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FINAL DAYS TO WIN A SOLO EXHIBITION IN MAY 2026
FINAL DAYS TO WIN A SOLO EXHIBITION IN MAY 2026
Bence Mate
Bence Mate
Bence Mate

Bence Mate

Country: Hungary
Birth: 1985

A wildlife photographer, born in Hungary, 1985. In 2010 he won the prestigious BBC Wildlife Photography of the Year award in London. He is the most effective photographer in the 53-year-old history of the competition, being the only contestant winning the first prize in both the young and adult categories.

In 2005 he experimented the one-way glass photography technique, making fundamental changes in hide photography practice. This technique has been widely used all over the world, and most hides are equipped with such glasses.

Since 2008 he has been designing wildlife photography hides in different parts of the world (Hungary, Costa Rica, Brazil, Norway, South-Africa and Transylvania, Romania). His enterprise operating in Hungary welcomes photographers with the most exclusive hides in the world.

Books: The Invisible Wildlife Photographer (English, Hungarian), The Handbook of Bird Photography (Markus Varesvuo, Jari Peltomäki, Bence Máté; English, German, Finnish, French).

Statement
"A great wildlife photo is technically perfect, innovative, and unrepeatable. It is a genuine reflection of what took place, and the subjects must be able to move around as they wish. Whilst Photoshop can be used to enhance an image, the sole goal of post-production should be to reflect reality in the most accurate way possible." -- Bence Mate
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Dale Niles
United States
Born in Norfolk, Virginia, Niles' formative years were spent with her family living in small, southern towns in Virginia and North Carolina. Inspired by the heritage of these locales, neighbors, and friends, she developed deep-seated southern roots that richly inform her photography practice with visual storytelling. Niles celebrates the diverseness of the human spirit, appreciating those qualities that make us delightfully unique, yet connected in many ways, particularly through shared experiences and preserved visual memories. Niles majored in sociology at Lenoir Rhyne College in Hickory, North Carolina. While exploring opportunities in her chosen field, she pursued her artistic interests, ultimately discovering that photography was her passion. The medium offers Niles a wide berth of options for technique, subject matter, and her creative process. Exhibitions include group and solo installations across the United States, Canada, Paris, France, and Venice, Italy. Her prints are held in many private collections as well the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA) and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. A selection of her work is currently exhibited at Mayo Clinic, Jacksonville, Florida. She was selected for Photolucida's Critical Mass Top 200, Ones to Watch , the Fence, an exhibition at Hartsfield International Airport, and she won the Virginia Twinam Purchase Award. Featured publications include: Light and Shadow Magazine, SouthxSoutheast Magazine, Shots, Lenscratch, The HAND Magazine, and Oxford American. Her book, What Lies With: the Eclectic Collections of Andrea Noel received recognition from Elizabeth Avedon as best photography book of 2021. What We Keep The passing of a loved one is a life moment everyone is forced to face and walk through in their own way. A person dies and items of their existence remain. This process is often emotionally and physically overwhelming and taxing. There may be cumbersome items as well as very minuscule things. Some may even have an element of an obscure nature like a set of false teeth. How and what do we choose to keep? Do we keep something as a way to hold on to the person that left us? Is there an emotion that is triggered just by seeing or touching it? Is it valuable or something trivial that has an attached memory that only we can relate to? Does something remind us of the home we once knew that no longer exists? A homesickness feeling may be eased by its presence? Is there a guilt or regret in letting things go or a feeling of obligation? Do we hope that we can pass on these obtained pieces of our heritage as a bridge from past to present to preserve family legacy to those who follow?Is it a way to not only say that your loved one existed but that you too existed as well? People say 'these are just things' and yes they are but a person you loved put meaning to them. I am not one to judge or help in this matter as I kept the teeth.
Anthony Goicolea
United States/Cuba
1971
Anthony Goicolea is a New York-based fine art photographer. Goicolea's photographs frequently deal with issues of androgyny, homosexuality, and child sexuality. Goicolea, Cuban-American and gay, was educated at the University of Georgia and studied painting, photography, and sculpture at that institution. He holds an MFA in fine arts from the Pratt Institute. He made his debut in 1999, and now shows work with Postmasters gallery in New York and Aurel Scheibler in Berlin, Germany. In 2005, he received the BMW-Award for Photography. Some of his work features photographs of "pre- to barely pubescent boys" (Art in America, Dec, 2001) in elaborately staged tableau settings, commonly showing multiple boys wearing traditional private school uniforms either engaged in school-life or recreation after school — but with often transgressive and erotic twists in their activities. Of great interest in these compositions is the fact that Goicolea himself portrays all of the boys in his photographs through the astute use of costumes, wigs, make-up, and post-production editing via the software Adobe Photoshop; "always looking uncannily like a boy on the edge of puberty" (The Advocate, August 14, 2001). Therefore, despite having numerous figures in them, Goicolea's photographs are actually very complex large-scale self-portraits, and are always done in a flawlessly realist manner. The pioneering fine-art photographer Cindy Sherman is an apparent influence on Goicolea's work, given her own extensive use of self-portraits and emphasis on sexually-charged narrative topics. Sherman and Goicolea have also had several joint exhibitions. His work can be strongly compared to similar manipulated and/or staged art photography featuring children and adolescents, such as that of Bernard Faucon, Loretta Lux, and Justine Kurland. Recently, Goicolea has also been producing and exhibiting his drawings, which follow much of the same subject matter as his photographs. He has also published several books. Goicolea is also represented by Gow Langsford Gallery based in Auckland, New Zealand.Source Wikipedia
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.”
Irving Penn
United States
1917 | † 2009
Irving Penn was born on June 16, 1917 in Plainfield, New Jersey, to Harry Penn and Sonia Greenberg. In 1922, Irving Penn's younger brother, Arthur Penn, was born, who would go on to become a film director and producer. Irving Penn attended the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts) from 1934 to 1938, where he studied drawing, painting, graphics, and industrial arts under Alexey Brodovitch. While still a student, Penn worked under Brodovitch at Harper's Bazaar, where several of Penn's drawings were published. Irving Penn worked for two years as a freelance designer and making his first amateur photographs before taking Brodovitch's position as the art director at Saks Fifth Avenue in 1940. Penn remained at Saks Fifth Avenue for a year before leaving to spend a year painting and taking photographs in Mexico and across the US. When Irving Penn returned to New York, Alexander Liberman offered him a position as an associate in the Vogue magazine Art Department, where Penn worked on layout before Liberman asked him to try his hand at photography for the magazine. Irving Penn photographed his first cover for Vogue magazine in 1943 and continued to work at the magazine throughout his career, shooting covers, portraits, still lifes, fashion, and photographic essays. In the 1950s, Penn founded his own studio in New York and began making advertising photographs. Over the years, Penn's list of clients grew to include General Foods, De Beers, Issey Miyake, and Clinique. Irving Penn met fashion model Lisa Fonssagrives at a photo shoot in 1947. In 1950, the two married at Chelsea Register Office, and two years later Lisa gave birth to their son, Tom Penn, who would go on to become a metal designer. Lisa Fonssagrives died in 1992. Irving Penn died aged 92 on October 7, 2009 at his home in Manhattan. Source: Wikipedia
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