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Submit your Best Project to Win a Solo Exhibition this March!
Submit your Best Project to Win a Solo Exhibition this March!
Yuyang Liu
Yuyang Liu
Yuyang Liu

Yuyang Liu

Country: China
Birth: 1991

Yuyang Liu, b.1991, graduated from Department of History, East China Normal University. He is a freelancer photographer based in Guangzhou, China. When he was a high school student, he started to love taking photos and decided to be a photographer. His images focus on the change and connection of people in the changing society. He had won Magnum Foundation Human Rights & Photography Fellowship, Abigail Cohen Fellowship in Documentary Photography and Ian Parry Scholarship. His work was published on TIME, New York Times, the Guardian, NPR and BBC World Service.

Awards
Ian Parry Scholarship, 2015
Abigail Cohen Fellowship in Documentary Photography (Magnum Foundation/ChinaFile, 2015
National Geographic Photo Contest China, Honorable Mention, 2014
Magnum Foundation: The Human Rights & Photography Fellowship, 2014
ND Scholarship, 3rd Prize, 2014
2013 Shanghai Youth Art Exhibition, Shortlisted, 2013
5th Foundation of OFPiX Photo Agency, Shortlisted, 2012

Exhibitions & Events
Magnum Foundation Human Rights & Photography Fellowship Program Forum: Inter Art Center and Gallery, Beijing, China, 2014
Home of Youth: High School No.7 Chengdu (multimedia):PhotoChina Original International Photographic Exhibition, Confucius’ Hall, Guiyang, China, 2014
Neither Here Nor There (multimedia): LOOKbetween 2014, Virginia, USA, 2014
Auspicious Things: Lishui International Photography Festival Hand-made Books Workshop, Pump Factory, Lishui, China, 2013
Auspicious Things: 2013 Shanghai Youth Art Exhibition, China Art Museum, Shanghai, China, 2013

