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Enter AAP Magazine 54 Nature: Landscape, Wildlife, Flora & Fauna
Enter AAP Magazine 54 Nature: Landscape, Wildlife, Flora & Fauna
Laurent Chéhère
Laurent Chéhère
Laurent Chéhère

Laurent Chéhère

Country: France

This Parisian by birth is a former award-winning advertising for his campaign Road Safety. Audi or Nike. One day he decides to leave the advertising to go around the world. Upon his return he chose to live his two passions, travel and photography. From Shanghai to Valparaiso, frome Srinagar to Ushuais, from La Paz to Lhasa, from Bamako to Bogota. He will feed his imagination and give us his view of the world and others. He loves exploring the cities, suburbs, country, as he likes to explore all fields of photography from reportage to conceptual image. Its particular interest in architecture and offset ideas will be born the series of "Flying Houses". Real house? Imaginary house? He tries to show us their hidden beauty pulling them out of their anonymity and perhaps invites us to leave. Laurent Chéhère exposed the series "Flying Houses" at Dock en Seine City of Fashion and Design in June 2012 where he won the Prix Special. He is represented by the gallery "Paris-Beijing" where he will exibit this series in October 2012. The "Flying Houses" will be shown in China at the 2012 Pingyao Internation Photography Festival and the Internation Fair "Paris Photo 2012"
Source www.parisbeijingphotogallery.com
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Maroesjka Lavigne
Maroesjka Lavigne (b.1989, Belgium) gained her Masters in Photography at Ghent University in the summer of 2012. Her work has been shown internationally at the Foam Talent exhibition in Amsterdam, The Robert Mann Gallery in New York, Galerie Hug in Paris and Museum Saint Guislain in Gent, Belgium, among others. She self-published a book called ‘ísland’ in 2012 that sold out. In 2014 she published a postcard version of this book. In 2015 she made a commissioned work ‘Not seeing is a Flower’ in collaboration with the Flanders centre in Osaka. This was published in the catalog called Facing Japan. Her latest project 'Land of Nothingness' is made in Namibia and exhibited in the Robert Mann Gallery in New York. She was selected for the Talent Call at Fotomuseum Amsterdam (FOAM) Netherlands 2012 and was the winner of the Emerging Talent competition of Lensculture in 2014 with the series ‘You are More than beautiful‘. In 2015 she won the Harry Penningsprijs in Eindhoven,Netherlands and in 2016 she won 1st place in the Landscape Category at the Sony World Photography Awards. She is currently living and working in Ghent, Belgium.Source: www.maroesjkalavigne.be Island: "Travelling through Iceland for four months, a country I was unfamiliar with: The light was bright, colours were vivid, and by the end of my trip the sun kept on shining all night long. Snow still held the country in its veil, creating a big white void. This has a way of cleaning up the landscape, the scenery gets more graphic. Wondering how this scene would look like in wintertime, I decided to go back for another month in January. The country turns blue at dusk in wintertime. All colours fade. Cities look like scale models seeking shelter from the weather in the shadow of the mountains.It was my intention to express the dazzling moment, that sometimes, time seems to stop."
