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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.

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@rmichalak

 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Matej Michalik
Matej Michalik
Slovakia
1981
"My name is Matej Michalik. I was born in 1981 and live in Bratislava, Slovakia. I came in contact with photography in 2010. Apparently, I belong to the new wave of photographers who didn’t go through the analogue era and developing films in darkrooms but ended up in times of digital cameras instead. I am convinced that no matter how expensive your photography gear is, having a good imagination is essencial. From the beginning, my intuition was leading me towards black and white photos. I began observing the work of several fine art photographers whose work I enormously appreciate. I started communicating with them, sharing pieces of advice and experience. That‘s how it all started." -- Matej Michalik
Stefano Galli
Stefano Galli
Italy
1981
Stefano Galli is an Italian photographer born in 1981. After graduating at the University of Turin, with a BA in cinema, he moved to Copenhagen, Denmark, where he worked with director Lars Von Trier. During these years he attended Fatamorgana, The Danish School of Art & Documentary Photography. Fascinated with traveling and the discovery of new environments, Galli is currently working on a new series that belong to a trilogy started with 'Cars' and followed by '80 Skies'. He recently terminated a non-narrative documentary-film, based on the stories of random people met along a journey through the USA. Galli exclusively works on a traditional analog way, both in his motion and still project. Currently based in Los Angeles. About '80 skies'Gazes at the sky. The beauty and power of pure light entering the camera. A project that recalls Claude Monet’s study of the influence of light on objects. Stefano Galli brings his own light studies to the extreme, focusing on the sky and its myriad variations. In “80 SKIES”, the protagonists of Galli’s frames are airplanes or - better said - the small shapes that fly over our heads daily. Because of their height in the sky and the sunlight by which they are surrounded, the shapes Galli captures become something entirely different than just giant devices that move hundreds of human beings. In many cases, the planes are insignificant elements when compared to the magnificence of the heavens. In fact, the eye of the viewer becomes lost in the contemplation of the colors, in the totality of the photographs; looking at these images, the impression of hearing the deafening noise or the usual imagery of the airplane is not perceived. Fascinated by movement and travel, Stefano Galli dedicates this project to the aircraft for the purpose of studying the sky. The result is a creative pictorial but also a tiring study that begins in the early hours of dawn and ends with the fall of the sun. Pushing 35mm negatives to the extreme through a 90mm lens, he lets the film be flooded by the infinite heavenly hue, the changing colors of the horizon sometimes grayish, or yellow and pink, the broad spectrum of colors that characterize the sky. The intensity of the light seems to struggle with the film speed, so the photographs are characterized by a thick grain that gives the picture a three-dimensional effect, as if it had been given a brushstroke.A photographic project that shows the endless variations of the light system in which we live. About 'Cars': Stefano Galli’s work documents his journey of crossing deserts, through forgotten villages, on remote and empty roads. In ‘Cars’ , geography is just as important as photography even if in his shots - distinctive sharp cuts - he leads away from the dusty streets and daily life. Galli conducts the imagination to an elsewhere where lines play with material and shape, where the tail lights and fenders are transformed into surreal and alien beings. Yet ‘Cars’ goes far beyond a mere figurative research, the work is conducted with rigor and awareness, typical of a geographer or an archivist. In fact, Stefano meticulously notates the physical location of the intersection shown in each photograph. Therefore, the project goes beyond the cult of the American car. Through this adventure, Galli tracks and defines - snap after snap - a cognitive path of the new continent. So there is an aspect that links these works to a deep investigation of American society and to aspects of decay and yet, mixed with a splendor that still dazzles. The essence of his idea lies not only in the aesthetics of the work, but also in his decision to show the layers of dust on the cars, the broken headlights and swollen wheels. In this series, a fascination with America remains. A fascination with all its vastness and complexity, which attracts and disturbs at the same time. Discover Stefano Galli's Interview
Alberto del Hoyo Mora
Alberto del Hoyo Mora
Spain
