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Mike Magers
David Burnett, Contact Press Images
Mike Magers
Mike Magers

Mike Magers

Country: United States
Birth: 1976

Michael Magers is a documentary photographer and journalist based in New York City. He is a frequent collaborator with the highly acclaimed team at Roads & Kingdoms and served as the lead photographer on their award-winning books, Rice Noodle Fish and Grape Olive Pig (as well as contributing to the 3rd book in the series Pasta Pane Vino) published by Harper Collins/Anthony Bourdain.

His images are exhibited both internationally and in the U.S. and have appeared in a wide range of digital and print publications including TIME, Smithsonian, Vogue Italia, Huck Magazine, Outside, The California Sunday Magazine, CNN's Explore Parts Unknown, Saveur, New York Times - T Magazine (Instagram Takeover), Grantland, Barron's, The Guardian.com, and L'oeil de la Photographie.

Michael's work documenting craftsmanship in Japan was named a 2016 Critical Mass Finalist.

About Independent Mysteries
Independent Mysteries (pub. November 2019) is the first monograph from documentary photographer Michael Magers. In it, Magers exposes the persistent tension between connection and disconnection -- a feeling of "intimate distance" -- he grappled with while traveling to places like Japan, Haiti, and Cuba for various assignments and personal projects. Drawing on nearly a decade of work, each image can be viewed as a film-still, with little context other than light brushes of human contact, fleeting intimacy, solitude and vulnerability. Every one of the grainy, black-and-white photographs in this book carries with it a secret to be discovered and explored.

