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Win a Solo Exhibition in June 2026 + An Exclusive Interview!
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Sasha Maslov
Sasha Maslov
Sasha Maslov

Sasha Maslov

Country: Ukraine
Birth: 1984

Sasha Maslov was born in Ukraine in 1984. Inspired and taught by his father, photographer Guennadi Maslov, and later his teacher and mentor, Oleg Shishkov, he developed into an aspiring young photographer. Later Sasha became known for his social documentary projects around Eastern Europe, especially in his native country. He started pursuing career as a portrait photographer in New York city, where he moved at the age of 24 in 2008. Since then he has been working for leading publications around the Globe and pursuing work on his personal projects.

Statement
"I believe in the efficacy of photography as a visual art medium. We are living in age where visual stimuli in a variety of mediums populate the waking moments of our lives. Our memories are inhabited by fragments of life – experiences from around the globe, products, familiar faces – all intricately tied together in a complex web of associations. This visual overload has polluted our minds, made our tastes less discerning, and ultimately devalued the standards that qualify impactful and meaningful photography. Instead of reveling in a complex photo that enjoys intense visual engagement and reflection, viewers now expect to devour and digest imagery in one gulp. While I do believe that evolving for adaptation is vital, however, it is also important to me that every image I take embodies a sense of purpose and meaning, provokes thought and sparks dialogue."
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Joanna Borowiec
Poland
1971
Joanna Borowiec, a graduate of the European Academy of Photography in Warsaw, diploma thesis in the Creative and Expressive Photography Workshop, Dr Izabela Jaroszewska. Member of the Association of Polish Art Photographers (ZPAF). Scholarship holder of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage 2020. Photography Workshop. Enthusiast of medium- and large-format analogue photography. Uses historic photographic processes like ambrotype – wet collodion technique, cyanotype e.c.t. The main topic of her photos is humanistic photography, human. Winner International Photography Awards IPA 2021- category Deeper Perspective Photographer of the Year. She was also awarded the third place in Photographer of the Year category of the Black& White Spider Awards competition. Prize-winner of the Portfolio Black + White Photography UK, the Portfolio Black & White for Collectors Of Fine Photography Canada, the Portfolio 2012 Shot Magazine USA. Her works and interviews with her were published in many magazines, i.a. the Black+ White Photography UK (the cover), the Shot Magazine USA, the Black and White Magazine Canada and in national magazines. Her photographs can be found in public and private collections at home and abroad, i.a. in Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Sweden, USA e.c.t. She has participated in individual and collective exhibitions at home and abroad, i.a. in Poland, Germany, Spain, Singapore, Canada, USA e.c.t. Blue Story Many of my cyanotypes are created by layering a combination of objects and film imagery with carefully timed light exposures for a depth of blue/indigo colors. Inspired by nature and how we interact with it, I arrange natural objects such as leaves, flowers and vines with human made objects or images of objects. I choose to work with cyanotypes "live", in sunlight for the spontaneity of arranging the objects and often have a general idea of what I want to do allowing for of-the-minute additions and subtractions of objects and timing of exposures. I sometimes add acryl paint, or colored pencil to a washed and dried print. Cyanotype is a contact print process using treated, UV light sensitive paper. It results in a Prussian blue final print. Also known as photogram, sun print. The English scientist and astronomer Sir John Herschel discovered this procedure in 1842. (...) Due to the coating and printing process Cyanotypes are always non reproducible unique items in itself. Dreams Unfinished It is a story about pain, love and longing. The photos were taken after the death of my father. He passed away suddenly in his sleep. I could not understand what happened, to come to terms with the loss. I looked for him everywhere and imagined he was asleep and dreaming. As a result, I have contact with him in the dream world he is with me. Works depict dreams, motifs, shards of memories which probably appear in everyone's dreams. Dreams - eternal companions of human life - encourage us to analyse our own experiences and understand our fate. They enable us to bring to surface deeply hidden secrets and go beyond the earthly matters. These records are born out of imagination and perishable ephemeral memory. They are not meant to be unambiguous; they should leave the door open for free interpretation and free reading to enable everyone to supplement them with their own story. Glass Faces "The eyes and faces all turned themselves towards me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room" Sylvia Plath Glass Faces present unique, enchanting, climatic and hypnotising portraits. Bewitching with natural beauty and somewhat unreal, mysterious, silent and oozing various emotions. Faces of friends and people we have just met. Ambrotypes - positive images created on a sheet of glass using the 19th century wet collodion process - are the vital element of the project. The ambrotype is inimitable. You may try to reproduce it, but a piece created on black glass remains unique. Ambrotype - Ambrotos means immortal... I was born in a camp The story of Jan Chmiel, who was born in the Waltrop forced labor camp - a city in western Germany. According to a record issued by a German official, he was born in 1944. , according to information provided by the mother in 1942. Of the 143 children captured in the Waltrop camp, three survived, including Jan.
