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Ellen Auerbach
© Stefan Moses
Ellen Auerbach
Ellen Auerbach

Ellen Auerbach

Country: Germany
Birth: 1906 | Death: 2004

Ellen Auerbach was a German-born American photographer remarkable both for her avant-garde photography and for her innovative and successful ringl+pit studio, where she and fellow artist Grete Stern signed all their work collaboratively.

Ellen Auerbach was born Ellen Rosenburg in Karlsruhe, Germany. After sculpture courses in Karlsruhe and Stuttgart, she studied photography with Walter Peterhans at the Bauhaus school in Berlin. In 1929, she founded ringl+pit, an advertising and portrait studio, with her friend Grete Stern. The unusual title was derived from the nicknames they used as children. When Hitler rose to power, Auerbach emigrated with her future husband to Tel Aviv. There she opened a children's portrait studio named Ishon. Following the outbreak of the Abyssinian War, Auerbach moved to London, where she was reunited with Grete Stern. Together they worked on a series of portraits of Bertolt Brecht.

By 1937, Ellen and Walter Auerbach had married and moved to the United States, eventually settling in New York City. Ellen began to experiment with new photographic techniques, worked for Time and Columbia Masterworks on a freelance basis, and taught photography at a junior college. In 1955 Auerbach traveled to Mexico with Eliot Porter and the two produced a powerful body of work documenting Mexican churches. The series, printed primarily in color, explores the religious traditions and ceremonial icons of a fading era in Mexican religious history. Auerbach continued to travel and photograph extensively. At the age of sixty, she began a second career as a child therapist.

Ellen Auerbach's travels provided her with a kaleidoscope of people and places through which to develop her personal visual language. She believed that photography allows for the use of a metaphorical "third eye" which allows the artist to capture not only what exists on the surface of an image, but also to capture the essence of the subject that lies beneath that surface.

Source: Robert Mann Gallery


 

