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Win a Solo Exhibition in June 2026 + An Exclusive Interview!
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Ed Sievers
Untitled (Self portrait in mirror), Venice Beach, CA, 1976
Ed Sievers
Ed Sievers

Ed Sievers

Country: United States
Birth: 1932 | Death: 2002

Ed Sievers was born in 1932 in St. Louis, MO, the son of a family doctor that made house calls and an aspiring opera singer. He attended Grinnell College, graduating with a degree in Speech in 1954. His first job was as a creative writer for Hallmark Cards. The slogans he penned were notable for the wry wit and wisdom with which he commented on the human condition. At the same time, his interest in the arts was expanding from the literary to the visual, and would ultimately lead him in a new direction.

In 1966 he was accepted into the MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design to study photography with Harry Callahan. Upon graduation in 1968 he joined the faculty of California State University, Northridge, as a specialist in fine art photography. He took up residence in the Carlton Hotel in Venice Beach and soon realized he had walked into a street photographer's dream.

Originally designed as a resort community modeled after its Italian namesake, Venice had fallen on hard times. Buildings were in disrepair and rents were cheap. Influenced by the Bohemian lifestyle of its poets, artists, students and a struggling lower class, the boardwalk suddenly sprang to life. There were musicians, dancers, jugglers, mimes, magicians, comedians, roller skaters, fortune tellers, gritty street people and colorful hippies. And, of course, there was the sprawling nude beach. Throngs of gapers flocked from throughout Southern California to enjoy the expressive spirit of the moment.

But that was only on weekends. A quieter, more sensitive mood prevailed during the week. The gentle gestures of holocaust survivors at the Israel Levin Center. The recovering alcoholics quietly heading home after Al-Anon meetings. The homeless searching for food and drink. The once cheerful cottages longing for attention. The iconic murals. The myopic murals. The motions of a people not sure of what lay ahead.

Within a decade the Venice that Ed knew had been swallowed up by rampant commercialism and the inexorable influx of the nouveau riche. Upon his death in 2002, the Edwin R. Sievers Memorial Award was established to share his vision with future students; "His approach to photography was straight forward: use the nuances of available light to enhance the subject, whatever that may be: ordinary, quirky, or sublime."

Source: Robert Mann Gallery

 

