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Marco Sanges
Photo © G.Forte
Marco Sanges
Marco Sanges

Marco Sanges

Country: Italian
Birth: 1970

SANGES is an imaginative and innovative photographer who has exhibited worldwide and published extensively. Clients and art projects include: Agent Provocateur, Cutler & Gross, Vogue, National Opera Munich,Dolce & Gabbana National Opera Stuttgart, Dario Argento, Stash Klossowski de Rola and Gunther Von Hagens' Body World.
Academy of Art New York.

Magazines include: Sunday Telegraph, Silver Shotz, Photo, All About Photos, Musee, Katalog, Lomography, Normal, Elle, Esquire, The Times, Independent, Fault , Aesthetica , Shoot, Harpers Bazar, L’œil De la Photographie. Wonderland

Some of his short films include : Sugar, Meet me in Winter, Circumstances, Music Sound Machine, Sonnambula, Wunderkamera.

His books include : Circumstances, Venus, Wild, and Erotic Photography, Love Lust Desire, Dolce & Gabbana Animal, National Opera Munich, The Cutting Room. Mefistofele Opera Stuttgart by Arrigo Boito.

A multi-disciplinary artist, his film 'Circumstances' won Best Art Film at the Portobello Film Festival in London and Best Experimental Film at the Open Cinema Film Festival, St. Petersburg, Russia.

Sanges' work is exhibited in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts permanent collection and at the Center for Creative Photography in Arizona - USA

His distinctive photographs have been shown at major contemporary photography festivals including Helsinki Photo Festival and Batumi PhotoDays in Georgia and the Lodz Photofestiwal in Poland.
One of his latest project 'Wunderkamera' has been exhibited at the Hospital Club in London and at the Chateau de Dampierre (France) and will be exhibited in the Gallerie de Buci in Paris February 2020.

Website

www.sangesstudio.com

 

