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FINAL DAYS TO WIN A SOLO EXHIBITION IN MAY 2026
FINAL DAYS TO WIN A SOLO EXHIBITION IN MAY 2026
Rafał Michalak
Rafał Michalak
Rafał Michalak

Rafał Michalak

Country: Poland
Birth: 1971

Lives and works in Wroclaw, Poland. He studied political science and public relations. Graduate of Academy of Art and Design in Wroclaw with a Master of Arts (Media Art Department). A member of The Association of Polish Art Photographers (ZPAF).

He has been associated with the advertising industry and commercial photography for years. In his everyday work he deals with brand communication issues as well as visual identity development for companies and corporations. At the same time, he is actively engaged in creating his own original photography, thereafter presented in exhibitions and published in trade magazines. Winner of many photographic praises and commendations.

Human being as individuality and its place in the so fast altering world are the key factors of Michalak’s photographic research. In his photography he is mostly consumed with transgression understood as a conscious and intentional exceeding of bounds and limits that we impose on ourselves or encounter. At the same time, it provides a way to learn more about the hidden depths and makes it possible to experience reality from different points of view. Transgressive approach has characterised Michalak’s personal style of representation, regardless of used technique and medium, ever since he knowingly engaged in fine-art photography. Transgression determines his personal choices in terms of subjects he approaches, and even more so, the message, i.e. the idea behind a photograph, which he believes to be essential.

Website

@rmichalak

 