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Carolyn Hampton
United States
Garry Winogrand
United States
1928 | † 1984
Garry Winogrand was an American street photographer, known for his portrayal of U.S. life and its social issues, in the mid-20th century. Photography curator, historian, and critic John Szarkowski called Winogrand the central photographer of his generation. Winogrand was influenced by Walker Evans and Robert Frank and their respective publications American Photographs and The Americans. Henri Cartier-Bresson was another influence although stylistically different. Winogrand worked as a freelance photojournalist and advertising photographer in the 1950s and 1960s. Between 1952 and 1954 he freelanced with the PIX Publishing agency in Manhattan on an introduction from Ed Feingersh, and from 1954 at Brackman Associates. Winogrand's beach scene of a man playfully lifting a woman above the waves appeared in the 1955 The Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York which then toured the world to be seen by 9 million visitors. His first solo show was held at Image Gallery in New York in 1959. His first notable exhibition was in Five Unrelated Photographers in 1963, also at MoMA in New York, along with Minor White, George Krause, Jerome Liebling, and Ken Heyman. Winogrand was known for his portrayal of American life in the early 1960s. Many of his photographs depict the social issues of his time and in the role of media in shaping attitudes. He roamed the streets of New York with his 35mm Leica camera rapidly taking photographs using a prefocused wide angle lens. His pictures frequently appeared as if they were driven by the energy of the events he was witnessing. Winogrand's photographs of the Bronx Zoo and the Coney Island Aquarium made up his first book The Animals (1969), a collection of pictures that observes the connections between humans and animals. He received three Guggenheim Fellowships to work on personal projects, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and published four books during his lifetime. He was one of three photographers featured in the influential New Documents exhibition at Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1967 and had solo exhibitions there in 1969, 1977, and 1988. He supported himself by working as a freelance photojournalist and advertising photographer in the 1950s and 1960s, and taught photography in the 1970s. His photographs featured in photography magazines including Popular Photography, Eros, Contemporary Photographer, and Photography Annual. Critic Sean O'Hagan wrote in 2014 that in "the 1960s and 70s, he defined street photography as an attitude as well as a style – and it has laboured in his shadow ever since, so definitive are his photographs of New York"; and in 2010 that though he photographed elsewhere, "Winogrand was essentially a New York photographer: frenetic, in-your-face, arty despite himself." Phil Coomes, writing for BBC News in 2013, said "For those of us interested in street photography there are a few names that stand out and one of those is Garry Winogrand, whose pictures of New York in the 1960s are a photographic lesson in every frame." In his lifetime Winogrand published four monographs: The Animals (1969), Women are Beautiful (1975), Public Relations (1977) and Stock Photographs: The Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo (1980). At the time of his death, his late work remained undeveloped, with about 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film, 6,500 rolls of developed but not proofed exposures, and about 3,000 rolls only realized as far as contact sheets being made.Source: Wikipedia Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed. -- Garry Winogrand A native New Yorker, Garry Winogrand became known for his street photography blending documentary and photojournalist styles and freezing his subjects in spontaneous and bizarre moments. Winogrand typically used a wide-angle lens mounted on a Leica 35mm camera and photographed prolifically, leaving 2,500 rolls of shot but undeveloped film and 300,000 unedited images upon his death. The tilted horizon and feeling of chaos in his images belie his careful compositions concerned with capturing surface detail and energy. Winogrand believed that the act of framing and photographing something transformed it. His images are often confrontational and take moments out of context, positioning Winogrand as an outside observer of human gestures and actions. Among Winogrand’s favorite subjects were women, and he described himself as being “compulsively interested in women” and having “compulsively photographed women.” A large part of Winogrand’s images in the collection of the MoCP form part of the Women are Beautiful portfolio (1981), which was initially published as a monograph in 1975. For the monograph, John Szarkowski, curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York at the time, selected eighty-five images featuring women from hundreds of photographs by Winogrand. The resulting book offers a random collection of women caught on the street, in parks, getting into cars, at parties, marching in parades, skinny-dipping in ponds, etc. The images capture not only Winogrand’s attraction to the women he photographed, but also the styles, activities, gestures, and energies pertaining to gender in the 1960s and 1970s, an era of transition during second-wave feminism and the sexual revolution. In the monograph and in the portfolio, Winogrand wrote: “Whenever I’ve seen an attractive woman, I’ve done my best to photograph her. I don’t know if all the women in the photographs are beautiful, but I do know that the women are beautiful in the photographs.”Source: Museum of Contemporary Photography
Peter Ydeen
United States
1957
Peter Ydeen is a photographer and artist currently living in Easton, Pennsylvania, working in New York City, and frequently traveling abroad. He works within the now-established tenet of Urban Landscape Photography, celebrating the complexity and beauty of the mundane world. Although his work draws inspiration from New Topographics, his photographs depart from its stoic aesthetic, embracing the ethereal layering typical of a romantic. His work is introspective and pictorial in nature, and has found inspiration in the poetics of George Tice, the playful lyricism of Paul Klee, the readymades of Marcel Duchamp, and the eccentric energy of Charles Burchfield—elements that seem to bring the work together as if in the setting of an E.T.A. Hoffmann tale. The thrust of Ydeen’s work has been the night series Easton Nights; however, he has also created several other series, including Waiting for Palms, shot in Egypt and Morocco; Commuter Motions, a motion study of his commute from Easton to New York City; Black White and Gray, a more traditional monochrome series also shot along the Interstate 78 corridor from Easton to New York; Valley Days and its subset Valley Days Rondels, a series of daylight shots in the Lehigh Valley; and finally, the ongoing series Away, which studies urban landscapes Ydeen encounters on his travels. All of these works have found their way into many books and publications, as well as into numerous creative exhibitions. Ydeen received his BA in painting and sculpture at Virginia Tech under Ray Kass, and his MFA in painting and sculpture at Brooklyn College (Fellowship) under Robert Henry, Phillip Pearlstein, and Alan D’Arcangelo, followed by a scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and a fellowship to the Sculpture Center in NYC. Following his education, he made his way as a technician in a number of fields, including technical illustration, industrial set construction, display, architectural drafting, and model making. He was the Director of Joseph Zelvin Models, where he built finished models for many architects, including Philip Johnson, Michael Graves, and Robert Stern, and for several years ran the model shop for the visionary architect Emilio Ambasz, with many of Ydeen’s models being published and exhibited. This period of exacting craftsmanship later became an important foundation for his immersive three-dimensional photography installations and hand-built framing techniques applied to his many exhibits. After meeting his wife, the art dealer Mei Li Dong, and with the help of African art dealer and scholar Marc Leo Felix, they opened the gallery Arts du Monde Inc. in New York City, selling African, Chinese, and Tibetan art and presenting a number of important exhibitions. This experience furthered his knowledge of display, working with designers such as Joaquin Carter, as well as enabling him to handle a vast cross-section of art daily, providing a humbling lesson in the aesthetics and history of those traditions. Easton Nights Easton Nights is a story which grew from the unique and uncommon valley in which the city lies; and is told with the images of unpeopled landscapes taken at night. Here, in the small hours, the world we see as mundane, cascades into dream. Like a surreal scene from a Guillermo del Toro film, trash bins and Toyotas, stop signs and doorways; all become animated. They lean; they stretch, and emanate, all with umbrageous hues, which seem to exhale from the nights own personal color wheel. Scattered signs give the words, marking our place in time, while the geometries show our relentless effort to arrange our world in a box. These are our stages, with the houses our beehives, the machines our toys, and the doors our portals. Complete they are a mimesis of our daily life, as can only shown in the mystical emptiness of night. Then with the dawn comes the beginning, where we all wake, then act; all while these magical and romantic worlds return to sleep. WAITING FOR PALMS Waiting for Palms is a series of urban landscape photographs taken in two corners of North Africa—Morocco and Egypt—that reflect their contrasting peoples and places with a gestalt that is private and colorful, foreign yet familiar, and often fiercely guarded. The photographs capture a world brought inward only to reemerge through the landscapes' 'spirit of place,' where every corner is layered with an unusual elegance and underlying beauty—a waiting and wanting—all presented to us as if the seen world is built on top of a myriad of swallowed dreams. BLACK WHITE and GRAY Black White and Gray is a series of urban landscape photographs shot along the eighty mile I-78 corridor, beginning in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, traveling through a cross section of both desolate and urbanized New Jersey, and then landing in the core of New York City. These are Images living in the mid tones, which find their origins in the stoic tenets of New Topographics only to wander towards a more romantic embrace of the animism of our places; a quality so often unseen in our daily life. This is a Lewis Baltz industrial park with a Bertolucci perspective, or a Robert Adams trailer topped with a Fragonard Cloud. Here, geometry melds with movement, sometimes contorted. cluttered or even stretched like a rubber band, while still presenting a respect of the classic, formal and academic qualities of our built environment. There is an overlay of chimerical wonderment which reflects the dreams and concerns of the countless stream of unobservant passersby who traverse these spaces daily. Gray, both in tone and subject matter, this is a study built with tensions which then lay us down in an elegant romance, interacting with both the monumental shapes and structures which move from simplicity into the cacophony of our urban landscape. Commuter Motions Traveling from the industrial town of Easton, Pennsylvania, through sparsely populated western New Jersey, and into the cacophony of New York City, Commuter Motions is a photography series that develops from the experiential capture of an eighty-mile commute. By opposing the usual fixity of photography, the series attempts to capture the energy and movement of that commute using an almost Bergsonian approach, which, through time-lapse, builds images from segments of a continuous dynamic. These photographs are not about the specificity of a “decisive moment” but are more in line with the thoughts and theories of late 19th and early 20th-century artists, who were immersed in the concepts of perpetuity, fleeting moments, change, chance and dynamism. Time surfaces as a fourth verity, adding to Robert Adam’s three: geography, biography and metaphor. It is that fourth that which gives us not a moment in time, but instead, a cross-section of a continuum. The usually narrow focus of our memory is substituted with an accumulation of peripheral vision, which creates an image reflecting the gestalt of these movements, a gestalt we perceive and experience but do not visually remember. Through this unusual form of capture, Commuter Motions frames the labyrinth of oscillating movements of our highways, bridges, and cities into photographs that reflect the élan vital of our daily commute. Winner AAP Magazine 45 Travels
Matthew Finley
United States
1972
Matthew Finley uses his photography to express himself and connect to the world around him. With a variety of photography processes, he explores intimate emotions through gesture, line and performance to communicate his experience. Growing up queer in an unaccepting environment, Finley felt apart from the world around him. Now, as an adult working through social anxiety, the studio is a safe space to create where he can be vulnerable and express his true self. Creating and exhibiting his work is a way to forge relationships with viewers and help those who see themselves reflected in it to feel less alone. Finding inspiration in nature, classic art and found photographs, he address-es modern issues such as his coming out story, intimate relationships, and finding peace in our tumultuous world. Based in Los Angeles, Finley’s work has shown in solo and group shows in multiple galleries across the U.S. Most recently, his work was on the walls of the esteemed Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles with the likes of Herb Ritts and Herbert List. Other works have circled the globe as part of the FOTOFILMIC 17 traveling show and he has pieces in the permanent col-lections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago, The Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, and the Center for Fine Art Photography. His images have also appeared in publications including Oxford American, Shots Magazine, and Plates to Pixels where he won the Juror Award in The Visual Armistice 10th Annual Juried Showcase. Finley’s most current project An Impossibly Normal Life recently received Center Santa Fe’s 2024 Personal Award as well as the Center for Photographic Art’s 2024 LGBTQ+ Artist Grant. Article Exclusive Interview
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AAP Magazine #58 B&W
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