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Manuel Álvarez Bravo
Mexico
1902 | † 2002
Manuel Álvarez Bravo was a Mexican artistic photographer and one of the most important figures in 20th century Latin American photography. He was born and raised in Mexico City. While he took art classes at the Academy of San Carlos, his photography is self-taught. His career spanned from the late 1920s to the 1990s with its artistic peak between the 1920s and 1950s. His hallmark as a photographer was to capture images of the ordinary but in ironic or Surrealistic ways. His early work was based on European influences, but he was soon influenced by the Mexican muralism movement and the general cultural and political push at the time to redefine Mexican identity. He rejected the picturesque, employing elements to avoid stereotyping. He had numerous exhibitions of his work, worked in the Mexican cinema and established Fondo Editorial de la Plástica Mexicana publishing house. He won numerous awards for his work, mostly after 1970. His work was recognized by the UNESCO Memory of the World registry in 2017.Source: Wikipedia Manuel Álvarez Bravo, one of the founders of modern photography, is considered the main representative of Latin American photography in the 20th century. His work extends from the late 1920s to the 1990s. Alvarez Bravo was born in downtown Mexico City on February 4, 1902. He left school at the age of twelve in order to begin making a contribution to his family's finances after his father's death. He worked at a textile factory for a time, and later at the National General Treasury. Both his grandfather (a painter) and his father were amateur photographers. His early discovery of the camera awakened in him an interest that he would continue to cultivate throughout his life. As a self-taught photographer, he would explore many different techniques, as well as graphic art. Influenced by his study of painting at the Academy of San Carlos, he embraced pictorialism at first. Then, with the discovery of cubism and all the possibilities offered by abstraction, he began to explore modern aesthetics. He had his initiation into documentary photography in 1930: when she was deported from Mexico, Tina Modotti left him her job at the magazine Mexican Folkways. He also worked for the muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Álvarez Bravo is an emblematic figure from the period following the Mexican Revolution often called the Mexican Renaissance. It was a time of a creative fertility, owing to the happy though not always tranquil marriage between a desire for modernization and the search for an identity with Mexican roots, in which archaeology, history and ethnology played an important role, parallel to the arts. Alvarez Bravo embodied both tendencies in the field of visual arts. Between 1943 and 1959, he worked in the film industry doing still shots, which inspired him to realize some of his own experiments with cinema. While Manuel Álvarez Bravo was alive, he held over 150 individual exhibitions and participated in over 200 collective exhibitions. According to several critics, the work of this "poet of the lens" expresses the essence of Mexico. However, the humanist regard reflected in his work, the aesthetic, literary and musical references it contains, likewise endow with a truly universal dimension. He died on October 19, 2002, at the age of one hundred.Source: www.manuelalvarezbravo.org Manuel Álvarez Bravo was a teenager when he first picked up a camera and began taking pictures, before he enrolled in night classes in painting at the Academia San Carlos, in 1917, or sought instruction in the darkroom of local German photographer Hugo Brehme. Initially self-taught, Álvarez Bravo’s style developed through study of foreign and local photography journals. In these pages, he first encountered the work of Edward Weston and Tina Modotti, who came to Mexico in 1923; the latter became a close colleague and supporter, introducing Álvarez Bravo to the artists of Mexico’s avant-garde, including Diego Rivera, Frida Khalo, and Rufino Tamayo, as well as encouraging him to send photographs to Weston. In the 1930s, Álvarez Bravo met Paul Strand, traveling with him while he worked in Mexico, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. With Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans he exhibited in a three-man show at the Julien Levy Gallery, New York, in 1935. Mexico was a cultural hub for many in the international avant-garde in these years; André Breton visited, including Álvarez Bravo in the Exposition of Surrealism he organized in 1940 in Mexico City. Although the artist never identified with Surrealism, it was a major theme in the analysis of his pictures throughout his career. Revealing the influence of his formative years following the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Álvarez Bravo would instead speak of his interest in representing the cultural heritage, peasant population, and indigenous roots of the Mexican people in the face of rapid modernization.Source: Museum of Modern Art
Colby Deal
United States
1988
Colby Deal is a photographic artist born (b. 1988) and raised in Houston, Texas. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in the practice of photography from The University of Houston. Within his practice, he explores the culmination of elements of the psychological environment as well as the physical. He shows the dynamic range of family, community and the individual by combining street photography and portraiture to capture vibrant communities. In recent years he has incorporated the medium of sculpture and public art as a means of preserving cultural characteristics that are being erased and positively influencing his community and others alike. Colby is directly inspired by his upbringing through getting to see his family’s photographs that were mostly taken by his father. This appreciation for slowing down and concentrating on photographing what’s right in front of him, “The Now”, has led him to be more in touch with using analog photography. Colby Deal is an alumni of Project Row Houses residency, Red Line Contemporary Art Center residency in Denver, Colorado and in 2020, was