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Alexander Anufriev
Alexander Anufriev
Alexander Anufriev

Alexander Anufriev

Country: Russia
Birth: 1988

Alexander Anufriev is a Russian photographer, born in Ukhta (Komi Republic, Russia) in 1988. Before photography, Anufriev worked in international advertising agencies. Currently, he is a Moscow-based photographer who works on projects describing and analysing social landscape of contemporary Russia.

Alexander Anufriev’s Russia Close-Up series is a zoomed-in look at what makes a modern Russia, through a highly subjective lens. He got the idea for it while he was studying at The Rodchenko Art School in Moscow, after becoming disillusioned with documentary photography. “At the time, it was important for me to tell stories and for them to be the truth, but it started to feel like a little bit of a lie,” he explains. “Even if you’re trying to be totally objective, it is always a bit subjective."

“I stopped shooting for six months, and I was about to quit photography, but then I thought, ‘What if I tried to be completely subjective?’ So I cropped the images very tightly, and included only the elements I wanted to show. It was a farewell to convention.” Unconventional it may be, but the series has already had some success, exhibited in Cardiff, Sydney, and Saint Petersburg, and winning third place in the Moscow Photobookfest Dummy book award.

Anufriev’s past projects have included a series on homeless people celebrating New Year’s Eve in a Moscow train station, and portraits of market sellers on the city’s streets. But for this project, he wanted find a way to visualise the mood of a whole country. Born in 1988, he doesn’t remember life in the Soviet Union, behind the Iron Curtain. But over the last few years, against a backdrop of political apathy, he has began to realise the underlying forces of patriotism and nationalism in modern Russia. This series is an attempt to bring the image of Russia up to date, he says.

“There are inner processes that are not obvious to the rest of the world,” he adds, “the strengthening of censorship and propaganda. This series is an attempt to visualise these processes.”

Source: British Journal of Photography


 