Read More about Independent Mysteries Book
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Alex Webb
United States
1952
Alex Webb (born May 5, 1952) is a photographer known for his vibrant and complex color photographs. He has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1979. He's authored 16 books, including Hot Light/Half-Made Worlds (1986), Under a Grudging Sun (1989) From The Sunshine State (1996), Amazon (1997) Crossings (2003), Istanbul (2007), The Suffering of Light (2011), La Calle (2016), as well as five books with photographer Rebecca Norris Webb, his wife and creative partner—Violet Isle (2009), Memory City (2014), Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb on Street Photography and the Poetic Image (2014), Slant Rhymes (2017), and Brooklyn: The City Within (2019). He has exhibited at museums worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of Art, NYC, the Metropolitan Museum, NYC, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. He has contributed to Geo, TIME Magazine, National Geographic, and The New York Times Magazine among others. Born in San Francisco, Webb was raised in New England. Webb first became interested in photography as a high school student and in 1972 attended the Apeiron Workshops in Millerton, New York, where he met Magnum photographers Bruce Davidson and Charles Harbutt. He went on to study history and literature at Harvard University (graduating in 1974), but also studied photography at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. By 1974 he was working as a photojournalist and in 1976 he became an associate member of Magnum Photos. During this time he documented small-town life in the American South. He also did some work in the Caribbean and Mexico, which led him, in 1978, to begin working in color, which he has continued to do. Webb's work has been exhibited around the world, including at the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Photographic Arts, the International Center of Photography, the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His work is in numerous collections. He has received commissions from the High Museum of Art as well as the Banesto Foundation in Spain. Webb now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York with his wife, Rebecca Norris Webb, who is also a photographer, and they have collaborated on a number of books.Source: Wikipedia Alex Webb is best known for his complex and vibrant color photographs of serendipitous or enigmatic moments, often in places with socio-political tensions. Over the past 45 years, Webb has worked in places as varied as the U.S.-Mexico border, Haiti, Istanbul, and, most recently, a number of U.S. cities. “My work is questioning and exploratory,” he says. “I believe in photographs that convey a certain level of ambiguity, that ask questions rather than provide answers.” In 1974, the 22-year-old Webb, a Magnum Photos nominee, began working as a professional photojournalist, going on to work for the New York Times Magazine, Geo, Life, National Geographic, among other magazines. Alex became a full member of Magnum Photos in 1979. Working mostly in Latin America and the Caribbean, he credits those cultures with inspiring his interest in color, when he transitioned from black-and-white photography in 1979. Webb has published 16 photography books, including The Suffering of Light, a survey of 30 years of his color photographs, and Memory City (with poet and photographer Rebecca Norris Webb, his wife and creative partner), a meditation about film, time, and the city of Rochester, NY, itself, the long-time home of Kodak, in the year following the company’s bankruptcy. His most recent books include La Calle: Photographs from Mexico and the collaboration Slant Rhymes with Rebecca. In fall 2019, Aperture will publish his seventeenth book—and fifth collaboration with Rebecca—Brooklyn: The City Within. He has received numerous awards and grants including a Hasselblad Foundation Grant in 1998, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1990, and the Leica Medal of Excellence in 2000.Source: Magnum Photos
Clay Lipsky
United States
Clay Lipsky is a fine art photographer & Emmy Award winning graphic designer based in Los Angeles. He has applied his unique visual style across a variety of mediums, from print and multimedia to TV and film. Despite his varied interests, photography has always been a part of Clay’s life. Recently, he has experienced a new-found interest with the medium and is now passionately focused on pursuing photography as fine art, free from clients and limitless in creative possibilities. Clay is self-taught and strives to create images that can stand the test of time. His photos have been exhibited in various group shows, including those at the Annenberg Space for Photography, MOPLA, Pink Art Fair Seoul, Wall Space, Rayko and Impossible Project Spaces in NYC & Warsaw, Poland. Clay has been published internationally in print and online, most notably with Esquire Russia, Wired Italia, Fraction, Square, Lenscratch, Diffusion, i-ref, Daily News (UK), Yahoo! Lifestyle (Germany), La Republica (Italy), Libération (France), Shots & um[laut] Magazines. Clay Lipsky's project, In Dark Light, is intriguing on a number of levels. First, the work was created, for the most part, on a trip to Iceland and as we know, creating conceptual fine art images while in a foreign place, with no opportunity for previsualization, is not an easy task. But somehow, Clay instinctively found a narrative and way of working within a concentrated period of time. The other interesting aspect is what the work is about. Making imagery about depression, about loss and solitude has to have subtle nuances that are at once personal and universal, and Clay captured this subject with emotion and simplicity. Clay works as fine art photographer and graphic in Los Angeles. His photos have been exhibited in group shows across the country, including the Annenberg Space for Photography, MOPLA, Pink Art Fair Seoul, PhotoPlace and Impossible Project NYC. He has been featured internationally in print and online in publications such as Fraction, Square, Diffusion, F-Stop, PH and Shots Magazines. Recently, he was a featured "Ten" through Jennifer Schwartz Gallery, and North Light Press will be publishing an edition of his Cuba photos through their 11+1 series. He is also an avid self-publisher with several titles that exhibit as part of the Indie Photobook Library. Source: www.lenscratch.com About the series In Dark Light This series of self portraits examines my loss of identity and enduring personal journey through depression. It is a solitary path that encompasses loss of home and parent, the pursuit of beauty, work and perseverance under no religious or visceral compass. Imagined as a vast, shadowed plane it is a private purgatory mired in fog with colors muted and senses numbed. The varied landscape acts as metaphor for life's many obstacles. Beyond the horizon lies hope for brighter days and so the lone soul carries on, albeit cast in dark light. Discover Clay Lipsky's Interview
