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Aurore Valade
Aurore Valade
Aurore Valade

Aurore Valade

Country: France
Birth: 1981

Aurore Valade is a French photographer born in 1981. She creates images that play with the iconic register of scenography. In these elaborate stagings, we are often confronted with clichés, meaningful reflections of a social, economic, or cultural situation in contemporary life.


In 2008, she won the HSBC Prize for Photography for a series in which she photographs people who perform their own roles, in their interiors. From there, his work evolved into a political approach to the image. In 2015, she was an artist member of the Casa de Velázquez (Académie de France in Madrid), where she initiated research on indignation which gave rise to the Digo yo and Se manifester series, for which she obtained the Photo Folio Prize. Review of the Rencontres d'Arles1 Festival in 2017. Very elaborate, the staging of his photographs can be considered as "significant reflections of a social, economic or cultural situation of our time but also certain values ​​which question the limits of privacy."

Source: Wikipedia

It has been said that intimacy is connected to the art of talking about life. That art is precisely what Aurore Valade’s project summons. Her starting point is the art of conversation: con-verse means to go with another, to walk along the same road together, and that is what gives rise to the collaboration between the artist and those she photographs. Aurore Valade explores an “intimacy liberated” by the desire to share the voice and listen to other voices of those who recognize that every life is exceptional, for, each time, that life is always the only one that can be lived.

Each of these photographs shows a shared space that concentrates and exudes that irreducible, excessive vitality. That is why Aurore Valade wanted to explore the specific space in which there is a constant tension between the intimate and the political, where its liberation is always transgressive and inhabits the very heart of revolt.

Source: Arles - Les Rencontres de la Photographie

 

