the West with their unobstructed views for miles and miles are a very different experience than the more circumscribed views of the East.

AAP: How could you describe your style?
Based on nature and the real world, but slightly abstracted.

AAP: Do you have a favorite photograph or series?
My Fire Ghosts portfolio.

Website

www.philipmetcalf.com

 

Inspiring Portfolios

Thomas Vijayan
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Julie Wang
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Pedro Jarque Krebs
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More Great Photographers To Discover

Lillian Bassman
Lillian Bassman
United States
1917 | † 2012
Lillian Bassman (June 15, 1917 – February 13, 2012) was an American photographer and painter. Her parents were Jewish intellectuals who emigrated to the United States from Russia in 1905 and settled in Brooklyn, New York. She studied at the Textile High School in Manhattan with Alexey Brodovitch and graduated in 1933. While there, she met the photographer, Paul Himmel, and they were married in 1935; Himmel died in 2009 after 73 years of marriage. From the 1940s until the 1960s Bassman worked as a fashion photographer for Junior Bazaar and later at Harper's Bazaar where she promoted the careers of photographers such as Richard Avedon, Robert Frank, Louis Faurer and Arnold Newman. Under the guidance of the Russian emigrant, Alexey Brodovitch, she began to photograph her model subjects primarily in black and white. Her work was published for the most part in Harper’s Bazaar from 1950 to 1965. By the 1970s Bassman’s interest in pure form in her fashion photography was out of vogue. She turned to her own photo projects and abandoned fashion photography. In doing so she tossed out 40 years of negatives and prints - her life’s work. A forgotten bag filled with hundreds of images was discovered over 20 years later. Bassman’s fashion photographic work began to be re-appreciated in the 1990s. She worked with digital technology and abstract color photography into her 90s to create a new series of work. She used Photoshop for her image manipulation. The most notable qualities about her photographic work are the high contrasts between light and dark, the graininess of the finished photos, and the geometric placement and camera angles of the subjects. Bassman became one of the last great woman photographers in the world of fashion. Bassman died on February 13, 2012, at age 94. Source: Wikipedia Lillian Bassman was born in 1917 into an immigrant family of free-thinking intellectuals, and was brought up with a mindset that allowed her to live as an independent and unconventional woman.She worked as a textile designer and fashion illustrator before working at Harper's Bazaar with Alexey Brodovitch, and ultimately becoming a photographer. Bassman's fashion images are unique, and acheieve their effect through manipulation in the dark room. Appearing in Harper's Bazaar from the 1940's to the 1960's, her work was categorized by their elegance and grace.Bassman had transformed these photographs into original works of art through her darkroom techniques in which she blurs and bleaches the images, investing them with poetry, mystery, and glamour. Source: Staley-Wise Gallery Lillian Bassman is one of the great 20th century fashion photographers along with Irving Penn and Richard Avedon. She began her career not as a photographer but as a painter at the WPA and then took courses at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. In 1945, Bassman was appointed Art Director at Junior Bazaar, giving projects to photographers such as Richard Avedon, Robert Frank and Paul Himmel (her husband). Later in 1947, she became the Art Director at Harper’s Bazaar, and her work appeared in Harper’s Bazaar throughout the 1940’s and 50’s. Her work was nearly destroyed in the 70’s by a water leak in her studio, and it was not until the 1990’s that her work was revived. With this new spotlight, Bassman received the Agfa Life Time Achievement Award and the Dem Art Directors Club Award in 1996. During the same year, Bassman began photographing again when she was asked to photograph the Haute Couture collection for New York Times Magazine, the Autumn Collection for Neiman Marcus, as well as work for German Vogue. Her work has been exhibited worldwide. Source: Peter Fetterman Gallery
Elizabeth (Lee) Miller
Elizabeth (Lee) Miller
United States
1907 | † 1977
Lee Miller, 1907-1977, first entered the world of photography as a model in New York to photographers such as Edward Steichen, Arnold Genthe and George Hoyninguen-Huene. In 1929 Miller moved to Paris and became the assistant, and lover, of Man Ray. Together, they produced some of the most significant works of both of their careers, including rediscovering the solarisation technique in Man Ray’s darkroom. She quickly became established as both surrealist artist and photographer in her own right and returned to New York to run her own studio with commissions for portraits, packing shots and editorials for Vogue magazine. Lee Miller spent several years in the mid 1930’s living in Cairo with her Egyptian husband, Aziz Eloui Bey. Bored of life in the city, she would travel by jeep through the desert on photography exhibitions and re-imagine desert landscapes with her witty and surrealist flair. In 1939, Lee moved to London and worked as freelance photographer for British Vogue magazine. Alongside this, her documentation of the Blitz was published in Grim Glory, a pamphlet encouraging the US to join the war effort. Lee Miller later became one of the first ever female war correspondents accredited to the US Army and travelled with the US troops throughout Europe during 1944 and 1945. She documented the liberation of Paris, the siege at St Malo and Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. Perhaps most famously, she took a self-portrait sitting in Adolf Hitler’s bathtub in his Munich apartment, a statement of the end of the war. Lee Miller mostly abandoned photography later in her life and didn’t speak of her wartime experiences. Her former and final home, Farley Farm House, Sussex, England is now the base of the Lee Miller Archives which holds over 60,000 of her negatives as well as manuscripts and vintage prints. Over 3,000 images are available to view at www.leemiller.co.uk.