Laurent Dequick
Laurent Dequick is a professional architect in his forties. His photographic work has been influenced by architecture, since it is primarily focused on ideas surrounding the contemporary city and more specifically, urban sprawl. The photographer’s message is to accurately convey the impression of freneticism stemming from population density and activity in urban zones: “As you walk down the street, the lights, noises, traffic, hustle and bustle, and mix of smells are so striking that no single shot could capture all of it. So do we have to make choices? I don’t think so and I don’t want to.” To convey in images this “congestion” of urban life, Laurent Dequick does not hesitate to juxtapose, superimpose, or imbricate his shots. He fits together photographs representing architectural complexes, highways, and people, all with the same intensity. He condenses the images like the city condenses the sum of the lives of all of its inhabitants. His style is reminiscent of cubism in its rendering, which verges on abstraction in its representation of constant motion. Source: Yellow Korner The passing of time is a fascinating concept which happens all around us, at every single moment of every single day. French photographer Laurent Dequick decided to capture these fleeting seconds in a series of photographs entitled Vibrations Urbaines. Each image is a collective sequence of multiple photographs, superimposed together to visually reflect the chaos and congestion of large urban areas. The series features colorful and energetic portraits of both New York and Berlin. Viewers might feel a bit hyper as they view the still photograph which so strongly convey the motion of cars zipping past and the life of people rushing by. Dequick says his work is “primarily a reflection on the contemporary city and more specifically the proliferation of modern urban space.” Through these compositions, the artist portrays the constant urban action and excitement that are generally challenging to communicate through just one still photograph. Source: My Modern Met
Quentin Shih
China
1975
Quentin Shih (a.k.a. Shi Xiaofan), born in Tianjin, China in 1975, lives and works as a camera artist, and filmmaker between New York and Beijing. A self-taught photographer, he began to shoot photos in college for local underground musicians and artists. After graduation, he came to Beijing to develop his career as a professional photographer/artist. From 2000 to 2002, he participated in exhibitions in China and America with his fine art photographic works and his works have been collected by American museums, such as the Danforth Museum of Art and the Worcester Art Museum. During the last few years, he has been producing work for top commercial clients and international publications such as Adidas, Microsoft, Sony, Siemens, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and Esquire. His advertising campaigns work have won numerous prestigious international advertising and photography awards. In 2007, Quentin was named 'Photographer of the Year' by Esquire Magazine (China). In the following years, he joined lots group exhibitions and solo exhibitions in China, Europe, Southeast Asia and United States. As one of the leading Chinese photographers, Quentin Shih is well recognized for his individual artistic style which utilizes vast sets and dramatic lighting to engage in emotional narratives. Now, he is returning to his roots in fine art photography and challenging its techniques and concepts into his commercial and fashion photography in order to achieve a unique symbiosis. At the same time, he is also working on his film projects, A Parisian Movie (2011) was his first short movie shot in Paris, France.
Kevin Kinner
United States
1953
I realized that the term ''emerging photographer'' applies to where I am at this stage. As a young man perhaps better to say teenager, I had the opportunity to work at Hiro Studios here in New York City as a summer intern. It was there that I learned my way around the dark room and was able to experience the glamor and excitement of a shoot. However, during l my free time I took to the streets with my Pentax. Walking through Central Park photographing people, their surroundings, anything that caught my eye. Little did I know at the time that what I was practicing was street photography. Later on my professional career was advertising production. Particularly print production. Although not photography, I worked in tandem with photographers and retouchers to create the best final images that were to appear on the page. When digital phased out print, I decided to get back to my true passion....photography. Here I am again on the streets of New York City. Enjoying the independence, the discovery and the people. Hopefully continuing to “emerge” as a photographer. Recently, I have shown at the Treviso Photography Festival, as well as the ArtBoxy exhibit in Soho. I received a Single Image Award in Black & White magazine’s special 2022 issue. I was an integral part and exhibitor with Art on the Ave NYC. An initiative conceived to display art and photography in the vast amount of vacant store fronts. Street facing windows on The Upper West Side of Manhattan, Greenwich Village and Downtown Manhattan were transformed into galleries that rejuvenated their respective neighborhoods.
Andy Fabrykant
