All about photo.com: photo contests, photography exhibitions, galleries, photographers, books, schools and venues.
Win a Solo Exhibition in June 2026 + An Exclusive Interview!
Win a Solo Exhibition in June 2026 + An Exclusive Interview!
David Pace
David Pace
David Pace

David Pace

Country: United States
Birth: 1951 | Death: 2020

David Pace is a Bay Area photographer and curator. He received his MFA from San Jose State University in 1991. He has taught photography at San Jose State University, San Francisco State University and Santa Clara University, where he served as Resident Director of SCU's study abroad program in West Africa from 2009 - 2013. Pace photographed in the small sub-Saharan country of Burkina Faso annually from 2007-2016, documenting daily life in Bereba, a remote village without electricity or running water. His work has been exhibited internationally. His African photographs of the Karaba Brick Quarry are featured in the 2019 Venice Biennale in a group show entitled "Personal Structures" organized by the European Cultural Center. His book Images In Transition, a collaboration with gallerist Stephen Wirtz, was published in the spring of 2019 by Schilt Publishing.

"Through my photography I want to express to a broad audience what it's like to live in West Africa. The Western media typically shows only the negative side of life in Africa, highlighting war, famine, genocide, and illness. This perspective is newsworthy but it is incomplete and misleading. It fails to capture the richness and complexity of life in small villages where a large percentage of West Africans live and work. Most live simple, meaningful lives. My photography in the remote village of Bereba and the surrounding region portrays a story of life in the community that is largely positive. My work projects a view that may be at odds with the more common perspective, but is no less accurate or realistic. I am committed to communicating the realities of life in West Africa to challenge the negativity that too frequently pervades the images we see."
David Pace

About Sur La Route
 

Selected Books

Inspiring Portfolios

Call for Entries
AAP Magazine #58 B&W
Publish your work in our printed magazine and win $1,000 cash prizes
 
Stay up-to-date  with call for entries, deadlines and other news about exhibitions, galleries, publications, & special events.