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Jack Savage
United Kingdom
1980
Jack Savage is a fine art photographer, digital and mixed media artist and gallery owner. Born in Northampton, England (1980) - He was educated at Nottingham University, where he carries an MA in American Studies and Film. Winner of over 100 international professional photography awards -he produces a unique brand of artworks using the varying mediums of studio portraiture, landscapes, street photography, mixed media photographic art, and digital psychedelic creations from what he labels "His Unconscious Soul". Savage's multi-faceted works have gained international recognition and acclaim - resulting in several prestigious international prizes, including most notably The Pangea Prize from Siena Photo Awards, Gold from the Shatto Gallery - Los Angeles, Photographer of the Year from The Spider Awards - Beverly Hills California and Gold in consecutive years from Tokyo Foto Awards. Over the last few years, he has exhibited his artworks internationally, in countries such as Italy, France, Greece, Hungary, Germany, USA and throughout the UK. Jack is currently represented by Singulart, Paris, The Zari Gallery, London, The Opulent Art Gallery, London, and ThePassePartout Gallery, Milan, Italy. In 2022 Jack became an influential gallerist, with the formation of The Influx Gallery, Notting Hill - London - showcasing the very best of contemporary art from around the world. Jack Savage is one of the UK’s most celebrated fine art photographers, acclaimed for his haunting black-and-white "Definitive Ambiguities" series. A certified Adobe Photoshop CC expert, Savage fuses classical film noir lighting with precise post-production to create images steeped in moral ambiguity, repressed desire, and an undercurrent of violence. Winner of the Pangea Prize at the Siena International Photo Awards, two consecutive Gold medals at the Tokyo International Foto Awards, Photographer of the Year at the Black & White Spider Awards (Los Angeles), and First Place at the Mono Awards, Savage draws heavily on the cinematic language of Otto Preminger and Orson Welles. His work echoes the words of historian Alain Silver, who described film noir as “a cinema of moral uncertainty and dangerous seduction,” and James Ursini, who noted its “dark urban poetry.” All portraits in this series feature residents from Savage’s hometown of Northampton, England, intensifying what Ursini might call the “claustrophobic menace” of the Midlands’ urban landscape. From shadow-draped alleys to the spectral “men in hats,” Savage’s noir vision transforms everyday streets into charged stages of human drama, where desire and danger meet in a single frame.
Shannon Taggart
United States
Shannon Taggart is an artist and author based in St. Paul, MN. In a past life, she contributed to printed publications including TIME, Newsweek, New York Times Magazine, Discover, New York, Wall Street Journal and Reader’s Digest. Her work has been exhibited internationally and recognized by PDN, Nikon, Magnum Photos + Inge Morath Foundation, American Photography, International Photography Awards and the Alexia Foundation for World Peace. Her first monograph, SÉANCE (Fulgur Press), was published in 2019. Currently, she is working on an illustrated book about The Society for Research on Rapport and Telekinesis (SORRAT), one of the most exotic cases within the history of psychical research.Source: www.shannontaggart.com As a teenager, photographer Shannon Taggart was introduced to the world of spiritualism after a medium told her cousin details about her grandfather’s death that proved to be true. The reading had taken place at the Lily Dale Assembly in New York, the world’s largest spiritualist community. Curious but with reservations, Taggart headed to Lily Dale to delve into the history of spiritualism thinking she would learn what all the tricks of the trade were, but she didn’t end up getting the explanations she thought she would. Instead, she discovered a mysterious world she began to document with her camera. She certainly wasn’t the first photographer to do this, as spiritualism and spiritualist photography have long been connected. Both surfaced in the mid-1800s in Rochester, N.Y.,—home of Kodak. At the time, spiritualists naturally gravitated toward this new technology in hopes of recording what they had been experiencing. One of the most well-known spiritualist portraits of this era purports to show the ghost of President Abraham Lincoln with his hand placed nonchalantly on the shoulder of his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln. When Taggart first began taking photos at Lily Dale, she remained an observer. After the first year, she became involved as a student and a participant while continuing her photography. Although at first she had a hard time understanding spiritualism, Taggart was curious and said she has since experienced numerous mysterious experiences that have helped her tap into her own creative process. One of these inexplicable events occurred during one of her first visits to the Lily Dale Museum. Taggart said that a large purple orb appeared on the shoulder of a woman she was photographing, but she wasn’t shooting into the sun. “When I brought a copy back for her, she calmly said, ‘Oh, that’s Bob,’ her deceased husband. She was thrilled with the picture,” Taggart said. Taggart was also interested in physical mediumship, which claims to involve perceptible manifestations—such as loud raps or voices—and is practiced outside the New York community. While at Lily Dale, she met a medium who suggested she visit England, where, along with other parts of the United Kingdom and Europe, a “new age of physical mediumship” was happening. Taggart said one of the strangest things she witnessed happened during the mediumship of Gordon Garforth, a deep trance and physical medium in Stansted, England. Garforth told Taggart that his hands enlarge during his séances. About 20 minutes into one, Garforth’s wife, who operates as his “spirit control,” said that the spirits were going to work with his hands. While seated under a dim red light, Garforth held out his hand to Taggart. “Unbelievably to me, it seemed to effortlessly stretch, and the entire hand became large, instantly. I gasped and yelled ‘Oh my God!’ ” Taggart remembered. She said that the 30 other people in the room also reacted with amazement; she worried the experience was merely “hypnotic” and that her camera, set to one-second exposures, wouldn’t capture the growth. “The photographs made seem to confirm a distorted large hand … I was able to sit with Gordon on two additional occasions and I saw the same thing,” Taggart said. While some of her experiences struck Taggart as downright supernatural, some of her images were more straightforward, including her photo of bent spoons. It may not come as a surprise to learn the spiritualists bend them with their hands as a sort of symbolic connection to what they believe to be possible. “It is taught as an exercise of the power of the mind, a physical example of our ability to do things that seem impossible,” said Taggart of her most asked-about image.Source: Slate
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Félix Bonfils
France
1831 | † 1885
Félix Adrien Bonfils was a French photographer and writer who was active in the Middle East. He was one of the first commercial photographers to produce images of the Middle East on a large scale and amongst the first to employ a new method of colour photography, developed in 1880. He was born in Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort and died in Alès. Félix worked as a bookbinder. In 1860, he joined General d'Hautpoul's expedition to the Levant, organized by France following the massacre of Christians in the civil conflict between Christians and Druze in Mount Lebanon and Damascus. On his return to France, it is thought that Félix was taught the heliogravure printing process by Abel Niépce de Saint-Victor and opened a printing office in Alès in 1864. Soon after returning from Lebanon, he became a photographer. In 1857, he married Marie-Lydie Cabanis. When his son, Adrien, fell ill, Félix remembered the green hills around Beirut and sent him there to recover, being accompanied by Félix's wife. The family moved to Beirut in 1867 where they opened a photographic studio called "Maison Bonfils". Source: Wikipedia Félix Bonfils and his wife Lydie (1837-1918) came from Saint Hippolyte du Fort in the Gard. As a binder, then a printer, and finally a photographer trained by Niépce de Saint Victor, Félix Bonfils stayed in Lebanon in 1860 during France’s military expedition. He soon decided to transfer his activity there, and so Bonfils’s photographic studio was founded in Beirut in 1867. Bonfils was not a pioneer photography, yet he was the first Frenchman to open a studio in Beirut. His wife, soon assisted by their son Adrien (1861-1929), produced portraits and genre scenes as they travelled throughout Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Turkey and Greece before bringing back their shots. 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For the Paris World Fair in 1878, he produced a series of five volumes entitled: Souvenirs d’Orient : album pittoresque des sites, villes et ruines les plus remarquables… published by their author in Alès in 1877-1878 and covering the Orient from Egypt and Nubia (volumes I and II) to Athens and Constantinople (volume V). Each album included around forty original, tipped-in photographs, as well as an “historical, archaeological and descriptive notice opposite each plate”. These collections were thus offered to the buyers in a finished form, a little like the engraved keepsakes from the 1830s. They won a medal at the World Fair and the department of Stamps at the then Bibliothèque Impériale acquired the entire collection. At this time, the firm, which was now divided between Alès and Beirut, was renamed Bonfils et Cie. This enterprise had a commercial rationale: it was important for it to offer as broad an offer as possible covering all the countries of the Middle East, with all the sites, monuments and landscapes sought-out by its clientele. For this reason, Félix Bonfils was soon unable to do everything on his own. Apart from his wife and son, he took on the help of assistants who have mostly remained anonymous, as well as local photographers also from the Gard, such as Tancrède Dumas (1830-1905) and Jean-Baptiste Charlier (1822-1907) who sold on their shots to him. In 1875 Félix Bonfils felt the need to distribute his prints from Europe, even if he also had a network of foreign correspondents as can be seen in their often bilingual captions. He left his wife and son to manage the Beirut studio and moved back to Alès in the Gard to organize mail ordering of all the images they produced on the banks of the Mediterranean. After his death in 1885, the firm which had opened up several subsidies around the Middle East, was run by his wife and son, until 1895 when the latter turned towards the hotel business. It was only at the death of Lydie Bonfils in 1918 that Abraham Guiragossian, who had been an associate since 1909, brought up the business, which finally closed in 1938. The entire catalogue of works provided by the Bonfils company is as large as it is interesting, especially because these images marry a documentary concern with an aesthetic approach to composition and framing. The large number of photographers explains the obvious fluctuations of quality. The great demand, trade requirements, and the interest of the clientele in the obviously picturesque explains why a part of the production can be judged to be rather mediocre, unjustly obscuring pieces of great quality. This huge production spread out over more than half a century explains why Bonfils’s photographs are today heavily present in French public collections (the BnF, Médiathèque de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, Musée Niépce…).Source: Bibliothèque Nationale de France
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