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Germán Rodriguez Laverde
Germán Rodriguez Laverde
Germán Rodriguez Laverde

Germán Rodriguez Laverde

Country: Colombia

Colombian cinematographer, thanks to his work he has managed to develop a particular style in his projects, managing to project emotions and feelings by becoming one with the camera. He also works as an assistant director, director, and cinematographer and has had the experience of working for large production houses and projects that have been mentioned worldwide.

Throughout his career, Germán has been the winner twice consecutively in the categories (best photography and best short film) for Canon Colombia. He has also been recognized worldwide by Sony International Photography in the category "moving image", has won several awards as Cannes with an advertising campaign in which he worked; He was a finalist in a Vans USA contest for the best short film.

He studied in Los Angeles California thanks to a stimulus scholarship that he won at the school (Global Cinematography Institute) of the member of the American Film Association (ASC) Yuri Neyman ASC.

Websites

www.germanrlaverde.com

@german.rlaverde

 

Inspiring Portfolios

Marijn Fidder
© Marijn Fidder
Julien Chatelin
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Marcus Yam
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More Great Photographers To Discover

Dianne Yudelson
Dianne Yudelson
United States
Dianne Yudelson is an award winning photographic artist and master of the New Eclecticism Photography. Her work has been exhibited in Malaysia, France, Thailand, and throughout the USA. Dianne is a 2013 Critical Mass Finalist and a Julia Margaret Cameron Award winner in documentary, as well as street photography. Recent 2013 exhibitions include the Natural History Museum in San Diego California, National Geographic Museum as part of FOTODC, The FENCE 2013 and 2014 in Boston as part of the Magenta Flash Forward Festival, The FENCE 2013 and 2014 in Brooklyn as part of Photoville, the 2014 FENCE in Atlanta as part the ACP festival, and The Center for Fine Art Photography as part of 2013 and 2014 Center Forward. Dianne graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of California, Berkeley. “My fascination with photography began upon the realization that, in addition to being a wonderful means of documentation, photography can also be used as a fine art medium. My style is eclectic. In the fine tradition of eclectic artists of our past, from DaVinci to Duchamp to Calder, I embrace the challenge of exploring varied subjects and forms of expression. By that I mean, neither subject matter nor genre solely defines my images; they are defined by my artistic esthetic." Dianne’s 2013-2014 top honors include "Photographer of the Year" titles from three acclaimed international competitions; Black and White Spider Awards, Photography Masters Cup, and World Photography Gala Awards. In 2013 Dianne received: First Place in the International Photography Awards (IPA) in Fine Art and Collage, GOLD overall category PX3, Grand Prize Winner in the New York Center for Photographic Arts, Gold medalist in San Francisco International Exhibition, First Place Professional Women Photographers, First Place WPGA Black & White Awards, First Place Texas Photographic Society, and advertising honors in the LICC for a third consecutive year. "Throughout my life art has been the one true common thread, the stitches that bind my chapters together. As a photographic artist, I embrace the ability to spotlight my point of view and give a voice to my imagination." Interview With Dianne Yudelson AAP: When did you realize you wanted to be a photographer?I realized I wanted to be a photographer when I discovered that, in addition to being a wonderful means of documentation, photography can be used as a fine art medium.AAP: Where did you study photography?I am a self-taught photographer.AAP: How long have you been a photographer?In the summer of 2009 I came across an article in the Rangefinder magazine regarding the Black and White Spider Awards. This article reported that the competition was for amateurs as well as professional photographers. I researched online and discovered that the deadline for entries was in 2 days. During the next two days I photographed and created my composite image entitled “Vessels,” and entered it in the competition. The following February, “Vessels” won a nomination in the Abstract category at the 5th Spider Awards. Since 2010 I have considered myself a photographer and I have dedicated myself to photography from that point on, initially creating single images and then moving forward to create whole portfolios of work. Within two years, at the 7th Black and White Spider Awards, I was named Photographer of the Year, Honor of Distinction.AAP: Do you remember your first shot? What was it?I was about 10 years old when I took my first snapshot. Although I have always enjoyed taking pictures, I remember people commenting, “Why are you wasting film taking a photo of a lollipop discarded in the street or a chair off in the corner?” I do remember the first photograph that elicited the response “Whoa… you could sell this shot!” The comment came from a friend of mine, who was