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Mitch Epstein
United States
1952
Mitchell Epstein (born 1952) is an American fine-art photographer, among the first to make significant use of color. Epstein's books include Sunshine Hotel (2019), Rocks and Clouds (2018), New York Arbor, (2013) Berlin (2011); American Power (2009); Mitch Epstein: Work ( 2006); Recreation: American Photographs 1973-1988 (2005); and Family Business (2003), which won the 2004 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award. Epstein's work has been exhibited and published extensively in the United States and Europe, and collected by numerous major museums, including New York's Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Tate Modern in London. He has also worked as a director, cinematographer, and production designer on several films, including Dad, Salaam Bombay!, and Mississippi Masala. Epstein was born and raised in a Jewish family in Holyoke, Massachusetts. He graduated from Williston Academy, where he studied with artist and bookmaker Barry Moser. In the early 1970s he studied at Union College, New York; Rhode Island School of Design, Rhode Island, and the Cooper Union, New York, where he was a student of photographer Garry Winogrand. By the mid-1970s, Epstein had abandoned his academic studies and begun to travel, embarking on a photographic exploration of the United States. Ten of the photographs he made during this period were in a 1977 group exhibition at Light Gallery in New York. In 1978, he journeyed to India with his future wife, director Mira Nair, where he was a producer, set designer, and cinematographer on several films, including Salaam Bombay! and India Cabaret. His book In Pursuit of India is a compilation of his Indian photographs from this period. From 1992 to 1995, Epstein photographed in Vietnam, which resulted in an exhibition of this work at Wooster Gardens in New York, along with a book titled Vietnam: A Book of Changes. “I don’t know that Mitch Epstein’s glorious photographs record all of what is salient in end-of-the-twentieth century Vietnam,” wrote Susan Sontag for his book jacket, “for it’s been more than two decades since my two stays there. I can testify that his images confirm what moved and troubled me then… and offer shrewd and poignant glimpses into the costs of imposing a certain modernity. This is beautiful, authoritative work by an extremely intelligent and gifted photographer.” Reviewing an exhibition of the Vietnam pictures for Art in America, Peter Von Ziegesar writes, “In a show full of small pleasures, little prepares one for the stunning epiphany contained in Perfume Pagoda… Few photographers have managed to make an image so loaded and so beautiful at once.” Having lived and traveled beyond the United States for over a decade, Epstein began to spend more time in his adopted home of New York City. His 1999 series The City investigated the relationship between public and private life in New York. Reviewing The City exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins in New York, Vince Aletti wrote that the pictures “[are] as assured as they are ambitious.” In 1999, Epstein returned to his hometown of Holyoke, Massachusetts, to record the demise of his father's two businesses—a retail furniture store and a low-rent real estate empire. The resulting project assembled large-format photographs, video, archival materials, interviews and writing by the artist. The book Family Business, which combined all of these elements, won the 2004 Krazna-Kraus Best Photography Book of the Year award. In 2004, his work was exhibited during evening screenings at Rencontres d'Arles festival, France. From 2004 to 2009, Epstein investigated energy production and consumption in the United States, photographing in and around various energy production sites. This series, titled American Power, questions the meaning and make-up of power—electrical and political. Epstein made a monograph of the American Power pictures (2009), in which he wrote that he was often stopped by corporate security guards and once interrogated by the FBI for standing on public streets and pointing his camera at energy infrastructure. The large-scale prints from this series have been exhibited worldwide. In his Art in America review, Dave Coggins wrote that Epstein “grounds his images… in the human condition, combining empathy with sharp social observation, politics with sheer beauty.” In the New York Times, Martha Schwendener wrote: “What is interesting, beyond the haunting, complicated beauty and precision of these images, is Mr. Epstein's ability to merge what have long been considered opposing terms: photo-conceptualism and so-called documentary photography. He utilizes the supersize scale and saturated color of conceptualism, and his odd, implied narratives strongly recall the work of artists like Jeff Wall.” In 2008, Epstein won the Berlin Prize in Arts and Letters from the American Academy in Berlin. Awarded a 6-month residency, he moved to Berlin with his wife and daughter from January to June 2008. The photographs he made of significant historical sites were published in the monograph Berlin (Steidl and The American Academy in Berlin, 2011).Source: Wikipedia In 2013, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis commissioned and premiered a theatrical rendition of Epstein’s American Power photographic series. A collaboration between Epstein and cellist Eric Friedlander, the performance combined original live music, storytelling, video, and projected photographs and archival material. Epstein and Friedlander also performed at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio (2014), and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2015). His new series, Property Rights, was exhibited at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York and Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne in the fall of 2019 and at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas in 2020-2021. Recent solo exhibitions include: Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow (2020), Museum Helmond, Netherlands (2019), Andreas Murkudis, Berlin; Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York; Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire, Paris (2016-17); as well as Fondation A Stichting in Brussels (2013); Sikkema Jenkins & Co., NY (2012); Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne (2012); Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris (2011); Kunstmuseum Bonn (2011); and Musee de l'Elysee in Lausanne (2011). In 2020, Mitch Epstein was inducted as an Academician to the National Academy of Design. In 2011, Epstein won the Prix Pictet for American Power. Among his other awards are the Berlin Prize in Arts and Letters from the American Academy in Berlin (2008), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2003).Source: mitchepstein.net At Cooper Union, Epstein was a student of photographer Garry Winogrand and was influenced both by Winogrand and William Eggleston's use of color. Epstein helped pioneer the redefinition of color photography as art form, as he was one of the earlier practitioners of fine-art color photography. He is well known for documenting his projects as books, which he feels allows him to form a narrative structure for his photographs. Epstein shoots film, as he believes he would not get the tonal rendering and detail for his large prints if he were to use digital.Source: International Center of Photography