Andy Fabrykant was born in Argentina in 1984. He studied filmmaking at the Film University of Buenos Aires (FUC) and he did a master degree in Czech Republic at FAMU. Today he lives in Paris and he has already made 5 exhibitions (2011 - Paris, des lieux et de gens - Paris / 2011 - Nomade - Bourg-en-Bresse / 2012 - Tremplin Jaunes Talents - Saint-Mandé / 2013 - Besares - Buenos Aires / 2014 - L’Argentine à l’honneur - Neuilly-sur-seine). Even thought he is a filmaker he has been always around a film cameras.fter many years of walking around as a "flâneur" in my own city Buenos Aires (and after in Czech Republic and France) using my camera as a tool to get related with people and the city without knowing exactly what I was looking for, I realized that after the taxonomy of my work I could find the meaning of it. Because, what is a photographer more than a collector of images? That's how I started to find out which were my interests. In general, I am attracted to the relationship between the subject and the space. Sometimes it is an architectural approach where there is a lack of human activity and sometimes is completely the opposite, the subject verbs the object. I have been working around this topic for the last 5 years creating different activities or how I like to call them: games. Each game has it's own rule and I try to change them so I can always have a fresh and new approach. For example I just follow someone on the street and I let him take me to places that I don't know. Normally I don't take pictures of the subject, I just let him be an excuse bring me to where I am.I know a piece is done when I let the person go or when I get interested in someone else.
MD Tanveer Rohan
Bangladesh
1982
Md. Tanveer Hassan Rohan was born and brought up in Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh. He has an utter passion for photography and photography has been his passion for a very long time. Growing up in Dhaka, he has realized that beauty manifests in many forms. This city is a manifestation of the contrast of nature and urbanization. As a photographer, his essential aim is to capture the moments of life and give them significance by making them static in time. He loves to travel and be in different places, meet new people, and enjoy the experience that photography offers, which is to capture Earth's beautiful and awe-inspiring moments. He also loves to experiment with his photography. He has finished his Basic Photography course From Prism . He has taken part in many National and International Photography contest and till now he has won many national and more than 200 international photography awards, including IPA 2015 (2nd Place in General News Category and 7 Honorable mentions in different categories), MIFA 2015 (1st Place In General News Category and 3 Honorable mentions in different categories), Grand Winner in "Photo for Tolerance +" International Youth Photography Contest 2015. 1st prize in Sony World Photography Awards 2016, National Award ,2nd Prize in Photojournalism category from Xposure International Photography Competition 2016, 9 (3 Gold, 1 Silver, 1 Bronze , 3 Honorable mentions and also 2nd Place in People category) awards from Tokyo International Photography awards 2016. 2 Awards (1st Place in Reportage and 2nd Place in People category) from VIAP 2016, Bulgaria. He has been selected as a best Authors three times in FIAP patronage Photography Contest in France, Czech Republic and Bangladesh. His photographs exhibited in more than 45 countries.He has been awarded AFIAP distinction from Fédération Internationale de l'Art Photographique (FIAP) in early 2016, and BEPSS Distinction From The Photographic Society of Singapore (PSS) in November 2016 and PPSA Distinction FromPhotographic Society Of America in December 2016. It is with utmost diligent and inspiration that he is willing to carry on this passion throughout his life.
Harry Gruyaert
Belgium
1941
Originally dreaming of becoming a film director, Harry Gruyaert studied at the School of Film and Photography in Brussels from 1959 to 1962. Shortly after he left Belgium at the age of 21, fleeing the strict catholic environment in which he was raised. Gruyaert travelled extensively across Europe, North Africa, Asia and the United States and lived in cities with a vibrant film and photography scene like Paris and London. During his first trip to New York in 1968, he discovered Pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg. This encounter made him appreciate the creative potential of colour and encouraged him to search for beauty in everyday elements for the rest of his career. Around the same time Gruyaert befriended the American artists Richard Nonas and Gordon Matta-Clark and photographed their work. Further inspired by the visual impulses on his first trip to Morocco in 1969, he decided in the second half of the 1970s as one of the first photographers in Europe to commit himself entirely to colour photography. Gruyaert's cinematographic background instilled in him an aesthetic conception of photography. Rather than telling stories or documenting the world through his lens, he searches for beauty in everyday elements. His images are simply snapshots of magical moments in which different visual elements, primarily colour, form, light and movement, spontaneously come together in front of his lens. In his search for strong graphical images, Gruyaert focuses his camera on objects as much as on people, who are often reduced to silhouettes or rendered to plain colour fields. Unsurprisingly the countries he photographs are mostly identified by means of the subtle differences in colour palette and light, inherent to the local atmosphere, culture and climate, more than by the depicted subjects or scenes. Among his most well-known series are 'Rivages/Edges', featuring coastal views from around the world, that Gruyaert photographed out of a fascination for the rapidly changing light in these places. In the early 1970s, while he was living in London, Gruyaert worked on a series of colour television screen shots later to become the 'TV Shots' and now part of the Centre Pompidou collection. Around that time he regularly returned to his home country Belgium. This resulted in the series 'Roots', that perfectly reflects the Belgian Zeitgeist of the 1970s and 1980s. In 1982 Gruyaert joined Magnum Photos. More about Irish Summers More about Between Worlds
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