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Robert Demachy
Robert Demachy
France
1859 | † 1936
Robert Demachy (1859–1936) was a prominent French Pictorial photographer of the late 19th and early 20th century. He is best known for his intensely manipulated prints that display a distinct painterly quality. Léon-Robert Demachy was born in the home of his grandmother in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, on the outskirts of Paris, on 7 July 1859. His parents, Charles Adolphe Demachy (1818–1888) and Zoé Girod de l’Ain (1827–1916), had two other sons, Charles Amédée (1852–1911) and Adrien Édouard (1854–1927), and a daughter, Germaine (1856-1940?). The elder Charles had started the highly successful financial enterprise of Banque Demachy, and by the time Demachy was born the family was very wealthy. He had no need to earn a living, and there is no record of his having ever been employed anywhere. He dropped the first part of his name in his childhood and was always known as "Robert". After his birth his family returned to their mansion at 13 Rue François Premier in Paris, where Demachy continued to live for the next fifty years. His early years were quite idyllic, and each year his family would spend several months at their summer villa near Villers-sur-Mer in Normandy. The rest of the year he was educated in Jesuit schools in Paris, and he became fluent in English by the time he was a teenager. His education also included extensive musical lessons, and he became an accomplished violin player. About 1870, Demachy, his mother and his siblings left Paris for Brussels due to the increasing dangers of the Franco-Prussian War. His father stayed in Paris as part of the Commune and the Banque Demachy played an important role in financing the resistance efforts. When he turned eighteen Demachy briefly served a year as an army volunteer, but he soon returned to his life of comfort. In the mid-1870s he began frequenting the artists’ cafés and, perhaps in rebellion to his gentrified life, he became involved in the growing bohemian culture that was beginning to take hold in Paris. He began making sketches of café patrons and people on the street, a practice he continued throughout his life.Source: Wikipedia Robert Demachy was considered by many to be the most influential Pictorialist photographer across the whole of Europe. He was a man of independent means allowing him to focus completely on photography and international travel for it. He was a strong advocate of gum bichromate to enhance Pictorialist photography, for which he coined the term ‘ Photo-Aquatint’ associating it with intaglio printmaking. It is obvious when studying his work closely that his enjoyment of this process was from the artistic freedom it gave him. His gum prints were very successful, with their greatly softened detail quite deliberately reminiscent of impressionist art. Demachy became a strong and vocal defender of manipulated printing techniques. He is most famous for the prominent brushstrokes and rough-textured papers. Although these were greatly manipulated, he was able to bring an air of naturalism and poise to his work. He wrote “Do not say that nature being beautiful, and photography being able to reproduce its beauty, therefore photography is Art. This is unsound. Nature is often beautiful, of course, but never artistic ’per se’, for there can be no art without intervention of the artist in the making of the picture. Nature is but a theme for the artist to play upon. Straight photography registers the theme, that is all - and, between ourselves, it registers it differently” Quoted in Robert Demachy: Photographs and Essays. Bill Jay, 1974. Robert Demachy was a leader in French Pictorialist photography at the turn of the last century. He was elected to the Société française de photographie in 1882 and co-founded the Photo-Club de Paris with Maurice Bucquet in 1888. He had his first exhibition of gum prints in 1895 at the Photo-Club de Paris, which helped to promote his increasingly international status: the same year he was elected to The Linked Ring in London and made an honorary member of the Royal Photographic Society.Source: Edward Draper
Manuela Thames
Manuela Thames
German
1975
Manuela Thames is a photographic artist based in Saint Paul, Minnesota where she lives with her husband and two children. Born and raised in Germany, she moved to the US in 2004 after marrying her American husband. Her background is in nursing and alternative health, but around 2008 she began to focus solely on photography after two life changing events happened within one year, the birth of her first son and the death of her brother. Manuela uses various photographic techniques to explore themes around loss and grief, her personal experience with generational trauma, as well as the notions of belonging, connection and what it means to be human. Within that she continues to explore human ways of coping, the strength that evolves out of suffering and our common desire for healing and journey towards wholeness. Much of her work consists of black and white, conceptual self-portraits. Manuela’s photography has been described as contemplative, evocative, and cinematic and has been widely exhibited nationally as well as internationally. Her “Trauma” series won 1st place conceptual series of the year in the Monovisions Award in 2019, and in the same year she won the 13th Julia Margaret Cameron Award in the Self-Portrait Category. In addition, her work has been published online and in print in such places as Black and White Magazine, Sun Magazine, Dohdo Magazine and Shots Magazine. She teaches workshops privately and through various places such as Santa Fe Workshops, LA Center of Photography, SE Center of Photography, and offers mentoring services as well.