Julia Margaret Cameron
United Kingdom
1815 | † 1879
Julia Margaret Cameron (née Pattle; 11 June 1815 – 26 January 1879) was a British photographer. She became known for her portraits of celebrities of the time, and for photographs with Arthurian and other legendary themes. Cameron's photographic career was short, spanning eleven years of her life (1864–1875). She took up photography at the relatively late age of 48, when she was given a camera as a present. Although her style was not widely appreciated in her own day, her work has had an impact on modern photographers, especially her closely cropped portraits. Her house, Dimbola Lodge, on the Isle of Wight is open to the public. Julia Margaret Cameron was born Julia Margaret Pattle in Calcutta, India, to James Pattle, a British official of the East India Company, and Adeline de l'Etang. Adeline de l'Etang was the daughter of Chevalier Antoine de l'Etang, who had been a page and probable lover of Marie Antoinette and an officer in the Garde du Corps of King Louis XVI. He had married the Indian-born Therese Blin de Grincourt a daughter of French aristocrats. Julia was from a family of celebrated beauties, and was considered an ugly duckling among her sisters. As her great-niece Virginia Woolf wrote in the 1926 introduction to the Hogarth Press collection of Cameron's photographs, "In the trio [of sisters] where...[one] was Beauty; and [one] Dash; Mrs. Cameron was undoubtedly Talent". Cameron's sister Virginia was the mother of the temperance leader Lady Henry Somerset. Cameron was educated in France, but returned to India, and in 1838 married Charles Hay Cameron, a jurist and member of the Law Commission stationed in Calcutta, who was twenty years her senior. In 1848, Charles Hay Cameron retired, and the family moved to London, England. Cameron's sister, Sarah Prinsep, had been living in London and hosted a salon at Little Holland House, the dower house of Holland House in Kensington, where famous artists and writers regularly visited. In 1860, Cameron visited the estate of poet Alfred Lord Tennyson on the Isle of Wight. Julia was taken with the location, and the Cameron family purchased a property on the island soon after. They called it Dimbola Lodge after the family's Ceylon estate. In 1863, when Cameron was 48 years old, her daughter gave her a camera as a present, thereby starting her career as a photographer. Within a year, Cameron became a member of the Photographic Societies of London and Scotland. In her photography, Cameron strove to capture beauty. She wrote, "I longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me and at length the longing has been satisfied." The basic techniques of soft-focus "fancy portraits", which she later developed, were taught to her by David Wilkie Wynfield. She later wrote that "to my feeling about his beautiful photography I owed all my attempts and indeed consequently all my success". Lord Tennyson, her neighbour on the Isle of Wight, often brought friends to see the photographer. Cameron was sometimes obsessive about her new occupation, with subjects sitting for countless exposures in the blinding light as she laboriously coated, exposed, and processed each wet plate. The results were, in fact, unconventional in their intimacy and their particular visual habit of created blur through both long exposures, where the subject moved and by leaving the lens intentionally out of focus. This led some of her contemporaries to complain and even ridicule the work, but her friends and family were supportive, and she was one of the most prolific and advanced of amateurs in her time. Her enthusiasm for her craft meant that her children and others sometimes tired of her endless photographing, but it also means that we are left with some of the best of records of her children and of the many notable figures of the time who visited her. During her career, Cameron registered each of her photographs with the copyright office and kept detailed records. Her shrewd business sense is one reason that so many of her works survive today. Another reason that many of Cameron's portraits are significant is because they are often the only existing photograph of historical figures. Many paintings and drawings exist, but, at the time, photography was still a new and challenging medium for someone outside a typical portrait studio. The bulk of Cameron's photographs fit into two categories – closely framed portraits and illustrative allegories based on religious and literary works. In the allegorical works in particular, her artistic influence was clearly Pre-Raphaelite, with far-away looks and limp poses and soft lighting. Cameron's sister ran the artistic scene at Little Holland House, which gave her many famous subjects for her portraits. Some of her famous subjects include: Charles Darwin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, John Everett Millais, William Michael Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Ellen Terry and George Frederic Watts. Most of these distinctive portraits are cropped closely around the subject's face and are in soft focus. Cameron was often friends with these Victorian celebrities, and tried to capture their personalities in her photos. Among Cameron's lesser-known images are those she took of Mary Emily ('May') Prinsep, wife of Hallam Tennyson, 2nd Baron Tennyson, the elder son of Alfred Tennyson and a British colonial administrator. Cameron's portraits of May Prinsep, taken on the Isle of Wight, show a somewhat plain woman shot head-on and without affect. Cameron's posed photographic illustrations represent the