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Win a Solo Exhibition in July 2026 + An Exclusive Interview!
Win a Solo Exhibition in July 2026 + An Exclusive Interview!
Patrick Morarescu
Performers catalogue
Patrick Morarescu
Patrick Morarescu

Patrick Morarescu

Country: Germany


Statement
"Due to the natural dynamic and complexity of the individual, I have always been drawn to portraiture. I photograph persons to whom I feel an initial attraction and try to reflect this force in images. A power that you cannot describe in words or in rational concepts but it captures the attention and creates a strong curiosity, a sort of addiction not only to body shapes, eyes, skin tonalities, but to what is behind: the thoughts and the mental state of that persons. And I feel a sort of instinct of possession, a desire to materialize the moment that this person is living.

The human presence, with it’s emotionality, is some times too strong; it is almost insulting, shouting to get all the attention: Like a red dot in the green, like a flash in the darkness. To balance that force I need the background, the space that as a negative form defines the contour of the figure. Through that supplementary space I create a whole story. The key of my research lies in the dialogue between the person and its background; sometimes I think I am not portraying a person with a background, but the background with a person; sometimes it is the opposite. The background speaks about fear, happiness, peace, desperation; it speaks about the circumstances through an atmosphere. There is one basic element that is crucial to bring all the elements together: The light. Like a thread that creates structure and consistence in a tissue; the magical substance of photography. It is a physical condition that contains many extraordinary qualities. The photography is a chemical reaction in which the light is transcripted in a plain surface, creating a code that by the eyes suggest reality; but photography is not reality itself but an abstraction of it. And this is the point that fascinates me; the possibility of recreating the reality through the chemical process."
-- Patrick Morarescu
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Milos Nejezchleb
Czech Republic
1978
The Czech photographer Miloš Nejezchleb was born in 1978. He lives in the Czech Republic and has got three children. He has only been involved in conceptual photography since 2016; however, he has already won several prestigious international awards. He is the absolute winner of the Fine Art Photography Award in London (2021), where he won the FINE ART PHOTOGRAHER OF THE YEAR title. He is the winner of the Malta International Photo Award (2020), two-time gold medalist in the Trierenberg Super Circuit competition in Linz and he is also, among others, silver medalist in IPA 2021 - International Photography Award. The most characteristic features of his photographs are noticeably colorful elements with a clear focus on the art of photography. Miloš often chooses current social topics, which he processes as stories using photographic series. These stories are narrated by people. He works on such series on his own and ensures the entire Art direction. He himself designs styling, looks for locations and carries out post-production. Besides conceptual art, where he points out currently discussed topics, Miloš has 2long-term thematic photographic cycles which document stories of real people. The most famous of them is photographic cycle "Stronger", in which Milos takes photos of people who have gone through hard times in their lives, and thanks to this experience they have become stronger personalities. Milos is at the beginning of his photographic career. He was fascinated by art photography when he bought his first camera. It happened before the birth of his first daughter. He is currently working on other production-intensive projects.
Julie Blackmon
United States
1966
Born in Springfield, Missouri, Julie Blackmon studied art education and photography at Missouri State University. She has received several national awards for her photographs, including commendation in the 2004 Santa Fe Center of Photography Project Competition, a merit award from the Society of Contemporary Photography, 2005 B& W Magazine Merit Award for Single Image Contest, 2006 1st Place for Domestic Vacations from the Santa Fe Center of Photograph Project Competition, 2006 Critical Mass Book Award Winner for Domestic Vacations, and recognized as American Photo’s Emerging Photographer of 2008. Her photographs are included in the permanent collections of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Toledo Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, among numerous others. About Domestic Vacations:The Dutch proverb “a Jan Steen household” originated in the 17th century and is used today to refer to a home in disarray, full of rowdy children and boisterous family gatherings. The paintings of Steen, along with those of other Dutch and Flemish genre painters, helped inspire this body of work. I am the oldest of nine children and now the mother of three. As Steen’s personal narratives of family life depicted nearly 400 yrs. ago, the conflation of art and life is an area I have explored in photographing the everyday life of my family and the lives of my sisters and their families at home. These images are both fictional and auto-biographical, and reflect not only our lives today and as children growing up in a large family, but also move beyond the documentary to explore the fantastic elements of our everyday lives, both imagined and real. The stress, the chaos, and the need to simultaneously escape and connect are issue that I investigate in this body of work. We live in a culture where we are both “child centered” and “self-obsessed.” The struggle between living in the moment versus escaping to another reality is intense since these two opposites strive to dominate. Caught in the swirl of soccer practices, play dates, work, and trying to find our way in our “make-over” culture, we must still create the space to find ourselves. The expectations of family life have never been more at odds with each other. These issues, as well as the relationship between the domestic landscape of the past and present, are issues I have explored in these photographs. I believe there are moments that can be found throughout any given day that bring sanctuary. It is in finding these moments amidst the stress of the everyday that my life as a mother parallels my work as an artist, and where the dynamics of family life throughout time seem remarkably unchanged. As an artist and as a mother, I believe life’s most poignant moments come from the ability to fuse fantasy and reality: to see the mythic amidst the chaos.
