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Paola Gareri
Paola Gareri
Paola Gareri

Paola Gareri

Country: Italy

Born in Calabria, South Italy
Studied Art and Literature in Bologna and Rome. Specialised in Photography at IED Rome.
Works like freelance in advertising then in anthropological reportage for Ministry of Culture in Italy.
The photography is for me like a mystic instant. When I can put into the small rectangle all my essence, reorganizing my interior universe through the apparent form of the outside world, the photo takes my own form and then I’m happy. This moment is a time suspension, an instant outside the time. It’s an inner experience, and this happen in the meeting and the fusion: the meeting with people or places, sometimes with objects, the meeting with the light and the outward form, the fusion between me and the word. My photography’s keys are light, meeting, fusion, melting.
The photography is for me the possibility to be a witness about worlds, cultures, emotions of the life on the Earth.
Some photos are in analogic camera, others made with a Rolleiflex 6x6

Website

paolagareri.myportfolio.com

 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Ralph Eugene Meatyard
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. Merton appeared in a number of Meatyard's experimental photographs taken on the grounds of the monastery, and they shared an interest in literature, philosophy, and Eastern and Western spirituality. Meatyard wrote Merton's eulogy in the Kentucky Kernel shortly after his death in Bangkok, Thailand, in December 1968. Meatyard died four years later, in 1972, of cancer. Though Lexington was not a well-established center of photography, Meatyard did not consider himself a "Southern" or regional photographer. His work was beginning to be recognized nationally at the time of his death, shown and collected by some prominent museums and published in magazines. He exhibited with photographers including Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Minor White, Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, and Eikoh Hosoe. By the late 1970s, his photographs appeared mainly in exhibitions of 'southern' art, but have since attracted renewed interest. 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
Jonas Scheck
Jonas Scheck
Netherlands
1986
Born and raised in France, I’ve lived in the Netherlands, New-Zealand and Berlin before settling in Switzerland. With a background in architecture and furniture manufacturing, I’m now turning my lifelong passion for photography into a profession. I’ve so far acquired my skills through self-learning, online courses, and practical experience. Currently working in photojournalism and really enjoying it!
Nasos Karabelas
Nasos Karabelas
Greece
1992
Nasos Karabelas was born in Pyrgos, Greece and he is 27 years old. He started dealing with photography the last seven years and he has produced five short films and one feature film(OSMOSIS) which took part in festivals, in Greece and abroad. This series is the attempt to understand the functioning of sensations. To explorate the space of emotions and the interaction between the forms of the image and the viewer. Each photo is an entity, which includes a certain mental condition. So, we are dealing with a variety of emotional loads within a world that is equally ambiguous with ours. The forms obtain a dreamlike dimension. Sometimes you can not easily understand their contours. Τhe exploration of the forms inside the photographs gives us the opportunity to discover the various aspects of our psychosynthesis. The imprinted forms indicate an extension of ourselves and express our deeper psychic world. The deformed and fragile forms are like an endless flow of feelings. The camera is transformed into the prime tool for observation, exploration and re-discovery of the world of emotions and the use of black & white offers the right aesthetics for depicting forms and framing emotions. With the idea of movement continually imprinted on photos, the people look like enclosed within a new reality. A fuzzy and deformed reality. A dimension that belongs to the world of dreams and chaos.
Christer Strömholm
Christer Strömholm
Sweden
1918 | † 2002