Ferdinando Scianna
Ferdinando Scianna
Italy
1943
Ferdinando Scianna (born 1943) is an Italian photographer. Scianna won the Prix Nadar in 1966 and became a full member of Magnum Photos in 1989. He has produced numerous books. Scianna took up photography while studying literature, philosophy and art history at the University of Palermo in the 1960s. He moved to Milan in 1966 and started working as a photographer for L'Europeo in 1967, becoming a journalist there in 1973. Scianna wrote on politics for Le Monde diplomatique and on literature and photography for La Quinzaine Littéraire. He first joined Magnum Photos in 1982, becoming a full member in 1989. He took up fashion photography in the late 1980s. His first work, in 1987, was to photograph Marpessa Hennink for Dolce & Gabbana's advertising campaign for their Fall/Winter collection, clothing which was inspired by Sicily.Source: Wikipedia Ferdinando Scianna started taking photographs in the 1960s while studying literature, philosophy and art history at the University of Palermo. It was then that he began to photograph the Sicilian people systematically. Feste Religiose in Sicilia (1965) included an essay by the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia, and it was the first of many collaborations with famous writers. Scianna moved to Milan in 1966. The following year he started working for the weekly magazine L’Europeo, first as a photographer, then as a journalist from 1973. He also wrote on politics for Le Monde Diplomatique and on literature and photography for La Quinzaine Littéraire. In 1977 he published Les Siciliens in France and La Villa Dei Mostri in Italy. During this period, Scianna met Henri Cartier-Bresson, and in 1982 he joined Magnum Photos. He entered the field of fashion photography in the late 1980s and at the end of the decade he published a retrospective, Le Forme del Caos (1989). Scianna returned to exploring the meaning of religious rituals with Viaggio a Lourdes (1995), then two years later he published a collection of images of sleepers – Dormire Forse Sognare (To Sleep, Perchance to Dream). His portraits of the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges were published in 1999, and in the same year, the exhibition Niños del Mundo displayed Scianna’s images of children from around the world. In 2002 Scianna completed Quelli di Bagheria, a book on his home town in Sicily, in which he tries to reconstruct the atmosphere of his youth through writings and photographs of Bagheria and the people who live there.Source: Magnum Photos
Jeremy Cowart
Jeremy Cowart
United States
At his core, Jeremy is an artist. Starting out as a painter first, Jeremy fell in love with the creative process. He then went on to study graphic design in college and founded his own graphic design company, Pixelgrazer, in 2001. Jeremy really only began taking pictures to bring texture into his design work. But before he knew it, he realized that photography was his true passion. So in April of 2005, Jeremy switched over to it full time and he has never looked back. In a relatively short amount of time, Jeremy earned the respect of artists, photographers, and celebrities alike. Now hailed as one of the trailblazers in the industry, Jeremy sees photography as a natural extension of his passion for the arts. Jeremy has taken portraits of many familiar names such as Taylor Swift, Tim Tebow, The Kardashians, Sting, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Heidi Klum, Gwyneth Paltrow, The Civil Wars, Emma Stone, Courtney Cox, and Ryan Seacrest, just to name a few. His clients, mostly entertainment based, include ABC, FOX, A&E, F/X, Discovery Channel, ESPN, People, US Weekly, VIBE, E!, Universal Records, Sony Records and Warner Brothers Records. His work has been published in Rolling Stone, ESPN Magazine, People Magazine, USA Today, Fast Company, NYTimes, TIME, Nylon and more. There's always something interesting going on in Jeremy's world. His humanitarian projects have been featured on CNN.com as international leading headlines twice, he shot the cover of Tim Tebow's NY Times best-selling autobiography, and he recently starred in an episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. In addition to all that, Jeremy is something of a social media/technology guru. He's a featured user on Google+ with over a million followers, he won the Celebrity TwitChange campaign last year that raised thousands of dollars to fight global poverty, and he's currently working on his first iPhone app to be released Summer 2012. Photography has taken Jeremy to six continents. He traveled with Britney Spears in 2009 as her "Circus World Tour" photographer, documented seventeen countries with the Passion World Tour in 2008, and has been on numerous trips to Africa and Haiti with various organizations. From all his travels, Jeremy has released 3 Photography books, "Hope