Laia Abril
Laia Abril
Spain
1986
Laia Abril s a Spanish photographer and multiplatform storyteller whose work relates to femininity. Abril was born in 1986 in Barcelona, Spain. She gained a degree in journalism in Barcelona. She moved to New York City to study photography at the International Center of Photography. In 2009 she enrolled at Fabrica research centre, the artist residency of Benetton in Italy, where she worked as a staff photographer and consultant photo editor at Colors magazine for a number of years. Since 2010, Abril has been working on various projects exploring the subject of eating disorders: A Bad Day, a short film about a young girl struggling with bulimia; Thinspiration (2012), which explores the use of photography in pro-ana websites; and The Epilogue (2014), documenting the indirect victims of eating disorders, through the story of the Robinson family and the aftermath of the death of Cammy Robinson to bulimia. Critic Sean O'Hagan, wrote in The Guardian that The Epilogue "... is a sombre and affecting photobook ... dense and rewarding ... At times, it makes for a painful read. From time to time, I had to put it down, take a breather. But I kept going back." Her extended study of misogyny thus far includes A History of Misogyny: Chapter One: On Abortion, about the repercussions of abortion controls in many different cultures. Work is ongoing to produce A History Of Misogyny, Chapter 2: On Rape. Her other projects include Femme Love, on a young lesbian community in Brooklyn; Last Cabaret on a sex club in Barcelona; and the Asexuals Project, a documentary film about asexuality. Abril's books include The Epilogue (2014), which documents the indirect victims of eating disorders, and A History of Misogyny: Chapter One: On Abortion (2018), about the repercussions of abortion controls in many different cultures. On Abortion won Photobook of the Year award at the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. In 2018 she was awarded the Tim Hetherington Trust's Visionary Award to work on A History Of Misogyny, Chapter 2: On Rape Culture. For the long-term project A History Of Misogyny, in 2019 she was awarded the Royal Photographic Society's Hood Medal and in 2020 she was awarded the Paul Huf Award from Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam.Source: Wikipedia
Jonk
Jonk
France
1985
Jonk discovers photography at the age of 11 when his parents send him for a language exchange to the USA, where each of the ten children forming the group lives with a different host family. The few souvenir pictures shot with the famous disposable orange cameras were his firsts. For the following six years, he travels each winter to a new family in a different state, and in the meantime upgrades his gear with a basic analogue camera. After having swapped it for a pocket numeric device, he realizes his first solo trip, at the age of 19. This trip to Barcelona changes his life, and he comes back with two passions that won't leave him: travels (he has since visited more than 70 countries) and urban art (street art and graffiti), whose discovery gave him his first photographic subject that still occupies him today. Living in Paris, he discovers urban exploration at the end of years 2000 through rooftops, subways and the city's unofficial catacombs. At that time, he finds another subject: documenting the unseen side of the city and invest in his first digital reflex camera, an APS-C. Climbing roofs to see her from the top, going at night in subway tunnels or spending whole days underground in the catacombs exploring the tens of kilometers of galleries looking for beautiful carved rooms: he finds in that activity a thrill, the adrenaline that he looks for in his life. These urban explorations, and his search for unseen graffiti, bring him to abandoned places, where graffiti artists often go to paint, to be alone and able to take time to make bigger and better paintings. After some time frequenting these artists, he starts himself to paint there and adopts the nickname “Jonk”. At that time, he also sticks his travel pictures on the walls in the streets. Visiting abandoned places looking for graffiti, he realizes the intensity of the atmospheres and the beauty of the spectacle of time passaging: rust, decaying and peeling painted walls, broken windows, Nature taking over create unbelievable, highly photogenic sceneries. For him, such sceneries feel like infinite poetry. Traveling, painting, sticking, photographing, roaming on roofs, metros and catacombs, a very time-consuming job don't leave him enough time to do everything. At the hour of choices, he drops the spray, the pot of glue, the height and the undergrounds to stay with the photography of lost places, even if he could not get rid of his nickname, symbol of his graffiti artist times, highly important to him. He then continues to travel, almost exclusively looking for abandoned locations to shoot, with or without graffiti. He upgrades his gear again with one, then two, full-frame reflex. Today, he