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Enter AAP Magazine 54 Nature: Landscape, Wildlife, Flora & Fauna
Enter AAP Magazine 54 Nature: Landscape, Wildlife, Flora & Fauna
Robi Chakraborty
Robi Chakraborty
Robi Chakraborty

Robi Chakraborty

Country: United States/India
Birth: 1959

Originally from India, Robi Chakraborty studied photography under the prestigious O.P. Sharma at Triveni Kala Sangam Photography in New Delhi. He began his career doing both commercial and press photography in the early 1980s, but through wanderlust and with a spirit to explore, Robi became drawn to photographing the people in the cities and villages of his native India. Taking roads less traveled, Robi sought out cultures and ways of life that were quickly becoming lost in the contemporary, more homogenized world of today.

With his knack for finding people and places where tradition survives in the face of modernity, Robi delves below the surface and succinctly and eloquently captures moments in time that wonderfully illustrate the connection forged with the peoples and cultures that he encounters on his journeys. His work tells his subjects' stories in a way that is relatable and invites the viewer directly into their worlds.

Having lived in India, Nepal, Africa and the US, Robi portrays his global view of the world through his photography by celebrating both the diversity of his subjects yet beautifully revealing the striking similarities and capturing the humanity that we can all relate to.

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Athina Alkini
Greece
2004
Athina Alkini is a visual artist, born in Athens, Greece in 2004. She is currently studying in the Athens School of Fine Arts. Alkini utilizes various media in her artistic practice such as photography and sculpting. She has participated in art exhibitions in Greece and Malta, and has been awarded by the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens. Her photography series MAMA has been exhibited at the Visual Arts International Festival of Thessaloniki in 2024. In 2025, Alkini was selected for the ΕΚΕΙΝΕΣ: The Women of Greek Photography exhibition by Photometria Photography Center and Photometria Festival, on the occasion of the International Women’s Day, with her photography series MAMA. Since 2023, she has been writing and editing cultural and art related content for the Athens Center for Indian and Indo-Hellenic Studies of the Hellenic-Indian Society for Culture and Development. In her conceptual photography, Alkini explores scenarios linked to emotional states and interpersonal relationships. About the Series: MAMA MAMA is a series of photographs referring to a mother-daughter relationship through the lens of loss. This series is based on the duality of that bond; profound love and immense sorrow. It aims to express the incomplete restoration of moments and images of childhood time and space, combining the contexts of motherhood and loss. Alkini utilizes specific objects, places and people to form memory-like scenarios, based on her journey of reflecting on the relationship and reconnecting with her mother in the present. Every image in this series corresponds to a specific memory or emotion, functioning as part of a diptych: the past and present of this relationship. The visual elements used are deeply personal, but also serve as symbols, linked to loss, grief, childhood, and family. Alkini strives for the series to become part of a collective memory and shared journey, inviting viewers to reflect on their own connections to love and loss. Awarded Photographer of the Week - Week 12
Angelika Kollin
Estonia
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Angelika Kollin is a 44 year old Estonian photographer currently based in Tampa, Florida. She is self-taught and engages with her passion for photography and art as a tool of exploration of interhuman connections, intimacy, and/or the absence of such. Angelika has spent the last 8 years living in African countries (Ghana, Namibia, South Africa), where she explored the same topic in a variety of different cultures and economic conditions. More and more it strengthens her belief that despite many circumstances in life, the one thing that shapes us the most is our relationship with our parents. Through intense artistic evolution she has arrived at her current and ongoing project You Are My Mother/Father. Statement: My main project for the year 2020 became You are my Mother that subsequently expanded into You are my Father. As the covid pandemic rolled over the world, many of us found ourself going back to basics and spending more times with our families. I started photographing my project in April, while we were still in complete lockdown in Cape Town,South Africa. Initially I only wanted to document an act of acceptance and joining I witnessed between a mother and her adult daughter. Afterwards I continued to explore same "story" in other mother/child connections, examining the impact it has on my own family life and on my audience. There is no groundbreaking story occurring in my project, and yet, at least for myself, I am learning to understand the significance and value of connection to our family and how it shapes us for the rest of our life.