Antti Yrjönen
Finland
1992
Antti Yrjönen is a Finnish photojournalist and documentary photographer with over a decade of experience reporting internationally and at home. He works across media and humanitarian contexts, covering conflict, displacement and everyday life in places including Somalia, Syria, South Sudan and Ukraine, while also returning to stories closer to home. He is drawn to stories that can’t be understood in a single visit. Yrjönen revisits places, people and movements over time, building relationships without surrendering his position as a journalist. He works from a simple premise: you cannot photograph what you do not understand. That insistence on understanding shapes both his reporting and the way he edits, sequencing images to create clarity rather than noise. His photographs look for nuance and for the small details that hold a larger story in place, sometimes through quiet humour or a hint of the surreal. For Yrjönen, humour is not a distraction from difficult realities but part of them: a sign of life, especially in hard times. Alongside visual work, he writes on visual culture, journalism ethics, media critique and press freedom, and he occasionally lectures on responsible photojournalism and conflict reporting. His work has been published internationally by outlets including The New York Times, BBC, Le Temps, Bloomberg, Haaretz, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Condé Nast Traveller, Helsingin Sanomat and Suomen Kuvalehti, and he has received multiple awards for his photography. He studied photojournalism at Tampere University and is currently developing a long-term book project on polycrisis at the intersection of conflict, climate change and food security. Statement "Photography is how I stay present. Being there matters, but so does being in the moment. I return to the same places and people because understanding takes time, and because you can’t photograph what you don’t understand. My work follows power up and down its chain, from policy rooms to street corners and back again, looking for the human consequences of politics, conflict and crisis. Sometimes a quiet humour slips in, not to soften reality, but to tell it honestly." Awarded Photographer of the Week - Week 05, 2026
Philipp Bolthausen
United States
Akzidenz currently living and working between Paris and New York. His education focused around art and communication studies in Paris and New York, where he lived and worked for many years before returning to Paris. He presently works as an art director for some of the mosthigh-end luxury brands worldwide.This background has a rooted presence in his work - in that he is less interested in the representational qualities of the photograph, focusing more on the exploration of the fringes of each terrain. This focus stems from the will to not use photography as a traditional means of representation of reality but creating a platform for discourse and thought. In order to achieve this dais, he tries to invent his own visual language, using multi-exposures, superposition, juxtaposition and ‘sequentiality’ to interpret, rewrite and therefore, relate to manufactured experiences which are being created on a daily basis by mass media.In short his photography can be summed into Objects, which create an intrinsic world of their own, or in his own words: “My works aren’t pictures of something, but objects about something.”Akzidenz purposefully chooses to use the 20th century medium of film allowing him to see, and therefore place the present into perspective. The choice of black & white and grain become the signifiers that depict and foster the equivalence of life and shape within his work. The single ‘effects’ of contemporary post-processing are not important to his work, to the point that he refuses to use such ‘effects’ - anything beyond the traditional workflow of the darkroom is prohibited in his work.
