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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

Keith Carter
United States
1948
Keith Carter is an American photographer who is known for his dreamlike black and white photographs of the figure, animals, and meaningful objects. He began photographing new and unknown realities in his native East Texas environment. This setting, with heavy folklore, religious, and cultural motifs, inspired Carter to create some of his most iconic images. Since his start in Texas, his work continues to push imaginative realms in his travels within the United States and across oceans. In 1970, Carter earned a Business Management degree from Lamar University and began his career as a commercial photographer while working on personal projects. These personal projects have resulted in a long career and over twelve published monographs. Carter currently teaches photography at Lamar University as a Distinguished Faculty Lecturer. He travels worldwide providing photography lectures and workshops for artists. Carter's fine art career has made him the recipient of an array of awards such as the 2009 Texas Medal of Arts, 2009 Artist of the Year presented by the Art League Houston and, in 1991 the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University presented Carter with the Lange-Taylor Prize. His work has also been featured in print and online publications, television, and film. In 2006, the Anthropy Arts in New York filmed a documentary about Carter's photographic work, and in 1997 CBS made an art segment on Carter's work for public television. He has extensively exhibited his work throughout the world and participated in over 100 solo exhibitions. Permanent collections of his work can be found in many private and public institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the George Eastman House, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Dallas Museum of Art, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Ralf Dreier
Germany
1964
Ralf Dreier is a self-taught photographer with more than 25 years of experience. With a particular focus on minimalist black and white photography in the fields of architecture and landscape, he strives first and foremost to convey emotions and moods with his images. Statement: My pictures are essentially about conveying feelings and moods, so I don't really try to tell a story with them. These moods and feelings are what I feel when I look at a landscape that I would also photograph. It's about relaxation and letting go of everyday problems. But if a story does develop in the viewer's mind, it's definitely positive, because it's their very personal story that they associate with my pictures. However, it makes a difference whether we look at a landscape directly and immediately or whether we only look at a picture of it. Directly in the landscape, our brain is able to block out everything that distracts or disturbs us. At least this works if the distractions are not too dominant. In a photograph, small things often distract us and prevent us from finding the necessary calm and relaxation to engage with the image and let the feelings and moods come to us. I therefore try not to include any of these distracting elements in my pictures. I achieve this in my minimalist black and white pictures, for example, through the choice of image detail. Other disruptive elements that create unrest and therefore attract attention can be the sky or uneven water surfaces. For water surfaces, I usually use long exposures of up to two minutes in my pictures. This makes the surface soft and smooth and suddenly even conveys additional calm. With a turbulent sky, on the other hand, the only thing that usually helps is to wait for better conditions. My favourite subjects are mainly landscapes and architecture. However, for me, the two tend to merge seamlessly. I prefer open landscapes that allow you to look into the distance. From my point of view, this helps me to detach my thoughts from the realities of everyday life. In densely built-up areas or mountainous landscapes, however, a clear view is often only possible in the direction of the sky. For this reason, the sky is becoming increasingly important in my pictures. And it also depends on the structure of the sky. A uniformly blue or grey sky is often somewhat boring, at least in a photo. On the other hand, restless clouds with strong contrasts can attract more attention than they deserve. It's simply important to wait for the sky to be as suitable as possible. In some cases, however, my pictures manage without looking into the distance. Then geometric shapes and structures take over the task of detaching thoughts from everyday life. The order of the geometric shapes and the regularity of the structures have a calming effect on the viewer and in this way help them to get into the mood of the picture.