a commercial photographer. I had taken an adventurous trip to England, receiving a camera as a going away gift. Because I was traveling alone, my photos captured my personal vision of the landscape: rowboats near a river’s edge at dawn, silhouettes of statuary at sunset and the delicate curvature of wildflowers as they blew in the autumn breeze. Capturing these photographs sparked my artistic curiosity; consequently, taking the photos became one of the most exciting aspects of my journey abroad.AAP: Do you have a mentor?My mentors are all the eclectic artists who have preceded me. I have honored some of these artists in my series “Fusions” and “Monarchs in Art.” In these two series I have utilized stylistic elements of the artists who were important contributors to their artistic movements, “monarchs” of their medium, while interpreting the subject matter and creating an image truly representative of my own modern artistic style.AAP: What inspires you?I am generally inspired by all things visual, from grand vistas to the reflection of light on a teardrop. Sometimes I am immediately compelled to take a photo and at other times the visual moment triggers a thought process that leads to the creation of a photo or photo series. Every now and then, as an avid reader, I will come across a pairing of words that peak my interest. For example, I created an image to symbolize a concept I had studied in graduate school, “Synaptic Euphoria.”AAP: How could you describe your style?My style is eclectic. By that I mean I embrace the challenge of exploring varied subjects and forms of artistic expression. As part of this philosophy, I created a new art movement that I call the “New Eclecticism.” Neither subject matter nor genre solely defines my images; they are defined by my artistic esthetic.As a teen, I performed in musicals. I remember saying, “I wish I could sing like Barbara Streisand.” My mother pointed out that the world already has a Barbara Streisand. We love Barbara because she is unique. To be unique you must be yourself as the world only has one of you.” From that day forward, I have understood that to be original, you must remain true to yourself and your vision.AAP: What kind of gear do you use?I am a Nikon girl -- camera, lenses and speedlights.AAP: Do you spend a lot of time editing your images?Sometimes yes and other times no. I will say that, when I am in the process of editing or creating images, time seems to disappear; I am in my own world. When I am not shooting or creating, I am thinking about what needs to be taken care of, so that I can get back to my art.AAP: What advice would you give a young photographer?I teach a photography group and I always advise them to keep the elements of composition in mind, photograph what inspires them and, if an idea hits you out of the blue, take a second to notate it for use later. Above all else, allow your images to serve as self-expression.AAP: Do you have an idea or project you would like to share?Recently, I have focused on my nature and wildlife photography. I have always loved birds and will sit in a field, by a stream or in a ditch along the side of a road for an hour or more to capture an elusive species or to wait for that moment of interaction. As a very young girl my fondest memory was sitting on my grandmother’s porch while she showed me tintypes of my great grandmother and other loved ones. Holding these tintypes in my hand and gazing into the eyes of my ancestors while hearing stories of my grandmother’s childhood was an experience I hold dear to my heart. Those tintypes were my first exposure to the art of photography. My series "Antique Aviary" is a melding of my lifelong passion for birds, my wildlife photography and my deep appreciation of the tintype image.AAP: What was your worst memory as a photographer?In April of this year I drove 400 miles to hand deliver my framed image “Great Horned Owl” from my “Antique Aviary” to the SMASHBOX exhibition during MOPLA (Month of Photography Los Angeles). Upon exiting my rental car, I took two steps and tripped into a 12inch pothole in the parking lot across the street from the Smashbox Studios in Hollywood and broke my foot.AAP: What is your best memory as a photographer?One day I was taking a drive with my 9 year old son. We were driving down a country road appreciating the tall mustard grass. Suddenly I spotted a 6 foot fence pole that was literally covered with bees. I pulled over, jumped out of the car and grabbed my camera from the trunk as well as a jacket to throw over my head. I told my son to stay in the car and take some photos with his little camera, but not to roll down the window. Bees were flying over my head and around my body to get to the pole. As I attempted to focus on the bees I realized that all these bees were vibrating up and down the pole. In order to get the shot, I was going to have to move in very close. At a couple of feet away I took the photos in my series “A Gathering of Bees.” When I returned to the car my son was a bit distraught. I said "I’m sorry if I took too long" and he said, “But Mommy, you’re allergic to bees. What if they swarmed you? What would I do?” I shall always remember the look on his face when I told him that if they swarmed me, “Take the Shot!”
