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Katharine Cooper
2014 © Gabrielle Menezes
Katharine Cooper
Katharine Cooper

Katharine Cooper

Country: South Africa
Birth: 1978

Katharine Cooper, born 1978 in Grahamstown, in South Africa's Eastern Cape, moved at a young age to Zimbabwe, where she completed her schooling. In 1998, she moved to the United Kingdom to pursue her studies in photography, before finally landing at the Arles national school of photography, from which she graduated with honours in 2004, notably for her film "Family Archive". Katharine worked as in-house printer to photographer Lucien Clergue, in his Arles-based atelier, from 2004 up until his death in 2014. Her work has been exhibited in various collective shows, and bought by art-collectors from around the world. Katharine Cooper regularly teaches workshops in the Arles region, whose Camargue landscapes and strong winds remind her of her homeland. In 2012 Katharine Cooper received the Academy of the Arts' Photography Prize for her series "White Africans", which showed in Paris October/November 2013.
 

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Mark Cohen
United States
1943
Mark Cohen (born August 24, 1943) is an American photographer best known for his innovative close-up street photography. Cohen was born and lived in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania until 2013. He attended Penn State University and Wilkes College between 1961 and 1965, and opened a commercial photo studio in 1966. The majority of the photography for which Mark Cohen is known is shot in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre metropolitan area (also known as the Wyoming Valley), a historic industrialized region of northeastern Pennsylvania. Characteristically Cohen photographs people close-up, using a wide-angle lens and a flash, mostly in black and white, frequently cropping their heads from the frame, concentrating on small details. He has used 21 mm, 28 mm, and 35 mm focal length, wide-angle, lenses and later on 50 mm. Cohen has described his method as "intrusive." Discussing his influences with Thomas Southall in 2004 he cites "... so many photographers who followed Cartier-Bresson, like Frank, Koudelka, Winogrand, Friedlander." He also recognizes the influence of Diane Arbus. Whilst acknowledging these influences he says: "I knew about art photography... Then I did these outside the context of any other photographer." Cohen's major books of photography are Grim Street (2005), True Color (2007), and Mexico (2016). His work was first exhibited in a group exhibition at George Eastman House in 1969 and he had his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1973. He was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1971 and 1976 and received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1975. In 2013 Cohen moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.Source: Wikipedia Mark Cohen was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania where he lived and photographed for most of his life. (He now lives in Philadelphia.) His work was first exhibited in 1969 at the George Eastman House but came to prominence with his first solo exhibition at MoMA in 1973. Known primarily for his black and white images, Cohen was also a pioneer of the 1970s color movement that changed American photography. Shooting in the gritty environs of working class Pennsylvania, Cohen brought to street photography a literal and innovative closeness that came from his style of holding the camera at arm's length without looking through the viewfinder while using an unusually wide-angle lens. Intrusive but elegant, by turns brutal and sensuous, Cohen’s cropped bodies and faces and gritty still lives and landscapes reveal a finely tuned aesthetic and consistency. No background behind the looming foreground figures is without interest. No random object is observed without purpose. "They're not easy pictures. But I guess that's why they're mine." Says Cohen. Cohen is the recipient of two Guggenheim Grants and his work is in the collections of major museums from the U.S. to Japan. His most recent retrospective in 2013 at Le Bal in Paris and the accompanying publication Dark Knees were singled out by critics around the world as outstanding achievements in photography. Source: Danziger Gallery In many of the images, the points of attraction are clear: a giant football eclipsing the skinny torso of a young boy; the shining eyes of a black cat; a woman_’_s bare midriff beneath a pair of high-waisted cutoff shorts. We can imagine glancing or even staring at these subjects ourselves, taking in their rough-hewn idiosyncrasies. But it is in the moment that follows, when most of us would avert our eyes and move on, that the American street photographer Mark Cohen makes his work, moving forward, toward children, young women, dirty and shirtless strangers, until his wide-angle lens is close enough to bump bellies. In the nineteen-seventies, shooting in and around his native Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a small industrial city far outside the urban centers where street photography was born, Cohen pioneered an aggressive, if not invasive, approach to his craft, shortening the distance between photographer and subject until heads were lost to the frame’s edge and only collar bones and clipped limbs remained. “I have been pushed and shoved and screamed at, but nothing serious,” he has said. “I am always aware of the edge.”Source: The New Yorker “Cohen’s black-and-white photos… are deliberately disconcerting, almost vulgar… Heads are cropped out of the frame; truncated hands, legs and arms loom monstrously into view; perspective warps. Cohen wasn’t alone in his harsh, comic view of down-home America, but his in-your-face take and fragmentary results were jarringly unique, and much imitated.” -- Vince AlettiSource: The Village Voice
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.