other half of her work. In these illustrations, she frequently photographed historical scenes or literary works, which often took the quality of oil paintings. However, she made no attempt in hiding the backgrounds. Cameron's friendship with Tennyson led to him asking her to photograph illustrations for his Idylls of the King. These photographs are designed to look like oil paintings from the same time period, including rich details like historical costumes and intricate draperies. Today, these posed works are sometimes dismissed by art critics. Nevertheless, Cameron saw these photographs as art, just like the oil paintings they imitated. In 1875, the Camerons moved back to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Julia continued to practice photography but complained in letters about the difficulties of getting chemicals and pure water to develop and print photographs. Also, in India, she did not have access to Little Holland House's artistic community. She also did not have a market to distribute her photographs as she had in England. Because of this, Cameron took fewer pictures in India. These pictures were of posed Indian people, paralleling the posed pictures that Cameron had taken of neighbours in England. Almost none of Cameron's work from India survives. Cameron caught a bad chill and died in Kalutara, Ceylon in 1879. Cameron's niece Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson; 1846–1895) wrote the biography of Cameron, which appeared in the first edition of the Dictionary of National Biography, 1886. Julia Stephen was the mother of Virginia Woolf, who wrote a comic portrayal of the "Freshwater circle" in her only play Freshwater. Woolf edited, with Roger Fry, a collection of Cameron's photographs. However, it was not until 1948 that her photography became more widely known when Helmut Gernsheim wrote a book on her work. In 1977 Gernsheim noted that although a great photographer, Cameron had "left no mark" on the aesthetic history of photography because her work was not appreciated by her contemporaries and thus not imitated. But this situation was evidently already changing by then thanks to his popularisation of her work, for instance in 1975 Imogen Cunningham had commented "I'd like to see portrait photography go right back to Julia Margaret Cameron. I don't think there's anyone better." In 2013, Getty Images says in its caption of a portrait of Alice Liddell (whom Cameron photographed as Alethea, Pomona, Ceres, and St. Agnes in 1872) that "Cameron's photographic portraits are considered among the finest in the early history of photography". Source: Wikipedia
Helga Paris
Germany
1938
Helga Steffens, daughter of Gertrud Steffens and typesetter Wilhelm Steffens, was born just over a year before the outbreak of the Second World War in Gollnow, a small town then in the north of Germany. In May 1945 she celebrated her seventh birthday, while the war ended in defeat for Germany. Her father and two brothers were still away, but in the meantime frontier changes mandated by the victorious powers and large scale ethnic cleansing forced Helga's mother to flee with her two daughters. They ended up in Zossen, a small town a little to the south of Berlin. There she was raised by a community of mostly women, many of whom worked. She is introduced to photography by her aunts who take many photographs. In Zossen she went to school and successfully passed her School leaving exams in 1956. After this, till 1960, she studied fashion design at the School of Engineering for the Clothing Industry ("Berlin Ingenieurschule für Bekleidungsindustrie") in Berlin and undertook, still in Berlin, an internship at VEB Treffmodelle. After this she worked as a fashion lecturer and as a commercial artist. In 1960 she starts to take photographs with a 6x6 Flexaret camera. It was during this time that she met the painter Ronald Paris. They were married between 1961 and 1974. Through her husband she was now quickly able to establish contacts in the East German artistic scene of the time. By now she had also acquired a passion for photography. Like many of the German Democratic Republic's leading photographers, Helga Paris is often described as self-taught. She herself believes that much of her photographic passion and skill was acquired from two aunts who were themselves, enthusiastic photographers, constantly taking pictures through the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, which now Paris herself keeps carefully stored in a collection of show boxes adapted for the purpose. Paris began taking photographs seriously around 1967. She was influenced by the work of Edvard Munch, Max Beckmann, Francis Bacon, and Werner Held. Between 1967 and 1968 she worked in the photo laboratory of Walli Baucik. Her first freelance job, in 1969, was to photograph slaughtering at a home in Thüringen; in 1970 she shot fashion photographs for the youth magazine neues leben. In 1972 she joined the National Association of Visual Artists, which was virtually a prerequisite for success in what was now her chosen career. Her professional work is wide-ranging. In 1975 she photographed scenes from productions by Benno Besson at the Berlin Volksbühne ("People's Theatre"). She presented her first personal exhibition in 1978, in Dresden at the Fine Arts Academy. By the 1980s her work was concentrated increasingly on people and streetscapes, initially in Berlin where many of her subjects were neighbours and friends. She encountered greater difficulty when undertaking an equivalent project in Halle where the people she photographed were strangers