Peter Hujar
United States
1934 | † 1987
Peter Hujar was an American photographer best known for his black and white portraits. He has been recognized posthumously as "one of the major American photographers of the late twentieth century" and "among the greatest American photographers." Hujar was born October 11, 1934, in Trenton, New Jersey, to Rose Murphy, a waitress abandoned by her husband during her pregnancy. He was raised by his Ukrainian grandparents on their farm, where he spoke only Ukrainian until he started school. He remained on the farm with his grandparents until his grandmother's death in 1946. He moved to New York City to live with his mother and her second husband. The household was abusive, and in 1950, when Hujar was 16, he left home and began to live independently. Hujar received his first camera in 1947 and in 1953 entered the School of Industrial Art where he expressed interest in being a photographer. He was fortunate to encounter an encouraging teacher, the poet Daisy Aldan (1923–2001), and following her advice, he became a commercial photography apprentice. Apart from classes in photography during high school, Hujar's photographic education and technical mastery were acquired in commercial photo studios. By 1957, when he was 23 years old, he was making photographs now considered to be of museum quality. Early in 1967, he was one of a select group of young photographers in a master class taught by Richard Avedon and Marvin Israel, where he met Alexey Brodovitch and Diane Arbus. In 1958, Hujar accompanied the artist Joseph Raffael on a Fulbright to Italy. In 1963, he secured his own Fulbright and returned to Italy with Paul Thek, where they explored and photographed the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, classic images featured in his 1975 book Portraits in Life and Death. In 1964, Hujar returned to America and became a chief assistant in the studio of the commercial photographer Harold Krieger. Around this time, he also met Andy Warhol, posed for four of Warhol's three-minute "screen tests," and was included in the compilation film The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys. In 1967, Hujar quit his job in commercial photography, and at a great financial sacrifice, began to pursue primarily his own work. What followed was a dramatic expansion of his output. In 1969, with his lover the political activist Jim Fouratt, he witnessed the Stonewall riots in the West Village. In 1973, he moved into a loft above The Eden Theater at 189 2nd Avenue, where he lived for the rest of his life. In the 1970s and early 1980s, he inhabited the small bohemian art world in downtown New York City and made portraits of people such as drag queen and actor Divine, writers Susan Sontag, William Burroughs, Fran Lebowitz, and Vince Aletti. He visited "extremely serious, very heavy S&M bars" and the abandoned West Side Hudson River piers where men cruised for sex. In 1975, Hujar published Portraits in Life and Death, with an introduction by Sontag. After a tepid reception, the book became a classic in American photography. The rest of the 1970s was a period of prolific work. In early 1981, Hujar met the writer, filmmaker, and artist David Wojnarowicz, and after a brief period as Hujar's lover, Wojnarowicz became a protégé linked to Hujar for the remainder of the photographer's life. Hujar remained instrumental in all phases of Wojnarowicz's emergence as an important young artist. Hujar's work received only marginal public recognition during his lifetime. In January 1987, Hujar was diagnosed with AIDS. He died 10 months later at the age of 53 on November 25 at Cabrini Medical Center in New York. His funeral was held at Church of St. Joseph in Greenwich Village and he was buried at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Valhalla, New York. Hujar willed his estate to his friend Stephen Koch. Source: Wikipedia Peter Hujar (born 1934) died of AIDS in 1987, leaving behind a complex and profound body of photographs. Hujar was a leading figure in the group of artists, musicians, writers, and performers at the forefront of the cultural scene in downtown New York in the 1970s and early 80s, and he was enormously admired for his completely uncompromising attitude towards work and life. He was a consummate technician, and his portraits of people, animals, and landscapes, with their exquisite black-and-white tonalities, were extremely influential. Highly emotional yet stripped of excess, Hujar’s photographs are always beautiful, although rarely in a conventional way. His extraordinary first book, Portraits in Life and Death, with an introduction by Susan Sontag, was published in 1976, but his “difficult” personality and refusal to pander to the marketplace ensured that it was one of the last publications during his lifetime.Source: The Peter Hujar Archive Peter Hujar, who died of aids-related pneumonia in 1987, at the age of fifty-three, was among the greatest of all American photographers and has had, by far, the most confusing reputation. A dazzling retrospective, curated by Joel Smith at the Morgan Library & Museum, of a hundred and sixty-four pictures affirms Hujar’s excellence while, if anything, complicating his history. The works range across the genres of portraiture, nudes, cityscape, and still-life—the stillest of all from the catacombs of Palermo, Italy, shot in 1963, when he was there with his lover at the time, the artist Paul Thek. The finest are portraits, not only of people. Some memorialize the existence of cows, sheep, and—one of my favorites—an individual goose, with an eagerly confiding mien. The quality of Hujar’s hand-done prints, tending to sumptuous blacks and simmering grays, transfixes. He was a darkroom master, maintaining technical standards for which he got scant credit except among certain cognoscenti. He never hatched a signature look to rival those of more celebrated elders who influenced him, such as Richard Avedon and Diane Arbus, or those of Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin, younger peers who learned from him. His pictures share, in place of a style, an unfailing rigor that can only be experienced, not described. Hujar needed no introduction to the low. He never met his father, who abandoned his mother, a diner waitress, before his birth, in 1934, in Trenton. She left his raising to her Ukrainian-speaking Polish parents in semirural surroundings in Ewing Township, New Jersey, until, when he was eleven, she took him to live with her and a new husband in a one-room apartment in Manhattan. The home wasn’t happy. Hujar moved out at sixteen, at first sleeping on the couch of a mentoring English teacher at the School of Industrial Arts (now the High School of Art and Design): the fine poet, editor, and translator Daisy Aldan, a free-spirited lesbian who is portrayed in the earliest of his works in the Morgan show, from 1955.Source: The New Yorker