Richard Misrach
Richard Misrach
United States
1949
Richard Misrach (born 1949) is an American photographer "firmly identified with the introduction of color to 'fine' [art] photography in the 1970s, and with the use of large-format traditional cameras" (Nancy Princenthal, Art in America). David Littlejohn of the Wall Street Journal calls Misrach "the most interesting and original American photographer of his generation," describing his work as running "parallel to that of Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky, two German contemporaries." Littlejohn notes that all three used a large scale color format that defied the expectations of fine art photography at the time. Misrach is widely recognized as "one of this century’s most internationally acclaimed photographers." He is perhaps best known for his depictions of the deserts of the American west, and for his series documenting the changes brought to bear on the environment by various man-made factors such as urban sprawl, tourism, industrialization, floods, fires, petrochemical manufacturing, and the testing of explosives and nuclear weapons by the military. Curator Anne Wilkes Tucker writes that Misrach's practice has been "driven [by] issues of aesthetics, politics, ecology, and sociology." In a 2011 interview, Misrach noted: "My career, in a way, has been about navigating these two extremes - the political and the aesthetic." Describing his philosophy, Tracey Taylor of the New York Times writes that "[Misrach's] images are for the historical record, not reportage." Misrach has been married since 1989 to writer Myriam Weisang and has a son, Jake, from his first marriage to Debra Bloomfield. Misrach's book Desert Cantos received the 1988 Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and his Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West, co-authored with Myriam Weisang Misrach, was awarded the 1991 PEN Center West Award for a nonfiction book. His Katrina monograph Destroy This Memory won Best Photobook of the Year 2011 at PhotoEspaña. He has received numerous awards including four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an International Center of Photography Infinity Award for a Publication, and the Distinguished Career in Photography Award from the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies. In 2002 he was given the Kulturpreis for Lifetime Achievement in Photography by the German Society for Photography, and in 2008 he received the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Fine Art Photography. In 2010, Apple licensed Misrach's 2004 image Pyramid Lake (at Night) as the inaugural wallpaper for the first iPad. The opening credits of the 2014 HBO series True Detective featured a montage of images from Misrach's Petrochemical America. In 2016, the AIGA selected Border Cantos for its "50 Books | 50 Covers" competition, a "survey of the best in book design represent[ing] perhaps the longest-standing legacy in American graphic design." Source: Wikipedia Richard Misrach is one of the most influential photographers of his generation. In the 1970s, he helped pioneer the renaissance of color photography and large-scale presentation that are in widespread practice today. Best known for his ongoing series, Desert Cantos, a multi-faceted approach to the study of place and man’s complex relationship to it, he has worked in the landscape for over 40 years. A recent chapter of the series, Border Cantos, made in collaboration with the experimental composer Guillermo Galindo, explores the unseen realities of the US-Mexico borderlands. This work was exhibited at the Amon Carter Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and San Jose Museum of Art in 2016-17. In the most recent chapters, Premonitions and The Writing on the Wall, Misrach documents graffiti on abandoned buildings throughout the Southwest and Southern California, finding an angry and ominous response to the highly charged political climate before and after the 2016 election. Both series premiered at Fraenkel Gallery in 2017. Other notable bodies of work include his documentation of the industrial corridor along the Mississippi River known as Cancer Alley, the study of weather, time, color and light in his serial photographs of the Golden Gate Bridge, and On The Beach, an aerial perspective of human interaction and isolation. Recent projects mark departures from his work to date. In one series, he has experimented with new advances in digital capture and printing, foregrounding the negative as an end in itself and digitally creating images with astonishing detail and color spectrum. In another, he built a powerful narrative out of images of graffiti produced in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, made with a 4-megapixel pocket camera. In fall 2012, in collaboration with landscape architect Kate Orff, Misrach launched a major book and exhibition entitled Petrochemical America, which addresses the health and environmental issues associated with our dependency on oil. Source: Fraenkel Gallery
Sherrie Nickol
Sherrie Nickol
United States
Sherrie Nickol is a fine art photographer who captures moments in time - and in life - with an almost tangible warmth and energy. She was grew up in Osceola, Arkansas and has lived her adult life in New York City. Nickol studied photography at the University of Cincinnati and later at the International Center of Photography in New York City. Her photographs are in the permanent collection of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris, and in numerous private collections in the United States. She has mounted one-person exhibitions at Temple University and The National Arts Club in New York City. In recent years, Nickol has focused especially on exploring the relationships between people and their environments. She is interested in families as they come together to share experiences and in individuals as they navigate their space alone. Her work examines the different ways to experience public and private spaces, and she brings a sincerity to her approach that breaks down barriers and allows her to connect deeply with her subjects - a connection which is evident in the photographs themselves. Les étés en bretagne Les étés en Bretagne (Summers in Brittany) is part of my larger series By the Water which is a meditatation on the carefree days of summer. When my son turned six our family began spending a part of each summer near the seaside town of Dinard, on the north coast of Brittany, and I began a project documenting the lives of French families as they vacationed on various beaches. We always rented the same home near the seaside, a short car ride from our relatives, who lived in an old stone house on a working farm. The scenes spoke of another era, with seaside picnics and striped cabanas dotting the beaches. The photographs in this series show the intimacy among families, friends, and lovers as they break from their routines and come together at the water.
