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Kirk Crippens
© Gui Komel
Kirk Crippens
Kirk Crippens

Kirk Crippens

Country: United States

Kirk Crippens is an American artist living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He had an early start with photography, inspired by his grandfather who kept a darkroom in his closet. Based in San Francisco since 2000, he began exhibiting in 2008. In 2010 he exhibited in thirteen shows, three were solo exhibitions. He was named Top 50 Photographer in Critical Mass, nominated for the 2011–2013 Eureka Fellowship Program, and invited to speak during PhotoAlliance’s Spring Lecture series at the San Francisco Art Institute. In 2011 he was included in eighteen exhibitions, three were solo, named Top 50 photographer for the second consecutive year, and a finalist for Photolucida’s book prize. In 2012 he was the artist in residence at RayKo Photo Center in San Francisco and participated in ten exhibitions. In 2013 he was the artist in residence at Newspace Center for Photography in Portland, Oregon. His portfolio Foreclosure, USA was recently collected by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas and was featured in their exhibition State of the Art, Discovering American Art Now in 2014-2015.
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Sebastian Sardi
Sweden
1983
Sebastian Sardi was born in 1983 in Stockholm, Sweden. At the age of 22 he started taking classes in analog photography at the Peoples University in Stockholm. In 2009 he moved to Denmark to study photography at Fatamorgana the Danish school of art and photography. In 2011 he received a Bachelor’s degree in Art History and Visual Studies. He published his first photobook “A Cirkusz” in 2012. Sebastian began his work on photographing mines in 2008 after reading an article on how mining related injuries and deaths are systematically covered up by many authorities. 2019 his second book “Black Diamond” was published on Kehrer Verlag. Today Sebastian Sardi lives and works in Malmö and Copenhagen. Black Diamond It is an apocalyptic landscape. There are huge man-made craters everywhere that make up the visible landscape, the ground is burning, and a vast area is oozing with toxic gases, fire and smoke. Amongst all of this, there are men, woman and children digging in the soil with their bare hands. Coal is mined everywhere in Jharkhand, India, and large parts of it is sorted by hand. The locals call it; Kalaheera; or ”Black Diamond”.
Energy produced by the burning of coal is the single biggest contributor to the man-generated carbon dioxide emissions on this planet. Coal is a major part in the issue of global warming. In Jharkhand many people have been forced away from their lands when companies and authorities recognised the richness that hides in the ground. Underground fires force people to relocate. The mining companies claim they are unable to put out the fires, while the locals blame the companies for letting the fires burn so the coal can be reached and excavated from underneath their villages.

 There is a fragile balance between nature and mankind. A sense of discomfort is felt in the slow but seemingly unavoidable struggle towards the collapse of nature. The human inability to break patterns is painstakingly visible in these photographs, as we knowingly keep on extracting the ground beneath our own feet. Black Diamond is a close (self-)portrait of the people who work with extracting coal from the ground to supply the ever growing demands.