and reacted with hostility. She then took time to talk to people and ask before photographing them. Under those circumstances, citizens of Halle agreed to be photographed, though there was still reluctance to be photographed with Halle streets as background at a time when a major and long-running redevelopment project scheme involving extensive destruction of old houses was leaving the centre of the city looking badly damaged. Her 1986 exhibition Buildings and Faces: Halle 1983-1985, planned for the city's Marktschlößchen Gallery was cancelled a few days before the scheduled opening date because her pictures gave publicity to the city's misguided building policy. By the time it was cancelled a catalogue and exhibition labels for the photographs had already been printed. Her career as a free-lance photographer survived the changes of 1989/90 which led to the end of the German Democratic Republic, formally in October 1990 with German reunification, and for some commentators and others her photographs from the East German period have gained a wider interest as the period they depict has receded into history. Since 1996 Helga Paris has been a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts. In 2003 her twelve-part exhibition Self images 1981-1988 in the context of the Art in the German Democratic Republic exhibition drew much interest.Source: Wikipedia Buildings and Faces “I’ll take Halle” was Helga Paris’s spontaneous reaction when, at a meeting with colleagues and artists in East Berlin in the early 1980s, fellow photographer Arno Fischer came up with the idea of photographing East Germany systematically as photographers had done in the 1930s and 1940s for the Farm Security Administration on behalf of the US government. Helga Paris rose to the challenge and began to document Halle on her own initiative. The self-taught photographer had previously carried out several photo stories on themes relating to urban and neighborhood life as part of a personal project. She drove from East Berlin to Halle many times between 1983 and 1985. As her daughter lived there at the time, she had developed an affinity to the town. Helga Paris was fascinated by the endangered former beauty of the buildings and considered it her duty to preserve it in pictures before it disappeared completely. She decided to photograph Halle as if it were a “foreign town in a foreign country”. In doing so, she looked at it through the eyes of an explorer, who is inspired and galvanized by a new environment. She started off taking snapshots of urban life, focusing on streets with houses and passers-by. However, the local people, who felt exposed in their “everyday misery”, did not always react favorably. This prompted her to reconsider her approach and eventually to divide the project into portraits of buildings and portraits of people. Helga Paris consciously limited the moment between making contact with her subjects and pressing the shutter to ensure that their gazes were as open as possible. As a result, they seem to be poised in the very second in which they briefly pause for the photographer, but have not yet engaged mentally with the photographic situation. At the time, Halle was primarily putting money into building modern apartments, and the old town center offered a desolate picture with crumbling facades, including those of listed buildings, half-untiled roofs, and ramshackle roads and squares. All this is revealed in Helga Paris’s photographs in high-contrast black-and-white, although it was never her intention to denounce the state of things. However, the SED party leadership found that the picture of the town conveyed in Helga Paris’s images was too negative. As a result, she was barred from opening her exhibition Buildings and Faces at the last minute. Not until 1990, after German reunification, was it allowed to be shown in Halle.Source: Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation
Carl De Keyzer
Belgium
1958
Carl De Keyzer (27 December 1958) is a Belgian photographer. Major subjects in his work have included the collapse of Soviet Union and India. He became a full member of Magnum Photos in 1994. De Keyzer has exhibited his work in many European galleries and has received several awards, including the Book Award from Rencontres d'Arles, the W. Eugene Smith Award and the Kodak Award.Source: Wikipedia Carl de Keyzer started his career as a freelance photographer in 1982 while supporting himself as a photography instructor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium. At the same time, his interest in the work of other photographers led him to co-found and co-direct the XYZ-Photography Gallery. A Magnum nominee in 1990, he became a full member in 1994. De Keyzer likes to tackle large-scale projects and general themes. A basic premise in much of his work is that, in overpopulated communities everywhere, disaster has already struck and infrastructures are on the verge of collapse. His style is not dependent on isolated images; instead, he prefers an accumulation of images that interact with the text.Source: www.carldekeyzer.com Magnum photographer Carl de Keyzer was born in Kortrijk, Belgium, in 1958. In his early work he focused on social groups outside of the mainstream. The God, Inc. series explores the various sects of Christianity in the United States and the drastically different and often extreme ways in which people communicate with God. Currently de Keyzer is tackling large-scale projects and general themes relating to overpopulated communities, disasters, and infrastructures. He prefers to work with an accumulation