More Great Photographers To Discover

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.”
Piotr Zbierski
Piotr Zbierski studied photography at National Film School. Author of three individual exhibitions (White Elephants, Here, Love has to be reinvented), a participant in collective exhibitions and publications including Photokina and Lab East. He presented his works in many countries like Poland, Germany, Portugal, Russia, Slovakia. As well as magazines (Shots Magazine, Ninja Mag, Archivo Zine, Die Nacht, Gup Magazine). In 2012 he won the prestigious prize for young photographer Leica Oscar Barnack Newcomer Award. His work was nominated to Deutsche Börse Photography Prize and has been shortlisted in many other prizes (Les Nuits Photographiques 2012, Terry O’Neill Award) for his series Pass by me. His works has been shown at Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles 2012 and are in collection of Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts. He lives and works in Lodz. About Love has to be reinvented "The series 'Love has to be reinvented' began in 2012 and its starting point was not an image but my personal experience, which changed my view and redefined my opinion on many issues. At the same time, it is neither my diary nor any personal document; recently such a name is given to whatever cannot be named. Titles of my series are just mottos for my creative works at their particular stages. Words are created by letters in the alphabet, which is a matter of convention depending on the culture. I build my series out of emotions, which are a biological fact, they are unquestionable. The key objective I identify for myself is the availability of a feeling. I really want the person looking at my photographs to experience something more and not just say whether photographs are good or bad. Photography does not begin with an image, it does not end with an image, either; I put on authenticity, and not on originality. An image is a form of communication of a higher art form, which is life itself. I took the title from the French poet, Artur Rimbaud, who wrote these words and expressed criticism of France and times he lived in about a hundred years ago. I returned to these words because I think the world has not changed so much, and I criticize a contemporary world, which has gone in the wrong direction, in my opinion. And I do not mean people but structures built around the castle, which the book hero has never reached. A major objective of my work is to get through to the essence of human emotions, to their purest form with no additions, no gadgets. To show a man in the way he has been created, a man from a primeval village. In a contemporary world, such an image may be created using a certain type of imagination because we are very far away from such a status quo; therefore, my work is reality-based but it is not the reality itself. It is an attempt to invoke and depict certain human impulses with full acceptance of their inherent contradictions. Like love: it is as full of adoration as hatred; a day could not exist without a night. I will finish this three-year series in spring 2015 during the total solar eclipse, which can be observed in Iceland. It is a characteristic clamp for my creative work in which I start from a personal, private and single experience at the very beginning, and come through an image to a part, which is common for us all, and independent of me. A macro-scale has its reflection in a micro scale while a normal scale, in which we live in, is its pulsating reflection. To follow theories of contemporary scientists, only a ballet dancer may be smaller, and on a macro-scale - a multiple universe. Life is a film directed by the universe while the world is the largest accumulation of sensually available metaphors, a secret in secret or a metaphor in a metaphor. Rimbaud has also written that eternity is skies mixed with water; quite right: black and white, grey on grey; in a child's drawing huge blue and objectively sacred transparency. In my opinion, there is one reality and infinitely many visions. To sum it up as simple as I can: if the world is a tree growing more and more branches (metaphors), then life is the fruit. While love is the juice of various tastes in the same way as the resin is what a tree uses for weeping. All this happens in the surroundings of eternal gases where toxic ones come away leaving space to healthy ones. Rootstocks and roots grow expanding in the same way. Who are people then?Undoubtedly, they are savages from a primeval village who have learned what a real taste of love is: they adored each other at the expense of "god's" hatred, they are Adam and Eve. It is only owing to such a full image of love that new generations could come into existence. I also invite to see the video work titled "Lodz", in which I develop motifs I have earlier discussed. Another continuing video is in progress. The bottomless source is RGB without DNA." - Piotr Zbierski
Fred Herzog
Canada
1930 | † 2019
Fred Herzog devoted his artistic life to walking the streets of Vancouver as well as almost 40 countries with his Leica, photographing - mostly with color slide film - his observations of the street life with all its complexities. Herzog ultimately became celebrated internationally for his pioneering street photography, his understanding of the medium combined with, as he put it, "how you see and how you think" created the right moment to take a picture. Fred was born Ulrich Herzog in Stuttgart, Germany in 1930 and spent his childhood in Rottweil, Germany. He lost both of his parents during the war, and in 1946 Herzog went to work as an apprentice in his grandparents' hardware store. Disillusioned by the ravages of war and the situation in Germany, he emigrated to Canada in 1952 and settled in Vancouver in 1953. During the next several years. Herzog studied photography magazines while working aboard ships for the CPR steamship line, and in 1957 he was hired as a medical photographer at St. Paul's Hospital. In 1961, he became the head of the Photo/Cine Division in the Department of Biomedical Communications at UBC, and in 1970 was appointed Associate Director of the Department. Herzog was also hired as an Instructional Specialist in the Fine Arts Department at Simon Fraser University in 1967, and in 1969 became an instructor in the Fine Arts Department