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Jelena Jankovic
Jelena Jankovic
Jelena Jankovic

Jelena Jankovic

Country: Serbia
Birth: 1985

Jelena Janković is fine art photographer from Belgrade, specialized in dance and theater photography. Actively engaged in the documentary, freelance fashion, conceptual and experimental photography. Recipient of significant awards for her photography, such as Grand Prix Balkan Photo Awards 2016, 2017 Sony World Photography Awards, Siena International Photo Awards 2017, First Prize of 2017 Andrei Stenin International Press Photo Contest, FIAP plate of Sterijino Pozorje for Theatre Photography... She has exhibited at twenty groups and seven solo exhibitions and has been credited for photography in over 40 theater productions.
Her photographs have been published: Rolling Stone (DE), Professional Photographer(USA), ELLE (SRB) Digital SLR Photographer magazine (UK), fotoMAGAZINE (DE), LensCulture, Lürzer's Archive, GEO (DE, ESP), National Geographic (SPA)...
She is a member of The Association of Fine Arts Artist and Designers of Serbia.

Statement
Photography helped me to express myself, through it I study about myself and and about people around me. I create in several fields:
Documentary photography is my reflection on the world around me; i use it to educate about the truths that exist. Dance and theatre photography is about expressing my inner emotion; the power and fragility of dance is affecting my most profound and intimate feelings.
Fashion is the platform for staging my theatre play; it is the blend of knowledge, imagination, and precision. Conceptual and Experimental photography. photography is the space without borders; it liberates my vision beyond known conventions.

The project Bird talks about me.
I am 32 years old and recently I have been diagnosed with dyslexia. Because of the very poor school system, uneducated teachers that were not able to distinguish dyslexia and me not being able to discover it in time, I have been living my whole life in fear and hiding. Unaware of the problem that I’m living with, frustrated with my inability to work and study normally, I developed various methods with whom I managed to avoid reading in front of my friends and professors. I didn’t knew how to explain that the letters are shaking in front of my eyes while I was reading and that I unconsciously twisted the letters and words that I was writing. I was feeling like a bird locked in a cage. The only safe place that I felt was my art creation; creative expression was my escape. I visited zoological gardens in Belgrade and Amsterdam and photographed locked birds in cages that were representing me and all the others that were living in a similar fear. Afterwards I would draw across the photos combining different techniques like painting and collage, so I can show to the world all the freedoms that exist from the inside. This project was developed as a wish, so people can discuss openly about dyslexia, all the problems that this disease carries, and so we can set ourselves free and stop the process of hiding because of the fear of judgements.