Elena Paraskeva
Cyprus
1973
Elena Paraskeva is an international Conceptual Photographer and Art Director. Having lived and worked in the U.S for a decade, she now resides in Cyprus, but often travels for assignments. Elena loves to create surrealistic conceptual work bathed in color and is often inspired by everyday life and popular culture. Achievements: LensCulture Portrait Awards 2019 - Jurors' Pick, Digital Camera Photographer Of The Year 2018, Neutral Density Awards 2018 - Gold Medal in Advertising, Trierenberg Supercircuit 2018 - Gold Medal in Series, Trierenberg Supercircuit 2017 - Gold Medal in Portraiture, Prix De La Photographie, Paris 2018- Silver in Portraiture, Prix De La Photographie, Paris 2017 - Silver in Advertising/Fashion, Prix De La Photographie, Paris 2017- Silver and Bronze in Children Portraiture, Monovisions Photography Awards 2018 - Bronze in Conceptual, American Photography Open 2018 - Shortlisted, International Photography Awards (IPA) 2018 - Honorable Mention, One Eyeland Awards 2017 - Silver in Advertising/Conceptual, Moscow International Photography Awards (MIFA 2017) - Bronze in Portraiture, Chromatic Awards 2017 - Bronze in Fashion/Beauty, Neutral Density Awards 2017 -Bronze in People Category, International Photographer Of The Year (IPOTY 2017) - 3 Honorable Mentions in Portraiture, London International Creative Competition 2017 - Honorable Mention, International Photography Awards (IPA) 2017 - 3 Honorable Mentions, WPPI - Second Place Individual Portrait Division 2017, First Place Individual Portrait Division 2016, FAPA 2017 - Honorable Mentions Conceptual & Portrait Divisions, PDN World In Focus 2016 - Second Place, Neutral Density Awards 2016 - Bronze in Advertising/Conceptual, International Photographer Of The Year 2016 - Honorable Mention, Monochrome Photography Awards 2016 - Honorable Mention Fashion/Beauty Exhibitions: Aperture Foundation, New York City - April 2019, Menier Gallery, London UK - 2018, NEC, Birmingham UK - 2018, Photo Oxford 2017, Oxford UK, Design Center, Linz Austria - 2017, Espace Baurepaire, Paris - 2017, Opus 39 Gallery, Cyprus - 2017, Thalassa Museum, Cyprus - 2017, The Printspace, London UK - 2015 Publications: Photography Masterclass, Digital Camera, Digital Photographer, N-Photo, PDN, Good Light, Economia, Fileleftheros Newspaper, Blurred, Omikron, Volition, Vantage, Icon, Ellements, Elegant, Incredible, LoveBite, La Plus Belle, Surreal
Tamara Dean
Australia
1976
Tamara Dean (b. 1976, Sydney, Australia) is a photographic artist whose works explore the informal rites of passage and rituals of young people within the natural world.Her solo shows include Ritualism, Divine Rites, This too Shall Pass and Only Human.Dean has received numerous awards including a $10,000 High Commendation prize in the 2013 Moran Contemporary Photographic Award, the 2011 Olive Cotton Award and 2009 Sydney Life: Art & About.Dean’s works have been widely exhibited both nationally and internationally. Her works have featured in ‘Dangerous Beauty’ curated by Stephan Stoyanov, Bulgaria 2013, the 2013 Aspettando FotoLeggendo festival in Rome, Fotofever Brussels Art Fair, 2012 and Pingyao Photography Festival, China, 2012 as well as at leading Australian galleries including Inheritance 2009 and Hijacked 2 – New Australian & German Photography 2010, both at the Australian Centre for Photography; Sydney Now – New Australian Photojournalism, Museum of Sydney 2007; Terra Australis Incognita at Monash Gallery of Art.Dean has been awarded artist residencies with ArtOmi, New York (2013), and previously Taronga Zoo, Montsalvat and repeatedly in the remote gold-mining town of Hill End, NSW.For a decade Dean was a member of Oculi photographic collective.Dean’s work is held in a number of public and private collections including Artbank, Sydney; The Francis J. Greenburger Collection, New York; the Mordant Family Collection, Australia; and is represented by Olsen Irwin Gallery Sydney and James Makin Gallery Melbourne.Source: www.tamaradean.com
Sandy Hill
United States
Sandy Hill grew up in a small town in Northeastern Ohio. The natural beauty as well as the rustic farms in the area provided the inspiration for her interest in photography. She earned a Bachelors degree in Photography at RIT before moving to Massachusetts where she was a freelance photographer for daily newspapers and a wire service in the greater Boston area. Her current work in portraiture has grown out of her interest in people and learning about different cultures as well as a general curiosity about others. She is also enjoying learning more about fine art photography and exploring that branch of her craft. Her photographs have been shown in multiple curated exhibits, two solo exhibitions and her news photos have been published in publications around the world. AMERICAN LAWN DÉCOR After a tumultuous year filled with isolation and conflict I decided to search for the innocence and optimism that I’ve always associated with our country, even as we hold different views, beliefs or backgrounds. I found signs of this in the joy of yards adorned with unique decorations. The many different perspectives on what constitutes beauty or humor continue to intrigue and draw me to a door to find out who lives or works there. Rarely have the residents turned down my request for a quick portrait, and they stand with dignity and pride, humor or mystery, near a fictional world created for us to enjoy. My intention was to avoid judgment. Rather I felt the need to search for a connection to people who share my country, and regardless of beliefs, views or background chose to celebrate life during a pandemic and beyond. This work was inspired by a desire to renew my own hopes and optimism for our country by looking beyond the headlines and finding a positive commonality. It is also my hope that these photographs can perhaps help us realize that we can find connections even during times that seem to be driving us apart.