at UBC. Herzog had a walking route through Vancouver that enabled him to build friendships with other photographers and neighborhood residents and gave him an acute understanding of the daily life and soul of Vancouver. Over the course of several decades, Herzog produced a substantial body of color photographs, taking urban life, second-hand shops, vacant lots, neon signage, and the crowds of people who have populated city streets over the past years as his primary subjects. Herzog's use of color was unusual in the 1950s and 60s, a time when fine art photography was almost exclusively associated with black and white imagery. Additionally, Herzog photographed using Kodachrome slide film which was notoriously difficult to print. For decades he remained virtually unknown until his mid-seventies when printing technology caught up, allowing him to make archival pigment prints that matched the exceptional color and intensity of the Kodachrome film. A retrospective exhibition, Fred Herzog: Vancouver Photographs, was held at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2007 and was the first major recognition of Herzog's body of work. Herzog exhibited his work both in Canada and internationally, including the exhibitions Fred Herzog: Photographs, C/O Berlin, Germany (2010), Fred Herzog: A Retrospective, Equinox Gallery, Vancouver (2012), Eyes Wide Open! 100 Years of Leica Photography, Haus der Photographie, Hamburg, Germany (2015), Photography in Canada, 1960-2000, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2017), and many others. In 2010 Herzog received an Honorary Doctorate from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and in 2014 he received the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts. An artist profile on Herzog was featured on the Knowledge Network for the series Snapshot: The Art of Photography II in 2011. In 2014, Herzog's photograph Bogner's Grocery (1960) was released as a limited edition stamp as part of Canada Post's Canadian Photography Series. Herzog died on September 9, 2019 at age 88.Source: Wikipedia
Laia Abril
Spain
1986
Laia Abril s a Spanish photographer and multiplatform storyteller whose work relates to femininity. Abril was born in 1986 in Barcelona, Spain. She gained a degree in journalism in Barcelona. She moved to New York City to study photography at the International Center of Photography. In 2009 she enrolled at Fabrica research centre, the artist residency of Benetton in Italy, where she worked as a staff photographer and consultant photo editor at Colors magazine for a number of years. Since 2010, Abril has been working on various projects exploring the subject of eating disorders: A Bad Day, a short film about a young girl struggling with bulimia; Thinspiration (2012), which explores the use of photography in pro-ana websites; and The Epilogue (2014), documenting the indirect victims of eating disorders, through the story of the Robinson family and the aftermath of the death of Cammy Robinson to bulimia. Critic Sean O'Hagan, wrote in The Guardian that The Epilogue "... is a sombre and affecting photobook ... dense and rewarding ... At times, it makes for a painful read. From time to time, I had to put it down, take a breather. But I kept going back." Her extended study of misogyny thus far includes A History of Misogyny: Chapter One: On Abortion, about the repercussions of abortion controls in many different cultures. Work is ongoing to produce A History Of Misogyny, Chapter 2: On Rape. Her other projects include Femme Love, on a young lesbian community in Brooklyn; Last Cabaret on a sex club in Barcelona; and the Asexuals Project, a documentary film about asexuality. Abril's books include The Epilogue (2014), which documents the indirect victims of eating disorders, and A History of Misogyny: Chapter One: On Abortion (2018), about the repercussions of abortion controls in many different cultures. On Abortion won Photobook of the Year award at the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. In 2018 she was awarded the Tim Hetherington Trust's Visionary Award to work on A History Of Misogyny, Chapter 2: On Rape Culture. For the long-term project A History Of Misogyny, in 2019 she was awarded the Royal Photographic Society's Hood Medal and in 2020 she was awarded the Paul Huf Award from Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam.Source: Wikipedia
JJ Jordan
Poland
1973
JJ Jordan is a visual artist, graphic designer, and photographer based in Surrey, UK. Working with both digital and analogue photography he creates monochrome, blurred, layered, or multi-exposed visual metaphors that favour ambiguity over certainty. Jordan’s work is deeply informed by personal experience, influenced by the dreamlike narratives of Murakami, Schulz, and Kafka, and the surreal aesthetics. Artist Statement My work explores the fragile line between perception and reality, between what is seen and what is felt. Through experimental portraiture and conceptual photography, I aim to question visual certainty and challenge the camera’s claim to truth. Often working in monochrome, and drawing on both digital and analogue processes (while deliberately excluding AI), I construct images that blur, layer, or distort, embracing ambiguity over resolution. Themes of memory, identity, and absence run through much of my work. Figures appear half-seen or obscured, more like echoes than individuals, suggestive rather than declarative. A blurred face, a painted square, a fleeting gesture, each becomes a site of tension between presence and disappearance. I am less interested in documenting a subject than in evoking the trace they leave behind: a flicker, a feeling, a fragment. Influenced by the surreal visual languages of art history and by the dreamlike narratives of Murakami, Schulz, and Kafka, my photographs often borrow from the whimsical and the uncanny. I aim to create images that invite pause, a space for wonder, doubt, and emotional reflection. Born behind the Iron Curtain and shaped by time spent across cultures, my perspective is rooted in a sense of displacement and layered experience. My portraits are not confessions; they are invitations, open-ended and unresolved, like memories still in the making. Awarded Photographer of the Week - Week 24
Advertisement
AAP Magazine #58 B&W
Win a Solo Exhibition in June
AAP Magazine #58 B&W