1979
Alberto del Hoyo is a Spanish photographer living in Tenerife. He holds an MBA from the Instituto de Empresa Business School and is a graduate in Business Administration and Photography. His own curiosity about the different forms of life has taken him to remote tribal territories in Asia, South America and Africa in search of the distinctive beauty and variety of his people. In 2016, after 2 years of incursions into the Omo Valley of Ethiopia, he founded Pics 4 Pills. Modest fundraising initiative for the people of the Omo Valley Three years later, at the end of 2018 he published the book Mystic Valley. Photographic travel notebook fruit of 4 years of photographic incursions in the Omo Valley. 100% of the revenues from sales are destined to solidarity projects in the different photographed tribal areas. Also in 2018, Alberto presented the Fine Art portrait exhibition with the same name "Mystic Valley", as a complement of the book. The objective is responsible photographic dissemination. Show the beauty of heterogeneity and cultural identity. About Mystic Valley Nadoria is a 13 years old girl of the Suri tribe in Ethiopia, lives in a small mountain village near the border with Sudan. She is the daughter of one of the elders of the tribe. The size of her ear plate indicates the extent of her dowry. "The bigger my ear plate, the higher number of cows my family will get from my marriage". Barduri, is a young man of 17 years of the same Suri tribe in Ethiopia. He has lost vision in his right eye as a result of a wound during the celebration of the "stick fight", ancestral ceremony consisting of an unprotected one-on-one stick fight battle against young members of the neighboring tribes. The fights can be furious and can result in death. A ritual for the transition of young stars to men. Far from feeling sorry Barduri feels pride, he has shown his family that he is a brave man, he has become a man, a warrior of honor. He has won his right in the tribe to be able to choose his wife and that she respect him. From the beginning of history the human race is composed of a large number of cultures, people and tribes. Each one has its own way of life, values and social rituals. The portraits of these people invite our conscience to remember the importance of understanding cultural identities in all their variety. Portraits of the fragility of a female childhood subrogated to warriors of honor. Portraits of his reality. It is vast, silent. Magical. Omo Valley
Beckett Hornik
Beckett Hornik
United States
2002
Beckett was born and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. He began photographing in sixth grade when he decided to pick up a film SLR camera as an alternative way to capture moments throughout his early teen years. His interest in photography grew during his middle school period. He explored the photos of many masters of photography and found inspiration in the California and Bay Area art scene. He also became interested in fashion and art magazines at this time. Beckett’s photography is strongly rooted in the work he has seen and admired, as well as by the environment and people around him. In the summer of 2016, he attended an Eric Kim street photography workshop. Through this, he expanded his photography beyond the bounds of his family and friends to the less comfortable settings of streets and cities he visited. Beckett continues to shoot photos as often as possible. He is expanding his interests, always searching for the next focus of his teenage years and possibly one that will continue into his adult life.
F. Bessma Rhea
F. Bessma Rhea
United States
2002
F. Bessma Rhea is her father’s second-born daughter (first-born son), her mother’s last line of defense at the dinner table, and her sister’s favorite fun house mirror. She is the first person to speak in a crowded elevator and the last person to get a word in edgewise. Bessma has always been a big talker, but her preferred method of communication is using the visual language of photography. F. Bessma Rhea graduated from Montana State University in 2025, achieving a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Integrated Lens Based Media from the School of Film and Photography. Although Bessma spent the last four and a half years in Bozeman, Montana, Bessma was born, raised, and is now currently residing in San Diego, California. Her photographic journey has encompassed an exploration of various mediums, ranging from silver gelatin prints and digital flash photography, to alternative process and chromogenic printing in the color darkroom. From this exploration she learned to cultivate her aesthetic, her relationship to photography, and to refine and utilize her voice. In her own reflection, she sees herself as a detective and a scientist, but to the outside world, she is an artist and a photographer. With her camera she will continue to investigate and theorize about the world she’s a part of, and where she fits in. But in the moments she’s not photographing, she enjoys filthy explicit music – and classic literature. Gutter Dutchess: I organize my environment in the frame and listen to when the world tells me I am a woman. I consider questions like, “How do I photograph a homewrecker?” and “What is inherently aggressive about a haircut?”