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Laurent Dequick
Laurent Dequick
Laurent Dequick

Laurent Dequick

Country: France

Laurent Dequick is a professional architect in his forties. His photographic work has been influenced by architecture, since it is primarily focused on ideas surrounding the contemporary city and more specifically, urban sprawl. The photographer’s message is to accurately convey the impression of freneticism stemming from population density and activity in urban zones: “As you walk down the street, the lights, noises, traffic, hustle and bustle, and mix of smells are so striking that no single shot could capture all of it. So do we have to make choices? I don’t think so and I don’t want to.” To convey in images this “congestion” of urban life, Laurent Dequick does not hesitate to juxtapose, superimpose, or imbricate his shots. He fits together photographs representing architectural complexes, highways, and people, all with the same intensity. He condenses the images like the city condenses the sum of the lives of all of its inhabitants. His style is reminiscent of cubism in its rendering, which verges on abstraction in its representation of constant motion.

Source: Yellow Korner


The passing of time is a fascinating concept which happens all around us, at every single moment of every single day. French photographer Laurent Dequick decided to capture these fleeting seconds in a series of photographs entitled Vibrations Urbaines. Each image is a collective sequence of multiple photographs, superimposed together to visually reflect the chaos and congestion of large urban areas.

The series features colorful and energetic portraits of both New York and Berlin. Viewers might feel a bit hyper as they view the still photograph which so strongly convey the motion of cars zipping past and the life of people rushing by. Dequick says his work is “primarily a reflection on the contemporary city and more specifically the proliferation of modern urban space.” Through these compositions, the artist portrays the constant urban action and excitement that are generally challenging to communicate through just one still photograph.

Source: My Modern Met

 

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Helga Paris
Germany
1938
Helga Steffens, daughter of Gertrud Steffens and typesetter Wilhelm Steffens, was born just over a year before the outbreak of the Second World War in Gollnow, a small town then in the north of Germany. In May 1945 she celebrated her seventh birthday, while the war ended in defeat for Germany. Her father and two brothers were still away, but in the meantime frontier changes mandated by the victorious powers and large scale ethnic cleansing forced Helga's mother to flee with her two daughters. They ended up in Zossen, a small town a little to the south of Berlin. There she was raised by a community of mostly women, many of whom worked. She is introduced to photography by her aunts who take many photographs. In Zossen she went to school and successfully passed her School leaving exams in 1956. After this, till 1960, she studied fashion design at the School of Engineering for the Clothing Industry ("Berlin Ingenieurschule für Bekleidungsindustrie") in Berlin and undertook, still in Berlin, an internship at VEB Treffmodelle. After this she worked as a fashion lecturer and as a commercial artist. In 1960 she starts to take photographs with a 6x6 Flexaret camera. It was during this time that she met the painter Ronald Paris. They were married between 1961 and 1974. Through her husband she was now quickly able to establish contacts in the East German artistic scene of the time. By now she had also acquired a passion for photography. Like many of the German Democratic Republic's leading photographers, Helga Paris is often described as self-taught. She herself believes that much of her photographic passion and skill was acquired from two aunts who were themselves, enthusiastic photographers, constantly taking pictures through the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, which now Paris herself keeps carefully stored in a collection of show boxes adapted for the purpose. Paris began taking photographs seriously around 1967. She was influenced by the work of Edvard Munch, Max Beckmann, Francis Bacon, and Werner Held. Between 1967 and 1968 she worked in the photo laboratory of Walli Baucik. Her first freelance job, in 1969, was to photograph slaughtering at a home in Thüringen; in 1970 she shot fashion photographs for the youth magazine neues leben. In 1972 she joined the National Association of Visual Artists, which was virtually a prerequisite for success in what was now her chosen career. Her professional work is wide-ranging. In 1975 she photographed scenes from