awarded an exhibition at the Houston Museum of African American Culture. Colby became a Magnum nominee member in 2020.Source: Magnum Photos Colby Deal is a firm believer in the potential of photography to be a transformative medium. “Especially now with Covid and how it is separating people, imagery is so important” he says, over video call from outside his home in Houston’s Third Ward, where he has been photographing with the intention to uplift cultural representations of the predominantly Black neighborhood. “People of color and people from under-resourced communities are always shown negative images about themselves,” says Deal, whose practice involves pasting his images onto abandoned buildings and derelict shopfronts. “Imagine being a kid, waking up, getting on the school bus, and seeing yourself displayed monumentally in a positive manner. That can have a strong psychological effect on the way you think about yourself and others. Like seriously, just a glance at an image can change your thought patterns — it can change your whole life.” Adopting a participatory approach, Deal’s process involves a lot of talking and walking. On a typical day, he will drag his large format camera on a wagon, stopping at people’s doorsteps and porches for a drink, smoke, and conversation, about their lives and the condition of their community. “I don’t want to call it a story because I sound like a fucking news reporter,” he laughs, “but what I’ll do is walk around, find things I like, and shoot around it”. The culmination of these excursions is Beautiful, Still, an ongoing collection of over 1,000 black-and-white negatives of street photographs and portraits. The ability to layer these historical, personal, and social contexts in a single image can be cited back to Deal’s childhood and evolution as an artist. Deal was initially self-taught, later enrolling in the Photography BFA at The University of Houston, mostly for “the network,” he says, and to “learn how to better articulate what I was doing”. The documentary photographer, who last month became a Magnum nominee, is also a sculptor, carpenter, graphic designer, and painter. “As a child, everything I found joy in was about art,” says Deal, who was drawing from the age of three, and later developed an obsession with breaking down objects and piecing them back together. “That aspect has played a huge part in what I do today, which is looking at an idea, concept, or message that I want to get across, then starting from the root, and working from there.”Source: British Journal of Photography
Katerina Belkina
Katerina Belkina was born in Samara, a city in the South-East of the European part of Russia. She grew up in an artistic atmosphere; her mother is a visual artist and, in herplace of birth, she got an education in the art of painting at the Art Academy. She continued her education in 2000 at an Academy for Photography also in Samara and exhibitions of her mysterious self-portraits ensued in Moscow and Paris. Katerina Belkina was nominated for the prestigious Kandinsky Prize (comparable to the British Turner prize) in Moscow in 2007. At the moment, Katerina Belkina is living and working in Moscow and Berlin.AAP: Where did you study photography?I started in a studio of photography and then I decided to study photography in an Art College. After several years I learned photography at the Photo Academy in Samara, Russia.AAP:How did you become a photographer?I think of myself as an artist in the broad sense of the word. For me photography is just a medium like a painting, drawing etc. However I like to use photography as a basis for my works. This form of art was always interesting for me. As well as drawing. I was influenced by my family in my childhood to like both mediums.AAP: Do you remember your first shot? What was it?When I was in fifth grade I took my school photo-group. Otherwise everything around me: school friends, street dogs, home yard.AAP:What was your first paid assignment/job?It was for an inexpensive portrait. The client was a girl who looked very similar to Marilyn Monroe. I found out that only when I looked at her in the viewfinder.AAP: What or who inspires you?Other people working in my field. When I see good results and when I see how they work. AAP: Do you spend a lot of time editing your images? For what purpose?Yes, a lot. At first I like the process of editing. In my case it is a combination of photo elements and then layer by layer drawing or correcting and making post-productions. I like when any art work include skills and labor. Every good idea should be perfectly executed.AAP: How do you choose your subjects?I always choose a topic that could be interesting for me at that moment. Then comes the process of thinking about. In the beginning ideas are always abstract. After a while it takes a shape: I choose a subject, composition, color combinations and details. AAP: Can you explain the process that you use to set up a portrait?When the idea takes shape in my mind, I draw a sketch, prepare all the necessary things for shooting and then start. Despite the fact that I know very exactly what I want for my future composition, I like to allow improvisation in the process. Because the result can be interesting and unexpectable. To take self-portraits I use a stative and make it by myself or I ask an assistant.AAP: Your worst souvenir as a photographer?Oh yes I remember! A meeting with a client who paid me and thought the world should rotate around him just because of that.AAP: What advice would you give a young photographer?Shoot a lot, take everything that could be interesting for you. Try new things, make discoveries. This is the most important thing. Don’t listen to anybody when they want to teach you something especially when it is in a critical way. AAP: What mistake should a young photographer avoid?Don’t try to be or to do like someone else. Your photography style will become unique over time. You need to be interested by what you are doing even if other photographers or artists can inspire you.
Qingjun Huang
China
1971