in the Dark", "The Poor Will Be Glad" and "Awakening", and he's currently working on a 4th new book, "What's Your Mark?" with Zondervan Publishers due out Fall 2012. Jeremy also spends his time on community projects, brainstorming innovative ways to use his camera to make an impact. In January 2010, after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, Jeremy responded with his "Voices of Haiti" photo essay, letting the people of Haiti write their own thoughts and prayers on found rubble. This project was displayed prominently at the entrance of a very important gathering of world leaders at the United Nations in March of 2010. They were meeting to discuss the rebuild of Haiti and they ended up pledging ten billion dollars to the effort. On that day, Jeremy's "Voices of Haiti" project proved that art can help change the world. In August of 2011, Jeremy traveled to Rwanda with filmmaker Laura Waters Hinson to document survivors and perpetrators of genocide who have reconciled and are living life together peacefully in the same community. Inspired by the "Voices of Haiti" photo essay, the portraits in this series captured genocide survivors standing with the killers of their families, who they've now forgiven. Many of the portraits were captured at the scene of the crime to help display the power of true forgiveness. The series ended up being featured on CNN.com as a worldwide leading headline on Monday, November 7th, 2011. Knowing the value that a photograph can have in just one person's life, Jeremy also founded Help-Portrait, a worldwide movement of photographers using their time, equipment, and expertise to give back to those less fortunate. On December 12, 2009, the first world-wide Help-Portrait event provided free portraits for over 40,000 people in 42 Countries. Those numbers have increased significantly over the last 2 years, with 169,523 photos given to date in at least 56 countries. Help-Portrait continues to grow, encouraging all photographers to use their platform to make a difference with their cameras. Lastly, Jeremy's speaking and teaching career has taken off as he spends his time annually traveling around the country speaking at conferences like TEDx, Catalyst Conference, Photoshop World, WPPI, Google Plus Photographers Conference, Photo Plus Expo and many more. He has also hosted 2 of his own LifeFinder Tour's that have taken him all across the country. His LifeFinder Tour is based on his educational DVD, LifeFinder. Jeremy is also an instructor for Scott Kelby's "Kelby Training" and has released 3 classes on the Kelby Training website. Jeremy is a crock pot of ideas, always on low simmer. He doesn't sleep enough. His mind won't let him. Whether it's the next shoot, the next talk, the next book, the next app, or the next humanitarian project, Jeremy just doesn't stop. And that's why his career keeps moving forward. Bouncing back and forth between Nashville and LA, Jeremy draws a lot of inspiration from his amazing wife, Shannon, and their two ridiculously cute and utterly fantastic kids, Adler and Eisley. They also have a dog and a cat, but they are not as inspirational.Source: jeremycowart.com
B Jane Levine
B Jane Levine
United States
B Jane Levine was raised in the suburbs of New Jersey, a short bus ride from New York City. She has a PhD in Biochemistry from Columbia University, but left the field of molecular biology research to raise her family. After leaving research, she took an interest in photography and began taking classes at ICP and other online platforms. She further honed her skills through many photography trips all over the world. Her photography spans many genres including street photography, landscape photography, and long exposure cityscapes. Currently, her focus is a series of candid portraits of strangers captured on the streets of New York City. Statement I prefer to capture moments on the street without the knowledge of the subject so that the expression, gesture and/or movement are authentic. Sometimes I get caught and a subject will give me that nod of recognition at the moment of the shot or after I press the shutter. I often go out with no expectations of subject matter other than looking for a moment, which elicits some emotion that I respond to with the subject, it is mainly driven by an internal signal that connects me to the subject or situation. Experimentation keeps me in the moment. I try to respect the subjects that I photograph. People show themselves on the street the way they want others to perceive them. I take an image of a moment, which I observe with no other intent other than to memorialize the moment, which I recognize is real for the subject as well as myself. The people in the photographs all possess a characteristic, gesture, or physical trait that I identifies as part of my own story. The series is a composite of pieces of my life – a self-portrait.