of images that interact with text, and in a series of large tableaux he has covered India; the collapse of the Soviet Union; and modern-day power and politics. His photographs have been published in The Guardian, LIFE, El País and Le Monde, and de Keyzer’s works are held in collections including the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Fotomuseum in Belgium. He also is a recipient of the W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography.Source: International Center of Photography Carl De Keyzer tackles large-scale themes through an accumulative, expansive approach. He builds up narratives through collected images, which often interact with text (taken from his travel diaries). In a series of large-format prints, he has covered India, the collapse of the Soviet Union and – more recently – modern-day power and politics in North Korea. His seminal project, God, Inc., captured religious life on the margins of American society. A basic premise in much of his work is that, in overpopulated communities everywhere, disaster has already struck, and infrastructures are on the verge of collapse.Source: Magnum Photos
Christian Werner
Germany
1987
Christian Werner is a freelance multimedia/photojournalist based in Boitzum, Germany. As a teenager he developed his interest in photography while traveling to foreign countries. In 2014 he graduated the photojournalism & documentary photography course at the University of Applied Sciences in Hannover. His main interests are social diversity and global political issues. The areas of interest is mainly the arabic world and culture. Chris worked in various countries in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and South America. His work has been exhibited internationally. He welcomes assignments local and overseas. Since 2012, Christian is represented by Agency Laif. Source: World Press Photo Chris, born in 1987, studied from 2009 to 2014 photojournalism and documentary photography at the University of Hanover. He works as a freelance photojournalist and published his photos and stories, among others, in Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, TIME Magazine, The Washington Post and many more. From 2012 -2016 Christian Werner was represented by the German reportage agency laif. In late 2016 Chris is represented by Zeitenspiegel. His photographic focus is the processing of social injustice, conflicts and geopolitical issues. His work has been awarded several times and frequently exhibited internationally. In 2015 Chris participated at the World Press Joop Swart Mastercalss in Amsterdam. 2016 Chris has been chosen in the 30 under 30 Europe Forbes List in the Media category. In late summer 2016 he begins working with MOAS (Migrant Offshore Aid Station). Chris worked in various countries in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and South America. Artist Statement "Rubble and Delusion - A Journey Through Assad's Syria With the fall of Aleppo, the regime of Bashar Assad once again controls the country's second-largest city. But is reconciliation possible in the country? A journey through the dictator's rump state. Our journey leads us to the three largest cities in northern and western Syria: Aleppo, Latakia and Homs. Aleppo has become symbolic of the brutal bombing campaign. Latakia, the regime stronghold on the Mediterranean, was largely untouched by the war and is still a popular vacation spot in the summer. And Homs, once the center of the uprising, was destroyed and is now slated to become a model of reconstruction."
Lu Nan
China
1962
Lu Nan is a contemporary photographer who was born in Beijing, China in 1962. After working for National Pictorial for 5 years, he decided to become an independent photographer. From 1989 to 1990, he shot a series of images of the living conditions of patients in Chinese mental hospitals. From 1992 to 1996, he shot a series of images about Catholicism in China. From 1996 to 2004, he shot a series of images of the daily life of Tibetan farmers. Lu Nan is known as "the most legendary photographer in China". He is also the only Chinese contemporary photographer chosen by Aperture magazine as a topic colon. Lu Nan is constantly invited to participate in numerous exhibitions; however, he is extremely selective about the exhibitions he is involved with. Lu also refused to have his portrait taken by others, so it’s very rare to see any photo documentations of him. For fifteen years, Lu has been leading a life that is almost like a monk, spending his time working and studying, as he believes that “good stuff comes out of reticence.” Since 1989, Lu Nan has spent 15 years completing his trilogy of photographic series: The Forgotten People, China's Catholicism and Four Seasons in Tibet. These images have allowed Nan to place himself in the international spotlight. But perhaps more importantly, he became one of the first people who exposed another side of Chinese society; people often considered outcasts. “I just respect them and care about them… They are the same as us,” said Lu as a reminder that all human beings are equal and deserve dignity. His black and white photographs depict people within their own environment by using a rather straight glance, which is yet associated with delicate contrasts and elegant compositions.Source: Wikipedia Correspondent for the prestigious international cooperative Magnum Photos since the 1990s, Lu Nan 呂楠 (born in 1962 in Beijing) is an independent photographer who has been documenting marginalized people in China. His pivotal series started in 1989 with The Forgotten People: The