A freelancer artist, photographer. He was born in 1971 in China. He has been engaged in photographic art creation for 30 years, currently lives and works in Peoria, IL USA. Qingjun's representative work is series from 2003 and it is still on-going. The series has reached 150 works till 2023. Robert Frank reviewed Qingjun’s works in 2012 and evaluated “ Your work is an open window to look at China. 'Family Stuff' contains the main series and some sub-series includes 'Online Shopping Family Stuff', 'Homeless People’s Family Stuff', 'China Intangible Cultural Heritage Inheritor’s Belongings', 'The Stuffs of Live Streamers', and 'Family Stuff USA'. BBC interviewed Qingjun four times, Various international media, such as New York Times, Bloomberg, Harvard Business Review and Wired, have also covered his works. His works have also been published widely on paper media, online media, photo books such as National Geographic, Architecture Boston, Business Insider, GEO, Chinese National Geography, Discovery Cultural Geographic Monthly, Guardian Weekend, China Daily, Chinese Photography Magazine, Grazia France, Dutch Weekly Magazine, Vrij Nederland, Dutch Financial Daily, Family Photography Now etc. Some of his works appeared in textbooks published by Oxford University Press, and National Geographic learning. Family Stuff I have been making my long-term project "Family Stuff" series for 20 years, which now includes 150 photographs. I gather a family’s belongings from different spaces in the home and arrange them in one place to take a photograph with the family members. Most of these photos are taken outdoors, with the home as the background. Ninety percent of my previous works were shot in China during a time of rapid economic development, modernization and globalization. I used this method of staged photographs to record history. In the photos, a household’s real interior space is briefly exposed in an external space; also can be seen are environment changes, urban expansion, technological advancements and shifts in people's lifestyles. Through static documentation of the above, I create a dynamic social panorama. From 2022, I started photographing American families. The family is the smallest unit that forms society, and many such units make up this society. I continue to use the "Family Stuff" series to reflect the internal structure and diversity of contemporary American society. I have observed that among American families, whether they live in big cities or small townships, there isn't much difference in their basic material living standards. Therefore, I pay more attention to showcasing their cultural and spiritual life. I spend a significant amount of time preparing for each photo, getting to know the story of the subjects, visiting their rooms, contemplating the concept of the shoot, and carefully selecting the items for display. The concepts of these works cover the lifestyle of native-born Americans, immigrants' nostalgia for their homeland, as well as themes of love, work, identity, gender and the passage of time. Each material object is carefully chosen to reflect the subject’s interests and aspirations. I move these items and arrange them in overlapping frames, visually enhancing the familiar scenes and highlighting the current life status, beliefs and emotional memories of the family or individual. In Oct.2023, I had photographed a Swiss man living in a camp, with his Harley motorbike and sports car living a different lifestyle in Switzerland, which makes me thinking about to document different lifestyles around the world as much as I can. I then came back to China and photographed two more interesting subjects in December 2023. I hope to move on to showing people’s spiritual life through their material life. Through a single photograph, I depict both the external reality and their inner world. The images help viewers to look at humanity itself, understand the stories and often provoke contemplation.
Michele Zousmer
United States
Michele Zousmer is a humanitarian and fine art photographer. The camera is her tool to give voice to marginalized communities and witness the human experience. Michele's work celebrates each individual's strength and beauty, as well as their vulnerability and spirit, going beyond how one presents oneself to the world. They are infused with her almost overwhelming empathy. Michele believes a photograph can create a lasting impression of emotion, curiosity, love, and ultimately hope of mankind. It can help people heal, give them dignity, and feel empowered. Her photographs reveal insights into the lives of people we wouldn't otherwise meet. Through her world travels, Michele meets people from different walks of life, listening to their stories and sharing intimate moments with them. The permission they grant and openness they offer by inviting them into their world never ceases to move Michele. The soulfulness of her images comes from developing relationships with the people she engages with. Michele truly believes that even though we may have differences on the outside, inside we are all the same. The images are infused with her almost overwhelming empathy. Artist Statement "My mind, my eyes, and my heart have been opened by my experiences. My life has been forever changed. I hope my work inspires others to feel we all matter and to care more profoundly. Engaging in the world and becoming open to different cultures and traditions allows for more conversation on diversity and equality. Photographs hold the power to connect people and create understanding. This is why I do what I do." Article Mis(s)Understood
Bruno Barbey
France
1941 | † 2020