has visited more than one thousand and five hundreds of them in around fifty countries on four continents. With time, his interest focuses on what appears to him to be the strongest in this vast subject of abandonment: Nature taking over. It is poetic, even magic, to see this Nature retaking what used to be hers, reintegrating through broken windows, cracks on the walls, spaces built by Man and then neglected, until sometimes guzzling them up entirely. This topic naturally imposed itself to him due to the ecologic consciousness that moves him since his youngest age and to the strength of the message it carries: the question of the place of Man on Earth and its relationship with Nature. She is stronger, and whatever happens to Man, She will always be there. In March 2018, he releases the book Naturalia on the topic and currently works on volume II for which Yann Arthus-Bertrand wrote the preface. In June 2018, at age 33, he quits his job in the finance to fully dedicate himself to this project. With this series, as a photographer Jonk tries to humbly contribute to make people aware of the critical ecological situation we are all in. Since, four other books were released. His work has been featured in prestigious paper publications (Der Spiegel, Corriere della Sera, Lonely Planet, Le Monde, GQ, Telerama…) as well as on prestigious web platforms (National Geographic, New York Post, Smithsonian, ArchDaily, AD, BBC, The Guardian…). He received various distinctions in recognized international contests with Honorable Mentions (International Photography Awards, ND Awards), nominations (Fine Art Photography Awards), Silver Awards (Tokyo International Foto Awards, Moscow International Foto Awards), places in shortlists (Arte Laguna Prize, Environmental Photographer of the Year, Royal Photography Society, Felix Schoeller Photo Award, Siena International Photo Awards), places of finalist (InCadaquès International Photo Festival, Nature Photographer Of The Year, Umbra Awards) and winner of the Chelsea International Photography Competition and the Earth Photo 2020 Photo Competition. His work has been part of many group shows across the world (Paris, London, Lisbon, Rome, Athens, Budapest, Moscow, Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore, Los Angeles, Palm Springs, New York…) as well as many solo shows in Paris, the main ones being in Paris 20th district City Hall “Salon of Honor”, at the OECD, the Forum des Halles and the Nicolas Hulot Foundation for Nature and Man. In October 2020, Jonk realizes his first solo shows abroad. The first one is the central show of Home Expo in Luxembourg, the most important Fair of the country. Consisting of 91 photos, this exhibition is also his biggest show to date. He simultaneously conducts five solos show in China for the Franco-Chinese Environmental Month. They take place at the Park View Gallery of the magnificent Design Society in Shenzhen, the French Institute of Beijing, the Kingold Century Center of Guangzhou, the Westred Art Museum of Harbin and the Parc Hongmei of Shenyang. Jonk had set a first foot in China the year before by giving a conference on his Naturalia series in Shenzhen. It was his second after a TEDx given in Paris in 2018. Several exhibitions of Naturalia are planned for 2021 and 2022. Naturalia: Chronicle of Contemporary Ruins As a child, I saw a wildlife documentary that marked my life. It focused on the melting of the ice caps and its consequences on polar bears' life. I still remember this bear that struggled to swim and find a piece of ice floe. It seems that "children are like wet cement. Whatever falls on them makes an impression." (Dr Haim Ginott). This vision marked me so much that during all my childhood, every time any of my parents did anything that seemed bad for the environment, it told them this sentence: «Watch out, you kill the bears!!" This ecological consciousness, that moves me since my youngest age, has little by little focused my interest on abandoned places reclaimed by Nature. She is stronger, and whatever happens to Man, She will always be there. Moreover, Naturalia: Chronicle of Contemporary Ruins asks a fundamental question: that of the place of Man on Earth and his relationship with Nature. Far from being pessimistic, and at a time when Man's domination of Nature has never been so extreme, it aims to wake our consciousness. Man builds, Man abandons. Every time for his own peculiar reasons. Nature does not care about those reasons. But one thing is for sure, when Man leaves, She comes back and She takes back everything. In his poem Eternity of Nature, brevity of Man, Alphonse de Lamartine writes "Triumph, immortal Nature! / Whose hand full of days / Lends unlimited strengths / Times that always rise again!" In her inexorable progression, She starts reclaiming the outsides of a Taiwanese reservoir (Picture 1) before infiltrating the insides of a Croatian castle (2) or a Belgian greenhouse (7). Then, She grows in the atrium of a Polish palace (8) or a Cuban theater (9) before invading a Montenegrin castle (10). Then, given more time, imprisons a Taiwanese mansion with her strong roots (20). The next steps? Collapse and burial. French poet Léo Ferré said "With Time goes, everything goes". So, when Nature and Time will have taken back what Man abandons, what will be left of our civilization?
Sumaya Agha
Sumaya Agha
Syria/United States
1970