Amira Al-Sharif
Amira Al-Sharif is an award-winning Paris-based Yemeni photographer and artist with two decades of visual storytelling experience. Over the years, she has received numerous awards and fellowships, including from the World Press Photo Foundation, the Magnum Foundation, the Prince Claus Fund, the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, the Samir Kassir Foundation, Women Photograph, and Free Press Unlimited’s “Most Resilient Journalist Award.” Her work has been published by National Geographic, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the New York Times, ARTE TV, TV5 Monde, NPR, ICORN, UNICEF, UNHCR, among other outlets and organizations, and she penned a chapter for the best-selling anthology Our Women On the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World (2019). She has also participated in scores of photography exhibitions and festivals in Europe, the MENA region, and across the world, from India to South Korea, and Cambodia to the United States.In 2010, she studied photojournalism and documentary photography at the International Center of Photography in New York, and later returned to her home city of Sana’a, Yemen, to teach visual storytelling to hundreds of aspiring photographers. Since fleeing Yemen in 2018, due to the wartime constraints on her work and life, Amira has completed a two-year-long artist residency at Cité Internationale des Arts and is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Art at the Beaux-Arts de Paris. With her five-year French Talent Passport for artistic and cultural professionals, she has also launched a Paris-based company for her art practice. Artist Statement People often comment that they do not see war in my beautiful pictures of Yemen, where the world’s worst humanitarian crisis continues to cast a tremendous, even inescapable shadow across the landscape. But, since the war began nearly eight years ago, the vast majority of the scenes that I have captured in my beloved motherland have put my life at risk. Even if the outcome looks beautiful — schoolchildren or fishermen smiling in the north, newlyweds or goatherders smiling in the south, women young and old with fighting spirits from north to south — destruction, destitution, and danger often lurk just beyond the frame. War makes my beautiful pictures war pictures. There are an untold number of bloody scenes from Yemen that only exist in my mind. Mental images that I cannot publish in a newspaper or hang on a gallery wall. They are the scenes that I did not want to photograph, to remember more than I already do. For me, just like my sister Hayat, who is also a photographer, flashing back to the stories and scenes that epitomize how ugly the war has been to us, and how much it has scattered us in all directions, is like free-falling into the darkness. We want to be in the light, to move on with our ambitions and dreams. That is why the word “move” has been dominant in my thoughts and speech over the last couple of years. In spite of the challenging conditions and hardships, we need to keep moving. We need to let go of that which imprisons our souls in all of the unfortunate things that have happened and are still happening to us. Sadly, we cannot stop this war. I often ask myself if people who live in peaceful countries and regions could better identify with the beautiful pictures — seeing themselves in us, their lives in ours — rather than the bloody ones that commonly inundate the international media, from Syria at present to Vietnam in the past. As a photographer with over sixteen years of experience on the ground in Yemen, I have come to the realization that the logic of “blood is to war as beauty is to peace” is flawed, incomplete. And the reason my work tends to focus on the beauty of my suffering country is simple, relatable: like people everywhere, regardless of their context of war or peace, Yemenis appreciate love and life. We, too, wish to live our loves and our lives before that unavoidable moment called “death.” -- Amira Al-Sharif About A Love Song to Socotra Island Documentary photography series (2014) Socotra is an isolated Yemeni island, and UNESCO World Heritage site, that lies between the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea. Described as “one of the most distinctive places on Earth,” or the “jewel of Arabia,” this special, almost secret, place is where I made A Love Song to Socotra Island, my first long-term documentary photography series. One Socotran woman in particular, Saadiya, lit up my imagination, and so for months at a time, I shadowed her days, just like the birds of the island. When I met Aunt Saadiya, as I affectionately call her, the mother of seven was locked in a near decade-long struggle against local tribesmen who were after her inherited plot of land, which sustains and shelters her family and dozens of animals. “I have a fighting spirit,” she told me one day. “Whatever happens, I am not leaving my land. I fear nobody.” From mountaintop to seaside, I documented Aunt Saadiya’s radiant life force, relatively free from the everyday constraints and fears of the conflict-ravaged mainland. After we rose with the sun, she greeted the birds and the trees, tended to her goat herd, taught her children to swim, and defended her family’s right to survive. In our last months together, a local court declared her “the rightful owner of the land.”
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