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Stephen Wilkes
United States
1957
Since opening his studio in New York City in 1983, photographer Stephen Wilkes has built an unprecedented body of work and a reputation as one of America's most iconic photographers, widely recognized for his fine art, editorial and commercial work. His photographs are included in the collections of the George Eastman Museum, James A. Michener Art Museum, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Dow Jones Collection, Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation, Jewish Museum of NY, Library of Congress, Snite Museum of Art, The Historic New Orleans Collection, Museum of the City of New York, 9/11 Memorial Museum and numerous private collections. His editorial work has appeared in, and on the covers of leading publications such as the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Time, Fortune, National Geographic, Sports Illustrated , and many others. Wilkes' early career interpretations of Mainland China, California's Highway One, and impressionistic "Burned Objects" set the tone for a series of career-defining projects that catapulted him to the top of the photographic landscape. In 1998, a one-day assignment to the south side of Ellis Island led to a 5-year photographic study of the island's long abandoned medical wards where immigrants were detained before they could enter America. Through his photographs and video, Wilkes helped secure $6 million toward the restoration of the south side of the island. A monograph based on the work, Ellis Island: Ghosts of Freedom, was published in 2006 and was named one of TIME magazine's 5 Best Photography Books of the Year. The work was also featured on NPR and CBS Sunday Morning. In 2000, Epson America commissioned Wilkes to create a millennial portrait of the United States, "America In Detail," a 52-day odyssey that was exhibited in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Day to Night , Wilkes' most defining project, began in 2009. These epic cityscapes and landscapes, portrayed from a fixed camera angle for up to 30 hours capture fleeting moments of humanity as light passes in front of his lens over the course of a full day. Blending these images into a single photograph takes months to complete. Day to Night has been featured on CBS Sunday Morning as well as dozens of other prominent media outlets and, with a grant from the National Geographic Society , was extended to include America's National Parks in celebration of their centennial anniversary and Bird Migration for the 2018 Year of the Bird. Most recently a new grant was extended for Canadian Iconic Species and Habitats at Risk in collaboration with The Royal Canadian Geographic Society. Day to Night : In the Field with Stephen Wilkes was exhibited at The National Geographic Museum in 2018. Day to Night was published by TASCHEN as a monograph in 2019. Wilkes' work documenting the ravages of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy has brought heightened awareness to the realities of global climate change. He was commissioned by the Annenberg Space for Photography to revisit New Orleans in 2013 after documenting Hurricane Katrina for the World Monuments Fund. And, his images were exhibited with his photographs on Hurricane Sandy in the 2014 Sink or Swim, Designing for a Sea of Change exhibition. Wilkes directorial debut, the documentary film, Jay Myself , world premiered at DOCNYC in November 2018. The film is an in depth look into the world of photographer Jay Maisel and his move out of his 35,000 sq. foot building at 190 Bowery. Oscilloscope Laboratories has acquired the North American rights and the film opened at Film Forum in New York in July, 2019 Wilkes was a speaker at the TED2016: Dream Conference on his Day to Night series. The talk has over 1.6 million views. In 2017 Wilkes was commissioned by the US Embassy, Ottawa to create a Day to Night photograph of Canada's 150th anniversary of Confederation. Despite his intense dedication to personal projects, Wilkes continues to shoot advertising campaigns for the world's leading agencies and corporations, including: Netflix, OppenheimerFunds, SAP, IBM, Capital One, The New Yorker, Johnson & Johnson, DHL, American Express, Nike, Sony, Verizon, IBM, AT&T, Rolex, Honda. He has a robust following on Instagram of more than 500,000. Wilkes' extensive awards and honors include the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Magazine Photography, Photographer of the Year from Adweek Magazine, Fine Art Photographer of the Year 2004 Lucie Award, TIME Magazine Top 10 Photographs of 2012, Sony World Photography Professional Award 2012, Adobe Breakthrough Photography Award 2012 and Prix Pictet, Consumption 2014. His board affiliations include the Advisory Board of the S.I. Newhouse School of Communications; Save Ellis Island Board of Directors, on which he served for 5 years; and the Goldring Arts Journalism Board. Wilkes was born in 1957 in New York. He received his BS in photography from Syracuse University S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications with a minor in business management from the Whitman School of Management in 1980. Wilkes, who lives and maintains his studio in Westport, CT, is represented by Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, New York; Fahey Klein Gallery, Los Angeles; Monroe Gallery of Photography, Santa Fe and Holden Luntz Gallery, Palm Beach..
Piotr Zbierski
Piotr Zbierski studied photography at National Film School. Author of three individual exhibitions (White Elephants, Here, Love has to be reinvented), a participant in collective exhibitions and publications including Photokina and Lab East. He presented his works in many countries like Poland, Germany, Portugal, Russia, Slovakia. As well as magazines (Shots Magazine, Ninja Mag, Archivo Zine, Die Nacht, Gup Magazine). In 2012 he won the prestigious prize for young photographer Leica Oscar Barnack Newcomer Award. His work was nominated to Deutsche Börse Photography Prize and has been shortlisted in many other prizes (Les Nuits Photographiques 2012, Terry O’Neill Award) for his series Pass by me. His works has been shown at Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles 2012 and are in collection of Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts. He lives and works in Lodz. About Love has to be reinvented "The series 'Love has to be reinvented' began in 2012 and its starting point was not an image but my personal experience, which changed my view and redefined my opinion on many issues. At the same time, it is neither my diary nor any personal document; recently such a name is given to whatever cannot be named. Titles of my series are just mottos for my creative works at their particular stages. Words are created by letters in the alphabet, which is a matter of convention depending on the culture. I build my series out of emotions, which are a biological fact, they are unquestionable. The key objective I identify for myself is the availability of a feeling. I really want the person looking at my photographs to experience something more and not just say whether photographs are good or bad. Photography does not begin with an image, it does not end with an image, either; I put on authenticity, and not on originality. An image is a form of communication of a higher art form, which is life itself. I took the title from the French poet, Artur Rimbaud, who wrote these words and expressed criticism of France and times he lived in