The second project is The chosen ones
Inspired by visual effects, I watched a bunch of people that reminded me of the great army. In these glorious visual moments, the lights chose some of them randomly, but some of them chose themselves by taking selfies. Selfie culture started to determine our existence; everybody needs to know where we are or are we doing something. Social media has a huge impact on our views about current issues. Social media has become one of the largest epidemics that affect the social relationship between people. While we are waiting for the approval of others, we miss the opportunity to enjoy the mysterious world around us.
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Francesco Zizola
Since the 1980's Francesco Zizola (Italy, 1962) has documented the world's major conflicts and their hidden crisis, focusing on the social and humanitarian issues that define life in the developing world as well as in western countries. A strong ethical commitment and a distinctive aesthetic eye are specific features of his pictures. His assignments and personal projects have taken him around the world, giving him the opportunity to carefully portray forgotten crises and relevant issues often disregarded by the mainstream media. He received several awards over the years, including ten awards in World Press Photo contests and six Picture of the Year International awards (POYi). Francesco published seven books, among which Uno Sguardo Inadeguato (Collana Grandi Autori, FIAF, 2013), Iraq (Ega/Amnesty International, 2007) and Born Somewhere (Delpire/Fusi Orari, 2004), extensive work on the living conditions of children from 27 different countries. In 2003 Henri Cartier Bresson included one of Francesco's pictures among his 100 favorites. This collection was made into an exhibition - Les Choix d'Henri Cartier Bresson - and a book. In 2007 Francesco founded with a group of colleagues Noor photo agency, based in Amsterdam. In 2008 he founded 10b Photography (Rome, Italy), a multipurpose centre for digital photography promoting photography culture through exhibitions, workshops, and lectures. In 2014 he was a jury member of the World Press Photo Contest. In 2016 Francesco has been awarded 2nd prize in the Contemporary Issues category of World Press Photo for his series In the Same Boat. In 2018 he was awarded the SIAE Prize for Creative Talent at the Venice Film Festival for his movie 'As if we were tuna', selected for 'Giornate degli autori', the autonomous review inside the Festival' Francesco lives in Rome, Italy. About Hybris Hybris, the last great work by Francesco, is a project that aims to tell, through a complex and articulate photographic language, how much man has exceeded the limits concerning the four elements of nature. Everyday Water, Fire, Earth and Air, are attacked and depleted of their organic and inorganic richness and diversity, of their vital energy so essential even for human life. At the time of writing this text, the chapter Hybris Water is in its final stage. The section of Hybrs Water wants to be a testimony of what is fast disappearing into the sea. The millennial balance that regulated the relationship between the need for human livelihood and the ability of the sea to bestow it, is suffering a crisis. Thanks to advanced technology and hunger for profit, contemporary man has forgotten the limit inherent to nature. Ignoring the cycles of reproduction and destroying the environment where biological diversity should always abound, the great fishing industry is drastically eliminating life in the sea. Those who still practice sustainable fishing today should be considered as the last witnesses of a possible symbiotic relationship with the sea and its life. The last witnesses with a knowledge that, once forgotten, can no longer be passed down to future generations. The fishermen live together with the fish from which their life depends, portrayed with the same dignity of the fishermen who have captured them, they are exposed among them, at the same height of their eyes, of their faces. The fishing scenes are taken with a careful look to make justice of that old relationship of respect towards the sea shown by those who practice a traditional way of fishing year after year, a sustainable fishing indeed. Francesco tries to give voice to different points of view. That of men, but also that of the nature that surrounds us and on which we depend.
Charles Harbutt
United States
1935 | † 2015
Charles Henry Harbutt (July 29, 1935 – June 30, 2015) was an American photographer, a former president of Magnum, and full-time Associate Professor of Photography at Parsons School of Design in New York. Harbutt was born in Camden, New Jersey, and raised in Teaneck, New Jersey, and learned much of his photography skills from the township's amateur camera club. He attended Regis High School in New York City where he took photographs for the school newspaper. He later graduated from Marquette University. Harbutt's work is deeply rooted in the modern photojournalist tradition. For the first twenty years of his career he contributed to major magazines in the United States, Europe and Japan. His work was often intrinsically political, exhibiting social and economic contingencies. In 1959, while working as a writer and photographer for the Catholic magazine Jubilee, he was invited by members of the Castro underground to document the Cuban Revolution on the strength of three photographs he had published in Modern Photography. An editor at Jubilee while Harbutt was working there, Robert Lax, used photographs taken by Harbutt for the front and back cover of his first book of poetry, The Circus of the Sun. Harbutt joined Magnum Photos and was elected president of the organization twice, first in 1979. He left the group in 1981, citing its increasingly commercial ambitions and the desire to pursue more personal work. He taught photography workshops, exhibited in solo and group shows around the world, and joined the faculty of the Parsons School of Design at New School University as a full-time professor, in addition to serving as guest artist at MIT, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Rhode Island School of Design. Harbutt was a founding member of Archive Pictures Inc., an international documentary photographers' cooperative, and a member of the American Society of Magazine Photographers. His work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of American History, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the U.S. Library of Congress, George Eastman House, the Art Institute of Chicago, the International Center of Photography, the Center for Creative Photography, and at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Beaubourg, and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. In 1997, his negatives, master prints, and archives were acquired for the collection of the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona. He mounted a large exhibition of his work at the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City in December 2000 and received the medal of the City of Perpignan at a retrospective of his work there in 2004. He died in Monteagle, Tennessee, on June 30, 2015, at the age of 79. He had emphysema.Source: Wikipedia Charles Harbutt’s early fascination with magic and the elusive line between perception and reality steered him toward journalism and its documentary role, first as a writer. But he altered his course in 1959, when he was 23, after