Jorge Pozuelo
Spain
1977
Born in León in 1977, he began his photographic career in the 90s. He quit his job as a telecommunications technician to devote himself to photography where he did an MA in photography from the University of Canterbury. He always wanted to find the human side in all his photographs, playing with visual aggression and silence of space. In 2009 he took an year off and traveled the world and published “Picture Easy”, a book for all rules of photography, affordable for anyone to start in the world of photography. He worked for an year as a digital photographic technician, where he met all professional teams and medium format digital market issues resolved color management studies like Ricky Dávila and Isabel Muñoz. He has done work for companies like Unidental photographic, Silken Hotels, Tinkle, Adecco, AD, Truhko Make Up, FX Magazine, Life Smile or artistic bodies festival in Spain. In October 2011 he traveled to Doha for several editorials for the magazine “Qultura” for the government of Qatar. He has done several photo exhibitions, “BodyArt”, “TattooArt” or “walls of silence”, joint exhibition of great impact in the press and on TV Carabanchel prison. He has made a joint project with the photojournalist Ervin Sarkisov titled “Back to Life” where they follow up drug abusers. His presentation was in the 2011 grenade Alandaluz Photofestival double pass and very well received. In the course of months he has now approached to teaching, he runs a photography school in Madrid and tries to instill his passion for photography. He has given seminars on photographic lighting as both white and black, making the latter a small obsession in Madrid, Cordoba and Barcelona for different associations, municipalities and companies like Elincrom and Fotocasión.Source Artphotofeature.com
Astrid Reischwitz
Astrid Reischwitz is a lens-based artist whose work explores storytelling from a personal perspective. Using keepsakes from family life, old photographs, and storytelling strategies, she builds a visual world of memory, identity, place, and home. Her current focus is the exploration of personal and collective memory influenced by her upbringing in Germany. Reischwitz has exhibited at national and international museums and galleries including Newport Art Museum, Griffin Museum of Photography, Danforth Art Museum, Photographic Resource Center, The Center for Fine Art Photography (CO), Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, Center for Photographic Art (CA), FotoNostrum, and Gallery Kayafas. She was a Top 50 photographer at Photolucida's Critical Mass in 2020, 2019 and 2016, and a Finalist for the 2017 Lens Culture Exposure Awards. She is the recipient of the Griffin Award 2020 and was awarded solo exhibitions at Soho Photo Gallery and The Center for Fine Art Photography. Reischwitz is a Category Winner at the 14th and 15th Julia Margaret Cameron Award for Women Photographers and at the 14th and 15th Pollux Awards. Honors also include Gold and Silver Medal Awards, a Portfolio Award and the Daylight Multimedia Award at the San Francisco International Photo Show. Her work was featured in Fraction Magazine, Lenscratch, LensCulture, What Will You Rembember?, Wired Japan, Il Post Italy, P3 Portugal, Aint-Bad Magazine, The Boston Globe, NRC Handelsblad Amsterdam, as well as other media outlets. Reischwitz is a graduate of the Technical University Braunschweig, Germany, with a PhD in Chemistry. Spin Club Tapestry An exploration of memory I grew up in a small farming village in Northern Germany. A village that is bound to its history and that stands out through its traditions even today. Long ago, village women met regularly in "Spinneklumps" (Spin Clubs) to spin wool, embroider, and stitch fabrics for their homes. I imagine their conversations as they worked, the beautiful stories that lifted their spirits, as well as the stories of sadness, sorrow and loss. In modern times, village women continued to meet in this tradition, but shared stories over coffee and cake instead of needlework. These close-knit groups of women often stayed together until their death. In this series, my composite images take the form of tapestries, combining images of embroidered Spin Club fabrics with new and old photographs from the village. I connect the present and the past by recreating and re-imagining pieces of the embroidery. Spin Club tablecloths, napkins and wall hangings (some dating back to 1799) have been passed down from generation to generation. By following the stitches in these fabrics, I follow a path through the lives of my ancestors - their layout of a perfect pattern and the mistakes they made. Along the way, I add my own mistakes. The fabrics also reveal the passage of time, stained and distorted after sometimes decades of use. The patterns I have stitched myself into the paper are only abstractions of the original Spin Club designs, fragments of memory. After all, memory is fleeting, and changed forever in the act of recollection. Sometimes the stitching is incomplete, creating an invitation for future generations. Every decision we make is influenced by our history, our environment, and the society we live in. The tapestry of my life belongs to me but is stitched through with the beauty and heartache of past generations. Discover the Spin Club Tapestry Solo Exhibition