productions by Benno Besson at the Berlin Volksbühne ("People's Theatre"). She presented her first personal exhibition in 1978, in Dresden at the Fine Arts Academy. By the 1980s her work was concentrated increasingly on people and streetscapes, initially in Berlin where many of her subjects were neighbours and friends. She encountered greater difficulty when undertaking an equivalent project in Halle where the people she photographed were strangers and reacted with hostility. She then took time to talk to people and ask before photographing them. Under those circumstances, citizens of Halle agreed to be photographed, though there was still reluctance to be photographed with Halle streets as background at a time when a major and long-running redevelopment project scheme involving extensive destruction of old houses was leaving the centre of the city looking badly damaged. Her 1986 exhibition Buildings and Faces: Halle 1983-1985, planned for the city's Marktschlößchen Gallery was cancelled a few days before the scheduled opening date because her pictures gave publicity to the city's misguided building policy. By the time it was cancelled a catalogue and exhibition labels for the photographs had already been printed. Her career as a free-lance photographer survived the changes of 1989/90 which led to the end of the German Democratic Republic, formally in October 1990 with German reunification, and for some commentators and others her photographs from the East German period have gained a wider interest as the period they depict has receded into history. Since 1996 Helga Paris has been a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts. In 2003 her twelve-part exhibition Self images 1981-1988 in the context of the Art in the German Democratic Republic exhibition drew much interest.Source: Wikipedia Buildings and Faces “I’ll take Halle” was Helga Paris’s spontaneous reaction when, at a meeting with colleagues and artists in East Berlin in the early 1980s, fellow photographer Arno Fischer came up with the idea of photographing East Germany systematically as photographers had done in the 1930s and 1940s for the Farm Security Administration on behalf of the US government. Helga Paris rose to the challenge and began to document Halle on her own initiative. The self-taught photographer had previously carried out several photo stories on themes relating to urban and neighborhood life as part of a personal project. She drove from East Berlin to Halle many times between 1983 and 1985. As her daughter lived there at the time, she had developed an affinity to the town. Helga Paris was fascinated by the endangered former beauty of the buildings and considered it her duty to preserve it in pictures before it disappeared completely. She decided to photograph Halle as if it were a “foreign town in a foreign country”. In doing so, she looked at it through the eyes of an explorer, who is inspired and galvanized by a new environment. She started off taking snapshots of urban life, focusing on streets with houses and passers-by. However, the local people, who felt exposed in their “everyday misery”, did not always react favorably. This prompted her to reconsider her approach and eventually to divide the project into portraits of buildings and portraits of people. Helga Paris consciously limited the moment between making contact with her subjects and pressing the shutter to ensure that their gazes were as open as possible. As a result, they seem to be poised in the very second in which they briefly pause for the photographer, but have not yet engaged mentally with the photographic situation. At the time, Halle was primarily putting money into building modern apartments, and the old town center offered a desolate picture with crumbling facades, including those of listed buildings, half-untiled roofs, and ramshackle roads and squares. All this is revealed in Helga Paris’s photographs in high-contrast black-and-white, although it was never her intention to denounce the state of things. However, the SED party leadership found that the picture of the town conveyed in Helga Paris’s images was too negative. As a result, she was barred from opening her exhibition Buildings and Faces at the last minute. Not until 1990, after German reunification, was it allowed to be shown in Halle.Source: Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation
Erberto Zani
Italy
1978