Latest Interviews

Exclusive Interview with Carolyn Moore
American photographer Carolyn Moore explores the inner landscape of emotion, memory, and personal transformation through a deeply intuitive photographic practice. Her work unfolds as a quiet dialogue between artist and viewer, where images become a space for reflection, vulnerability, and connection.
Exclusive Interview with Luca Desienna and Laura Estelle Barmwoldt
For over seven years, Of Lilies and Remains has explored the depths of the goth and darkwave underground, unfolding in Leipzig—a city long associated with a vibrant and enduring subcultural scene. Moving between iconic gatherings such as Wave-Gotik-Treffen and more intimate moments on the fringes, the project offers a rare and immersive glimpse into a world often misunderstood, yet rich in expression and community. Created by Luca in collaboration with Laura Estelle Barmwoldt, the work embraces a cinematic and deeply personal approach. Rather than documenting from a distance, it moves within the scene itself, capturing its atmosphere, its codes, and its quiet contradictions. The title Of Lilies and Remains hints at this duality—where beauty and darkness, fragility and strength coexist. As the book prepares for its release, we spoke with both artists about the origins of the project, their process, and what it means to document a subculture that continues to evolve while remaining true to its spirit.
Exclusive Interview with Matthew Finley
American photographer Matthew Finley turns inward, using photography as a way to explore identity, memory, and emotional truth. Based in Los Angeles, his practice moves between performance, gesture, and found imagery, creating a visual language that is both intimate and deeply personal
Exclusive Interview with Jan Janssen
Dutch photographer Jan Janssen explores universal human experiences through his long-term project It Matters, winner of the May 2025 Solo Exhibition. Begun in 2016, the series captures intimate moments of everyday life—love, loss, connection, and belonging—across Central and Eastern Europe. Working in countries such as Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, Janssen spends extended time within communities, building relationships based on trust and respect. His approach allows him to move beyond observation, revealing deeply human and authentic moments. Rooted in travel and personal discovery, It Matters reflects Janssen’s search for what connects us all in an increasingly divided world. The project is ongoing and will culminate in a photobook scheduled for publication in 2026.
Exclusive Interview with Henk Kosche
German photographer Henk Kosche turns his lens toward the streets of Halle an der Saale, capturing everyday life in the late years of the former German Democratic Republic. At the time, Kosche was studying design and exploring the city with his camera, drawn to the atmosphere of its industrial landscape and the quiet rhythms of daily life. His series Street Photography at the End of the 80s, selected as the Solo Exhibition for July 2025, revisits a body of work created just before a period of profound change. Rediscovered decades later in a small box of 35mm negatives, these photographs offer glimpses of a city and its people at a moment suspended between the familiar and the unknown.
Exclusive Interview with Anastasia Samoylova
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.
Exclusive Interview with Josh S. Rose
Josh S. Rose is a multidisciplinary artist working across photography, film, and writing. His practice bridges visual and performing arts, with a strong focus on movement, emotion, and the expressive potential of the image. Known for his long-standing collaborations with leading dance companies and performers, Rose brings together authenticity and precise composition—a balance he describes as “technical romanticism.” His work has been commissioned and exhibited internationally, appearing in outlets such as Vogue, at the Super Bowl, in film festivals, and most recently as a large-scale installation for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. A sought-after collaborator, he has worked with major artists, cultural institutions, and brands, following a previous career as Chief Creative Officer at Interpublic Group and the founder of Humans Are Social. We asked him a few questions about his life and work.
Interview with Maureen Ruddy Burkhart
Photographer Maureen Ruddy Burkhart brings a quietly attentive and deeply human sensibility to her exploration of the world through images. Shaped by a life immersed in photography, film, and visual storytelling, her work is guided by intuition, observation, and an enduring interest in the emotional undercurrents of everyday life. With a practice rooted in both fine art traditions and documentary awareness, she approaches her subjects with sensitivity, allowing subtle moments to emerge naturally rather than be imposed. Her series Til Death, selected as the Solo Exhibition for February 2025, reflects this long-standing commitment to photography as a space for reflection rather than spectacle. Drawn to moments that exist just outside the expected frame, Burkhart’s images suggest narratives without resolving them, leaving room for ambiguity, humor, and quiet connection. We asked her a few questions about her life and work.
Call for Entries
Win A Solo Exhibition in June
Get International Exposure and Connect with Industry Insiders