Jeff Brouws
United States
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Jeff Brouws, born in San Francisco in 1955, is a self-taught artist. Pursuing photography since age 13, where he roamed the railroad and industrial corridors of the South Bay Peninsula, Brouws has compiled a visual survey of America's evolving rural, urban and suburban cultural landscapes. Using single photographs as subtle narratives and compiling typologies to index the nation's character, he revels in the "readymades" found in many of these environments. Influenced by the New Topographic Movement, the artist books of Ed Ruscha (to whom Brouws paid homage with his Twentysix Abandoned Gasoline Stations project in 1992) as well as the writings of cultural geographers like J.B. Jackson, Dolores Hayden, John Stilgoe, Mike Davis and Leo Marx, Brouws has combined anthropological inquiry with a somber aesthetic vision mining the overlooked, the obsolete, and the mundane. Initially engaged with what Walker Evans termed the "historical contemporary" along America's secondary highways beginning in the late 1980s, over the following twenty years Brouws has extended this inquiry into the everyday places occupied by most Americans – the franchised landscapes of strip malls, homogenized housing tracts and fast food chains. Since moving to the Northeast in the late 1990s, Brouws has also investigated inner city areas, abandoned manufacturing sites, and other commercial ruins found in Buffalo, Detroit, Cleveland and Youngstown. His photographs of these discarded spaces—the byproducts of de-industrialization, white flight, disinvestment, and failed urban policy—suggest an underlying disparity throughout a country that purports economic equality and social justice for all. Alongside his photographic practice, for the past thirty years Brouws has researched and written about the historic and aesthetic development of railroad photography in America, authoring and editing numerous books on the subject including The Call of Trains: Railroad Photographs by Jim Shaughnessy, A Passion for Trains: The Railroad Photography of Richard Steinheimer, and his most recent publication (edited with Wendy Burton) Some Vernacular Railroad Photographs. In 2013 Brouws (along with co-editors Wendy Burton and Hermann Zschiegner and authors Phil Taylor and Mark Rawlinson) published Various Small Books: Referencing the Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha (MIT Press). This was a multi-year, collaborative project involving ninety artists from around the world. Honoring Ruscha’s seminal books from the 1960s and 70s like Twentysix Gasoline Stations, VSB went on to become the defacto catalog for the Ed Ruscha: Books & Co exhibition staged at the Gagosian Gallery, New York and the Museum Brandhorst in Munich. Brouws’s photography is represented by The Robert Mann Gallery, The Robert Koch Gallery, The Robert Klein Gallery, and The Craig Krull Gallery. His work is in numerous private and public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Princeton University Art Museum and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Tariq Zaidi
United Kingdom
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F. Bessma Rhea
United States
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Rachel Nixon
United Kingdom/Canada
Rachel Nixon is a British-Canadian fine art photographer – and former journalist – based in Vancouver. Having lived and worked across continents and cultures, she explores issues such as a desire for connection with one’s heritage, as well as secrecy, isolation and memory. She is intrigued by the visual poetry of everyday life and intuitively seeks out images speaking to beauty and broader messages in the seemingly mundane. In 2019, Rachel graduated with honours from the VanArts professional photography program. Since then, her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and she has received a number of accolades including being a four-time category winner in the Julia Margaret Cameron Awards. In 2024, she was named among Dodho Magazine’s top 100 fine art photographers. Rachel has earned attention for her series ''The Garden of Maggie Victoria'', which revives the story of her forgotten great-grandmother through collages integrating archive and contemporary images. In 2023, the series was selected for Blue Sky Gallery’s Pacific Northwest Drawers, and designated a finalist in Critical Mass and the Royal Photographic Society’s IPE 165. Before committing full-time to visual art, Rachel had a 20-year career as a journalist in the UK, US and Canada for the BBC, CBC and Microsoft where she developed and ran digital news services that reached millions. Her passion for storytelling, love of innovation and experimentation, and drive for excellence now extend to her photographic work. Rachel holds a first-class degree from the University of Oxford in Modern Languages. Her wide-ranging international experience offers a unique perspective on identity, place and belonging, and the connections we share despite polarized times.
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