Christer Strömholm is recognized as one of the major figures of 20th-century European photography. Strömholm captured his surroundings in black-and-white images that display his integrity, understated humor, and a highly personal aesthetic. With an unmistakable sensitivity to human suffering, based on his personal experience, he took photography in a new direction. Sean O’Hagan, writing in The Guardian, has described him ''as the father of Swedish photography both for his abiding influence and for his role as a teacher.'' Born in Stockholm, Strömholm discovered photography via graphic art in the late 1940s. During the 1950s and 60s he lived much of the time in Paris, where he developed his particular style of street photography. It was here that he produced his most famous work, Les amies de Place Blanche, a tribute to a group of young transsexuals with whom he became friends and whose lives he shared over many months. They were very much outsiders, struggling to survive with their main source of income being from prostitution. In these legendary photographs, shot at night in available light, Strömholm merged street photography and portraiture, depicting them as the close friends they were, in intimate and honest portraits far from the spectacular or speculative. Les amies de Place Blanche raises profound issues about sexuality and gender; and, in Strömholm’s own words, ''it is about obtaining the freedom to choose one’s own life and identity.'' Strömholm also went on numerous photographic expeditions to places around the globe in the early 1960s, including Spain, Japan, India, and the USA. Early in his career, he began teaching in Stockholm, eventually setting up the legendary Fotoskolan, from which some 1,200 students graduated between 1962 and 1974. Strömholm’s work has inspired many generations of photographers, though he did not become known to the broader public until 1986, with a major exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Stömholm died in 2002. Article Christer Strömholm
Robert S Johnson
Robert S Johnson
United States
1953
Robert S Johnson was born and raised on the grounds of the Boston State Hospital which was founded in 1839 under the name "Boston Lunatic Hospital". He returned to work on the locked wards for his gap year and for summers while in college. The first image he remembers taking was of a bear climbing on the family car in Yellowstone Park. The adults were frozen but he grabbed his mom’s Brownie and shot away. After five careers, ranging from Artistic Director of THECO, a theater company, to Regional Vice President of a for-profit, after-school education company, he turned to photography fulltime in 2008. He lives in New York City and Wellfleet MA with his wife, Katherine, and their son, Asher, a (very recent) 2018 graduate of Smith College.
Ghawam Kouchaki
Ghawam Kouchaki
United States
1991
Ghawam Kouchaki is a filmmaker and photographer based out of Los Angeles. After completing his first short film, his passion for cinema grew and sent him down a path to follow in the footsteps of filmmakers he’s admired like Edward Yang, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Michael Mann, and Toshiaki Toyoda. His photography has been exhibited in Tokyo at Gallery Conceal and at Grainmaker Studios in Los Angeles. He likes to get up-close and personal to his subjects. Ghawam is currently working on a photobook based on his last trip to Japan titled, Tokyo No-No.
Guy Bourdin
Guy Bourdin
France
1928 | † 1991
Guy Bourdin (1928-1991) was born in Paris. A painter his entire life and a self-taught photographer, he was working for magazines, such as Vogue as well as for brands such as Chanel, Ungaro and Charles Jourdan. He exhibited his first photographies at Galerie 29 in 1952. Nowadays his work has been exhibited in the most prestigious museums, such as The Victoria & Albert Museum, The Jeu de Paume, The National Art Museum of China, The Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and The Moscow House of Photography. His oeuvres is part of the collection of many prestigious institutions such as the MoMA in New York, The Getty Museum in Los Angeles, SFMOMA in San Francisco and the collection of the V&A among others. Guy Bourdin's career spanned more than forty years during which time he worked for the world's leading fashion houses and magazines. With the eye of a painter, Guy Bourdin created images that contained fascinating stories, compositions, both in B&W and in colors. He was among the 1st to create images with narratives, telling stories and shows that the image is more important than the product which is displayed. Using fashion photography as his medium, he sent out his message, one that was difficult to decode, exploring the realms between the absurd and the sublime. Famed for his suggestive narratives and surreal aesthetics, he radically broke conventions of commercial photography with a relentless perfectionism and sharp humor. Guy Bourdin used the format of the double spread magazine page in the most inventive way. He tailored his compositions to the constraints of the printed page both conceptually and graphically, and the mirror motif so central in his work finds its formal counterpart in the doubleness of the magazine spread. Layout and design become powerful metaphors for the photographic medium, engaging the eye and with it, the mind. While on the one hand employing formal elements of composition, Guy Bourdin, on the other hand, sought to transcend the reality of the photographic medium with surreal twists to the apparent subject of his images and his