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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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Sarah Moon
France
1941
A fashion and commercial photographer since 1968, and also a filmmaker, Sarah Moon is known for her dreamlike images and her representation of femininity as free from time and context, as living in a fairy world. Although Moon has been a major participant in the world of fashion for more than three decades, she has carefully carved out her own niche -- a signature style that dispenses with the erotically suggestive poses favored by many of her male counterparts in favor of the emblems of luxury and nostalgia. Mystery and sensuality are at the core of Moon's work, whether she's photographing haute couture, still life, or portraiture. In this book, Moon's first major retrospective, viewers will be treated to a visual tour-de-force, showing all the genres she has explored in her rich and diverse career. Source: Amazon Sarah Moon, previously known as Marielle Hadengue, is a French photographer. Initially a model, she turned to fashion photography in the 1970s. Since 1985, she has concentrated on gallery and film work. Hadengue was born in Vichy in 1941. Her Jewish family was forced to leave occupied France for England. As a teenager she studied drawing before working as a model in London and Paris (1960–1966) under the name Marielle Hadengue. She also became interested in photography, taking shots of her model colleagues. In 1970, she finally decided to spend all her time on photography rather than modeling, adopting Sarah Moon as her new name. She successfully captured the fashionable atmosphere of London after the "swinging sixties", working closely with Barbara Hulanicki, who had launched the popular clothes store Biba. In 1972, she shot the Pirelli calendar, the first woman to do so. After working for a long time with Cacharel, her reputation grew and she also received commissions from Chanel, Dior, Comme des Garçons and Vogue. In 1985, she moved into gallery and film work, even making a pop video. Source: Wikipedia Texture, surface, seeing, believing, dreaming. It is difficult to summarize Sarah Moon’s fantastical photography - almost thirty years of image-making has made Sarah Moon a legend in her own lifetime. Well known for her very personalized commercial work since the early 1970s, Sarah has continued to investigate a world of her own invention without repetition and also without compromise. Looking into Sarah Moon’s extraordinary photographs is comparable to looking through a two-way mirror. The mirror surface becomes the print and the viewer has the privilege of standing on the ’other-side’ looking through the image at the same time. The living creatures are rendered so ’still’ and conversely the inanimate objects, such as the dolls, become human and expressive with their own inimitable character, ultimately mirroring each other. There is an atmosphere and intensity which is constantly apparent that sets her work apart. It is also the range of subject matter, the banal, the incidental, and the secret that Sarah Moon allows us to see in a new and extraordinary light. The current trend in photography is towards a method that is more and more interventionist. Moon takes little pleasure in this kind of creation, but is involved in a personal search. The dream world is quintessential to her work; her images lead us into a world bewitched. When men appear, her pictures move towards a more disturbing surrealism and a dangerous mystery is inferred. These are photographs in which the bizarre and unusual confront ordinary reality. Source: Michael Hoppen Gallery
Shin Noguchi
Japan
1976
Shin Noguchi, born 1976 in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan, is an award winning street photographer based in Kamakura and Tokyo, Japan. He describes his street photography as an attempt to capture extraordinary moments of excitement, humanism and beauty among the flow of everyday life. With his discreet, poetic and enigmatic approach to his art, Shin is able to capture the subtleties and complexities of Japanese culture without relying on staged, no-finder or hip shot photography. He has been invited to hold solo exhibitions in Russia, France, China (organized by Leica Camera) and other countries, and also He has been featured on The Leica Camera Blog many times, in Courrier Inte'l, Internazionale, Libération, The Guardian, The Independent, etc, and some assignment work has been also published in Die Zeit, Libération, etc. His new book "In Color In Japan" was published in Italy, and one of his works was used as key visual for FIFDH 2022: The International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights. Currently, he has been selected for Leica Camera's new global campaign “M is M.” "The subjects tell me the meaning and value of life. To take a picture is to affirm the existence of peopleーthe human nature and karmaーand it's also an opportunity to affirm my own existence and accept it as it is." In Color in Japan From the introduction of the book: Like all good photographers, Shin Noguchi treats the camera as another appendage - a special sensory organ merging hand and eye that allows him to show us what he sees, and more subtly, how he sees. And his camera is always working. Noguchi is internationally respected as a "street photographer," but while he has won numerous prizes for his work in that genre, the appellation does not do justice to his omnivorous eye. His is just as likely to record tender moments with his family or newsworthy events like the typhoon as his encounters on the streets of Tokyo where he works, or Kamakura, where he lives. The connecting vein that runs throughout his work is a belief in the appearance of objectivity, a belief that first began to manifest when he discovered the work of the Magnum photo cooperative when he was still in his teens. It was, as he has said, the first time he realized that art and documentation could be merged. Noguchi knows perfectly well that what he shows us reflects his own sensibility and intellect but prefers to dial back the expressionistic impulse. It is an old trick in photography: make the viewer believe that had she been standing next to him she would have seen precisely what he saw. It’s also a difficult trick to pull off, particularly when the everyday world seems to be so full of surprises. In Noguchi-world, Giraffes wander about temples with Buddhist monks; workers dive into random circular openings in giant bushes, or burst from openings in blank walls as if transporting to or returning from another dimension; golf carts cluster like insects on neon-green lawns; objects possessed of more animate power than the people carrying them seem to propel their human cargo down the sidewalk instead of the opposite. In many images, goofy absurdity suddenly explodes from a sober social milieu in a way that seems to Western eyes particularly Japanese. Sentiment and affection are common themes, but the work is never sentimental. His new book, "Shin Noguchi, in Color in Japan," skates across the peaks of many of Noguchi’s favorite preoccupations (I personally have developed a fondness for his utterly adorable daughters) and one can only hope that we will get to explore his work more deeply in the future. - Chuck Patch museum curator, photographer and writer