Erberto Zani (Parma, Italy, 1978) is a journalist and documentary photographer who specializes in human rights issues. Graduate at school of applied Arts Paolo Toschi in graphic design, after the studies in History of Art at University of Parma he worked as a photographer in advertisement sector (1998-2004). Journalist and photographer for the newspaper Gazzetta di Parma (2004-2007) and editor in chief for some local magazines, he becomes freelance in 2008. During these years he documented the destruction created by the earthquake in Haiti, the climate crises in Sahel, the Maha Kumbh Mela in India, the daily life inside the ship breaking yards in Bangladesh, the exodus of Rohingya from Myanmar, the refugee camps in Lebanon, Greece and Uganda, the effects of the war in Marawi city / Philippines. Actually, Zani is working on two long term documentary projects, both around the world: Dark World, about the illegal mineral's extraction, and Survivors, about acid attack victims. Awarded in several international contests, his images are published on several books and dozens of international magazines. He lives in Basel, Switzerland. Books Urban Visions (ed. Blurb, 2021), Elemental Fashion (ed. Blurb,2019), Exodus (ed. Blurb, 2018), Kied Pologo (ed. Stamperia, 2017), Aftermath (ed. Stamperia, 2016), Black World (ed. Stamperia, 2015), Maha Kumbh Mela (ed. Stamperia, 2014), Tsiry (ed. Stamperia, 2014), Babanagar-Colombia (ed. Stamperia, 2013), Sahel (ed. Stamperia, 2012), Hope (ed. Stamperia, 2011), Haiti, fragments (ed. Stamperia, 2010), Drops of Life (ed. Stamperia, 2010), Da Borgo San Donnino al Passo della Cisa (ed. Publiprint, 2006). Publications WHO (World Health Organization), UNESCO (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization), USAID (United States Agency for International Development), AMURT Global Network, John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Development Gateway, Id21 (Institute of Development Studies University of Sussex), Planeta Salud, ICF Macro, GTZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit), UNIPID (Finnish University Partnership for International Development), March (Maternal Reproductive & Child Health), The Appalachian Voice, AIP (Journal of Chemical Physics), Gazzetta di Parma, L'Informazione di Parma, Diario, Africa, Nigrizia, Popoli, Redattore Sociale, Repubblica.it, Treatment Action Campaign, CORE Group, Solidarietà e Cooperazione CIPSI, Witness Journal, Tsiry Parma Onlus, E gli Altri? Onlus, Solidarietà Muungano Onlus, Dodho Magazine, Phosmag, Terra Nuova, L'Espresso, Rex Shutterstock agency, Associated Press agency, Fotodom agency, Sipa agency, Scanpix agency, Puzzlepix agency, Le Journal du Dimanche, DeStandaard, Enough Project, Life Force Magazine, LesEchos.fr, vdi-nachtrichten.com, 20 minutes.fr, stimmenafrikas.de, wisdom wander.pl, Loveless, Illume Oy, Global Witness, QCode magazine, Street Art United States, Art Works Projects, Libéma Fun Factory, TheJournal.ie, MSN.com, Fotopolis.com, Mymodernmet.com, Traveller24.com, The Telegraph, Metro.se, All About Photo, Click Magazine, Musagetes Foundation, Vogue Italia, Alamy.com, DeAbyDay, Rai3 Tg3 Mondo, FotoNostrum, Camilo Egas Museum - MuNa, DocuMagazine, Korper magazine. Awards All About Photo: 2nd place Portrait, 2021 Art Limited: 3rd place in Reportage & Press Awards, 2021 Umbra International Photography Awards: Main category "People" winner, 2020 Smithsonian Photo Contest: Finalist, 2020 Art Limited Awards: 1st place in Reportage & Press Awards 2019 Chromatic Photography Awards: 1st place in Wildlife / Animal and 2nd place in Portrait, 2019 PX3 - Prix de la Photographie Paris: 1st place in Advertising / Book cover and 1st place in Book / People categories, 2019 Moscow Photography Awards: Gold medal in "Book / People" category , 2018 Monochrome Photography Awards: 1st and 2nd place, category "Photojournalism", 2017 IPA - International Photography Awards: 2nd place, category Book Documentary, 2016 PX3 - Prix de la Photographie Paris: Gold medal in Professional Book Documentary and Bronze medal in Professional Book People category, 2016 Exhibitions 2021 Town Hall, Möhlin, Switzerland (30/04 - 30/06) 2020 Museo Camilo Egas - MuNa, Quito, Ecuador, 16/10 - 05/12 2019 MIPA - Malta International Photo Award exhibition, Malta Postal Museum 16/02 - 16/03 (Valletta, Malta) 2018 ImagOrbetello Festival, Sale di Piazza del Popolo, 25/08 - 08/09 Orbetello (Italy), 2018 PX3 - Paris Photography Prize winner’s exhibition at the Espace Beaurepaire (Paris, 10-14 July) 2017 ImagOrbetello Festival, Sala Imago, Piazza del Popolo, Orbetello (Italy) 2017 "Black World" book at Image Text Ithaca Symposium, Ithaca College Campus (June 30th)2017 "Black World" book at Reading room at MAGNUM Foundation, New York City (June 17th) 2017 "Black World" book at Carnegie Museum of Art, PGH Photo Fair, Pittsburgh (29-30 April) 2016 Photo "Finding coltan" for permanent collection at The Design Museum, Londo, UK 2014 IPA Best of Show, Thonglor - Roof top gallery, Bangkok, Thailand 2009 "Sguardi a Sud-Est", Sorbolo (PR, Italy) Centro Civico 2007 "Sguardi a Sud-Est", Fidenza (PR, Italy) Palazzo Orsoline.