. I desperately follow curiosity like the north star. GUTTER DUCHESS is a punk portrait series represented by twenty color film images of friends, best friends, my sister, my mother, myself, and moments in between. From doctor’s appointments to dumpster diving, I comprehend a women’s world through a lens that is candid, impulsive, crude, jovial, contrite, and desperate to reject assimilation to any one characteristic. As I photograph, I find myself constantly fighting with my images because I am a pessimistic, hotheaded, angry little person. However, in these photographs, I am continuously confronted with an abundance of love from the women in my life, who are proof of the untamable female spirit. This work is messy, unglamorous, and a raw exploration of womanhood. Favoring emotional truth over aesthetic polish, my series sprinkles clues of the fallacy of attempting feminine definition. Artist Philosophy Photography is a method of comprehension, I want to understand what is here. I have always been intrigued by the surreal but perhaps that comes from a bigger desire to turn the psyche outward, to make the invisible visible. I am driven by the ability to push the boundaries of sensation through the uncanny, visceral, and provocative. Visual arts is my language to answer life’s biggest questions. Every series is a conversation and if photography is to speak then a camera is the tongue. I have completely fallen in love with the medium, and without the tongue there is no voice.
Ernest Cole
Ernest Cole
South Africa
1940 | † 1990
Ernest Cole was born in South Africa’s Transvaal in 1940 and died in New York City in 1990. During his life he was known for only one book: House of Bondage – published in 1967. In 2011, the Hasselblad Foundation produced a follow-up: Ernest Cole: Photographer. Cole’s early work chronicled the horrors of apartheid and in 1966 he fled the Republic of South Africa becoming a ‘banned person’. He was briefly associated with Magnum Photographers and received funding from the Ford Foundation and Time-Life. In North America, he concentrated on street photography in primarily urban settings. Between 1969 and 1971, Cole spent an extensive amount of time on regular visits to Sweden where he became involved with the Tiofoto collective and exhibited his work. From 1972, Cole’s life fell into disarray and he ceased to work as a photographer, losing control of his archive and negatives in the process. Having experienced periods of homelessness, Cole died aged forty-nine of pancreatic cancer in 1990. In 2017, more than 60,000 of Cole’s negatives missing for more than forty years were discovered in a Stockholm bank vault. This work is now being examined and catalogued.Source: Magnum Photos Ernest Cole (1940–1990)—one of South Africa’s first black photo-journalists—created powerful photographs that revealed to the world what it meant to be black under apartheid. With imaginative daring, courage, and compassion, Cole portrayed the everyday lives of blacks as they negotiated apartheid’s racist laws and oppression. Apartheid, which means “apartness” in Afrikaans (the language of South Africa’s white minority of Dutch descent), was an often brutally enforced legal policy that separated people by race in all aspects of life, within a white supremacist hierarchy of power. Born in Eersterust, a black freehold township in Pretoria, Cole was forcibly relocated with his family to nearby Mamelodi in the late 1950s. While still a teenager, he began working as a darkroom assistant at Drum, a black lifestyle magazine in Johannesburg. There he mingled with young black South African photographers, journalists, jazz musicians, and leaders of the burgeoning anti-apartheid movement. Inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photo-essays, Cole embarked on a life mission to produce a book that would awaken the rest of the world to apartheid’s corrosive effects. House of Bondage was published in New York in 1967. Although it was immediately banned in South Africa, contraband copies spurred on the country’s emerging activist photographers. Cole’s images are hard-hitting and incendiary, yet often subtle and even elegant. He frequently worked clandestinely with a hidden camera to capture scenes he was forbidden to photograph, employing striking perspectives and framing. Many of the prints on view here are displayed for the first time uncropped, as he originally intended, and often accompanied by House of Bondage’s incisive captions. In 1966 Cole was arrested by the South African police. Fleeing to Europe, he took with him little more than the layouts for his book. He