Alex MacLean
United States
Pilot and photographer, Alex MacLean, has flown his plane over much of the United States documenting the landscape. Trained as an architect, he has portrayed the history and evolution of the land from vast agricultural patterns to city grids, recording changes brought about by human intervention and natural processes. His powerful and descriptive images provide clues to understanding the relationship between the natural and constructed environments. MacLean’s photographs have been exhibited widely in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia, and are found in private, public and university collections. He has won numerous awards, including the 2009 CORINE International Book Award, the American Academy of Rome’s Prix de Rome in Landscape Architecture for 2003-2004, and grants from foundations such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting in 2014. MacLean is the author of eleven books including, Up on the Roof: New York's Hidden Skyline Spaces (2012), Las Vegas | Venice (2010), Chroniques Aeriennes: L'art d'Alex MacLean (2010), Alex MacLean: Given a Free Hand (2010), OVER: The American Landscape at the Tipping Point (2008), Visualizing Density (2007), The Playbook (2006), Designs on the Land: Exploring America from the Air (2003), Taking Measures Across the American Landscape (1996), Look at the Land; Aerial Reflections of America (1993) and Above and Beyond; Visualizing Change in Small Towns and Rural Areas (2002). MacLean maintains a studio and lives in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Sea Level Rise: On the shoreline of the Atlantic coast from Maine to Florida, rising salt water will impact over 100 million people. As a result, our nation will spend unimagined fortunes to adjust both gradual and abrupt disruptions of rising ocean waters. Sea level rise occurs when warmer temperatures associated with climate warming melt land ice and thermally expand the volume of seawater. Although sea level is now rising in fractions of inches, the impact will accelerate, with mean sea level predicted to be 3 to 6 feet higher by the end of the century. Even though many people are skeptical of climate change, and certainly not engaged in actions to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gasses, there is no denying that sea level rise, enhanced by storms and storm surges, causes erosion, flooding, dislocations, and will result in catastrophic damage along our coastlines. This problem is a significant cost factor reflected in financial markets for hazard insurance and appraisal of real estate values. Sea level rise is a relentless, visible indicator of a warming climate, which cannot be ignored.
Laura Mohiuddin
Bangladesh
William Heick
United States
1916 | † 2012
William Heick (October 6, 1916 – September 13, 2012) was a San Francisco-based photographer and filmmaker. He is best known for his ethnographic photographs and documentary films of North American Indian cultures. W.R. Heick served as producer-director and chief cinematographer for the Anthropology Department of the University of California, Berkeley on their National Science Foundation supported American Indian Film Project. His photographs capture the life and culture of Native Americans from the Kwakiutl, Kashaya Pomo, Hupa, Navajo, Blackfoot and Sioux. He filmed a number of award winning films in this series along with the documentaries Pomo Shaman and Sucking Doctor, a Pomo doctoring ceremony considered by anthropologists to be one of the most complete and outstanding films of an aboriginal ceremony made to date. William Heick's career in photography began as a naval intelligence photographer during World War Two in the Pacific. After the war he studied photography at California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) under such notable teachers as Ansel Adams and Minor White. He became lifelong friends with Imogen Cunningham and Dorothea Lange and regards these two photographers as the primary influences on his photographic work. William Heick filmed two documentaries about Pacific Northwest Indian tribes, Blunden Harbour (1951) and Dances of the Kwakiutl (1951). W.R. Heick worked through most of the 1950s and 1960s as producer-director, assistant historian and cinematographer for the worldwide engineering firm of Bechtel Corporation. While with Bechtel he wrote and filmed documentaries of their major projects with special emphasis on ethnic and social consideration in remote areas of the Arctic, South America, Africa, Greenland, Europe, The Middle East, Australia, Indonesia and the islands of New Guinea and Bougainville. From 1956 to 1964 Heick was involved with C. Cameron Macauley in the American Indian Film Project, a project to document Native American cultures through film and sound recordings, working closely with Alfred Kroeber and Samuel Barrett. William Heick produced two documentaries for the Quakers. Beauty for Ashes documents the Quaker's project to rebuild 40 churches that had been burned by nightriders during Mississippi's racial strife in the turbulent 1960s. Voyage of the Phoenix documents the controversial