Sarah and Lucy Jenkins
Air Bare is an award-winning, visual art drone photography collaboration created in Port Douglas, Queensland in October 2020. They are the mother/daughter team of Sarah and Lucy Jenkins, with Sarah now living in Fremantle Australia, and Lucy in London UK. They collaborate frequently and draw on each other’s strengths to develop ideas to create and execute interesting perspectives and unique images from above. Sarah has Limb Girdle Muscular Dystrophy, diagnosed at age 30, and is now confined to a wheelchair. She has very little strength in her hands and arms, so a conventional camera is difficult to use. The drone, however, is operated with a remote control in her lap, and using just her thumbs and fingers she can fly it and take images. Lucy studied architecture at the University of Melbourne in 2015. She graduated in 2022 and was awarded the Bates Smart Medal Graduate Prize for Outstanding Design for her thesis 'Service Disruption'. She has worked for world-renowned architectural firm Foster + Partners in London since June 2023 and became fully qualified in September 2024. In November 2024, she became a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). Sarah and Lucy, who are both self-taught, won their first award at the Boston Drone Film Festival in March 2021. From there they went on to win Capture Magazine’s Australasia’s Top Emerging Photographer’s Awards ‘Single Shot’ category in May 2021. They have been acknowledged in Australia and internationally ever since. In 2022 they were invited to collaborate with the German publishing company teNeues for the book, ‘Minimalism in Photography’. They were one of 15 international minimalist photographers chosen, many being world acclaimed in their field. They held their first hugely successful solo exhibition at the Moores Gallery Art Space in Fremantle, Australia in February 2024. All About Photo Competitions AAP Magazine 56 Shadows
Lewis Carroll
United Kingdom
1832 | † 1898
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (27 January 1832 - 14 January 1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English writer of world-famous children's fiction, notably Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass. He was noted for his facility at word play, logic and fantasy. The poems Jabberwocky and The Hunting of the Snark are classified in the genre of literary nonsense. He was also a mathematician, photographer and Anglican deacon. Carroll came from a family of high church Anglicans, and developed a long relationship with Christ Church, Oxford, where he lived for most of his life as a scholar and teacher. Alice Liddell, daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, Henry Liddell, is widely identified as the original for Alice in Wonderland, though Carroll always denied this. Photography (1856–1880) In 1856, Dodgson took up the new art form of photography under the influence first of his uncle Skeffington Lutwidge, and later of his Oxford friend Reginald Southey. He soon excelled at the art and became a well-known gentleman-photographer, and he seems even to have toyed with the idea of making a living out of it in his very early years. A study by Roger Taylor and Edward Wakeling exhaustively lists every surviving print, and Taylor calculates that just over half of his surviving work depicts young girls, though about 60% of his original photographic portfolio is now missing. Dodgson also made many studies of men, women, boys, and landscapes; his subjects also include skeletons, dolls, dogs, statues, paintings, and trees. His pictures of children were taken with a parent in attendance and many of the pictures were taken in the Liddell garden because natural sunlight was required for good exposures. He also found photography to be a useful entrée into higher social circles. During the most productive part of his career, he made portraits of notable sitters such as John Everett Millais, Ellen Terry, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Julia Margaret Cameron, Michael Faraday, Lord Salisbury, and Alfred Tennyson. By the time that Dodgson abruptly ceased photography (1880, over 24 years), he had established his own studio on the roof of Tom Quad, created around 3,000 images, and was an amateur master of the medium, though fewer than 1,000 images have survived time and deliberate destruction. He stopped taking photographs because keeping his studio working was too time-consuming. He used the wet collodion process; commercial photographers who started using the dry-plate process in the 1870s took pictures more quickly.