Condition of China’s Psychiatric Patients. Pursing his intentions to document Chinese people from the margins of society, his subsequent series captured members of the Catholic Faith (On The Road: The Catholic Faith in China, 1992-1996), peasants’ life in Tibet (Four Seasons: Everyday Life of Tibetan Peasants, 1996-2004), and prisoner’s conditions (Prisons of North Burma, 2006).Source: photographyofchina.com “In 15 years, not a day went by when I didn’t question my own work,” says Chinese photographer Lu Nan, in an interview included in his new book Trilogy. “That’s why I scrutinize what I was doing by means of reading. This mode of assessing action through thought and assessing thought through action helped me to complete these projects." “The trilogy is concerned with human beings. I hope that by looking into real life, I’ll find something fundamentally and enduringly human.” Lu Nan isn’t well known outside China but this book, his first in English, should change all that. It collects together three projects he shot over 15 years – The Forgotten People, a look at the lives of Chinese psychiatric patients, shot from 1989-1990; On the Road, a look at the lives of Catholics in China, shot from 1992-96; and Four Seasons, a look at the lives of rural Tibetans, shot from 1996-2004. These microcosms are apparently very different and yet, to Lu Nan, they’re intimately interrelated. Inspired by image-makers such as Josef Sudek and Sebastiao Salgado and extremely well-read, Lu Nan says the three projects represent the three states of life – The Forgotten People is about suffering and adversity, On the Road purification, and Four Seasons about a blessed, serene state.Source: British Journal of Photography
LaToya Ruby Frazier
United States
1982
LaToya Ruby Frazier is an American artist and professor of photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. From Braddock, Pennsylvania, Frazier began photographing her family and hometown at the age of 16, revising the social documentary traditional of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange to imagine documentation from within and by the community, and collaboration between the photographer and her subjects. Inspired by Gordon Parks, who promoted the camera as a weapon for social justice, Frazier uses her tight focus to make apparent the impact of systemic problems, from racism to deindustrialization to environmental degradation, on individual bodies, relationships and spaces. In her work, she is concerned with bringing to light these problems, which she describes as global issues. Speaking to The New York Times about her position, Frazier said: "We need longer sustained stories that reflect and tell us where the prejudices and blind spots are and continue to be in this culture and society... This is a race and class issue that is affecting everyone. It is not a black problem, it is an American problem, it is a global problem. Braddock is everywhere." Frazier has been extensively educated in photography through education at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania (BFA), Syracuse University (MFA), the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, and she was the Guna S. Mundheim Fellow for Visual Arts at the American Academy in Berlin. The photographic work of LaToya Ruby Frazier includes both images of personal spaces, intensely private moments and the story of racial and economic injustice in America. Her work includes raw portraits of friends and family members in intimate moments and examples of social injustice. As Frazier explains, "the collaboration between my family and myself blurs the line between self-portraiture and social documentary". Often her work focuses on the plight of her home town of Braddock, Pennsylvania which became financially depressed after the collapse of the steel industry in the 1970–80s. With black and white photographs, Frazier highlights the beauty of Braddock and how this town has impacted her family's life along with other residents. Her still photographs have a raw sense of strength and vulnerability juxtaposed in an honest and personal way. Besides working on her most famous work Notion of Family, Frazier has worked with other contemporary issues such as the Flint water crisis. This particular project depicts and focuses on a young woman and her family living their everyday lives amongst the crucial water conditions within their lower-class Flint community. She recently contributed photographs to a New York Times project, Why America's Black Mothers and Babies are in a Life-or-Death Crisis. Informed by documentary practices from the turn of the last century, Frazier explores identities of place, race, and family in work that is a hybrid of self-portraiture and social narrative. Her primary subjects of these portraits are Frazier's Grandma Ruby (1925-2009), her mother (b. 1959), and the artist herself. The crumbling landscape of Braddock, Pennsylvania, a once-thriving steel town, forms the backdrop of her images, which make manifest both the environmental and infrastructural decay caused by postindustrial decline and the lives of those who continue—largely by necessity—to live among it. As Frazier says, "I see myself as an artist and a citizen that's documenting and telling the story and building the archive of working-class families facing all this change that's happening, because it has to be documented." Through her own family she has been able to recount the history of Braddock by way of the generations who experienced it. Her work begins dialogues about class structure, history, and social responsibility. A 