Charles Scowen
Charles Scowen
United Kingdom
1852 | † 1948
Charles Thomas Scowen (11 March 1852 – 24 November 1948) was a British photographer during the nineteenth century. He was active as a photographer from 1871 to 1890, working in Sri Lanka and British India in the early 1870s. By 1876 Scowen had established a studio, Scowen & Co, in Kandy and by the 1890s, he had opened a second in Colombo. His work, which included landscapes and portraits of Malay women, is noted for its lighting, technically superior printing, and strong compositional qualities. Scowen's photographs are represented in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Charles Scowen became a tea planter before retiring and returning to England around the turn of the century. He died in Sudbury, Suffolk, aged 96.Source: Wikipedia Described as the Pearl of the Indian Ocean, the island Ceylon was conquered by the English in 1796 and for many years was at the center of the spice and trade routes. Rich in ivory, cinnamon, coffee, tea, gems, and pearls the island became increasingly accessible during the nineteenth century. Its exotic scenery was well documented by commercial photographers throughout the nineteenth century. One of the most accomplished and successful photographic firms working in Ceylon was Charles T. Scowen and Co. Scowen and his team produced records for the tourist market, as well as for commerce and industry. These documents included images of plantation economies, railroad, native people, architectural city views, and ancient ruins. The photographs are of superior quality, representing the rich beauty and detail found only in an albumen print.Source: Joseph Bellows Gallery
Pat Rose
Pat Rose
United States
Pat Rose is a photographer based in Portland, Oregon. Her work includes landscape, street, portrait and botanical photography. She is a retired teacher of English as a Second Language who has taught in Saudi Arabia and Turkey, as well as in Austin, Texas, and most recently at Portland State University. After picking up her first digital camera a few years before her retirement about a decade ago, she quickly developed many photographic interests. Landscape and street photography appeal to her love of wandering and exploring new places, while her interest in portraiture stems from a desire to work collaboratively with her subjects. In late February 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic was gaining traction in the world and just starting to spread in the US, she began exploring the genre of scanner photography, an alternative form of photography involving the use of a flatbed scanner rather than a conventional camera to make digital images. This kind of work seemed an excellent way to continue her creative efforts as she started practicing self-isolation at home during the growing pandemic. For her scanned images she has been using flowers and other botanical specimens to create "virtual" bouquets as a celebration of the beauty and grace still to be found in the world during these troubled times. Pat has shown her work in a number of group exhibitions in galleries across the country. In Oregon, her photography has been juried into exhibitions at the LightBox Gallery in Astoria and the Black Box Gallery in Portland, and her Landscapes of the Pacific Northwest series was juried into the 2018 Pacific Northwest Photography Viewing Drawers at the Blue Sky Gallery in Portland. Her work has also been juried into exhibitions in the A Smith Gallery in Johnson City, Texas, the SE Center for Photography in Greenville, South Carolina, and PhotoPlace Gallery in Middlebury, Vermont, among others. In addition, one of her landscapes graces the cover of the 2016 edition of The Creaky Knees Guide, Oregon published by Sasquatch Books in Seattle. Another of her landscape photographs appears in the 2017 German edition of the National Geographic Guide to National Parks of the United States, a travel guide published by NG Buchverlag GmbH in Munich. Pat has received several awards for her photography. Her landscape image titled Enchanted Forest was selected for the Juror's First Award at the 2017 Nature's Way exhibition at the LightBox Gallery in Oregon, and the image won the Grand Prize in The American Landscape 2021 Photo Contest presented by Outdoor Photographer Magazine. Her portrait titled Sophia With Roses won a Director's Honorable Mention in the 2020 Portraits exhibition at the A Smith Gallery in Texas, and the image won Second Place in The Face, 2020 Portrait Photo Contest presented by Digital Photo Pro Magazine. Her cityscape image titled Random Chaos won a Director's Honorable Mention in the 2020 Vistas exhibition at the A Smith Gallery in Texas. And her botanical image titled Still Life with Roses & Raffia won an Honorable Mention in the Still Life Amateur category in The 14th Annual International Color Awards. Pat also writes about photography for Oregon ArtsWatch, an online magazine about culture and the arts in the Pacific Northwest. Much of her photography and her CV can be found on her website.