Bruno Barbey is a Moroccan-born French photographer. Throughout his four-decade career he has traveled across five continents, photographing many wars. Barbey was born in Morocco and in 1959-1960 he studied photography and graphic arts at the Ecole des Arts et Métiers in Vevey, Switzerland. During the 1960s he was commissioned to photograph European and African countries by Editions Rencontre in Lausanne. In 1964 Barbey began a relationship with Magnum Photos, becoming an Associate member in 1966, and a full member in 1968, at which time he was photographing student riots in Paris. He eventually served as Magnum vice president for Europe in 1978 and 1979 and from 1992-1995 as President of Magnum International. He spent 1979 to 1981 photographing Poland, resulting in his book Portrait of Poland. He rejects the label of 'war photographer', although he has covered civil wars in Nigeria, Vietnam, the Middle East, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Northern Ireland, Iraq, and Kuwait. From 2005 Barbey has, among other work, been pursuing a project on Istanbul. Source: Wikipedia Bruno Barbey was born on Feb. 13, 1941, in Berrechid, Morocco, just south of Casablanca, and grew up in various parts of the country: Rabat, Salé, Marrakesh and Tangiers. His father, Marc, was a diplomat; his mother was Marie Clement-Grandcourt. From a young age he knew he wanted to travel the world like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French writer and aviator. Bruno’s parents sent him to Paris for high school, where he was a “dunce and a thwarted lefthander,” he wrote in his retrospective photographic book, Passages (2015). He and his friends skipped classes to see movies by Italian neorealist filmmakers like Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica. Mr. Barbey entered Ecole Des Arts et Métiers in Vevey, Switzerland, in 1959 to study photography and graphic arts, but left after a year, because his courses had focused on advertising and industrial photography. He craved the freedom to pursue a single subject for an extended period as the Swiss documentary photographer Robert Frank did in his groundbreaking book The Americans, which was published in France in 1958. Following Frank’s example, Mr. Barbey drove through Italy in a used Volkswagen in the early 1960s, photographing its people in black-and-white in a neorealist style. “My goal,” he wrote in Passages, “was to capture the spirit of the place.” He caught dozens of moments in the life of a nation: a family racing along on a scooter, each person ebullient save for the pregnant mother; a group of girls whose joyful expressions contrast with that of a doleful beggar holding out his hand behind them; little boys playing with realistic-looking weapons; and a host of other characters like prostitutes, priests, old men and Mafiosi. The photographs - which would later be published as The Italians in 2002 - brought him to the attention of Magnum, where he worked for more than 50 years. In addition to the Paris demonstrations, he covered conflicts in the Middle East, Nigeria, Vietnam and Cambodia and recorded life in China, Brazil, India, Japan and Spain. He spent much of 1981 in Poland during the rise of the Solidarity trade union, capturing Poles in a period of turmoil and torment. He collected the pictures in Portrait of Poland (1982). “He brought genteel attention to the human experience — with a lot of kindness,” Gilles Peress, another Magnum photographer, said in a phone interview. Mr. Barbey, whose photographs have been widely exhibited, received the French National Order of Merit and was elected a member of the French Academy of Fine Arts, Institut de France, in 2016. He served as a Magnum executive at two different times. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a daughter, Aurélie Barbey; a son, Igor; two sisters, Loïse Barbey-Caussé and Adelaïde Barbey-Guissinger; two brothers, Dominique and Guy; and four grandchildren. Although he left Morocco at age 12, Mr. Barbey kept returning there, lured by its rich colors, light and architecture. Many of his photographs were of quiet moments: a bride showing off her hands decorated with a henna design; a golden-hued interior with a distant figure in a black-and-white striped robe blending into the floor’s design; red hides drying in the sun; and a person in black walking down a lane bracketed by pink walls. “Its very difficult to photograph there,” Mr. Barbey was quoted as saying on Magnum’s website, “because in Islam photography is supposed to bring the evil eye.” He added: “You have to be cunning as a fox, well-organized and respect some customs. The photographer must learn to merge into walls. Photos must either be taken swiftly, with all the attendant risks, or only after long periods of infinite patience.”Source: New York Times
Lukas Holas
Czech Republic
I am a small-town photographer and a graphic designer from the Czech Republic. I have occasionally been taking photos of everything that comes along - people, animals, macro and landscape ... for about 6 years. My dream is taking pictures of wild and exotic animals in their natural environment. So far, however, workload, a tight family budget and most of all being an active father of three children do not allow me to fulfill it. I can only combine business with pleasure and therefore we often go with the whole family to zoos in our small country at least. And so it happens that instead of tracking wildlife I often seek and “tame” our wild offspring. Nevertheless, it sometimes comes about that Dad gets away for a few minutes and gets stuck in a willingly posing animal.It may not seem so but shooting in a zoo might turn into a totally exciting matter. "Will the picture be good despite a smudged glass, strong steel bars, frequent apathy of animals or omnipresent crowds of tourists?" Sometimes it works out well! I'm trying to take pictures of the animals against a naturally dark background, but the contrasting final form is given by the adjustments in Photoshop. The experience and the daily practice at my work (a graphic designer) come in handy. My images have no specific message, but I believe that they leave some space for personal imagination and foreshadow a deeper story of animals portrayed. I also suppose that the black colour simply suits the animals and presents them in a more dignified environment than the stark walls of the enclosures do.I was also pleased with the opportunity to cooperate with the Union of Czech and Slovakian Zoos (for which I have been designing the annual reports using my black&white photos for several years), or with some specific gardens in the Czech Republic. I hope that such cooperation will continue in future and that the animals in my images will delight and inspire people in other countries than the Czech Republic.
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Call for Entries
AAP Magazine #55 Women
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