Isabeau De Rouffignac
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Tamara Reynolds
United States
Tamara Reynolds is a documentary photographer whose unflinching eye considers what it means to be human in today’s society. In particular, her work focuses on the lives of those who are usually unseen. Reynolds’ photobook The Drake was published and released by Dewi Lewis in early 2022. The work — portraits, still lifes and streetscapes that document the lives of people existing just above survival on one square block around a motel in Nashville, Tennessee — has received numerous honors, including a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2021 BarTur Photo Award, a 2020 Puffin Grant, the 2019 Tennessee Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant and the Santa Fe Center 2018 Project Launch Grant. Reynolds’ acclaimed earlier body of work, Southern Route, which explores issues of identity, conflict and the disappearing culture of the South, was included in Southbound, a traveling exhibition and book curated by Mark Sloan and Mark Long of Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, with support from the NEA and the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. In addition to numerous exhibitions around the country, Reynolds’ photographs have been featured on the New York Times Lens Blog, PBS News Hour, Lenscratch, Strange Fire Collective, Photo-Emphasis, Oxford American and FotoRoom, among others. Her images have also been published in Ain’t Bad, American Photography 29, 30 and 33, Oxford American Magazine: Eyes on the South, Communication Arts and All About Photos and are in the public collections such as The Do Good Fund and Cassilhaus. In 2017, she received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Hartford, where she graduated with honors. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Middle Tennessee State University where she was recently inducted to their Wall of Fame. Reynolds has been a guest lecturer at George Fox University, Middle Tennesse University, Vanderbilt University, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Cassilhaus Gallery, the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and Morris Museum of Fine Art. Prior to her current work in documentary photography, Reynolds has worked as a commercial photographer for over 30 years. Her work has appeared in many national publications including NBC News, Bloomberg Businessweek, Forbes, The New York Times Magazine and The Wall Street Journal to name only a few and has been part of numerous national advertising campaigns. Along with working as an editorial photographer, she currently teaches as a Lecturer at Vanderbilt University and Adjunct Professor at Belmont University. Tamara Reynolds was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and has lived there all her life. The Drake he Drake is a series of portraits, still lifes and streetscapes that document the lives of people existing just above survival on one square block around a motel in Nashville, Tennessee. The Drake Motel is located in an area ignored by developers, a microcosm of the disregarded or resentfully tolerated. Alcohol and drug addiction are prevalent among those who live in its shadow. Prostitution, panhandling and day labor have become ways to maintain addiction. The Drake offers a means to delve deeply into a world far removed from my own but also perilously close — how my life might have looked had I not found the resources that led me to recovery. The work continuously challenges my concept of empathy and how to photograph my subjects in such a way as to make the unseen seen. I am passionate in my intent to push back against a society of increasing culturally endorsed behavior to not acknowledge the marginalized. These are not easy pictures, but my hope is that the images give space for viewers to move closer, to enter the stillness of the photographs and consider the lives of those looking back.
Martin Munkácsi
Hungary
1896 | † 1963
Martin Munkácsi (born Mermelstein Márton; Kolozsvár, Hungary, May 18, 1896; died July 13, 1963, New York, NY) was a Hungarian photographer who worked in Germany (1928–34) and the United States, where he was based in New York City. Munkácsi was a newspaper writer and photographer in Hungary, specializing in sports. At the time, sports action photography could only be done in bright light outdoors. Munkácsi's innovation was to make sports photographs as meticulously composed action photographs, which required both artistic and technical skill. Munkácsi's legendary big break was to happen upon a fatal brawl, which he photographed. Those photos affected the outcome of the trial of the accused killer, and gave Munkácsi considerable notoriety. That notoriety helped him get a job in Berlin in 1928, for the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, where his first published photo was a race car splashing its way through a puddle. He also worked for the fashion magazine Die Dame. More than just sports and fashion, he photographed Berliners, rich and poor, in all their activities. He traveled to Turkey, Sicily, Egypt, London, New York, and famously Liberia, for photo spreads in the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung. The speed of the modern age and the excitement of new photographic viewpoints enthralled him, especially flying. There are aerial photographs; there are air-to-air photographs of a flying school for women; there are photographs from a Zeppelin, including the ones on his trip to Brazil, where he crosses over a boat whose passengers wave to the airship above. On March 21, 1933, he photographed the fateful Day of Potsdam, when the aged President Paul von Hindenburg handed Germany over to Adolf Hitler. On assignment for the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, he photographed Hitler's inner circle, although he was a Jewish foreigner. In 1934, the Nazis nationalized the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, fired its Jewish editor-in-chief, Kurt Korff, and replaced its innovative photography with pictures of German troops. Munkácsi left for New York, where he signed on, for a substantial $100,000, with Harper's Bazaar, a top fashion magazine. In a change from usual practice, he often left the studio to shoot outdoors, on the beach, on farms and fields, at an airport. He produced one of the first articles in a popular magazine to be illustrated with nude photographs. His portraits include Katharine Hepburn, Leslie Howard, Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford, Jane Russell, Louis Armstrong, and the definitive dance photograph of Fred Astaire. Munkácsi died in poverty and controversy. Several universities and museums declined to accept his archives, and they were scattered around the world. Berlin's Ullstein Archives and Hamburg's F. C. Gundlach collection are home to two of the largest collections of Munkácsi's work.Source: Wikipedia
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