about a hundred years ago. I returned to these words because I think the world has not changed so much, and I criticize a contemporary world, which has gone in the wrong direction, in my opinion. And I do not mean people but structures built around the castle, which the book hero has never reached. A major objective of my work is to get through to the essence of human emotions, to their purest form with no additions, no gadgets. To show a man in the way he has been created, a man from a primeval village. In a contemporary world, such an image may be created using a certain type of imagination because we are very far away from such a status quo; therefore, my work is reality-based but it is not the reality itself. It is an attempt to invoke and depict certain human impulses with full acceptance of their inherent contradictions. Like love: it is as full of adoration as hatred; a day could not exist without a night. I will finish this three-year series in spring 2015 during the total solar eclipse, which can be observed in Iceland. It is a characteristic clamp for my creative work in which I start from a personal, private and single experience at the very beginning, and come through an image to a part, which is common for us all, and independent of me. A macro-scale has its reflection in a micro scale while a normal scale, in which we live in, is its pulsating reflection. To follow theories of contemporary scientists, only a ballet dancer may be smaller, and on a macro-scale - a multiple universe. Life is a film directed by the universe while the world is the largest accumulation of sensually available metaphors, a secret in secret or a metaphor in a metaphor. Rimbaud has also written that eternity is skies mixed with water; quite right: black and white, grey on grey; in a child's drawing huge blue and objectively sacred transparency. In my opinion, there is one reality and infinitely many visions. To sum it up as simple as I can: if the world is a tree growing more and more branches (metaphors), then life is the fruit. While love is the juice of various tastes in the same way as the resin is what a tree uses for weeping. All this happens in the surroundings of eternal gases where toxic ones come away leaving space to healthy ones. Rootstocks and roots grow expanding in the same way. Who are people then?Undoubtedly, they are savages from a primeval village who have learned what a real taste of love is: they adored each other at the expense of "god's" hatred, they are Adam and Eve. It is only owing to such a full image of love that new generations could come into existence. I also invite to see the video work titled "Lodz", in which I develop motifs I have earlier discussed. Another continuing video is in progress. The bottomless source is RGB without DNA." - Piotr Zbierski
Bill Burke
United States
1943
William M. Burke is an American photographer and educator known for his 20 years of documentary photography in Vietnam and neighboring countries, detailing the effects of war. Bill Burke was born in 1943 in Derby, Connecticut. In 1966, he received a B.A. degree in Art History from Middlebury College. He continued studies at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and received a B.F.A degree in 1968 and a MFA degree in 1970, while studying with photographer Harry Callahan. In 1971, he started teaching at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In 1978, he became a Guggenheim fellow in photography. His work is included in many public collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Princeton University Art Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among others.Source: Wikipedia Since 1971 he has taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. While he has contributed to the Christian Science Monitor and published his work in Fortune and Esquire, Burke prefers to present personal travelogue images in series in books and exhibitions. His monographs include They Shall Cast Out Demons (1983), Bill Burke Portraits (1987), I Want to Take Picture (1987), and Mine Fields (1994). He has exhibited alone and in groups at ICP and elsewhere. Bill Burke, who failed his draft physical, was spared the experience of many of his contemporaries who fought in the Vietnam War. Since the 1970s he has photographed his travels through Asia not to document military atrocities, but to record his personal reactions. His work reflects a fascination with historical events and sites, yet his interest is broader than the topical documentation of photojournalism. The independent spirit of works such as Robert Frank's The Americans (1959) informs Burke's approach to his subjects: he recognizes his outsider status, and the black-and-white photographs of his many trips to Cambodia are as much about the personal impact and experience of being a witness as they are about the cultures he visits. This visitor status is important: Burke makes no pretense trying to develop a photo essay with political overtones, in the tradition of American documentary photography of the 1930s.Source: International Center of Photography
Elaine Mayes
United States
1936
Elaine Mayes has been an active visual artist since 1960. A main focus and emphasis for her work has been investigations of ‘seeing’ and documentary forms in photography. This interest led to a number of projects and seeking out various close at hand situations in the world as subject material for her photographs. Elaine majored in painting and art history at Stanford University and then studied at the San Francisco Art Institute with John Collier, Jr. Paul Hassel, Minor White, Nathan Oliviera and Richard Diebenkorn. Between 1961 and 1968 she was an independent photojournalist working in San Francisco for magazines and graphic designers. During 1967 and 1968 she was a rock and roll photographer and photographed the ‘Summer of Love’ and scene in the Haight Ashbury District of San Francisco. One of her assignments was to photograph the Monterey Pop Festival. This work was published in her book called, It Happened In Monterey. Elaine taught photography for thirty-five years, beginning at the University of Minnesota in 1968. Then she taught at Hampshire College from 1971 to 1981, at Bard College during 1982 and 1983, and at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts from 1983 until 2001. Elaine was Chair of the Tisch Photography Department from 1997 until her retirement from teaching. Currently, she is Professor Emeritus and is living in the Catskill Mountains of New York actively continuing her work. Elaine’s photography has been exhibited extensively, with recent exhibitions connected with The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Summer of Love and The Monterey Pop Festival and includes the de Young Museum, The California Historical Society, The SFO Museums United Airlines Terminal, The Monterey Art Museum, The Grammy Musuem, Spazio Gerra - Comune di Reggio Emilia, Italy and the Joseph Bellows Gallery in La Jolla. Elaine has received a number of awards including three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She also was awarded funding from The Atherton Foundation for her Hawaiian images and book production for a limited edition handmade book called, Ki i ‘no Hawai’i. Her newest publication is, Recently, Daylight Press, 2013. Elaine is affiliated with Getty Images, Joseph Bellows Gallery, Morrison Hotel Galleries, and Liberal Arts Roxbury.Source: www.elainemayesphoto.com
R.J. Kern
United States
1978
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