voyage of the yacht Phoenix, which sailed through the American battle fleet during the Vietnam War to deliver medical supplies to North Vietnam when the bombing of that beleaguered country was at its peak. In the late 1960s and early 1970s W.R. Heick served as cinematographer on three feature films, all for the director/artist Fredric Hobbs: Troika (1969, co-directed by Gordon Mueller), Alabama's Ghost (1973), and The Godmonster of Indian Flat (1973). During the mid-1970s, working as an independent producer with Gordon Mueller, W.R. Heick produced the Indonesian Dance Series. This series, funded with grants from Caltex Pacific Indonesia and Pertamina, documents fourteen traditional dance performances from the islands of Java, Bali, Sumatra and Kalimantan. W.R. Heick's later films include The Other China, a four-part mini-series filmed on location in Taiwan in 1988 documenting the social and cultural fabric of Taiwan. His fine art photography has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, the de Young Museum, the Seattle Museum of Art, the Henry Gallery (University of Washington), the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and the University Art Gallery (Cal State at Chico) among others. His photographs have been selected for the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Smithsonian Institution, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art. In a published Art Scene review Monterey landscape artist and art critic Rick Deregon wrote: "The special qualities of W.R. Heick's images come from the simple relationship between the photographer and subject. With no agenda other than to capture the decisive inspirational moment and to illustrate the human parade Mr. Heick's work transcends straight journalism and aspires to an art of nobility and compassion."Source: Wikipedia William Heick was born October 6th, 1916. Spanning seven decades, Heick's career in photography and filmmaking has covered locations all over the world. Heick grew up in Kentucky and attended the University of Cincinnati. He married Jeanne Ridge in 1942, and served as a naval intelligence photographer in the Pacific during World War II. After the war, he continued his education at San Francisco State University. He also attended the California School of Fine Arts (now known as the San Francisco Art Institute), where he studied photography, painting, and sculpture under distinguished instructors such as Ansel Adams and Minor White. It was during this period that he met and made lifelong friends with photographers Imogen Cunningham and Dorothea Lange, both of whom he regards as primary influences on his photographic work. His fine art photography has been exhibited in institutions such as San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, DeYoung Museum, and Seattle Museum of Art, among many others. He has produced over 200 films and thousands of photographs. At the age of 94, when asked to sum up his prolific career, he simply stated, "it sure beats working!"Source: Peter Fetterman Gallery
Pascal Maitre
France
1955
Born in Buzançais, France, in 1955, Pascal Maitre studied psychology before beginning a career in photojournalism in 1979. His numerous assignments have taken him all over the Earth, from Afghanistan to South America. His books, In the Heart of Africa and Madagascar: Travels in a World Apart, gather images from 15 years of work in Africa. His photographs have been published in publications around the world, including GEO, Le Figaro Magazine, Newsweek, Life, and many others. His photographs first appeared in National Geographic in a September 2005 article on oil in Africa. Maitre is based in Paris, France. Source: National Geographic After studying psychology, he starts his carrier as photojournalist with the Jeune Afrique press group. In 1984 he joins the Gamma staff and then in 1989, he cofounds the Odyssey Images agency. From 1994 to 2018, he was a member of Cosmos Agency. He is now represented by MYOP. He has worked with many prestigious international magazines including, the Figaro Magazine, Geo, Paris Match, Stern, Brigitt and the National Geographic. In 2000, he published My Africa, a book that compiles 15 years of his work on this continent, with Aperture in the USA and Geo in Germany. In September 2001, the French version is released by Vents de Sable editions. In 2012 he publishes Amazing Africa, a compilation of 30 years of his work on Africa, with edition Lammerhuber and Unesco. Pascal Maitre has worked in over 40 countries in Africa, while tackling many different aspects, men and their way of life, politics, conflicts, tradition or the environement. He received numerous awards, including some World Press Photo awards, the AFD/Polka Prize for the Best Photo Report Project, the VISA D’Or 'Honneur for Lifetime Achievement'. He had eight personal exhibitions at Visa pour l'Image in Perpignan, two personal exhibitions at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris and a personal exhibition about his work at The Arche de la Défense in Paris.Source: MYOP
Attar Abbas
Iran/France
1944 | † 2018
