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FINAL DAYS TO WIN A SOLO EXHIBITION IN MAY 2026
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Aaron Blum
Aaron Blum
Aaron Blum

Aaron Blum

Country: United States
Birth: 1983

Aaron Blum is an eighth generation West Virginian, and creates art deeply linked to his home. Most of his work centers around a single question, what does it mean to be Appalachian? Through this question he address many different artistic concepts from idealized memory vs. stereotypes to ideas of folk taxonomy. His creation process is a diversified approach of image-based media to create a glimpse into his own concepts of Appalachia, and the social fabric of a very large and misrepresented people and place. He pays close attention to the quality of light and the landscape as well as cultural markers to produce a unique version of life in the hills. After graduating with degrees in photography from West Virginia University and Syracuse University, Aaron immediately began receiving recognition for his work including Center of Santa Fe, Silvereye Center for photography, Critical Mass, and FOAM.

About The Prevailing Winds of Hills and Heritage
Appalachia pulls at me like a haunted memory. There is an ineffable force that compels me to suspend reality and embrace superstition and myth. It is a longing to hold on to my culture and history in spite of the modern world. The nebulous forests, enveloping moss and dark corners seem to tell a purer truth.

Storytelling in Appalachia has a long-standing tradition, and it infuses the region with mystery. Using lore, pseudo-scientific study, and personal experiences as a compass I see this place through idealized eyes of wonder, and these images become my personal folklore. They bring to life the fantasies and memories I carry with me. This is a place where you can wash away sin in cool stream waters, where corpse birds come to ferry away souls to the next life, rocks burn and kudzu conceals. This is the place where the prevailing winds whisper old stories to those who know how to listen.
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Josephine Cardin
Dominican Republic
Born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Josephine Cardin is a fine arts photographer who grew up in South Florida, until moving to Boston, MA in 2006.Presently, Cardin has been developing her figurative work, inspired by music, dance, and the human themes of loneliness, isolation, melancholy, love and loss. Cardin uses both dancers, and self-portraiture to illustrate scenes that bewitch, seduce, and explore our human sensibilities; through abstract stories with a visual dialogue between the subject and the artist created through a symbiosis of harmonic gestures and magnetic artistry.Cardin's work has been published in The Spoiler�s Hand, Lucy�s, Canto, beau BU, Scope, F-Stop, and Dance Magazines; Playbill, and the book Meet The Dancers. She has exhibited with The Professional Woman Photographers, The Boca Raton Museum of Art Juried Exhibition, and with The Woman in The Visual Arts. Most recently Cardin received and honorable mention for the 2014 Julia Margaret Cameron Awards, and was selected as a finalist for the PhotoNola/International House Mary Magdalene Exhibit in New Orleans. She has done work for the Boston Ballet, Rochester City Ballet, Arts Ballet Theater, and The Broward Center for the Performing Arts; as well as work for corporate clients. Additionally she earned an artistic grant from the state of Florida, prior to her move to Boston.Always an artist in some capacity, Cardin started out as a ballet dancer, then earning her B.A. in Art History from Florida Atlantic University, followed by an M.A. in Communications from Lynn University. She went on to hold several professional jobs in the arts, while continuing to produce personal and professional photography projects as a freelancer. In 2010 Cardin focused on pursuing her fine arts career full-time. She lives and works in Rochester, NY, with her husband and two young children.
Vanessa Winship
United Kingdom
1960
Born in the United Kingdom. Vanessa Winship lives in London. After studying cinema and photography at Westminster University (Polytechnic of Central London), Vanessa shares her time between photography and teaching. She then fully devotes herself to photography and lives for about 10 years in the Balkans and Turkey. She joins Agence VU in 2005,and the Gallery VU in 2009. Laureate of numerous prizes, including the World Press Photo (Amsterdam) twice, the National Portrait Gallery Prize (London), PhotoEspana Descubrimientos (Madrid). Exhibited her works in numerous museums and festivals such as the Rencontres d'Arles, the Kunstall Museum of Contemporary Art in Rotterdam or the Horst Gallery and Photographers Gallery in London. Prize-winner of the HCB Award 2011 for her project "Out there: an American Odyssey." Source: Agence VU Winship grew up in Barton-upon-Humber, rural Lincolnshire. She studied at Baysgarth School; Hull Art College (which included a photography module); photography at Filton Technical College, Bristol; and photography, film, and video at the Polytechnic of Central London from 1984 to 1987, graduating with a BA (Hons). She met her husband, the photographer George Georgiou, on the degree course. From 1999 she spent a decade living and working in the Balkans and surrounding territories of Turkey and the Black Sea. First she lived in Belgrade, for a short while in Athens, and five years in Istanbul. Her work is about the concepts of borders, land, desire, identity, belonging, memory and history, how those histories are told and how identities are expressed. Her books have been widely acclaimed. Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian, said "She is perhaps best known for Sweet Nothings, one of my favourite photography books of recent years". She Dances on Jackson was considered by Simon Bainbridge (editor of the BJP), Sean O'Hagan, Rob Hornstra and other reviewers to be shortlisted amongst the best photography books released in 2013. Phil Coomes, Picture editor at BBC News said "This is pure photography, and in my view, when viewed as a whole, is about as good as it gets." Winship and George Georgiou travel together, alternating between one working and the other either supporting them or experimenting with their own photography. She uses black-and-white photographic film in natural light. For her work in a reportage – or street – style she has used a 35 mm hand-held camera, for her landscape work she has at times used a medium format camera and for her portraiture work she has at times used a 5×4 inch large format camera. She says of the difference between using 35 mm and large format that "Each methodology makes for a different relationship with my subjects [and] both have their own beauty for me." Source: Wikipedia
Thomas Crauwels
Switzerland
1983
I live at the service of these impetuous guardians of the eternal snows. Watching their light, vibrating to the rhythm of their beauty has become second nature. I like to live these moments of contemplation of panoramas both frozen and changing, which feed me with their greatness. In these moments, I taste peace and melt into the landscape. When the clouds are absent, when my gaze goes on forever and I can let my inspiration flow freely. Without any particular goal. Just to live. To let myself be carried. At other times, I become a truth hunter. I look for the ephemeral moments. The coming storm. The elements colliding. The wind, the air, the rock, creating a chaos that engulfs me in intense and intoxicating sensations. These minutes where I hold my breath so much they are nimbered of a perfection which exceeds me and carries me in a different space. A space that my eye and its accomplice, my camera, know how to capture. Suddenly, everything calms down. Just after the fin of the world, the revelation of another world arrives. Before my amazed gaze, my senses on the alert, the clouds are torn apart like the curtain rises on a new show. The highest summits are adorned with another light, a new contrast. Nature creates before my eyes. Trembling with an inner joy, I try to capture impermanence. It is like a miracle always renewed. Just after the storm, when the first rays of sunlight illuminate the peaks with their royal light. My daily life is punctuated by the study of weather forecasts. Detecting the approach of the forces of nature. A subtle alliance between intuition and the rational study of the elements. I am at one with nature, who is the chief creative artist...and I the humble craftsman. Mixture of experience and naivety, dancing alchemy of summits and elements, fusion between nature and the human being that I am. Who am I in front of all this? A stardust, present, vibrating, panting in the heart of the mystery of life. I aspire to the mastery of the moment which however escapes... In the end, should I really try to control the moment? When I have everything in place with rigor and yet failure looms, I let my heart speak. And then, sometimes, the miracle happens. This miracle that floods me with joy. I am happy to share with you some of the nuggets I brought back from these journeys to the end of my dreams... My quest for an ever-renewed perfection, nature has offered it to me so that I can offer it to you in turn. I hope you will have as much pleasure in dreaming in front of these photos as I had in looking for the perfect moment, the right moment.
Judith Joy Ross
United States
1946
Judith Joy Ross (born 1946) is an American portrait photographer born in Hazleton, Pennsylvania in 1946. She graduated from the Moore College of Art in 1968 and earned a master's degree in photography in 1970 from the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where she studied with Aaron Siskind. Since the early 1980s, Ross has photographed a cross-section of the American population, especially people in eastern Pennsylvania where she was born and raised. Ross uses an 8×10 inch view camera mounted on a tripod and her portraits are made on printing out paper by contact, a process by which a print is made by placing a negative directly onto photographic paper, and then exposing it to sunlight for a few minutes to a few hours. Her photographic antecedents include the German August Sander and the American Diane Arbus. Her series include pictures of children at Eurana Park in Weatherly, Pennsylvania (1982), visitors to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. (1983–1984), members of the United States Congress and their aides in their Washington offices (1986–1987), laborers, people at shopping malls, and children at play near her home in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She has also photographed immigrants in New York City and Paris, and was commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to photograph tech workers in Silicon Valley, California. One of her major projects, pictures made from 1992 to 1994 in Hazleton public schools she had attended in the 1950s and 1960s, was published by the Yale University Art Gallery in 2006 as Portraits of the Hazleton Public Schools. Ross has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1985), a city of Easton, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Grant (1988), the Charles Pratt Memorial Award of $25,000 (1992), and the Andrea Frank Foundation Award (1998). Monographs and exhibition catalogs of her work have been published internationally. Her books include Contemporaries (1995), Portraits (1996), Portraits of the Hazleton Public Schools (2006) and Protest the War (2007), "exploring such themes as the innocence of youth, the faces of political power, and the emotional toll of war". John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art in New York selected Ross' work for the first exhibition in the New Photography