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FINAL DAYS TO WIN A SOLO EXHIBITION IN MAY 2026
FINAL DAYS TO WIN A SOLO EXHIBITION IN MAY 2026
Marco Panzetti
Marco Panzetti
Marco Panzetti

Marco Panzetti

Country: Italy
Birth: 1981

Marco Panzetti (Italy, 1981) is a freelance documentary photographer, multimedia journalist and visual artist. His work focuses on contemporary issues related to social injustice, migration and collective identity. He successfully carried out projects in Europe, Latin America and Asia, frequently in collaboration or on assignment for nonprofit organizations and media outlets.
His long-term body of work on the European migrant crisis, 'The Idea of Europe' (2015 – present) received international recognition including an Honorable Mention at the 2017 Lange-Taylor Prize and the first prize in the video category at the 2017 Migration Media Award.

'The Idea of Europe' is a long-term documentary work on the human impact of the European refugee crisis.

Fleeing from conflicts, humanitarian crisis and economical distress in their countries of origin, and escaping the slavery practices commonly reported in Libya, since early 2015 more than 10,000 people lost their lives in the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe, and about 3 million people applied for asylum in EU countries.

This huge influx highlighted the limits and unfairness of border control policies and asylum systems still anchored to the post-WWII treaties, and caused a major discussion among the public opinion.

Can Europe still indulge in considering itself the cradle of human rights?

With this question as motivation and common thread, 'The Idea of Europe' follows the migrants' journey from the desperate Mediterranean crossing to the asylum request in Italy.