Denise Grunstein
Denise Grunstein
Sweden
1950
Denise Grunstein is one of the best known and most highly respected profiles in Swedish photography. Her images are easily recognized for their characteristic, intensely present, highly personal and quite romantic artistic expression. Considered one of Sweden´s foremost portrayers of people, be they models, actors, dancers, directors or authors, she has a unique ability to imprint her own feelings and temperament on film. Besides people, nature has been another main source of inspiration for Denise throughout her career, with much of her most powerful work distiguished by often subtle natural romantic elements. Denise Grunstein works in her very own lifestyle tradition, always with strong fashion sense, regardless of project and commission. She has staged a large number of high profile solo exhibitions and contributed to numerous celebrated books. For her personal art work, Denise is represented by Galleri Charlotte Lund.
Solmaz Daryani
Solmaz Daryani
Iran
1989
Solmaz Daryani is an Iranian photographer and photojournalist, based between the UK and Iran. Her work is particularly known for exploring the themes of climate security, climate change, water crisis, human identity and environment. Daryani has worked internationally, covering social and environmental documentary stories in Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey and the United Kingdom. Her work has been published by international magazines and newspapers such as National Geographic Magazine, L'OBS Magazine, Foreign Policy Magazine, Polka Magazine, Zenith Magazine among others. The Eyes of Earth (THE DEATH OF LAKE URMIA) "A lake is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature." Henry David Thoreau Lake Urmia is located in the northwest of Iran. It was once the biggest salt lake in the Middle East and sixth biggest salt lake on earth situated between two neighboring provinces (East-Azerbaijan and West-Azerbaijan) in Iran. Lake Urmia was home to many birds like ducks, pelicans, and flamingoes.10 years ago; the lake was still a popular destination for vacationers. Bathers immersed themselves in the saline water and smeared their bodies with its legendary black mud, which helped to treat skin disease. My extended family on my mother's side born and lived in Sharafkhaneh port. The town used to be one of the heavily traveled touristic villages on the north coast of Lake Urmia. My grandfather had built a motel beside the lake, and my uncles were sailors. Less than a decade ago, my grandfather hosted dozens of tourists a day in the summers, with his two sons taking them on boat tours. During the past 20 years, approximately 80% of this lake dried due to climatic changes, excessive development in the agriculture sector, lack of correct management of water consumption, and excessive dams constructed on the lake's basin river in this area. At the moment, hopes for the salt lake's survival have been revived after 2018 torrential rain has boosted a government program aimed at preserving it before it dries up. The desiccation is one of the most unfortunate environmental disasters of Iran in recent years. It will increase the frequency of salt storms that sweep across the exposed lakebed, diminishing the productivity of surrounding land and encouraging farmers to move away. More than 4 million people live in two neighboring provinces (East-Azerbaijan and West Azerbaijan) around the lake and agriculture, animal husbandry, and handicraft making play a significant role in the region. As the lake dried up, agriculture waned which caused my grandparent's garden dry and deserted. Lake's ducks; flamingos and pelicans have vanished, too. My childhood in Sharafkhaneh seems like a long time ago. The motel abandoned, and the almond trees have withered. The port today is a sparsely populated village where most people are old, and it no longer resembles the place where I left my childhood memories. The project investigates the impacts of drying of Urmia Lake on people and the environment around it and to demonstrate environmental, economic, physical, and social changes that happened after lake shrinking. (the Year 2014-ongoing)
Robert Frank
Robert Frank
Switzerland/United States
1924 | † 2019
Robert Frank was a Swiss photographer and documentary filmmaker, who became an American binational. His most notable work, the 1958 book titled The Americans, earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and nuanced outsider's view of American society. Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014, said The Americans "changed the nature of photography, what it could say and how it could say it. it remains perhaps the most influential photography book of the 20th century." Frank later expanded into film and video and experimented with manipulating photographs and photomontage. I’m always looking outside, trying to look inside. Trying to say something that is true. But maybe nothing is really true. Except what’s out there. And what’s out there is always changing. -- Robert Frank Frank was born in Zürich, Switzerland, the son of Rosa (Zucker) and Hermann Frank. His family was Jewish. Robert states in Gerald Fox's 2004 documentary Leaving Home, Coming Home that his mother, Rosa (other sources state her name as Regina), had a Swiss