Charles Harbutt
Charles Harbutt
United States
1935 | † 2015
Charles Henry Harbutt (July 29, 1935 – June 30, 2015) was an American photographer, a former president of Magnum, and full-time Associate Professor of Photography at Parsons School of Design in New York. Harbutt was born in Camden, New Jersey, and raised in Teaneck, New Jersey, and learned much of his photography skills from the township's amateur camera club. He attended Regis High School in New York City where he took photographs for the school newspaper. He later graduated from Marquette University. Harbutt's work is deeply rooted in the modern photojournalist tradition. For the first twenty years of his career he contributed to major magazines in the United States, Europe and Japan. His work was often intrinsically political, exhibiting social and economic contingencies. In 1959, while working as a writer and photographer for the Catholic magazine Jubilee, he was invited by members of the Castro underground to document the Cuban Revolution on the strength of three photographs he had published in Modern Photography. An editor at Jubilee while Harbutt was working there, Robert Lax, used photographs taken by Harbutt for the front and back cover of his first book of poetry, The Circus of the Sun. Harbutt joined Magnum Photos and was elected president of the organization twice, first in 1979. He left the group in 1981, citing its increasingly commercial ambitions and the desire to pursue more personal work. He taught photography workshops, exhibited in solo and group shows around the world, and joined the faculty of the Parsons School of Design at New School University as a full-time professor, in addition to serving as guest artist at MIT, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Rhode Island School of Design. Harbutt was a founding member of Archive Pictures Inc., an international documentary photographers' cooperative, and a member of the American Society of Magazine Photographers. His work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of American History, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the U.S. Library of Congress, George Eastman House, the Art Institute of Chicago, the International Center of Photography, the Center for Creative Photography, and at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Beaubourg, and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. In 1997, his negatives, master prints, and archives were acquired for the collection of the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona. He mounted a large exhibition of his work at the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City in December 2000 and received the medal of the City of Perpignan at a retrospective of his work there in 2004. He died in Monteagle, Tennessee, on June 30, 2015, at the age of 79. He had emphysema.Source: Wikipedia Charles Harbutt’s early fascination with magic and the elusive line between perception and reality steered him toward journalism and its documentary role, first as a writer. But he altered his course in 1959, when he was 23, after being invited by Cuban rebels to document the Castro revolution. Immersing himself in Havana’s convulsive and euphoric newfound freedom, he recalled, “I soon understood that I could get closer to the feel of things by taking pictures.” Mr. Harbutt went on to become an accomplished photojournalist for major magazines and the renowned agency Magnum Photos. “He and Burk Uzzle took photojournalism and pushed it in a direction away from literalism or classicism,” Jeff Jacobson, a former colleague, told The New York Times, referring to a contemporary whose pictures of the Woodstock music festival in 1969 gained wide attention, “away from certainly the European paradigm of Cartier-Bresson, and away from the narrative paradigm of Gene Smith to something very, very different, very involved with metaphor.” But Charles Harbutt became disillusioned with his craft, questioning the veracity of the events he was covering, particularly after witnessing undercover government agents provoke violence at a rally in New Haven in 1970 in support of jailed Black Panthers. “The kinds of stories I chose to do, I later realized, were mostly about American myths,” he wrote in his last book, Departures and Arrivals (2012). “I photographed small towns, immigrants, the barrio in New York, and then the enormous changes that came with the ’60s. I tried to be a witness as well as show my feelings about all of this. But maybe I had a sell-by time — expiration date — for being a witness,” he continued. “In the early ’70s, I started questioning this reportage for myself. A host of manipulators had so corrupted and warped public events, I could no longer trust the authenticity of what I was seeing. I realized that I was more interested in pajamas on a bed one Brooklyn morning, or a Dublin woman hauling groceries to her house, than I was in the machinations of politics and history ‘writ large.’ ” Mr. Harbutt experimented with surreal composition and juxtaposition of quotidian forms in a style he described as personal documentary and facetiously branded “superbanalisms.” Among his most famous black-and-white photographs was one of a blind boy, seemingly trying to transcend his sightlessness by reaching for a ribbon of light on a wall. In another, a bride in a flowing white gown poses pensively below exposed pipes and empty tables in a large basement before her wedding reception. Charles Harbutt’s own favorite, called “Mr. X-Ray Man,” was shot through a car window on the Rue du Départ near the Montparnasse train station in Paris, where fragments of the cityscape and even of the photographer himself can be seen reflected in the glass. What made it special was that it was unexpected, he explained in Arrivals and Departures. “What I like best,” he wrote, “is that however the picture is made, it’s a surprise to me when I see the photo come up in the developer.”Source: The New York Times