Thierry Camus
France
1959
From the black and white film photo lab of my teenage high school to my full-size CANON of today, passing through slides in the 90s and the arrival of digital in the early 2000s : a lifetime with photography as a passion, amateur and self-taught. Over the years, my way of taking pictures matured and I felt like "interpreting" what I was seing, discovering the world and showing it in my own way. Taking pictures meets the need and the secret desire, to leave a trace of this vision and to convey an emotion. Offering my point of view and expressing my uniqueness, this is what being a photographer means to me. ARCHITECTURAL photography fascinates me and the city is my inexhaustible source of inspiration, the URBAN BODY. It’s not the building itself that interests me, but its LINES and COLORS, as shown by my first serie "my LINES on BLUE" and "STRICTLY LINE". Then architectural photography became URBAN LANDSCAPE, mixing stone and urban objets, always without human pesence, to forget scale and remain abstract. That brought me to my serie "STRICTLY COLOR". « Locked up at home » during the first confinement, I discovered that natural light could create interesting shadows and reflections on my everyday objects surrounding me. It was giving them poeetry and even sensuality, and a real architectural spirit … I created my last series "at HOME" and "my POETRY of the ORDINARY". Always the same thread : LINES and COLORS. Exterior or interior architecture, with details taken out of their context, with frontal, tight and minimalist framings, and unusual angle views, all references are lost. My images become almost unreal and theatrical, in order to exacerbate strength, materiality, power and sometimes violence of buildings and objects. Playing with geometry and shapes being drawn by colors, they are highly graphic. I like that « decisive moment » when I look for the photo, find it, integrate it, then shoot it and, last but not least, interpret and finalize it. I am happy to share this work.
Mariska Karto
Netherlands
Mariska Karto is an artist/ fine art-photographer born in Suriname (South-America) and raised in the Netherlands. In this age of rapidity and technical development, in which human is exposed to impersonal detachment of current technical era, Mariska Karto creates the vulnerable and intensive dimensions of human feelings and emotions. This all happens in the dreamworld she has created with her technique in which past and present have found their way to each other, in this era of transformation.She talks to you in a language without words using symbolism in a dreamworld of historic paintings atmosphere.Mystique, tragic and erotic are the keywords for her work. Her work are like old stories escaped from an old world of eternal dreams, eternal emotions and eternal feelings that existed for hundred of years but still repeats themselves as in a pattern of an earthy rite, in this new modern contemporary era.Her works are like poems and thoughts, restless ones but are also like whispers of thoughtless experiences, floating in a centuries long movement in time.Artist Statement"My work is based on a period in which photography did not exist, It was not until the end of the 18th century that it was invented. As a result of this, people thought that photography would make the art of painting disappear, especially in the post modern era, the traditional art had to make way for new technical developments. In my work I seek and found a respectful connection of technique and traditional craft through a striking contradiction. Painters in the Baroque/renaissance time were trying to paint as true-to-life with painting-techniques and color applications. What a camera does is portray the world in its realistic colors. That’s the contradiction in my work, it’s the other way around. I shoot realistic images and through an intensive transformation process, the work is changed, true-to-life in the characteristic Baroque colors and style of that time. Eventually, this says nothing about photography and technique, but more about the great masters of that gone era, they were able to be as realistic and accurate as possible with brush and paint the world in all its reality… That’s the great contradiction in my work, I’m leaving the visible reality of our current time, and bring the invisible realism of the past forward in my work. As a result of this, I pull away present time from its structure and then time appears to be just a definition, which slowly fades away, when current and past becomes interwoven with each other.” More background info: "I mix skills from different worlds together. It is a blend of skills of my (I'm originally a painter and sketcher, textiles - I was a textile artist some years ago, photography and image processing) that ultimately meets each other in this form of art. A main factor are also social emotional influences in my life which developed how I see, learn and finally understand things in an essential (psychological) way. All these (artistic) elements from different areas and personal influences come together in a work of mine."
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