passport, while his father, Hermann originating from Frankfurt, Germany had become stateless after losing his German citizenship as a Jew. They had to apply for Swiss citizenship for Robert and his older brother, Manfred. Though Frank and his family remained safe in Switzerland during World War II, the threat of Nazism nonetheless affected his understanding of oppression. He turned to photography, in part as a means to escape the confines of his business-oriented family and home, and trained under a few photographers and graphic designers before he created his first hand-made book of photographs, 40 Fotos, in 1946. Frank emigrated to the United States in 1947 and secured a job in New York City as a fashion photographer for Harper's Bazaar. In 1949, the new editor of Camera magazine, Walter Laubli (1902-1991), published a substantial portfolio of Jakob Tuggener pictures made at upper-class entertainments and in factories, alongside the work of the 25-year-old Frank who had just returned to his native Switzerland after two years abroad, with pages including some of his first pictures from New York. The magazine promoted the two as representatives of the 'new photography' of Switzerland. Tuggener was a role model for the younger artist, first mentioned to him by Frank's boss and mentor, Zurich commercial photographer Michael Wolgensinger (1913-1990) who understood that Frank was unsuited to the more mercenary application of the medium. Tuggener, as a serious artist who had left the commercial world behind, was the "one Frank really did love, from among all Swiss photographers," according to Guido Magnaguagno and Fabrik, as a photo book, was a model for Frank's Les Américains ('The Americans') published ten years later in Paris by Delpire, in 1958. He soon left to travel in South America and Europe. He created another hand-made book of photographs that he shot in Peru, and returned to the U.S. in 1950. That year was momentous for Frank, who, after meeting Edward Steichen, participated in the group show 51 American Photographers at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); he also married fellow artist Mary Frank née Mary Lockspeiser, with whom he had two children, Andrea and Pablo. Though he was initially optimistic about the United States' society and culture, Frank's perspective quickly changed as he confronted the fast pace of American life and what he saw as an overemphasis on money. He now saw America as an often bleak and lonely place, a perspective that became evident in his later photography. Frank's own dissatisfaction with the control that editors exercised over his work also undoubtedly colored his experience. He continued to travel, moving his family briefly to Paris. In 1953, he returned to New York and continued to work as a freelance photojournalist for magazines including McCall's, Vogue, and Fortune. Associating with other contemporary photographers such as Saul Leiter and Diane Arbus, he helped form what Jane Livingston has termed The New York School of photographers (not to be confused with the New York School of art) during the 1940s and 1950s. In 1955, Frank achieved further recognition with the inclusion by Edward Steichen of seven of his photographs (many more than most other contributors) in the world-touring Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Family of Man that was to be seen by 9 million visitors and with a popular catalog that is still in print. Frank's contributions had been taken in Spain (of a woman kissing her swaddled babe-in-arms); of a bowed old woman in Peru; a rheumy-eyed miner in Wales; and the others in England and the US, including two (one atypically soft-focus) of his wife in pregnancy; and one (later to be included in The Americans) of six laughing women in the window of the White Tower Hamburger Stand on Fourteenth Street, New York City. The truth is somewhere between the documentary and the fictional, and that is what I try to show. What is real one moment has become imaginary the next. You believe what you see now, and the next second you don’t anymore. -- Robert Frank Inspired by fellow Swiss Jakob Tuggener's 1943 book Fabrik, Bill Brandt's The English at Home (1936), and Walker Evans's American Photographs (1938), and on the recommendation of Evans (a previous recipient), Alexey Brodovitch, Alexander Leiberman, Edward Steichen, and Meyer Schapiro, Frank secured a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1955 to travel across the United States and photograph all strata of its society. Cities he visited included Detroit and Dearborn, Michigan; Savannah, Georgia; Miami Beach and St. Petersburg, Florida; New Orleans, Louisiana; Houston, Texas; Los Angeles, California; Reno, Nevada; Salt Lake City, Utah; Butte, Montana; and Chicago, Illinois. He took his family along with him for part of his series of road trips over the next two years, during which time he took 28,000 shots. 