series. In 2011, Die Photographische Sammlung in Cologne organized a retrospective exhibition of Ross's work which traveled to the Kunstmuseum Kloster in Madeburg and the Foundation A Stichting, Brussels.Source: Wikipedia Since the early 1980s, the American photographer Judith Joy Ross has dedicated her work to the medium of portraiture. She is best known for her sensitive, deeply personal, yet authentic portraits of various groups of people at the center of American society: school children and teachers, soldiers, visitors to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. and U.S. Congress members of the Republican and Democratic parties. The photographs, which Ross contextualizes by arranging them in series, offer both an aesthetic and a humanitarian approach to photography. Judith Joy Ross’s work shows references to photographers like August Sander, Eugène Atget, Walker Evans or Diane Arbus in her documentary style and her use of technical equipment. She photographs with an 8x10 inch view camera, which due to long exposure times and the need to set up a tripod forces her to concentrate on her subjects and does not allow for snapshots. The subjects are usually strangers to the photographer and so the photograph itself becomes an intense encounter. August Sander is often mentioned as a major influence. Both, Ross and Sander focus on facial expressions, gestures and posture of their subjects. However, while Sander’s famous photographs from the series People of the 20th Century is staged and aims at categorizing certain social groups, Ross does not give directions to her subjects and thus achieves an immediacy that characterizes her approach and style. It makes the viewer think about the inner reality of the person by using their own social experience in order to relate to the people she portraits, thus stressing the individuality of each subject over their association with a specific group. Judith Joy Ross describes her intention as follows: “The world outside oneself is bigger than ones idea of it. One tries to align oneself with that bigger world in making a picture”.Source: Galerie Thomas Zander At present, Ross is suffering from an eye problem following pre-pandemic surgery that has left her with double vision. “I can photograph,” she say, “but it’s hard to take a walk.” One senses that photography gave her a way to be in the world. “I’m just interested in people, but I don’t want to get too close to them,” she says. “I keep them at arm’s length with the camera. It’s like a magic charm. It’s such an intense pleasure to photograph strangers because, in that moment, you can see them in such an intimate way. It’s kind of crazy, but I love some of those people even though I have never seen them again.”Source: The Guardian
Peter Bogaczewicz
Poland/Canada
1974
Peter Bogaczewicz is a Canadian photographer and an architect currently developing projects in the Middle East. He divides his time between the two disciplines, often blurring the line between them, and uses his photography as a commentary on the built environment and the human community, how both are changing at a time of rapid progress and growing global interconnectedness, and the impact this has on the natural environment. There is no clearer reflection of a society's aspirations than through its collective "footprint" on nature; it is in the relationship of the constructed world to the natural world that a crucially revealing conversation takes place. Examining this dialogue captures Peter's imagination and appears as a common thread throughout his work, inviting the questions: How do we relate to the places we inhabit? And what does it reveal about us? Peter has recently had his photographs of Saudi Arabia published as a monograph by Daylight books and is regularly receiving recognition for his work. Kingdom of Sand and Cement Looking from the outside, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia appears doubly inaccessible: a seemingly endless inhospitable landscape populated by a traditionalist culture distrustful of outsiders. But looking from the inside reveals a subtler view: the culture, as different as it is, struggles with its identity like other cultures do at a time of growing global interdependencies and pressures to progress. What distinguishes Saudi Arabia in its struggle is that this country has had very little time to adapt. Though its abundance of oil wealth has given it an unprecedented advantage, at the same time, it ironically threatens its way of life. "Kingdom of Sand and Cement" explores the particular challenge Saudi Arabia is faced with as the country transitions from the tribal desert culture to an influential world power. It is a profound change, taking its population from mud buildings to the tallest of skyscrapers in less than a century. And while the whole country rapidly transforms from arid landscapes dotted with settlements, that seem to simply grow out of the ground, to imposing modern interventions, cutting, filling, and monumentalizing dominance over nature and the land, Saudi Arabia finds itself precariously balancing at a crossroads of old and new. The population adjusts, straddling both tradition and modernity, while its changing landscape readies it for more to come. The Series documents this relatively unfamiliar place at a time of its unique turning point. By photographically examining its past and present "markings" on nature—that crucial intersection of the built environment with that of the natural environment—the Series brings to light the country's aspirations tensely juxtaposed with its traditionalist past. The contrasts reveal an image of a place much different from our own, yet a place ultimately not so dissimilar to others in its ambition to progress, and susceptible as any to the risks of rapid and often careless transition. More about the book Kingdom of Sand and Cement
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