being invited by Cuban rebels to document the Castro revolution. Immersing himself in Havana’s convulsive and euphoric newfound freedom, he recalled, “I soon understood that I could get closer to the feel of things by taking pictures.” Mr. Harbutt went on to become an accomplished photojournalist for major magazines and the renowned agency Magnum Photos. “He and Burk Uzzle took photojournalism and pushed it in a direction away from literalism or classicism,” Jeff Jacobson, a former colleague, told The New York Times, referring to a contemporary whose pictures of the Woodstock music festival in 1969 gained wide attention, “away from certainly the European paradigm of Cartier-Bresson, and away from the narrative paradigm of Gene Smith to something very, very different, very involved with metaphor.” But Charles Harbutt became disillusioned with his craft, questioning the veracity of the events he was covering, particularly after witnessing undercover government agents provoke violence at a rally in New Haven in 1970 in support of jailed Black Panthers. “The kinds of stories I chose to do, I later realized, were mostly about American myths,” he wrote in his last book, Departures and Arrivals (2012). “I photographed small towns, immigrants, the barrio in New York, and then the enormous changes that came with the ’60s. I tried to be a witness as well as show my feelings about all of this. But maybe I had a sell-by time — expiration date — for being a witness,” he continued. “In the early ’70s, I started questioning this reportage for myself. A host of manipulators had so corrupted and warped public events, I could no longer trust the authenticity of what I was seeing. I realized that I was more interested in pajamas on a bed one Brooklyn morning, or a Dublin woman hauling groceries to her house, than I was in the machinations of politics and history ‘writ large.’ ” Mr. Harbutt experimented with surreal composition and juxtaposition of quotidian forms in a style he described as personal documentary and facetiously branded “superbanalisms.” Among his most famous black-and-white photographs was one of a blind boy, seemingly trying to transcend his sightlessness by reaching for a ribbon of light on a wall. In another, a bride in a flowing white gown poses pensively below exposed pipes and empty tables in a large basement before her wedding reception. Charles Harbutt’s own favorite, called “Mr. X-Ray Man,” was shot through a car window on the Rue du Départ near the Montparnasse train station in Paris, where fragments of the cityscape and even of the photographer himself can be seen reflected in the glass. What made it special was that it was unexpected, he explained in Arrivals and Departures. “What I like best,” he wrote, “is that however the picture is made, it’s a surprise to me when I see the photo come up in the developer.”Source: The New York Times
María Tuleda
Nurse by profession, I discovered photography by chance a little over a decade ago and since then I have dedicated part of my free time to taking photos. Self-taught, I conceive photography as an instrument to create, tell and transmit, but above all to feel. I do not follow norms or rules, and I confess to being more interested in suggesting than in the photographic technique itself. There's something nostalgic and beautiful about decadence, and maybe that's why almost all of my shots end up having a certain decadent feel to them. I have no idea why I make the images I make, I guess we look with a camera as we are, or one day we were. My photos are simply a visual diary, they show what I see, and how I felt. Photography allows me to return to that childlike curiosity, which makes me want to explore not only in the world, but within myself. When they ask me what I want to express with my photos or my way of creating them, the answer is simple: Provoke, simply provoke some sensation. A few years ago I decided to show my images on social networks, opening up a range of opportunities to disseminate my work, but if I have to choose a medium where I can express myself through photography, it is the photobook. Being able to create a visual narrative, with a set of photos between sheets of paper inside a book, has been a wonderful experience, yes, I confess, photobooks have me fascinated. On many occasions I don't know why some of the images I make exist. And honestly, I don't care to know. The birds What do birds represent in artistic photography? It is a simple filler in the composition, with the purpose of making it more attractive and attracting the viewer, or for the author, it has a meaning. The answer may be a little of both. It is easy to find the presence of symbols in creative or artistic photography, including birds. Jennifer Ackerman, a bird scholar, after spending time observing them, came to the conclusion that birds remember, think, feel, give gifts and love. And they also fly, and that is what makes them so special, that is what arouses so much interest and at the same time envy: the ability to fly. The author of the wonderful novel "Rebecca", Daphne du Maurier, is also the author of the story about "The Birds" in the Alfred Hitchcock film. Horror story where roles are exchanged, giving way to the revolution of the birds, and they are the ones who keep humans locked up, imprisoned and caged in their homes. Leonardo da Vinci's obsession with understanding the flight of birds led him to make a study and treatise on flight while painting the Mona Lisa. Some of the discoveries he made anticipated the foundations of modern aeronautics. Hundreds of birds fly over the Prado Museum of various species, a recent study reveals that there are nearly 700 paintings that illustrate frozen birds through the brushes of artists such as Rubens, Hieronymus Bosch or Goya. It is evident that birds have always aroused a lot of interest throughout history, and without a doubt they have been and are sources of inspiration, not only in art. But really, in artistic photography, what do they symbolize? The Mexican photographer and lady of symbols, Graciela Iturbide, is clear: "Birds are the eyes that help me fly." She claims that she loves them and for her they represent freedom. I share Graciela's considerations about the concepts she attributes to birds for her creations. I have no idea why they are so present in my work, why I go out into the world with my camera, sometimes, even with the sole intention of looking for them and photographing them. When they ask me what I want to express with their presence, I feel perplexed for not having a clear answer. I wish I could give you an exact answer about the important message behind this work. Birds, above all for me, are symbols of vision and freedom perfectly outlined in the process of the concept of creation, and at the same time, a metaphor alluding to an infinite number of things. My photos are simply a visual diary. They show what I see or what I saw, and how I felt. Photography allows me to return to that childlike curiosity, which makes me want to explore not only in the world, but within myself. On many occasions I don't know why some of the images I make exist. And honestly, I don't care to know. For others, the presence of birds perhaps blurs the composition, or they are representations that are too disturbing or tedious, and therefore contrary to what I intend to provoke, but perhaps that disparate vision that photography provokes is not part of its magic.
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