83 of these were selected by him for publication in The Americans. Frank's journey was not without incident. He later recalled the anti-Semitism to which he was subject in a small Arkansas town. "I remember the guy [policeman] took me into the police station, and he sat there and put his feet on the table. It came out that I was Jewish because I had a letter from the Guggenheim Foundation. They really were primitive." He was told by the sheriff, "Well, we have to get somebody who speaks Yiddish." ... "They wanted to make a thing out of it. It was the only time it happened on the trip. They put me in jail. It was scary. Nobody knew where I was." Elsewhere in the South, he was told by a sheriff that he had "an hour to leave town." Those incidents may have contributed to the dark view of America found in the work. Shortly after returning to New York in 1957, Frank met Beat writer Jack Kerouac "at a New York party where poets and Beatniks were," and showed him the photographs from his travels. However, according to Joyce Johnson, Kerouac's lover at the time, she met Frank while waiting for Kerouac to emerge from a conference with his editors, at Viking Press, looked at Frank's portfolio, and introduced them to each other. Kerouac immediately told Frank, "Sure I can write something about these pictures." He eventually contributed the introduction to the U.S. edition of The Americans. Frank also became lifelong friends with Allen Ginsberg, and was one of the main visual artists to document the Beat subculture, which felt an affinity with Frank's interest in documenting the tensions between the optimism of the 1950s and the realities of class and racial differences. The irony that Frank found in the gloss of American culture and wealth over this tension gave his photographs a clear contrast to those of most contemporary American photojournalists, as did his use of unusual focus, low lighting, and cropping that deviated from accepted photographic techniques. This divergence from contemporary photographic standards gave Frank difficulty at first in securing an American publisher. Les Américains was first published in 1958 by Robert Delpire in Paris, as part of its Encyclopédie Essentielle series, with texts by Simone de Beauvoir, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Henry Miller and John Steinbeck that Delpire positioned opposite Frank's photographs. It was finally published in 1959 in the United States, without the texts, by Grove Press, where it initially received substantial criticism. Popular Photography, for one, derided his images as "meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness." Though sales were also poor at first, the fact that the introduction was by the popular Kerouac helped it reach a larger audience. Over time and through the inspiration of later artists, The Americans became a seminal work in American photography and art history, and is the work with which Frank is most clearly identified. In 1961, Frank received his first individual show, entitled Robert Frank: Photographer, at the Art Institute of Chicago. He also showed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1962. By the time The Americans was published in the United States in 1959, Frank had moved away from photography to concentrate on filmmaking. Among his films was the 1959 Pull My Daisy, which was written and narrated by Kerouac and starred Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and others from the Beat circle. The Beats emphasized spontaneity, and the film conveyed the quality of having been thrown together or even improvised. Pull My Daisy was accordingly praised for years as an improvisational masterpiece, until Frank's co-director, Alfred Leslie, revealed in a November 28, 1968 article in the Village Voice that the film was actually carefully planned, rehearsed, and directed by him and Frank, who shot the film with professional lighting. Though Frank continued to be interested in film and video, he returned to still images in the 1970s, publishing his second photographic book, The Lines of My Hand, in 1972. This work has been described as a "visual autobiography", and consists largely of personal photographs. However, he largely gave up "straight" photography to instead create narratives out of constructed images and collages, incorporating words and multiple frames of images that were directly scratched and distorted on the negatives. None of this later work has achieved an impact comparable to that of The Americans. As some critics have pointed out, this is perhaps because Frank began playing with constructed images more than a decade after Robert Rauschenberg introduced his silkscreen composites—in contrast to The Americans, Frank's later images simply were not beyond the pale of accepted technique and practice by that time. Frank and Mary separated in 1969. He remarried, to sculptor June Leaf, and in 1971, moved to the community of Mabou, Nova Scotia in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia in Canada. In 1974, his daughter, Andrea, was killed in a plane crash in Tikal, Guatemala. Also around this time, his son, Pablo, was first hospitalized and diagnosed with schizophrenia. Much of Frank's subsequent work dealt with the impact of the loss of both his daughter and subsequently his son, who died in an Allentown, Pennsylvania hospital in 1994. In 1995, in memory of his daughter, he founded the Andrea Frank Foundation, which provides grants to artists. After his move to Nova Scotia, Canada, Frank divided his time between his home there, in a former fisherman's shack on the coast, and his Bleecker Street loft in New York. He acquired a reputation for being a recluse (particularly since the death of