Attar Abbas, better known as Abbas, was an Iranian photographer known for his photojournalism in Biafra, Vietnam and South Africa in the 1970s, and for his extensive essays on religions in later years. He was a member of Sipa Press from 1971 to 1973, a member of Gamma from 1974 to 1980, and joined Magnum Photos in 1981. Attar, an Iranian transplanted to Paris, dedicated his photographic work to the political and social coverage of the developing southern nations. Since 1970, his major works have been published in world magazines and include wars and revolutions in Biafra, Bangladesh, Ulster, Vietnam, the Middle East, Chile, Cuba, and South Africa with an essay on apartheid. From 1978 to 1980, he photographed the revolution in Iran, and returned in 1997 after a 17-year voluntary exile. His book Iran Diary: 1971– 2002 (2002) is a critical interpretation of its history, photographed and written as a personal diary. From 1983 to 1986, he travelled throughout Mexico, photographing the country as if he were writing a novel. An exhibition and a book, Return to Mexico: Journeys Beyond the Mask (1992), which includes his travel diaries, helped him define his aesthetics in photography. From 1987 to 1994, he photographed the resurgence of Islam from the Xinjiang to Morocco. His book and exhibition Allah O Akbar, a journey through militant Islam (1994) exposes the internal tensions within Muslim societies, torn between a mythical past and a desire for modernization and democracy. The book drew additional attention after the September 11 attacks in 2001. The choice was to think of oneself either as a photojournalist or an artist. It wasn’t out of humility that I called myself a photojournalist, but arrogance. I thought photojournalism was superior. -- Attar Abbas When the year 2000 became a landmark in the universal calendar, Christianity was the symbol of the strength of Western civilization. Faces of Christianity: A Photographic Journey (2000) and a touring exhibit, explored this religion as a political, a ritual and a spiritual phenomenon. From 2000 to 2002 he worked on Animism. In our world defined by science and technology, the work looked at why irrational rituals make a strong come-back. He abandoned this project on the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks. His book, In Whose Name? The Islamic World after 9/11 (2009), is a seven-year quest within 16 countries : opposed by governments who hunt them mercilessly, the jihadists lose many battles, but are they not winning the war to control the mind of the people, with the "creeping islamisation of all Muslim societies?" From 2008 to 2010 Abbas travelled the world of Buddhism, photographing with the same skeptical eye for his book Les Enfants du lotus, voyage chez les bouddhistes (2011). In 2013, he concluded a similar long-term project on Hinduism with the publication of Gods I've Seen: Travels Among Hindus (2016). Most recently, before his death, Abbas was working on documenting Judaism around the world. Before his death, Abbas was working on documenting Judaism around the world. He died in Paris on 25 April 2018, aged 74. About his photography Abbas wrote: "My photography is a reflection, which comes to life in action and leads to meditation. Spontaneity – the suspended moment – intervenes during action, in the viewfinder. A reflection on the subject precedes it. A meditation on finality follows it, and it is here, during this exalting and fragile moment, that the real photographic writing develops, sequencing the images. For this reason a writer's spirit is necessary to this enterprise. Isn't photography "writing with light"? But with the difference that while the writer possesses his word, the photographer is himself possessed by his photo, by the limit of the real which he must transcend so as not to become its prisoner." Source: Wikipedia Abbas, as he referred to himself professionally, was known for dramatic black-and-white photographs delivered with a point of view, especially in his book Iran Diary: 1971– 2002 (2002), a collection of images and text presented as a sort of journal. When the events that resulted in the overthrow of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in 1979 began, Abbas supported change, but he soon became disillusioned with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who took over the government. “When the revolution started, it was democratic,” The Toronto Star quoted him as saying in 2013. “It was my country, my people and my revolution. Then, slowly, it was being hijacked.” A turning point, he said, was the execution of four generals after a secret trial. He photographed their corpses in a morgue. “Something that we learned,” he said, “is that the extremists always win. That was my main lesson from the revolution. The extremists were prepared to kill, imprison, torture — everything. So they won.” Abbas was born in 1944 in a part of Iran near the Pakistan border. When he was a boy his family relocated to Algeria; he said that growing up during that country’s war of independence sparked his interest in documenting political events. He taught himself to use a camera, and among his earliest