[62] Popular taste changed with the advent of Modernism, affecting the types of photographs that he produced. He died of pneumonia following influenza on 14 January 1898 at his sisters' home, "The Chestnuts", in Guildford. He was two weeks away from turning 66 years old. His funeral was held at the nearby St Mary's Church. He is buried in Guildford at the Mount Cemetery.Source: Wikipedia
Paolo Roversi
Italy
1947
Paolo Roversi is an Italian-born fashion photographer based in Paris. His work is distinguished by soft, monochromatic images of women, with bodies veiled in shadow and captured with careful care to emphasize stunning facial features. Photography goes beyond the limits of reality and illusion. It brushes up against another life, another dimension, revealing not only what is there but what is not there. -- Paolo Roversi Paolo Roversi, who was born in Ravenna in 1947, became interested in photography as a teenager during a family vacation in Spain in 1964. Back at home, he established a darkroom in a convenient cellar with another keen amateur, local postman Battista Minguzzi, and began developing and printing his own black-and-white work. The meeting with a local professional photographer, Nevio Natali, was crucial: in Nevio's studio, Roversi spent many hours completing an important apprenticeship as well as a close and lasting friendship. In 1970, he began working with the Associated Press, and his first assignment was to cover Ezra Pound's burial in Venice. During the same year, Paolo Roversi founded his first portrait studio in Ravenna, capturing local celebrities and their families. In 1971, he met Peter Knapp, the legendary Art Director of Elle magazine, by chance in Ravenna. Paolo visited Paris in November 1973 at Knapp's invitation and has never returned. Paolo began working as a reporter for the Huppert Agency in Paris, but through his friends, he gradually began to explore fashion photography. But the photographers who piqued his interest at the time were reporters. Paolo Roversi knew nothing about fashion or fashion photography at the moment. Later, he discovered the work of Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin, and many others. In 1974, the British photographer Lawrence Sackmann hired Paolo as an assistant. Paolo endured Sackmann for nine months: "Sackmann was very difficult. Most assistants only lasted a week before running away. But he taught me everything I needed to know in order to become a professional photographer. Sackmann taught me creativity. He was always trying new things even if he did always use the same camera and flash set-up. He was almost military-like in his approach to preparation for a shoot. But he always used to say ‘your tripod and your camera must be well-fixed but your eyes and mind should be free’." Then he went freelance, doing small jobs for magazines like Elle and Depeche Mode until Marie Claire published his first major fashion story. When I take a picture using window light, I always think about what a long trip the light is making to reach my subject. -- Paolo Roversi Roversi's portfolio now includes celebrity and fashion photography. He has been a consistent contributor to American Vogue, and Vogue Italia, W, Vanity Fair, Interview and i-D. He has also photographed advertising campaigns for Yohji Yamamoto, Comme des Garçons, Dior, Cerruti, GIADA, Yves Saint Laurent, Valentino and Alberta Ferreti. Continuing to be a major force in contemporary fashion, Paolo Roversi is notable for his use of 8x10 Polaroid film, which is no longer produced. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions worldwide, including at Pace MacGill Gallery in New York, James Gallery in Moscow, and Comme des Garçons in Tokyo, Rencontres d'Arles festival, France (2008), among others.