spent the remaining 23 years of his life in painful exile between Sweden and the United States; after 1975 he was often destitute, living on New York City streets and in the subway. In 1990 he died of cancer at the age of 49—one week after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. Nearly all his possessions were lost; fortunately, he had given some prints to Tio Fotografer, a Swedish photographers’ association, which later donated them to the Hasselblad Foundation. Bringing this remarkable artist’s works to the international stage, Ernest Cole Photographer commemorates his pioneering efforts to capture the complex truths of day-to-day, lived experiences during harrowing times. Critiquing institutionalized segregation and celebrating human resilience, Cole challenged the status quo, and his work continues to speak eloquently and forcefully to contemporary issues of poverty and racial inequality in the United States and worldwide.Source: Grey Art Gallery, NYU
Kimmo Sahakangas
Kimmo Sahakangas
United States
1958
Kimmo Sahakangas received a Bachelor of Architecture from Cal Poly Pomona and a Master of Architecture from UCLA. After higher education, he was awarded an architectural traveling fellowship which facilitated a year-long exploration of European urban spaces. It concluded in a slide show presented to an academic institution. Prior to architectural studies, photography was a passionate endeavor in the family along with vacation roadtrips. At age 19, he traveled the very first time to Las Vegas… stayed at a cheap motel and was keen on photographing the neon lights of Fremont Street and the strip… the visit would inspire architectural study and form an interest in photographing the built American landscape. Sahakangas contextualizes the vast American landscape with a focus on transitional places and spaces. Some of the more favored subjects are roadside business establishments which epitomize the road trip experience. Traveling off the interstate, he would find such visual matter in the landscape... on a two-lane road allowing a slower pace without a destination in mind. His observations exclude people, to portray isolation as a visual drama. And to frame the cultural, economic and social policies at hand. His work has exhibited nationally in a dozen private and public galleries including Praxis Gallery Photo Arts Center (Minneapolis), Black Box Gallery (Portland OR) and Torrance Art Museum. A self-published affair, titled "Roadside Testament", was available in 2021. It features several decades of photography.
Rajan Dosaj
Rajan Dosaj
United States
1958
Born and raised in the United States, I spent nearly 20 years in the theater world, first as a dancer and singer in Broadway musicals and later as an actor and director. Upon my retirement from theater, I settled into the business world but it wouldn't be long before I was in need of a creative outlet and the Sebastiao Salgado documentary, The Salt of the Earth, rekindled my brief high school interest in photography. Soon, the books of Alec Soth, Nancy Rexroth, Sally Mann, Joshua Jackson, and many more were on my selves and with a newly purchased camera in hand, I started out on my latest adventure. Naturally, I started with dance portraits and found it incredibly exciting and fulfilling but soon I ventured into other genres to improve my work. Whether it was wildlife, street, architecture, portrait, or fine art photography, I was either taking a class or teaching myself about the genre in order to become a better photographer. In my short time behind the camera, I have been fortunate enough to have some of my images appear in galleries across the country, including Photo Place Gallery, A Smith Gallery, Praxis Gallery, Black Box Gallery, SE Center for Photography, and the Decode Gallery. With my background in theater, I know that photography can be a frustrating art form where most of the time I end up kicking myself for the mistakes that I continuously make over and over. But every once in a while, those rare moments come along when my eyes through a camera are able to see and capture an extraordinary moment.
Tabitha Bernard
Tabitha Bernard
United States
1994
Tabitha Barnard was born in Freedom, New Hampshire in 1994. She is a photographer who grew up in rural Maine with three sisters. Growing up in a very Christian female-dominated family has had a huge influence on her work. Barnard works primarily in digital color photography exploring themes of femininity and religion. She received her Bachelor of Fine Art from Maine College of Art in the Spring of 2016 and a Masters of Fine Art from Massachusetts College of Art in the Spring of 2021. She has worked in both commercial studio settings, as a shooting assistant, and as the media technician for the photo department at the Maine College of Art. She currently works in Portland Maine, teaching at the Maine College of Art.
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