2018 special issue of Atlantic Magazine featured aerial photography and an essay by Frazier documenting the impact of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. on the landscapes of Memphis, Chicago and Baltimore. Frazier's work was featured in the 2019 New York Times Magazine Money Issue for her photo essay on the people of Lordstown, Ohio after the General Motors plant shut down.Source: Wikipedia Frazier’s radical empathy has brought her to places whose occupants have every reason to distrust outsiders. She photographs communities gutted by unemployment, poverty, racism and environmental degradation, seeking out subjects dehumanized or ignored by the mainstream media. At 39, she sees her life’s work as an archive of humanity, one that particularly documents the courage and diversity of blue-collar workers and the consequences of the policies that condemn them to struggle. For her, this is what it means to be a patriot. “I am showing these dark things about America because I love my country and countrymen,” she said. “When you love somebody, you tell them the truth. Even if it hurts.” Socially conscious artistic practices may be in vogue these days, but Frazier goes beyond hollow claims of “raising awareness” with an essay in a magazine or a show at an art museum. She is the rare photographer who approaches relationships with her subjects as lifelong commitments, and who tries to make substantial, material differences in their lives. Frazier’s conviction in art that involves — and transforms — entire communities aligns her with Rick Lowe, an artist who, with his collaborators, famously converted an underserved swath of Houston into a nexus for housing, art programming and neighborhood development activities. She also carries on the legacy of the German artist Joseph Beuys, who believed that participatory art could heal society. Frazier, though, pursues these conceptual ideals while still producing formally elegant images using traditional techniques. Working mainly with a medium-format camera and black-and-white film, her intimate domestic portraits and expressive landscapes are classically beautiful, even when they depict harrowing realities. Making photographs as poetic as they are political is, for Frazier, a way of honoring her subjects. “She doesn’t pop in and pop out,” said the artist Carrie Mae Weems, Frazier’s friend and early mentor. “These are long-term projects that deeply matter, not only to her but to the community and, ultimately, I think, to the nation.”Source: The New York Times
Heinrich Kühn
Austria / Germany
1866 | † 1944
Carl Christian Heinrich Kühn (25 February 1866 in Dresden – 14 September 1944 in Birgitz) was an Austrian–German photographer and photography pioneer. Heinrich Kühn is regarded as one of the forefathers of fine art photography, which helped photography establish itself as an art on its own. His photographs closely resemble impressionist paintings, with their frequent use of soft lighting and focus. Kühn was part of the pictorialist photographic movement. Kühn mainly used the gum bichromate technique, applied in several layers, and thus allowing for previously unseen color tonalities. In 1911, Kühn invented the Gummigravüre technique, a combination of photogravure and Gum bichromate. In 1915 he developed the Leimdruck technique, which uses Animal glue as Colloid and produces pictures similar to gum prints. He also invented the Syngraphie, a forgotten technique that uses two negatives of different sensitivity to obtain a larger tonal spectrum. Kühn used Autochrome from its appearance in 1907; his Autochromes have been called "ethereal dreams of childhood, full of vaulted sunny skies and giddy perspectives, as gloriously cathartic as they are emotionally charged".Source: Wikipedia Heinrich Kühn, originally Carl Christian Heinrich Kühn was born on February 25th, 1866 in Dresden, Germany. Kühn was one of the central figures of international art photography at the beginning of the twentieth century. His lifelong goal was to establish the photographic image as a medium for rendering an artistic vision as precisely and creatively as in painting and drawing. Along with Alfred Stieglitz and other friends, Kühn made the stylized photographic an element of the gesamtkunstwerk, which translates to "ideal work of art", which the Secessionists aspired to create. The most important tool for this was the gum bichromate process that he had perfected and the free choice of paper and pigment, which made the picture look more like a print than a conventional photograph. This allowed him to deliberately alter the brightness contrasts to fit his notion of the image and dissolve its sharpness. Too much sharpness was considered "non-artistic" because it veered away from painting, thus eliminating it where he saw fit. Kühn reduced the romantic cosmos of "Pictorialism" to the point of abstraction, thus exhibiting a sense of timelessness and balance. Kühn's work is represented in many collections, including Eastman House Rochester (New York), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Kupferstich-Kabinett (Dresden), Hanmburgische Lichtbildstelle (Hamburg), Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), and Musée d'Orsay (Paris).Source: Peter Fetterman Gallery
Amy  Heller
United States