 Jonk
France
1985
Jonk discovers photography at the age of 11 when his parents send him for a language exchange to the USA, where each of the ten children forming the group lives with a different host family. The few souvenir pictures shot with the famous disposable orange cameras were his firsts. For the following six years, he travels each winter to a new family in a different state, and in the meantime upgrades his gear with a basic analogue camera. After having swapped it for a pocket numeric device, he realizes his first solo trip, at the age of 19. This trip to Barcelona changes his life, and he comes back with two passions that won't leave him: travels (he has since visited more than 70 countries) and urban art (street art and graffiti), whose discovery gave him his first photographic subject that still occupies him today. Living in Paris, he discovers urban exploration at the end of years 2000 through rooftops, subways and the city's unofficial catacombs. At that time, he finds another subject: documenting the unseen side of the city and invest in his first digital reflex camera, an APS-C. Climbing roofs to see her from the top, going at night in subway tunnels or spending whole days underground in the catacombs exploring the tens of kilometers of galleries looking for beautiful carved rooms: he finds in that activity a thrill, the adrenaline that he looks for in his life. These urban explorations, and his search for unseen graffiti, bring him to abandoned places, where graffiti artists often go to paint, to be alone and able to take time to make bigger and better paintings. After some time frequenting these artists, he starts himself to paint there and adopts the nickname “Jonk”. At that time, he also sticks his travel pictures on the walls in the streets. Visiting abandoned places looking for graffiti, he realizes the intensity of the atmospheres and the beauty of the spectacle of time passaging: rust, decaying and peeling painted walls, broken windows, Nature taking over create unbelievable, highly photogenic sceneries. For him, such sceneries feel like infinite poetry. Traveling, painting, sticking, photographing, roaming on roofs, metros and catacombs, a very time-consuming job don't leave him enough time to do everything. At the hour of choices, he drops the spray, the pot of glue, the height and the undergrounds to stay with the photography of lost places, even if he could not get rid of his nickname, symbol of his graffiti artist times, highly important to him. He then continues to travel, almost exclusively looking for abandoned locations to shoot, with or without graffiti. He upgrades his gear again with one, then two, full-frame reflex. Today, he has visited more than one thousand and five hundreds of them in around fifty countries on four continents. With time, his interest focuses on what appears to him to be the strongest in this vast subject of abandonment: Nature taking over. It is poetic, even magic, to see this Nature retaking what used to be hers, reintegrating through broken windows, cracks on the walls, spaces built by Man and then neglected, until sometimes guzzling them up entirely. This topic naturally imposed itself to him due to the ecologic consciousness that moves him since his youngest age and to the strength of the message it carries: the question of the place of Man on Earth and its relationship with Nature. She is stronger, and whatever happens to Man, She will always be there. In March 2018, he releases the book Naturalia on the topic and currently works on volume II for which Yann Arthus-Bertrand wrote the preface. In June 2018, at age 33, he quits his job in the finance to fully dedicate himself to this project. With this series, as a photographer Jonk tries to humbly contribute to make people aware of the critical ecological situation we are all in. Since, four other books were released. His work has been featured in prestigious paper publications (Der Spiegel, Corriere della Sera, Lonely Planet, Le Monde, GQ, Telerama…) as