Ave Pildas
United States
1939
Thank God I had a really good education. - Ave Pildas Ave Pildas began his arts education as an architecture student, designing department stores, government and medical buildings. Before long, this path felt too conservative and constricting, so he changed majors to design. Creating products, packaging and graphics provided enough diversity, to seem like "complete freedom" at the time. Concurrently, Ave was designing exhibits, displays, graphics and publications for the Cincinnati Public Library. After studying at the University of Cincinnati and graduating from the Cincinnati Art Academy inn 1962, Ave headed east to Pittsburgh, where he worked designing collateral for U.S. Steel, Alcoa, Pittsburgh Plate Glass, Koppers, and Westinghouse. At Westinghouse he met renowned graphic designer Paul Rand. With encouragement from Rand and well-known typographer Noel Martin, Ave traveled to Switzerland and enrolled at the Kunstgewerbeshule, studying typography and graphic design during the Cold War. As a student, he visited every country in Europe and parts of North Africa, often by car. It was at this time that Ave set the lofty goal of "raising the visual conscience" of the world, and, at the conclusion of his studies, accepted a position as assistant professor at Philadelphia College of Art, now the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Since then, he has taught at Layton School of Art, Leicester Polytechnic in Britain, Cal Arts, Art Center College of Design, UCLA, USC, as well as Otis College of Art and Design, where he served as Chair of the Communication Arts Department. He is currently Professor Emeritus at Otis. "Although Pildas was formally trained in Swiss design, he developed an early love for photography in the '60s when he photographed jazz legends like Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie for Downbeat Magazine," writes Mae Ryan of Southern California Public Radio/KPCC. For over 50 years, Ave's been taking pictures of diverse subject matter. Many of his images of Hollywood Boulevard from the 1970s reside in the permanent collections of museums and libraries including LACMA and the New York Public Library. He has published three books: Art Deco LA, Movie Palaces, and Bijou, which was released in December 2016 by Nazraeli Press. Ave Pildas provides a fascinating glimpse into how, over the span of four decades, the streets and people of Hollywood Boulevard have both changed and remained curiously the same, writes Haley Evans for Beautiful Decay Magazine. In the studio, Ave is working on a still-life series based on circles, squares, and triangles, substituting geometric objects like pyramids, cubes, and spheres for the typical vase of flowers or table setting. Outside the studio, Ave shoots "Paper Movies". These collages of multiple images are shot in public spaces and allow him to interact with passers by, encouraging them to participate with the photographer and the background. After collecting hundreds of photos, he edits them to tell a visual story, combining them into a single piece. He is also producing short, stop-action videos using still images from "Paper Movies" to promote the series. One of the videos, "Stairway to Heaven," assembled from images of a staircase at The Getty Museum, garnered 40,000 views in a week. Galleries Joseph Bellows Gallery Richard Moore Photographs Tufenkian Fine Arts Rock Photography Museum Small Books & Small Prints
Mark Seymour
United Kingdom
1960
Mark Seymour is a highly acclaimed documentary wedding photographer based in Berkshire, UK, with a career spanning over 30 years. His passion for capturing authentic, candid moments has led him to photograph more than 1,000 weddings, earning him a reputation for excellence in the industry. Mark's distinctive style focuses on storytelling, aiming to document the genuine emotions and unique narratives of each couple's special day. Throughout his illustrious career, Mark has received numerous accolades, including being named the UK Wedding Photographer of the Year three times by the Master Photographers Association (MPA). He holds the distinction of being the first photographer to receive a double Fellowship and Master Craftsman status in documentary wedding photography, a recognition akin to earning three Michelin stars in the culinary world. Mark also served as a Nikon UK Ambassador from 2013 to 2018, highlighting his influence and expertise in the field Mark's work extends beyond weddings; his documentary photography has been featured in esteemed publications such as National Geographic. One of his notable portraits, capturing designer Jimmy Choo, is part of the National Portrait Gallery's collection in London. In addition to his photography, Mark is dedicated to education, leading street and documentary photography workshops through Light & Land. His workshops take participants to culturally rich destinations like India, Vietnam, and Venice, offering immersive experiences that inspire photographers to see the world through new perspectives. Mark's commitment to meaningful storytelling is evident in his personal project, "Living with Alzheimer's: A Harmonica for Ronnie," which documents his father's battle with dementia. This poignant series was exhibited at the Andipa Gallery in London during World Alzheimer's Month in 2016 and featured on Sky TV, raising awareness about the impact of Alzheimer's disease. For couples seeking a wedding photographer who combines technical precision with an empathetic approach, Mark Seymour offers a wealth of experience and a genuine passion for capturing life's most cherished moments. His work not only preserves memories but also tells the unique story of each couple's journey together.
Pablo Trilles Farrington
Since I was little I was fascinated by animals, especially wildlife. I loved learning about them, their habits, behaviors, most remarkable characteristics such as size, speed, height, feeding, etc. As I grew up, that passion for wildlife began to fall asleep, giving way to other types of concerns. During my youth, my father gave me his SLR camera with interchangeable objects and taught me the basics of photography. I liked taking photographs of all kinds, from portraits to landscapes. They weren't good pictures, although it amused me. But after a few years, when I lived in my apartment, they broke in and took the photographic equipment. That was the end of my adventure in photography. Many years passed until, on a work trip I had to make to Guatemala, I managed to visit the Mayan ruins of Tikal recommended by my father, which he visited in the past. That trip, in the middle of the jungle and surrounded by wild animals, reawakened in me the passion for wildlife and the adventure of exploring natural places. At the same time, smartphones appeared and with them photography within everyone's reach. So I took pictures again this time with my mobile. The mobile was fitted with mini lenses for macro photography. Then I bought a zoom lens that connected to the mobile via Bluetooth. From there it went to a 70-200 lens connected to the phone, which I took on safari to Kenya and the Corcovado peninsula in Costa Rica. I finally understood that my passion for photography and wildlife justified investing in a mirrorless camera as well as better lenses. Until today I have two cameras and seven lenses that I have been using in my travels through Uganda, UAE, Morocco, Svalbard, etc. Always learning to achieve photographs that transmit and connect with the observer. Although in recent years I have obtained prizes, recognitions and honorable mentions that have sweetened the path, the real prize is the opportunity to live unique experiences and to invest the vital energy in this art called photography.