jobs was working for the International Olympic Committee at the 1968 Summer Games in Mexico. He would return to Mexico in the mid-1980s, taking pictures throughout the country over three years and producing the 1992 book Return to Mexico: Journeys Beyond the Mask (1992). In the 1970s he worked for the French agencies Sipa and Gamma. Early in that decade he was in Africa, covering the aftermath of the Biafran war in Nigeria and other events. He then found himself back in Iran. “My family is from Iran,” he told Vice in 2015, “but it isn’t as if I felt particularly Iranian back then. But I did feel that things had to change — you can’t just have some shah making all the important decisions for an entire country.” As the situation became more unstable and it became clear to him that the revolutionaries were no better than the regime they were replacing, he faced pressures from friends. “They urged me not to show the revolution’s negative side to the world,” he said. “The violence was supposed to come from the shah, not the protesters. I told them that it was my revolution as well, but I still needed to honor my duty as a journalist — or a historian, if you will.” He left the country in 1980 and did not return for 17 years. The revolution, though, had instilled in him an interest in what people throughout the world were doing in the name of God. “It was obvious after two years that the wave of Islamism was not going to stop at the borders of Iran,” he said in a video interview with The British Journal of Photography in 2009. “It was going much beyond the borders.” There are two ways to think about photography: one is writing with light, and the other is drawing with light. -- Attar Abbas He began by examining that phenomenon, resulting in the book Allah O Akbar: A Journey Through Militant Islam (1994), which recounted his travels through 29 Islamic countries. “When you’ve started with God you might as well stay with him,” he said, explaining why he went on to look at Christianity, paganism, Buddhism and more. It was an examination not of personal faith, he said, but of how faith can be deployed and twisted in other spheres. “What I’m interested in is the political, social, economic, even psychological aspects of religion,” he said, adding, “More and more, nations are defining their identities referring to religion.” If his work often put him in the middle of trouble spots, Abbas was not necessarily interested in images of blood and weaponry. “Most photographers, when they say they’re war photographers, they’re not really war photographers; they’re battle photographers,” he said in the video interview. “War does not limit itself to boom-boom, to the battle itself. Wars are very, very complex phenomenons, because they have a source, and it takes a while to come up, then it happens, and there are consequences. I’m more interested in the why and the afterwards of the wars.” He played down the part of his work that involved putting himself in harm’s way. “They say ‘courage’ — O.K., you have to be courageous,” he said. “But for me courage is a lack of imagination. You cannot imagine that it’s going to happen to you, therefore you go to the battle.”Source: New York Times
Martin Elkort
United States
1929 | † 2016
Martin Edward Elkort (April 18, 1929 - November 19, 2016) was an American photographer, illustrator and writer known primarily for his street photography. Prints of his work are held and displayed by several prominent art museums in the United States. His photographs have regularly appeared in galleries and major publications. Early black and white photographs by Elkort feature the fabled Lower East Side in Manhattan, New York City, showing its ethnic diversity, myriad streets and cluttered alleys. The Coney Island amusement park in Brooklyn was another favorite site during that period. His later work depicts street scenes from downtown Los Angeles and Tijuana, Mexico. Throughout Martin Elkort's long career as a photographer, he always showed the positive, joyful side of life in his candid images. Born in the Bronx, New York City, Martin Elkort grew up during the Great Depression. Elkort took his first professional photograph at the age of 10 while on a car trip with his parents to Baltimore. During the trip, he took photographs of flooded streets. The Baltimore Sun purchased his photographs of flood scenes and featured one of them on its front page. At the age of 15, he suffered a bout with polio and spent four months in the hospital. When he returned home, his parents gave him his first Ciroflex, a twin-lens reflex camera, that cost them about a week’s salary. After his recovery from polio, he set out around Manhattan taking pictures of whatever interested him. While studying at New York City's Cooper Union School of Art, Elkort joined the New York Photo League, an organization of photographers that served as the epicenter of the documentary movement in American photography. There he studied under successful photographers including Paul Strand, Aaron Siskind, Sid Grossman, Lou Stoumen, Imogen Cunningham and Weegee, learning to become adept at what he refers to as "stealth photography". With a more refined Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera strapped around his neck, he would roam the streets peering down into the 2×2 inch ground glass. He developed the skill of walking right up to a person and taking their photo without them even realizing it. His goal was to capture this post-war period's general optimism and innocence. During this period he worked at the Wildenstein & Company Gallery and later, the Stephen Michael Studio in Manhattan where he further enhanced his photographic knowledge and technique. In 1948, Elkort showed his pictures of Hasidic Jewish boys playing in the streets to Edward Steichen, who was curator of photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art and probably America's most famous photographer at the time. Steichen rejected his photos, describing Martin's skills as "no better than the other 35 million amateur photographers in the country." Dejected but determined, Elkort worked tirelessly to improve his craft and two years later, he met with Steichen again. This time the famous curator bought three of his images for the museum's collection: Soda Fountain Girl, Puppy Love, and The Girl With Black Cat, all uplifting images of children at Coney Island. Elkort's photographs (c. 1951) of recently liberated Jewish immigrants learning new work skills at the Bramson ORT (Organization for Rehabilitation and Training) School in Brooklyn offer a rare and intimate glimpse into of their optimistic struggle to integrate into a new society after World War II. Some of his pictures show Jewish workers bearing tattoos evidencing their incarceration in Nazi concentration camps during The Holocaust. In 1951, more than 20,000 Jews received vocational training at the Bramson ORT School. Seamstresses, tailors, pattern makers, pressers; here they learned a trade that was much needed in New York’s growing fashion and garment district. In 2008, Elkort donated 33 of his vintage ORT photographs to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.. Elkort was a member of New York Photo League from 1948–1951; an editorial associate and contributor to New Mexico Magazine in 1957; a founding member in 2002 of Los Angeles League of Photographers (LALOP); a contributing editor and contributed photographs to Rangefinder Magazine in 2006; and a member of the Photography Arts Council at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. After receiving a digital camera for his 70th birthday, Martin's photographic career re-ignited. He began to show his current and older work in galleries around the country. He also found a renewed interest in the New York Photo League. In 2002, he co-founded the Los Angeles League of Photographers along with David Schulman and David Stork. Modeled after the New York Photo League, its mission is to expose the wider public to photography's essential social, political and aesthetic values. He also writes articles for magazines dealing with photography including Rangefinder and Black & White Magazine. As of March 2014, Elkort's work is widely exhibited and can be found in the permanent collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; The Jewish Museum (Manhattan) in New York City; the Columbus Museum of Art; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles; as well as many corporate and private collections.Source: Wikipedia
Emma Powell
United States
Emma Powell is an artist in residence and lecturer in photography at Iowa State University. Powell graduated from the College of Wooster in Ohio and received her MFA from Rochester Institute of Technology. Her work often examines photography's history while incorporating historic processes and or devices within the imagery. In her series In Search of Sleep, Powell uses the cyanotype process to create a visual lullaby in wish she explores personal narratives and metaphors.In Search of SleepFrom my earliest days I have had a difficult relationship with sleep. As a child I avoided it at all costs, especially at night. To get me back to bed, my father used to tell me stories. They were not traditional children’s bedtime stories, but invented tales that began on our quiet street and journeyed down open drains to a dream-world of caverns, forests, and oceans full of unexpected animals and dangers. The story would always find its way back to the real world and end where it had begun, hopefully but doubtfully with me that much closer to sleep.In Search of Sleep recreates this shadowy realm and allows me to explore my real-life questions, from personal dramas to romantic doubts. The cyanotype process, with its distinctive blue tones, visually traverses the distance between waking and sleeping. These images are also toned with tea and wine to both dull the blues and add warmth. Tea, wine, cyanide – all three of these substances relate to different levels of consciousness that often mirror the mental states evoked by my photographs. In Search of Sleep creates a visual lullaby that allows me to safely explore what I love, what I fear, what I remember, and what I imagine.
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