well as on prestigious web platforms (National Geographic, New York Post, Smithsonian, ArchDaily, AD, BBC, The Guardian…). He received various distinctions in recognized international contests with Honorable Mentions (International Photography Awards, ND Awards), nominations (Fine Art Photography Awards), Silver Awards (Tokyo International Foto Awards, Moscow International Foto Awards), places in shortlists (Arte Laguna Prize, Environmental Photographer of the Year, Royal Photography Society, Felix Schoeller Photo Award, Siena International Photo Awards), places of finalist (InCadaquès International Photo Festival, Nature Photographer Of The Year, Umbra Awards) and winner of the Chelsea International Photography Competition and the Earth Photo 2020 Photo Competition. His work has been part of many group shows across the world (Paris, London, Lisbon, Rome, Athens, Budapest, Moscow, Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore, Los Angeles, Palm Springs, New York…) as well as many solo shows in Paris, the main ones being in Paris 20th district City Hall “Salon of Honor”, at the OECD, the Forum des Halles and the Nicolas Hulot Foundation for Nature and Man. In October 2020, Jonk realizes his first solo shows abroad. The first one is the central show of Home Expo in Luxembourg, the most important Fair of the country. Consisting of 91 photos, this exhibition is also his biggest show to date. He simultaneously conducts five solos show in China for the Franco-Chinese Environmental Month. They take place at the Park View Gallery of the magnificent Design Society in Shenzhen, the French Institute of Beijing, the Kingold Century Center of Guangzhou, the Westred Art Museum of Harbin and the Parc Hongmei of Shenyang. Jonk had set a first foot in China the year before by giving a conference on his Naturalia series in Shenzhen. It was his second after a TEDx given in Paris in 2018. Several exhibitions of Naturalia are planned for 2021 and 2022. Naturalia: Chronicle of Contemporary Ruins As a child, I saw a wildlife documentary that marked my life. It focused on the melting of the ice caps and its consequences on polar bears' life. I still remember this bear that struggled to swim and find a piece of ice floe. It seems that "children are like wet cement. Whatever falls on them makes an impression." (Dr Haim Ginott). This vision marked me so much that during all my childhood, every time any of my parents did anything that seemed bad for the environment, it told them this sentence: «Watch out, you kill the bears!!" This ecological consciousness, that moves me since my youngest age, has little by little focused my interest on abandoned places reclaimed by Nature. She is stronger, and whatever happens to Man, She will always be there. Moreover, Naturalia: Chronicle of Contemporary Ruins asks a fundamental question: that of the place of Man on Earth and his relationship with Nature. Far from being pessimistic, and at a time when Man's domination of Nature has never been so extreme, it aims to wake our consciousness. Man builds, Man abandons. Every time for his own peculiar reasons. Nature does not care about those reasons. But one thing is for sure, when Man leaves, She comes back and She takes back everything. In his poem Eternity of Nature, brevity of Man, Alphonse de Lamartine writes "Triumph, immortal Nature! / Whose hand full of days / Lends unlimited strengths / Times that always rise again!" In her inexorable progression, She starts reclaiming the outsides of a Taiwanese reservoir (Picture 1) before infiltrating the insides of a Croatian castle (2) or a Belgian greenhouse (7). Then, She grows in the atrium of a Polish palace (8) or a Cuban theater (9) before invading a Montenegrin castle (10). Then, given more time, imprisons a Taiwanese mansion with her strong roots (20). The next steps? Collapse and burial. French poet Léo Ferré said "With Time goes, everything goes". So, when Nature and Time will have taken back what Man abandons, what will be left of our civilization?