About the project: At home with mental illness:
In 2014 there were reportedly 16 million people in China living with severe mental illness. 80% of patients diagnosed did not receive sufficient or necessary treatment due to China’s flawed health care system. Most people who suffer from these illnesses are forced to live at home with their families or on their own. They are overlooked or often not recognized at all within society, they are invisible. So I decide to film these patients and families who have mental illness such as psychosis or dysgnosia. I’ve been to several towns and villages in Guangdong Province which is the richest region in southern China and filmed some mental illness at home. This project aims to explore the unique relationship between the mentally ill, their families, and society at large.
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Lello Fargione
Photographer for passion and empathetic traveler, I was born in Sicily where I live and have fun with photography. I continue to photograph, to tell things as they happen, as if I were not there, but at the same time remaining deeply inside the image, a "journey" for the desire to know new cultures and penetrate the most remote and inaccessible places by identifying with situations that I meet, to '' narrate '' through images. I remained, by nature and conviction, a freelance "photographer", who likes to "photograph" to tell stories, not to forget, not to stop "dreaming"... Asia, a woman's life Work, fatigue, the unhealthy environment in which women in Asia live, are the theme of my photographic journey in the Burmese and Vietnamese lands. A theme that has imposed itself with all the drama of the apparently impassive gazes of women who seem to be eternal figures in an exotic and enigmatic mosaic. Often in the shadows, as if to underline an obscure and forgetful role of the past, the gesture is repeated with the automatism forged in the labor of days that have consumed the face and limbs. It is known that once these women enjoyed a very different social status and one cannot help but know that what I see today is the result of a "commercialization" of the society that commodifies individuals. The anguish as the sense of guilt intervenes in a second moment: seeing oneself as a privileged observer of the condition of others. But reviewing and showing beyond glossy aesthetics is also a way (the photographer's only way) of going beyond the observer's impotence.
Ralph Eugene Meatyard
United States
1925 | † 1972
Ralph Eugene Meatyard (May 15, 1925 – May 7, 1972) was an American photographer from Normal, Illinois, U.S. Meatyard was born in Normal, Illinois and raised in the nearby town of Bloomington. When he turned 18 during World War II, he joined the United States Navy, though he did not serve overseas before the war ended. After leaving the force he briefly studied pre-dentistry, before training to become an optician. He moved with his new wife Madelyn to Lexington, Kentucky to continue working as an optician for Tinder-Krausse-Tinder, a company which also sold photographic equipment. The owners of the company were active members of the Lexington Camera Club, for which the Art Department of the University of Kentucky provided exhibition space. Meatyard purchased his first camera in 1950 to photograph his newborn first child, and subsequently worked primarily with a Rolleiflex medium-format camera. He joined the Lexington Camera club and the Photographic Society of America in 1954. At the Lexington Camera Club he met Van Deren Coke, who exhibited work by Meatyard in an exhibition for the university entitled Creative Photography in 1956. During the mid-1950s, Ralph Eugene Meatyard attended a series of summer workshops run by Henry Holmes Smith at Indiana University, and also with Minor White, who fostered Meatyard's interest in Zen Philosophy. An autodidact and voracious reader, Meatyard worked in productive bursts, often leaving his film undeveloped for long stretches, then working feverishly in the makeshift darkroom in his home. "His approach was somewhat improvisational and very heavily influenced by the jazz music of the time." He used his children in his work addressing the surreal "masks" of identity. Much of his work was made in abandoned farmhouses in the central Kentucky bluegrass region during family weekend outings and in derelict spaces around Lexington. Some of his earliest camera work was made in the traditionally African-American neighborhood around Lexington's Old Georgetown Street. Meatyard was a close acquaintance of several well-known writers in the Kentucky literary renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s, including his neighbor Guy Davenport, who later helped compile a posthumous edition of his photos. In 1971, Meatyard co-authored a book on Kentucky's Red River Gorge, The Unforeseen Wilderness, with writer Wendell Berry. The two frequently traveled into the Appalachian foothills. Berry and Meatyard's book contributed to saving the gorge from destruction by a proposed Army Corps of Engineers dam. Meatyard's ashes were scattered in the gorge after his death. Meatyard was also a friend and correspondent of Catholic monk and writer Thomas Merton, who lived at the Abbey of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery just west of Bardstown, Kentucky. 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His best-known photography featured dolls and masks, or family, friends and neighbors pictured in abandoned buildings or in ordinary suburban backyards.Source: Wikipedia Ralph Eugene Meatyard lived in Lexington, Kentucky, where he made his living as an optician while creating an impressive and enigmatic body of photographs. Meatyard’s creative circle included mystics and poets, such as Thomas Merton and Guy Davenport, as well as the photographers Cranston Ritchie and Van Deren Coke, who were mentors and fellow members of the Lexington Camera Club. Meatyard’s work spanned many genres and experimented with new means of expression, from dreamlike portraits—often set in abandoned places—to multiple exposures, motion-blur, and other methods of photographic abstraction. He also collaborated with his friend Wendell Berry on the 1971 book The Unforeseen Wilderness, for which Meatyard contributed photographs of Kentucky’s Red River Gorge. Meatyard’s final series, The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater, are cryptic double portraits of friends and family members wearing masks and enacting symbolic dramas. Museum exhibitions of the artist’s work have recently been presented at Art Institute of Chicago; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; the de Young Museum, San Francisco; The International Center of Photography, New York; Cincinnati Museum of Art, Ohio; the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; and Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas. His works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, The Eastman Museum, and Yale University Art Gallery, among others. Monographs include American Mystic, Dolls and Masks, A Fourfold Vision, and The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater and Other Figurative Photographs.Source: Fraenkel Gallery
Amy  Heller
United States
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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.
Ryotaro Horiuchi
Ryotaro Horiuchi was born in Tokyo in 1969. When he was a teenager, he started to work at the furniture studio as an assistant. During his time at the studio, he was asked to take photographs of furniture as its records. And that was the first time he felt his intention to focus on a thing in front of his eyes ''Through The Lends''. And that ''intention'' turned him into ''photo-holic'' by realizing the potential of photographs. Since then, he has been working on his works from Osaka University of Arts and while he was in Germany and till now. Now he is working with ''Descendants of Samurai'' and ''Roma Gypsy'' by taking their portraits. To do so, he keeps focusing on ''the identity'' of them and himself. Falling Waters When I faced the waterfall, my eyes were riveted on the falling waters. The waters kept changing and never became the same figure. I saw the vitality in its overwhelming energy. The waters looked so alive that I felt as if I were photo shooting creatures. These are not scenic photos but portraits of waterfalls. The waters kept moving vigorously with a roaring sound, however, I loved the silence behind it. Quiet Existence I have relatives who emigrated to a foreign country under a state-led migration policy during the pre-war period. They live as minorities in the country. Hearing stories about them as I grew up made me fascinated with people who are defined as minorities. When I was staying in Germany, I later learned that the people who had been closed to me were Roma. I had absolutely no knowledge about Roma at that time and their lifestyle looked just so mysterious to me. Since then, I had been drawn to their strong identity and I visited the area where many Romani people live. I met many other ethnic groups of people who live as minorities there. When I faced their lifestyles, I could see their quiet yet strong identity behind them, which strongly resonated with me. It might be impossible for minorities to maintain their culture without keeping their strong identity. What is identity? The question always makes me ask myself what kind of individuality I retain. Discover Descendants of Samurai
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AAP Magazine #55 Women
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