Joel-Peter Witkin
Joel-Peter Witkin
United States
1939
Joel-Peter Witkin (born September 13, 1939, in Brooklyn, New York City) is an American photographer who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His work often deals with such themes as death, corpses (and sometimes dismembered portions thereof), and various outsiders such as dwarves, transsexuals, hermaphrodites, and physically deformed people. Witkin's complex tableaux often recall religious episodes or classical paintings. Witkin was born to a Jewish father and Roman Catholic mother. His twin brother, Jerome Witkin, and son Kersen Witkin, are also painters. Witkin's parents divorced when he was young because they were unable to overcome their religious differences. He attended grammar school at Saint Cecelia's in Brooklyn and went on to Grover Cleveland High School. Between 1961 and 1964 he was a war photographer documenting the Vietnam war. Going freelance in 1967, he became the official photographer for City Walls Inc. He attended Cooper Union in New York where he studied sculpture, attaining a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1974. After Columbia University granted him a scholarship, he ended his studies at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where he became Master of Fine Arts.Source: Wikipedia Finding beauty within the grotesque, Witkin’s work extends beyond post-mortem photography with his staged set-ups of corpses and dismembered parts. Witkin’s fascination with death was triggered by a life-altering episode at a very early age; he witnessed an automobile accident in front of his house in which a young girl was decapitated. Witkin has also pursued his interest in the human condition, drawing attention to “the other,” photographing marginalized groups of people. Those often cast aside by society—hermaphrodites, dwarfs, amputees, androgynes— inspire his work as he confronts the viewers’ sense of normalcy. His interest in spirituality, in particular the teachings of Christianity, has played into his work, as do frequent references to classical paintings. Works by Picasso, Balthus, Goya, Velásquez, and Miro reappear in his dramatic, staged scenes, as well as the work of E.J. Bellocq, who photographed a series on prostitutes of the red light district in New Orleans in the early twentieth century. Witkin’s work has been exhibited internationally at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, Galerie Baudoin Lebon in Paris, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, among many others. Witkin is represented by Catherine Edelman Gallery and currently resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico.Source: International Center of Photography
Spiro Bolos
Spiro Bolos
United States
1967
Spiro Bolos is a Chicago-based street photographer who spends an inordinate amount of time on public transportation, especially since casting off his former minivan-centered life in suburbia. His chosen career is that of a social studies teacher and he became interested in American photography while teaching an American Studies course, first focusing on the documentary images of the Civil Rights era and then becoming preoccupied with the more artistic efforts of photographers such as Gordon Parks and William Eggleston. As a historian, he had an initial impulse to record a vision of the present era through the human characters surrounding him. But he had also seen the intriguing BBC documentary of Vivian Maier and attended a lecture by street photographer Brian Sokolowski, who demonstrated that an image of a complete stranger could function as a self-portrait. And so, with his phone ever-presently in hand, he started making photographs long before he was acquainted with Szarkowski's famous reference to "mirrors" and "windows". His subjects are usually blind to his stealthy process, perhaps because of the ubiquity of smartphones, as well as his desire to capture, as Strand put it, a "quality of being". But in a society increasingly surveilled, a moment of recognition occasionally surfaces in the subject’s eyes.
Rainer Elstermann
Rainer Elstermann
Germany
1965
Rainer Elstermann was born in West-Berlin in 1965. He took his first self-portrait-photographs when he was 17 years old. In 1983 when he was 18 he started working with the avantgarde experimental super-8 film production company Teufelsberg Produktion. In 1984 he began being seriously involved with photography after his uncle gave him a complete dark-room equipment. Further encouragment came by the way of famous fashion photographer Paolo Roversi who photographed Rainer Elstermann for Italien Vogue in 1985. After seeing his portfolio he insisted Rainer should be a fashion photographer in Paris. Instead Rainer Elstermann moved to London in 1988 where he remained until 1992, realizing little art projects and exploring photography. First assignements followed. In 1999 he started his studio as an advertising photographer. From 2006 Rainer Elstermann projects moved again towards Art photography and since 2009 he is exclusively concentrating on Art. Also in 2006 he met Andreas Stamm and they have been working together since.
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