Sumaya Agha is a freelance photographer based in Portland, OR, who began documenting the Syrian refugee crisis over four years ago in Jordan and Europe. She is of Syrian descent with many aunts, uncles, and cousins still living in Damascus. Sumaya holds a BS in Applied Art and Design with a concentration in Photography from Cal Poly State University in San Luis Obispo, CA and an MPA from Middlebury Institute of International Studies. Her worked appeared in the Huffington Post, BBC Focus on Africa, Forbes Africa, and NPR.org, and she was a still photographer for the Academy Award winning film “The Fog of War.” She has lived in Syria, Liberia, and the United States. Watching from afar as civil war ripped apart Syria, I felt compelled to help the refugees whose lives have been destroyed by the conflict. And with dozens of close relatives enduring the horrors in their hometown of Damascus, I had a personal connection to the crisis. I moved to Amman, Jordan in 2012 and began working as a photographer for humanitarian organizations helping mitigate the crisis that had spilled over from neighboring Syria. While in Jordan, I spent many days in the refugee camps and host communities, getting to know countless families living there and documenting their substandard living conditions. I heard myriad stories of heartbreaking loss and brutality and enduring spirit, and found that hopelessness is pervasive among the young, as they cannot see a future for themselves. In January 2016 I went on assignment to Macedonia and Serbia to photograph the refugees migrating through the Balkans. Throughout the freezing winter, 2,200 refugees per day crossed into Serbia. Up to 10,000 a day crossed in warmer months. They came from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds, including many families with young children. The typical journey went like this: flee their home country, take a perilous raft ride from Turkey to Greece, and then move onward through foreign lands in search of a peaceful home. Now that the Balkan borders are closed to refugees, thousands are stranded in Eastern Europe, hoping to be relocated to Western Europe. More than 60,000 refugees are in camps throughout Greece, including Ritsona Refugee Camp, where I went on assignment in July to document the crisis. With no end in sight to the conflict in Syria and elsewhere, the refugee crisis is certain to continue right along with it. That means millions of regular people continuing to seek safety and some sense of normalcy in the absence of peace.
Amy Anderson
Amy Anderson
United States
1977
Amy Anderson is an award-winning portrait photographer living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her work has been exhibited internationally and hangs in local and national galleries, museums and private collections. She has had works acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Florida Photographic Museum. She has received the prestigious Minnesota State Arts Board grant in 2012 and again in 2018 resulting in several solo shows. Funded again in 2021 by the state of Minnesota, she is currently working on a new body of portraits exploring ways to encourage reconnection in her own community after a time of isolation and unrest. Statement I strive to impact my community by creating authentic portraits that explore the universal themes that connect us as humans. My practice has been to live alongside a community and create connection with the people I photograph in hopes of presenting a meaningful image of a an individual to our larger collective community. I have completed several large, multi-year projects including At Risk, With Promise ; a series exploring the challenges and triumphs of at-risk youth in Minnesota. Over the course of this project I explored themes like marginalization and resilience, adolescence and personal growth, disconnection and intersecting identities. At Risk, With Promise culminated in a full and completed body of work that received recognition and was included in many local and national exhibitions. In 2018 with funding from the Minnesota State Arts Board, I began a new body of work exploring these and other themes in the context of several different communities, most significantly the elderly. Working closely with one woman, Rose Kaprelian, allowed me to dig deeper into the everyday realities of this nearly invisible marginalized group. As a nonagenarian in a culture increasingly connected by technologies that are foreign and largely inaccessible, women like Rose face isolation and stagnation as they age. This work is developing to encompass many universal themes from a unique perspective as well as preserving voices that are fading from our collective conversations. During the isolation and uprising in my city in 2020 I continued to make portraits as a way to document and explore the events that changed our world. From window portraits of those who were isolated to protest photos of those who marched, each image was an attempt to connect with my community and explore the changing landscape in which we found ourselves. I continue this exploration daily.
Marijn Fidder
Marijn Fidder
Netherlands
1997