Award-winning artist Amy Heller, originally from Washington, DC, lives year-round on Cape Cod in Massachusetts with her husband. Amy earned her B.A. in fine art at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, and her M.F.A. in photography at George Washington University (GWU) in Washington, DC. She has been an exhibit specialist for Smithsonian Museums and National Gallery of Art, and a photo editor/researcher/curator for U.S. News & World Report, National Geographic, Microsoft, and the Newseum. Her work has been exhibited and collected internationally and this includes: Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Cape Cod Museum of Art, Dimock Gallery at GWU, and many private collections. Statements: Here are statements for three of my portfolios of my lens-based, mixed-media artwork. In every instance I am always experimenting, playing, stretching the boundaries of the medium, and sometimes breaking the rules. Happy accidents occur along the way and I embrace the journey as much as the outcome. Time/Motion Study Multiples I have always loved dance and movement. As a child I was constantly in motion, dancing to the Beatles or pretending to be a ballerina. Even when seemingly at rest I "moved." I would lie on the living room couch, staring up at the cathedral ceiling, dreaming of the world upside-down. As an adult, I still have a fascination with motion and time: I am a child at heart, evidenced by my large collection of wind-up toys. I fell in love with the late 19th century human locomotion photographic experiments of Etienne-Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge, and others and started experimenting with the moving film stroboscopy technique of shooting motion. After many "happy accidents" I came up with my own version of Time/Motion studies, using the nude figure as a subject as well as a foil. I love the implied motion, the stopping of time, and the liminal spaces with abstract patterns created by photographic alchemy. I have examined the idea of motion and reality and seeing the unseen: what exists and yet cannot be perceived by the naked eye. Through the use of multiple imagery, the photographs reveal images that display surreal, dreamlike themes and moods, explore time, and produce on a flat surface, multi-dimensional creations in time and space. There are virtually limitless visual possibilities inherent in these techniques. My new series of reimagined Time/Motion Study Multiples combines the old (analog) with the new (digital) spanning three centuries of photographic exploration. The first time I shot the photos with black and white film and printed panoramic images. Now the second time around I am collaging and layering those earlier analog images in the digital world, creating new works of art. I am always experimenting with different ways of making art, and feel like I'm an artist in search of a medium that hasn't been invented yet. Maybe I will invent it?! Cyanotype on Fabric Mannequin Sculptures + Egg Sculptures I have been making cyanotypes for many years and have always loved the idea of mixing this 19th century process with 21st century digital technology and printing on non-traditional/unexpected surfaces such as fabric (cotton, dyed cotton, silk, velvet, etc.). "Still Lives" began as a series of figurative cyanotype photographs on fabric of classical sculpture from museums and art spaces. The sculptures are frozen in time/static, literally "still lives," revealing little else but their forms. The blue of the cyanotype adds to their "cold" stillness. "Still Lives" evolved into a series of three-dimensional, collaged mannequin sculptures, using the figure as a subject as well as a foil. The figures are collaged with cyanotype photographs of miscellaneous objects, and along with the collaged cyanotypes, the mannequins are veritable pin cushions stuck with decorative pins, acupuncture needles, wrapped with rope, etc. They are more narrative, exposed, and cerebral in nature and explore subjects such as astronomy, self-portrait, psychological themes, etc. The mannequins "wear" their stories on the surface, inviting the viewer to experience their own interpretation. Sculptural "Still Lives" morphed into explorations of time, motion, and dreams, first using manual turntables and then motorized turntables. A veritable "back to the future" for me, re-examining earlier themes used in my time/motion studies and combining my love of motion and cyanotypes. The cyanotype egg series is another exploration of my cyanotype sculptures. The eggs are collaged with cyanotype on fabric images of classical sculptures, everyday objects, etc. The egg form suggests renewal and rebirth, and at the same time is a simple, beautiful shape that is universal. LED Mixed-Media Cyanotypes on Silk Currently I have been making LED mixed-media cyanotypes on silk, exploring the theme of light as a metaphor for truth, revelation and understanding. The light reveals the multiple layers of collaged and sandwiched negatives, positives, and cyanotypes on silk, similar to an x-ray. The work is constantly evolving, and my creative process is somewhere between a stream of consciousness and a waking dream. Earlier LED mixed-media cyanotypes were smaller, multi-themed pieces and these newer ones are much larger. I am experimenting with wet cyanotypes in my new series "Sea/Me" using aquatic subject matter including prehistoric looking sea creatures (squid, octopi, skates, jellyfish, etc.), seaweed, and algae. Climate Change is something that is seen and felt firsthand on Cape Cod and is always on my mind. This series illuminates the flora and fauna and brings these often-hidden things to light. It is also a nod to Anna Atkins, and is inspired by fond childhood memories of beachcombing and swimming with my mother in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
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