Michael Philip Manheim
United States
1940
Michael Philip Manheim, born in the U.S. in 1940, is widely recognized both for his documentary and for his innovative multiple exposure photographs. Both categories encompass images that promote feelings. Most celebrate human emotion as a primal link that unifies all of humankind. Michael Philip Manheim's photography has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally, in over 20 solo exhibitions and 30 group shows. His work has been featured extensively online, as well as in hundreds of books and magazines such as Zoom (U.S. and Italy), Photographers International (Taiwan), La Fotografia (Spain), and Black and White Magazine (U.S.). Manheim's photographs are held in private as well as public collections including the Library of Congress, the International Photography Hall of Fame, the National Archives, the Danforth Museum of Art, and the Bates College Museum of Art. About How Once We Looked "The world I experienced, as the 1940s slid into the 1950s and beyond I'm delighted to share this sampling of my photography. When I created the snapshot of Little Sister, my four year old sister, I had no idea that I would be pursuing photography as an avocation, let alone a profession. Our mother did her best to expose my sister and me to the arts, even enrolling me in classes with adults at a local art center. As a youngster, I knew I wasn't good enough at painting. But I did have a sense of a composition. And I did have a science teacher at State Street Junior High School, Miss Ayers, who had set up a small darkroom and invited me to use it. Bingo! Shazam! Whatever you say, when the light literally turns on. I became enamored of photography. I was living in a Rust Belt town in Ohio where I didn't belong, in the 1950s. And what to do when you don't fit local norms? Entering my teen years, I hid behind a camera. My swords and shields as I moved on to high school began with the Speed Graphics assigned in photography class. It was unusual to have a high school photography course in that era, and I blossomed in that narrow sphere. I became a local treasure, winning in contests but with a whole lot to learn and a vital need to grow myself up. It took grit, I now realize, to escape the confines of a family business and the confines of the values of my community. But I didn't know that then. All I knew was that I had a passion that I must explore. Working strenuously to catch up, after college, I created a profession for myself. Today I look back with perspective and wonder. I see that I had a fascination with movement, as well as with light. I see that I developed reflexively and intuitively, in capturing the essence of a moment. I see that the innate compositional sense expanded into a style. And so on, all insights offering me a chance to pause and reflect as I go forward. My circuitous route through a long career in professional photography has swung back to my roots. Curators and collectors now appreciate photojournalism as fine art. So do the bloggers who are displaying my images. There's a message there! Hence into the archives I've plunged to see now what I saw long ago. I'm digitizing a series of nostalgic images that are going into my own blog and into a series of monographs. I'm creating a book series called How Once We Were, starting with an update of this earlier presentation of my nostalgic photography." -- Michael Philip Manheim
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Exclusive Interview with Jan Janssen
Dutch photographer Jan Janssen explores universal human experiences through his long-term project It Matters, winner of the May 2025 Solo Exhibition. Begun in 2016, the series captures intimate moments of everyday life—love, loss, connection, and belonging—across Central and Eastern Europe. Working in countries such as Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, Janssen spends extended time within communities, building relationships based on trust and respect. His approach allows him to move beyond observation, revealing deeply human and authentic moments. Rooted in travel and personal discovery, It Matters reflects Janssen’s search for what connects us all in an increasingly divided world. The project is ongoing and will culminate in a photobook scheduled for publication in 2026.
Exclusive Interview with Henk Kosche
German photographer Henk Kosche turns his lens toward the streets of Halle an der Saale, capturing everyday life in the late years of the former German Democratic Republic. At the time, Kosche was studying design and exploring the city with his camera, drawn to the atmosphere of its industrial landscape and the quiet rhythms of daily life. His series Street Photography at the End of the 80s, selected as the Solo Exhibition for July 2025, revisits a body of work created just before a period of profound change. Rediscovered decades later in a small box of 35mm negatives, these photographs offer glimpses of a city and its people at a moment suspended between the familiar and the unknown.
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