Jacob Riis
Denmark/United States
1849 | † 1914
Jacob August Riis was a Danish-American social reformer, "muckraking" journalist, and social documentary photographer. He contributed significantly to the cause of urban reform in America at the turn of the twentieth century. He is known for using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the impoverished in New York City; those impoverished New Yorkers were the subject of most of his prolific writings and photography. He endorsed the implementation of "model tenements" in New York with the help of humanitarian Lawrence Veiller. Additionally, as one of the most famous proponents of the newly practicable casual photography, he is considered one of the fathers of photography due to his very early adoption of flash. While living in New York, Riis experienced poverty and became a police reporter writing about the quality of life in the slums. He attempted to alleviate the bad living conditions of poor people by exposing their living conditions to the middle and upper classes. Riis had for some time been wondering how to show the squalor of which he wrote more vividly than his words could express. He tried sketching but was incompetent at this. Camera lenses of the 1880s were slow as was the emulsion of photographic plates; photography thus did not seem to be of any use for reporting about conditions of life in dark interiors. In early 1887, however, Riis was startled to read that "a way had been discovered to take pictures by flashlight. The darkest corner might be photographed that way." The German innovation, by Adolf Miethe and Johannes Gaedicke, flash powder was a mixture of magnesium with potassium chlorate and some antimony sulfide for added stability; the powder was used in a pistol-like device that fired cartridges. This was the introduction of flash photography. Recognizing the potential of the flash, Riis informed a friend, Dr. John Nagle, chief of the Bureau of Vital Statistics in the City Health Department who was also a keen amateur photographer. Nagle found two more photographer friends, Henry Piffard and Richard Hoe Lawrence, and the four of them began to photograph the slums. Their first report was published in the New York newspaper The Sun on February 12, 1888; it was an unsigned article by Riis which described its author as "an energetic gentleman, who combines in his person, though not in practice, the two dignities of deacon in a Long Island church and a police reporter in New York." The "pictures of Gotham's crime and misery by night and day" are described as "a foundation for a lecture called 'The Other Half: How It Lives and Dies in New York.' to give at church and Sunday school exhibitions, and the like." The article was illustrated by twelve-line drawings based on the photographs. Riis and his photographers were among the first Americans to use flash photography. Pistol lamps were dangerous and looked threatening, and would soon be replaced by another method for which Riis lit magnesium powder on a frying pan. The process involved removing the lens cap, igniting the flash powder, and replacing the lens cap; the time taken to ignite the flash powder sometimes allowed a visible image blurring created by the flash. Riis's first team soon tired of the late hours, and Riis had to find other help. Both his assistants were lazy and one was dishonest, selling plates for which Riis had paid. Riis sued him in court successfully. Nagle suggested that Riis should become self-sufficient, so in January 1888 Riis paid $25 for a 4×5 box camera, plate holders, a tripod and equipment for developing and printing. He took the equipment to the potter's field cemetery on Hart Island to practice, making two exposures. The result was seriously overexposed but successful. For three years, Riis combined his own photographs with others commissioned of professionals, donations by amateurs and purchased lantern slides, all of which formed the basis for his photographic archive. Because of the nighttime work, he was able to photograph the worst elements of the New York slums, the dark streets, tenement apartments, and "stale-beer" dives, and documented the hardships faced by the poor and criminal, especially in the vicinity of notorious Mulberry Street. A particularly important effort by Riis was his exposure of the condition of New York's water supply. His five-column story "Some Things We Drink", in the August 21, 1891, edition of the New York Evening Sun, included six photographs (later lost). Riis wrote: "I took my camera and went up in the watershed photographing my evidence wherever I found it. Populous towns sewered directly into our drinking water. I went to the doctors and asked how many days a vigorous cholera bacillus may live and multiply in running water. About seven, said they. My case was made." The story resulted in the purchase by New York City of areas around the New Croton Reservoir, and may well have saved New Yorkers from an epidemic of cholera. Riis tried hard to have the slums around Five Points demolished and replaced with a park. His writings resulted in the Drexel Committee's investigation of unsafe tenements; this resulted in the Small Park Act of 1887. Riis was not invited to the eventual opening of the park on June 15, 1897, but went all the same, together with Lincoln Steffens. In the last speech, the street cleaning commissioner credited Riis for the park and led the public in giving him three cheers of "Hooray, Jacob Riis!" Other parks also were created, and Riis was popularly credited with them as well.Source: Wikipedia