Nina Nelson
United States
1971
Born in London, England and raised on a 1,000-acre farm in Missouri, I’ve had a camera in my hands since I was ten. My path eventually led me to New York City, where I spent time on the other side of the lens as a model and actress. While pregnant, I didn’t look pregnant enough to book any modeling jobs, and I was just pregnant enough that I couldn’t book non-pregnant jobs, so I turned to another love—writing. My manuscript won the Ursula Nordstrom Fiction Contest and was published by HarperCollins under the name N.A. Nelson. While struggling with my second book, I enrolled in VCFA and earned an MFA in Creative Writing for Children and Young Adults. Writing is still hard. I now use my fancy Master’s degree to write imagined backstories for each item in my neglected Etsy store, The Vintage Bundt Cake. While taking a break from writing, I learned to shoot manually with my camera and after three years and four workshops on honing my visual voice, I realized I was still telling stories...only this time with my camera. Ha! Funny that. Acting, modeling, writing, vintage thrifting, photography—it all comes back to storytelling. Statement I’m steered by intuition. Intuition in what workshops to sign up for, on what locations to shoot, what vintage outfits to wear, what books to read, what music to listen to, what people to steer clear of and which ones to welcome. When I was growing up, we didn’t have a lot of money; I couldn’t compete on the same level as my peers in aspects of clothes, cars, and the things we build our identity on as a young person. I remember one day—realizing that wasn’t going to change, simply accepting that and thinking, “Well if I can’t be them, I can only be me.” The stillness that followed was filled with both the ineffable question of “Okay, but who am I?” and a true openness to the answer. Something clicked. Something aligned within me and as woo-woo as that sounds, every time I tune into that, there is a “rightness” in my work and my decisions that I can’t explain and I almost feel guilty taking credit for. I believe that teaming up with that internal GPS is what makes our art unique, our voices distinct. I continue to learn about photography, I continue to try new things, I continue to both succeed and make mistakes. So, the overall Statement About my Work is that the images are me as a photographer walking through this world still asking the same question my 14 year-old self asked: “Okay, but who am I?” followed by “And why am I here?” AAP Magazine AAP Magazine 55 Women
Constantine Manos
United States
1934 | † 2025
Constantine "Costa" Manos (born 1934 in South Carolina) is a Greek-American photographer known for his images of Boston and Greece. His work has been published in Esquire, Life, and Look. He is a member of Magnum Photos. Manos first began taking photographs while in high school when he joined his school's camera club. Within a few years, he was working professionally as a photographer. At 19, Manos was hired as the official photographer for the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood. His photographs of the orchestra culminated in 1961 with his first published work, Portrait of a Symphony. Manos graduated from the University of South Carolina in 1955, majoring in English Literature. He served in the military and then moved to New York City, working for various magazines. From 1961-64, Manos lived in Greece, photographing people and landscapes. This work resulted in A Greek Portfolio, published in 1972, which won awards at Arles and the Leipzig book fair. In 1963, Manos joined Magnum Photos and became a full member in 1965. After his time in Greece, Manos lived in Boston. In 1974, he was hired by the city to create the photographs for the Where's Boston? exhibition, a large production in honor of Boston's 200th anniversary. The photos from that exhibit were published in the book Bostonians: Photographs from Where's Boston? Manos also worked on projects for Time-Life Books. In 1995, American Color was published, containing Manos' recent photographs of American people. A Greek Portfolio was reissued in 1999, followed by a major exhibition of his work at the Benaki Museum of Athens. In 2003, Manos was awarded the Leica Medal of Excellence for his American Color photographs.Source: Wikipedia Constantine Manos was born in Columbia, South Carolina, U.S.A., of Greek immigrant parents. His photographic career began in the school camera club at the age of thirteen, and within several years he was a working professional. He graduated from the University of South Carolina with a B.A. in English Literature. At the age of nineteen he was hired as the official photographer of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at its summer festival at Tanglewood. Upon completion of his military service, he moved to New York, where he worked for Esquire, Life, and Look. His book, Portrait of a Symphony, a documentary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, was published in 1961. From 1961 to 1963 he lived in Greece, where he made the photographs for his book A Greek Portfolio, first published in 1972. The book won awards at Arles and at the Leipzig Book Fair, and exhibitions of the work took place at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1963 Manos joined Magnum Photos. Returning from Greece, Manos settled in Boston and completed many assignments for Time-Life books, including their book on Athens. In 1974 he was the chief photographer for Where’s Boston?, a multimedia production that documented the city and provided the photographs for his book Bostonians. Manos’s photographs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; George Eastman House, Rochester, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Benaki Museum, Athens. In 2003 Manos was awarded the Leica Medal of Excellence for his pictures from American Color. Work from Manos’s ongoing work in color first appeared in his book American Color, published in 1995. The work continued in American Color 2, published in 2010. A new edition of A Greek Portfolio was published in 1999, accompanied by an exhibition at the Benaki Museum in Athens. In 2013 an exhibition commemorating the 50th anniversary of the making of the photographs for the book, including eighty unpublished pictures, was held at the Benaki.Source: constantinemanos.com As of 2014, he is currently working on a major retrospective book and exhibition that will include unpublished photographs dating from the start of his career.
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