Mary Anne Mitchell
United States
Mary Anne Mitchell is a fine art photographer working primarily with analog processes. Her most recent series Meet me In my Dreams is shot using wet plate collodion. The images depict situations, often mysterious, which evoke her southern roots. She recently was a finalist in the 8th Edition of the Julia Margaret Cameron Awards and has been invited to exhibit some of this series in the 4th Biennial of Photography to be held in Berlin. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across the country and can be found in private and corporate collections across the US, Dubai, Taiwan, and Canada. She lives in Atlanta, GA. Source: www.maryannemitchellphotography.com About Meet Me in My Dreams, 2018 "This series is inspired by my poem Meet Me in My Dreams. The setting for many of the images is a fairytale landscape. My use of the young people celebrates the universal feeling of limitless potential that most people experience in their youth. The ghostlike figures are reflections of the later years when beauty and youth begin to fade. They suggest the feeling that one is becoming invisible and yet still present and powerful. The work speaks to family, memory, and the ethereal passage of time. The images are created using wet plate collodion. I scan and enlarge them to enhance the organic qualities of the medium. These are the elements of my dreams." -- Mary Anne Mitchell Meet Me in My Dreams Walking through the forest of my dreams I see a varied cast of characters. Some are known And some are strangers. Some are real, Some imagined. I catch a glimpse of something yet I look again and nothing is there, perhaps scattered by the wind. My eyes are tricked by the play of light on each and every tree. I sometimes sense I am not alone and someone watches me. The stories told are mine alone. Imagination fuels my memories and my vision is revealed. I invite you to come and meet me in my dreams. Interview with Mary Anne Mitchell All About Photo:I am a Georgia native and have exhibited my work in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States. My photographs have been featured in online publications such as Burn and Plates to Pixels and can be found in private and corporate collections around the country. AAP: When did you realize you wanted to be a photographer?As a freshman in college, I bought a 35mm camera and took a class to learn how to use it and fell in love! AAP: Where did you study photography?Received a BFA from UGA in Athens, GA AAP: What or who inspires you?I always loved Edward Weston and Cartier Bresson as far as the masters of photography. My kids are currently my muses. AAP: How could you describe your style?Much of my work captures authentic moments in atmospheric b/w. AAP: What kind of gear do you use?I shoot film and use mostly 35mm Nikon cameras or Holga or Blackbird Fly plastic cameras. AAP: Do you spend a lot of time editing your images?In darkroom some dodging and burning. AAP: Favorite(s) photographer(s)?I always loved Edward Weston and Cartier Bresson as far as the masters of photography. There are so many contemporary photographers doing amazing work...hard to pick... really love Vivian Maier and her whole backstory is so fascinating. AAP: What advice would you give a young photographer?Shoot constantly but selectively. AAP: Your best memory has a photographer?Strolling anywhere in Europe, camera in hand! AAP: Your worst souvenir has a photographer?A soaking wet Nikon and lens after being knocked over in a canoe while trying to get an incredible shot!
Claude Cahun
France
1894 | † 1954
Claude Cahun (25 October 1894 - 8 December 1954), born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob, was a French Surrealist photographer, sculptor and writer. Schwob adopted the pseudonym Claude Cahun in 1914 and is best known for their self-portraits, in which they assume a variety of personae. Cahun's work was both political and personal, and often undermined traditional concepts of static gender roles. In their autobiography, Disavowals, they explained their rejection of gender, "Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me." This declaration is an important consideration when analysing Cahun's photography as they intentionally play with and subvert the viewers' understanding of gender. This quote, together with their unconventional appearance and their gender-ambiguous pseudonym, means that it is not infrequent to see the pronoun 'they' used nowadays in critical studies on Cahun. There is no evidence that they ever adopted 'they' as their preferred pronoun, but one should take into account the cultural and historical context behind this. Given that French pronouns were extremely binary and the use of gender neutral pronouns for nonbinary individuals wasn't common in the European interwar period, it isn't unreasonable to imagine Cahun would have used gender neutral pronouns had it not been for their environment. In any case, the use of the gender neutral pronouns in reference to Cahun is less of an attempt to apply contemporary norms to a historical figure, but rather a way for their gender to remain an open question in academia. During WWII, Cahun was also active as a resistance worker and propagandist. Source: Wikipedia
Tracy Burke
United States
1964
Tracy Burke is a visual artist whose practice examines nature as humanity's salvation. Working primarily through photography, she explores places that remain essentially untamed despite their public accessibility, investigating human engagement with the natural world and its profoundly positive psychological, emotional, and physical effects. Burke received her BA in History from Yale University, where she served as editor and publisher of Black and White: The Yale Undergraduate Photography Review. She later earned a master's degree in clinical social work from Smith College. After a transformative three-month wilderness experience at age 22 that fundamentally shifted her understanding of what gives life meaning, Burke initially set aside photography, feeling unable to capture the profound impact of the natural world through her lens. She returned to the medium years later while documenting family outings to national parks, recognizing that these images transcended family snapshots to become powerful artistic statements about human connection to the natural world. Burke's work has been exhibited at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center in Denver and the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder, Colorado. Her photographs have been published in Lenscratch and included in online exhibitions with the Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, Colorado, and PhotoPlace Gallery in Vermont. Her work is held in numerous private collections. She lives and works in Boulder, Colorado. AAP Magazine AAP Magazine 54 Nature
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