Ferdinando Scianna
Ferdinando Scianna (born 1943) is an Italian photographer. Scianna won the Prix Nadar in 1966 and became a full member of Magnum Photos in 1989. He has produced numerous books. Scianna took up photography while studying literature, philosophy and art history at the University of Palermo in the 1960s. He moved to Milan in 1966 and started working as a photographer for L'Europeo in 1967, becoming a journalist there in 1973. Scianna wrote on politics for Le Monde diplomatique and on literature and photography for La Quinzaine Littéraire. He first joined Magnum Photos in 1982, becoming a full member in 1989. He took up fashion photography in the late 1980s. His first work, in 1987, was to photograph Marpessa Hennink for Dolce & Gabbana's advertising campaign for their Fall/Winter collection, clothing which was inspired by Sicily.Source: Wikipedia Ferdinando Scianna started taking photographs in the 1960s while studying literature, philosophy and art history at the University of Palermo. It was then that he began to photograph the Sicilian people systematically. Feste Religiose in Sicilia (1965) included an essay by the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia, and it was the first of many collaborations with famous writers. Scianna moved to Milan in 1966. The following year he started working for the weekly magazine L’Europeo, first as a photographer, then as a journalist from 1973. He also wrote on politics for Le Monde Diplomatique and on literature and photography for La Quinzaine Littéraire. In 1977 he published Les Siciliens in France and La Villa Dei Mostri in Italy. During this period, Scianna met Henri Cartier-Bresson, and in 1982 he joined Magnum Photos. He entered the field of fashion photography in the late 1980s and at the end of the decade he published a retrospective, Le Forme del Caos (1989). Scianna returned to exploring the meaning of religious rituals with Viaggio a Lourdes (1995), then two years later he published a collection of images of sleepers – Dormire Forse Sognare (To Sleep, Perchance to Dream). His portraits of the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges were published in 1999, and in the same year, the exhibition Niños del Mundo displayed Scianna’s images of children from around the world. In 2002 Scianna completed Quelli di Bagheria, a book on his home town in Sicily, in which he tries to reconstruct the atmosphere of his youth through writings and photographs of Bagheria and the people who live there.Source: Magnum Photos
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Anastasia Samoylova is an American artist whose photographic practice is shaped by close observation and a deep attentiveness to place. Working between documentary and formal exploration, she photographs landscapes, architecture, and everyday scenes with a sensitivity to light, structure, and atmosphere. Since relocating to Miami in 2016, her work has increasingly focused on how environments—both natural and built—carry social, cultural, and emotional traces. We asked her a few questions about her practice and her way of seeing, to better understand the thoughts and experiences that shape her work—while allowing the images themselves to remain open and speak in their own time.
Exclusive Interview with Marijn Fidder
Marijn Fidder is a Dutch documentary photographer whose work powerfully engages with current affairs and contemporary social issues. Driven by a deep sense of social justice, she uses photography to speak on behalf of the voiceless and to advocate for the rights of those who are most vulnerable. Her images have been widely published in major international outlets including National Geographic, CNN Style, NRC Handelsblad, Volkskrant, GUP New Talent, and ZEIT Magazin. Her long-term commitment to disability rights—particularly through years of work in Uganda—culminated in her acclaimed project Inclusive Nation, which earned her the title of Photographer of the Year 2025 at the All About Photo Awards. She is also the recipient of multiple prestigious honors, including awards from World Press Photo and the Global Peace Photo Award. We asked her a few questions about her life and work.
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