This project encompasses work from 'In Between', a project done in 2016-2017 from a rescue vessel in the Mediterranean to report on the humanitarian tragedy unfolding in international waters, 'We are not going back', a project work done in 2015-2016 from the disembarking port of Lampedusa and at the Italian border town of Ventimiglia where I documented the migrants' encounter with the resurging (physical, ideological and bureaucratic) walls of Europe, and 'Life after Hell', a project done in 2017 from various reception centres across Italy where I portrayed the daily lives of those waiting for a decision on their asylum request, which could take up to two years.
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Phil Penman
United Kingdom/United States
The British-born, New York-based photographer Phil Penman has documented the ever-changing scene of New York City’s streets for more than 25 years. In his career as a news and magazine photographer, with a large body of work in such publications as The Guardian, The Independent, The New York Review of Books, among others, he has photographed major public figures and historical events. In particular, his reportage following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center has featured on NBC’s Today show, as well as on the BBC, History Channel, and Al Jazeera, and his images have been included in the 9/11 Memorial and Museum’s archives. His work covering the pandemic lockdown in New York City has been acquired by the U.S. Library of Congress, whose collection holds work by such great Depression-era documentarians as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. Besides showing at Leica galleries in New York, Washington, D.C., Boston, and London, Penman’s signature street photography has appeared in international exhibitions as far afield as Venice, Berlin, and Sydney. He also tours the world teaching workshops on photography for Leica Akademie. He was recently named among the “52 Most Influential Street Photographers,” alongside such legends as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sebastião Salgado, Diane Arbus, and Garry Winogrand. Penman’s first book, Street, published in 2019, became a best-seller and was featured at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. New York Street Diaries Phil Penman shows the big city on the east coast of the USA from a side that is rarely seen, calm and tranquil. The pictures were taken partly during the great snowstorm and partly during the Corona Lockdown and are thus contemporary witnesses of the pandemic restrictions that completely turned our previously-known world upside down. Born in Great Britain (Poole, Dorset), he has been photographing the streets of New York for well over two decades. He is known, among other things, for his photographs of famous personalities such as Michael Jackson, Madonna, Jennifer Lopez or Bill Gates. When the biggest tragedy in New York's history shook the city on 11 September 2001, Phil Penman was on the spot and created unique footage of the events with his camera. Penman knows how to capture the city in its most sensitive moments in an impressive way. He catches intimate moments in his black-and-white photographs and shows the people and streets of New York City far away from the hustle and bustle. The city life of the metropolis is presented so closely that some pictures inevitably evoke a smile in the viewer. Penman literally catapults his viewer into the scene with a refreshing directness and the feeling of really being present. New York Street Diaries
Marco Di Marco
Marco Di Marco is a Sicilian visual journalist and photographer based in Reykjavík, Iceland. He began documenting the eruptions of Mount Etna in 2011 for local news agencies and has been interested in the dialogue between people and active volcanoes ever since. After relocating to Iceland in 2018, he started working as a freelance contributor for The Associated Press, covering volcanic eruptions and other major events on the island. With an academic background in geology and volcanology from the University of Catania and years of fieldwork on Etna and in Iceland, he combines scientific understanding with a reporter’s eye to build clear visual stories about life on unstable areas. Artist Statement: I photograph volcanoes and the landscapes and communities shaped by them. I did not move to Iceland only for the views. What keeps me here is the feeling that the ground is still a work in progress. Eruptions, gas and road closures are part of the daily routine, not only big news moments. My background is in earth sciences and guiding, so I tend to think about how a place works before I think about how it looks in a frame. I often visit the same locations many times, before, during and after an eruption. Some days I work for news outlets, other days I work slowly on long term projects or with small groups of photographers. The approach is similar. I try to show what it is like to live with a landscape that can change fast, instead of treating nature as a distant spectacle. In the end, my pictures are a mix of documentation and personal experience. They are about an island that is always active, but also about the people and life that keeps adapting to it. AAP Magazine AAP Magazine 54 Nature
Janet Sternburg
United States
1943
Janet Sternburg is a fine art photographer, a writer of literary books, a maker of theatre and films, and an educator. Since 1998 when she began taking photographs, her work has appeared in Aperture (2002), that same year on the cover of Art Journal, and in 2003 in The Utne Reader (“A New Lens,” 2003), in which she was selected as one of forty international artists and writers who “with depth, resonance, ideas and insights, challenge us to live more fully.” A monograph of her photographs, Overspilling World: The Photographs of Janet Sternburg, was published in 2016–17 by Distanz Verlag with a Foreword by Wim Wenders, in which he writes, “Photographers don’t have eyes in the back of their heads. Janet Sternburg does.” A second monograph followed in 2021, also from Distanz, I’ve Been Walking: Janet Sternburg Los Angeles Photographs, taken by Sternburg during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her photography has been exhibited in solo shows in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Milan, Munich, Mexico, and Korea, where she received a commission for a full-building installation at Seoul Institute of the Arts. In 2018, the USC Fisher Museum of the Arts presented her solo show LIMBUS. She pioneered in the use of disposable cameras to create images in which elements interpenetrate, a visual world without borders. Her literary books include the classic two volumes of The Writer on Her Work (W.W. Norton, 1981 and 1991), called “landmarks” and “groundbreaking” by Poets & Writers magazine; her papers for that book are now archived at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas. Other critically praised books followed, among them Phantom Limb (University of Nebraska American Lives Series, 2002) and White Matter (Hawthorne Books, 2016), both using a hybrid form of memoir and essay to probe family, neurology, and history, as well as a collection of poetry, Optic Nerve: Photopoems (Red Hen Press, 2005). Other creative work includes her film, El Teatro Campesino, a feature-length documentary on the Chicano theatre troupe (1969) selected for the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center; her film Virginia Woolf: The Moment Whole (1971), broadcast on National Educational Television and winner of a Cine Golden Eagle, as well as her play, The Fifth String (2011–2014), about Arab and Jewish expulsions throughout history, produced in Berlin, New York, and Los Angeles. Sternburg lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and also has a residence in Downtown Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo. She has been the recipient of numerous grants, fellowships, and artist residencies, among them from the National Endowment for the Humanities and MacDowell. She has taught in the Graduate Media Program at The New School University and in the Critical Studies School at the California Institute of the Arts. In 2016, she was co-recipient of the REDCAT Award, given to “individuals who exemplify the creativity and talent that define and lead the evolution of contemporary culture.”
Oliver Stegmann
Switzerland
1970
I was born in 1970 in Basel, Switzerland. Since my late teen years, photography has become a key medium for me to express myself. Professionally, however, I took a different path, studying economics and now working in a management position. I'm married and a father of two lovely daughters. On many trips to different continents, I have continuously worked on improving my skills as a photographer and on developing my own visual language. I participated in various workshops of well-known photographers such as Mary Ellen Mark, Anders Petersen or Ernesto Bazan. Until 2007 I photographed exclusively with black-and-white film and made all prints in my own darkroom. In 2005, I started scanning the negatives, editing them in Photoshop and creating fine art prints. Two years later, I started to use also digital cameras. My long-term project on circuses behind the scenes is planned to be published as a photo book in 2021. My other on-going personal project is to document the childhood years of my children. Statement I love music, but I have never played an instrument. So the camera has become the "instrument" for my creative work: I compose images instead of songs. I prefer black and white photography because leaving out the colors, the way we usually see the world, directs the viewer's eye to the essence of the image. I have always had a passion for observing people. Their emotions, facial expressions, interactions, activities and personal moments inspire me. Photographing people is a way to communicate with them, to capture perhaps just a fraction of their lives. A powerful photograph becomes a true gift of the moment when it manages to capture some sort of mystery or magic. My photos are meant to transport the viewer into a world less known to them, perhaps reminding them of experiences long past or leading them mentally into a possible future. With my photos I do not want to tell everything, but deliberately suggest unanswerable behind what is shown.
Nicholas Nixon
United States
1947
Nicholas Nixon is an American photographer, born in 1947 in Detroit, Michigan, known for his work in portraiture and documentary photography. Influenced by the photographs of Edward Weston and Walker Evans, he began working with large-format cameras. Whereas most professional photographers had abandoned these cameras in favor of shooting on 35 mm film with more portable cameras, Nixon preferred the format because it allowed prints to be made directly from the large format negatives, retaining the clarity and integrity of the image. Nixon has said "When photography went to the small camera and quick takes, it showed thinner and thinner slices of time, [unlike] early photography where time seemed non-changing. I like greater chunks, myself. Between 30 seconds and a thousand of a second the difference is very large." His first solo exhibition was at the Museum of Modern Art curated by John Szarkowski in 1976. Nixon’s early city views taken of Boston and New York in the mid-seventies were exhibited at one of the most influential exhibitions of the decade, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at the George Eastman House in 1975. In the late nineties, Nixon returned to this subject matter to document Boston’s changing urban landscape during the Big Dig highway development project. In 1976, 1980, and 1987, Nixon was awarded National Endowment for the Arts Photography Fellowships. In 1977 and 1986, he was awarded Guggenheim Fellowship. Nixon's subjects include schoolchildren and schools in and around Boston, people living along the Charles River near Boston and Cambridge as well as cities in the South, his family and himself, people in nursing homes, the blind, sick, and dying people, and the intimacy of couples. Nixon is also well known for his work People With AIDS, which began in 1987. Nixon recorded his subjects with meticulous detail in order to facilitate a connection between the viewer and the subject. In 1975, Nixon began his project, The Brown Sisters consisting of a single portrait of his wife, Bebe, and her three sisters each year, consistently posed in the same left to right order. As of 2020, there are forty-six portraits altogether. The series has been shown at the St. Louis Art Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth the National Gallery of Art, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. In 2010, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston organized the exhibition Nicholas Nixon: Family Album which included The Brown Sisters series among other portraits of his wife Bebe, himself and his children Sam and Clementine.Source: Wikipedia Nicholas Nixon is known for the ease and intimacy of his black and white large format photographs. Nixon has photographed porch life in the rural south, schools in and around Boston, cityscapes, sick and dying people, and the intimacy of couples. Recording his subjects close and with meticulous detail, he facilitates an emotional connection between the viewer and the subject. In 1975, he began an ongoing series, The Brown Sisters, an annual portrait of his wife, Bebe, and her three sisters unchangingly posed in the same order. This seminal project has been the subject of multiple publications and exhibitions. In Summer 2013, Nixon’s book Close Far was released by Steidl. The body of work explores the self in physical and psychological proximity to the urban landscape. On the 40th anniversary of Nixon’s The Brown Sisters series, in 2014, the complete sequence of images was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and re-published in an anniversary catalogue. In 2017, Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid opened a comprehensive survey of the artist’s work to date, accompanied by a catalogue illustrating over 200 images, and the ICA Boston mounted a chronological retrospective exhibition. In 2021, Galerie Le Château d’Eau in Toulouse mounted an ambitious survey exhibition, accompanied by an expanded catalogue.Source: Fraenkel Gallery
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