unconventional manipulation of the picture plane. Given total creative freedom and with uncompromising artistic ethic, Guy Bourdin captured the imagination of a whole generation at the late 1970s, recognised as the highest note in his career. Guy Bourdin was an image maker, a perfectionist. He knew how to grab the attention of the viewer and left nothing to chance. He created impeccable sets, or when not shooting in his studio rue des Ecouffes in le Marais, in undistinguished bedrooms, on the beach, in nature, or in urban landscapes. The unusual dramas that unfold in these seemingly everyday scenes and ordinary encounters pique our subconscious and invite our imagination. Moreover, he developed a technic using hyper real colours, meticulous compositions of cropped elements such as low skies with high grounds and the interplay of light and shadows as well as the unique make-up of the models. Guy Bourdin irreverently swept away all the standards of beauty, conventional morals and product portrayals in one fell swoop. Around the female body he constructed visual disruptions, the outrageous, the hair-raising, the indiscreet, the ugly, the doomed, the fragmentary and the absent, torsos and death - all the tension and the entire gamut of what lies beyond the aesthetic and the moral,« explains the exhibition's curator Ingo Taubhorn. Bourdin investigates in minute detail the variables of fashion photography, from brash posing to subtle performances and from complex settings to novel and disturbing notions of images. Guy Bourdin was among the first to imagine fashion photographies that contained fascinating narratives, dramatic effects with intense color saturation, hyper-realism and cropped compositions while he established the idea that the product is secondary to the image. A fan of Alfred Hitchcock's 'Macguffin' technique - an inanimate object catalyzing the plot - the photographer constructed 'crime scenes', getting rid of all usual standards of beauty and morals while his images demanded cerebral responses. When such photographers as David Bailey, in the 1960s, produced fantasy images of the girl-next-door, Guy Bourdin captured the atmosphere of the 1970s with sharp humor, erotism and outrageous femininity. Collaborating with Issey Miyake, Chanel or Emmanuel Ungaro, it was his work for the shoe label, Charles Jourdan, that brought him the attention of a wider public. With the campaign, Guy Bourdin dared to barely show the product and turned the shoe into a trivial element of a theatrical mise-en-scène that enhanced sex and bad taste. Guy Bourdin's imagery not only changed the course of fashion photography but influenced a host of contemporary artists, photographers and filmmakers. It is without question, that Guy Bourdin's work for Vogue and his highly acclaimed print advertising for Charles Jourdan in the 1970s are now being seen in the appropriate context of contemporary art.
Karina Bikbulatova
Karina Bikbulatova
Russia
1995
My name is Karina Bikbulatova. I was born on July 5, 1995 in Ufa, Russia. I started taking my first photos when I was 14 years old. I had a dream to become a professional photographer and leave my mark in the history of photography. I graduated from high school and moved to study and live in Moscow in 2013. I studied photography at the Moscow State University of Culture and Art in the workshop of Kalamkarov. In 2017, I went to study in Italy at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and study modern and contemporary art. I am currently in Russia and implementing a new photo project.
Elke Vogelsang
Elke Vogelsang
Germany
1972
Elke Vogelsang is a commercial and editorial photographer living in Germany. Her work has been featured worldwide in renowned print and tv publications and campaigns including The Sunday Time Magazine, National Geographic, Die Zeit, The Bark magazine, Good Morning America, and many more. Her works were exhibited in group and solo shows throughout the world, e.g. Paris, London, Lisbon, San Anselmo, and Singapore. She's the author of the book "Nice Nosing You - for the love of life, dogs and photography" featuring her pictures. Statement: Dogs are funny characters. They find pleasure in the most mundane things. My dogs are my joy, recreation, and constant source of laughter, though they can be shy and sad as well; they comfort me in bad times. They are members of the family, the kind I love to have around. I can never get into trouble with my dogs, because they are unpretentious and forgiving. I would never say that I prefer dogs to humans-after all, some people mean the world to me; but I would definitely say that dogs enrich my life in numerous ways. My hope is that I give back to them at least half of what they give me. As I try to explore in photography all the emotions I share with my dogs, I pay homage to them and also to life.
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