Andrea), declining most interviews and public appearances. He continued to accept eclectic assignments, however, such as photographing the 1984 Democratic National Convention and directing music videos for artists such as New Order ("Run"), and Patti Smith ("Summer Cannibals"). Frank produced both films and still images, and helped organize several retrospectives of his art. His work has been represented by Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York since 1984. In 1994, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. presented the most comprehensive retrospective of Frank's work to date, entitled Moving Out. Frank died on September 9, 2019, at his home in Nova Scotia.Source: Wikipedia I have been frequently accused of deliberately twisting subject matter to my point of view. Above all, I know that life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference. Opinion often consists of a kind of criticism. But criticism can come out of love. It is important to see what is invisible to others—perhaps the look of hope or the look of sadness. Also it is always the instantaneous reaction to oneself that produces a photograph. -- Robert Frank
Franco Fontana
Franco Fontana
Italy
1933 | † 2023
Franco Fontana is an Italian photographer, born in Modena, Italy. He is best known for his abstract colour landscapes. He started taking photographs in the 1950s when he was working as a decorator in a furniture showroom. In 1961 he joined a local amateur club in Modena. The experience would be a turning point in his career, and Fontana went on to have his first solo exhibition in 1965 at the Società Fotografica Subalpina, Turin and at the Galleria della Sala di Cultura in Modena in 1968. Since then he has participated in more than 400 group and solo exhibitions. Fontana has photographed for advertising campaigns for brands such as Fiat, Volkswagen, Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane, Snam, Sony, Volvo, Versace, Canon, Kodak, Robe di Kappa, Swissair, and has been a magazine photographer for publications including Time Magazine, Life, Vogue (USA and France), Venerdì di Repubblica, Panorama, and with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the New York Times. Fontana's first book, Skyline, was published in 1978 in France by Contrejour and in Italy by Punto e Virgola with a text by Helmut Gernsheim. Fontana is the art director of the Toscana Fotofestival. He has received numerous awards, such as the 1989 Tokyo Photographer Society of Japan - The 150 Years of Photography - Photographer Award. Fontana is especially interested in the interplay of colours. His early innovations in colour photography in the 1960s were stylistically disruptive. According to art critic Giuliana Scimé, Fontana "destroyed all the structures, practices, and technical choices within the Italian tradition." Fontana uses 35mm cameras, and as noted by Iwan Zahar, deploys distant viewpoints with telephoto lenses to flatten contours in a landscape of crops and fields into bands of intense, saturated colour. This is an effect that Franco Lefèvre has described as dialectical landscapism. Of his use of colour in his 2019 retrospective exhibition Sintesi ('Synthesis') at Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, curator Diana Baldon has observed “His bold geometric compositions are characterised by shimmering colours, level perspectives and a geometric-formalist and minimal language...By adopting this approach during the 1960s, Fontana injected a new vitality into the field of creative colour photography for then multicolour was not in fashion in art photography...The way Fontana shoots, dematerialises the objects photographed, which loose three-dimensionality and realism to become part of an abstract drawing”. Aside from the rural landscape Fontana has applied his graphic sensibility to other subjects: city architecture, portraiture, fashion, still-life and the nude. Fontana's photographs have also been used as album cover art for records produced by the ECM Records jazz label.Source: Wikipedia Fontana's style was shaped in the late 1960s under the influence of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. In that his teachers were his older contemporaries, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Ed Reinhardt. Fontana's work with its focus on form and color was quite different from the classical black-and-white art photography that was predominant at that time. His work is in more than 50 museums in the world, including Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film (Rochester), Ludwig Museum (Cologne), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Museum of Modern Art (Paris), The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts (Moscow), National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Galleria d’Arte Moderna - Torino, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston-Texas - USA, Deutch Bank, Banca Unicredit, Italia, UBS Unione Banche Svizzere, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes- Buenos Aires, Muscadelle Museum of Art - Williamsburg, USA, Mus e WWestlicht, Vienna, IVAM, Museo Internazionale d’Arte Moderna, Valencia, Mus e de l’Elys e, Losanna, Maxxi, Roma, Macro, Roma.Source: francofontanaphotographer.com
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