Marijn Fidder is a Dutch documentary photographer who focuses on current affairs and contemporary social issues. She uses photography to speak on behalf of the voiceless, and to advocate for the rights of all who are vulnerable. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, CNN Style, NRC Handelsblad, Volkskrant, GUP New Talent and ZEIT Magazin, among others. Her work has received multiple awards, including from World Press Photo and Global Peace Photo Award. Based in the Netherlands, Fidder has worked for many years in Uganda, researching disability rights in the country. Inclusive Nation Life can present many obstacles for people with disabilities. These challenges lead to social isolation, poverty and reduced quality of life. However, amid these obstacles, Uganda is gradually transforming to become more inclusive. As of 2020, Uganda has one of the most progressive laws for people with disabilities in the world. This states, among other things, that discrimination against people with disabilities is prohibited. Children with disabilities have the right to education and adults have the right to a job. This is very important because 80% of all people with disabilities in the world live in developing countries, such as Uganda. While there is still much work to be done, the progress made thus far is a glimmer of hope for people with disabilities. AAP Competitions Winner All About Photo Awards 2025 AAP Magazine 51 Colors Article Exclusive Interview
Guilhem Alandry
Guilhem Alandry
France
Guilhem is a London based photographer and multimedia producer who has exhibited his work as an international artist around the world. He founded Documentography in 2000 and has worked in socially engaged issues for a number of charities, agencies, magazines and galleries. He is a pioneer of interactive photographic narratives and is highly accomplished in new media forms. He is a true multimedia artist, versatile and comfortable using photography, video, VR technology and sound and always looking for new ways to bring them together. Guilhem won important awards and his work as been shown in forms as varied as print, interactive projects, exhibitions and TV.
Peter Hujar
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
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Interview
Exclusive Interview with Anastasia Samoylova
Anastasia Samoylova is an American artist whose photographic practice is shaped by close observation and a deep attentiveness to place. Working between documentary and formal exploration, she photographs landscapes, architecture, and everyday scenes with a sensitivity to light, structure, and atmosphere. Since relocating to Miami in 2016, her work has increasingly focused on how environments—both natural and built—carry social, cultural, and emotional traces. We asked her a few questions about her practice and her way of seeing, to better understand the thoughts and experiences that shape her work—while allowing the images themselves to remain open and speak in their own time.
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Exclusive Interview with Marijn Fidder
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Marijn Fidder
Marijn Fidder is a Dutch documentary photographer whose work powerfully engages with current affairs and contemporary social issues. Driven by a deep sense of social justice, she uses photography to speak on behalf of the voiceless and to advocate for the rights of those who are most vulnerable. Her images have been widely published in major international outlets including National Geographic, CNN Style, NRC Handelsblad, Volkskrant, GUP New Talent, and ZEIT Magazin. Her long-term commitment to disability rights—particularly through years of work in Uganda—culminated in her acclaimed project Inclusive Nation, which earned her the title of Photographer of the Year 2025 at the All About Photo Awards. She is also the recipient of multiple prestigious honors, including awards from World Press Photo and the Global Peace Photo Award. We asked her a few questions about her life and work.
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Exclusive Interview with Josh S. Rose
Interview
Exclusive Interview with Josh S. Rose
Josh S. Rose is a multidisciplinary artist working across photography, film, and writing. His practice bridges visual and performing arts, with a strong focus on movement, emotion, and the expressive potential of the image. Known for his long-standing collaborations with leading dance companies and performers, Rose brings together authenticity and precise composition—a balance he describes as “technical romanticism.” His work has been commissioned and exhibited internationally, appearing in outlets such as Vogue, at the Super Bowl, in film festivals, and most recently as a large-scale installation for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. A sought-after collaborator, he has worked with major artists, cultural institutions, and brands, following a previous career as Chief Creative Officer at Interpublic Group and the founder of Humans Are Social. We asked him a few questions about his life and work.
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Interview with Maureen Ruddy Burkhart
Interview
Interview with Maureen Ruddy Burkhart
Photographer Maureen Ruddy Burkhart brings a quietly attentive and deeply human sensibility to her exploration of the world through images. Shaped by a life immersed in photography, film, and visual storytelling, her work is guided by intuition, observation, and an enduring interest in the emotional undercurrents of everyday life. With a practice rooted in both fine art traditions and documentary awareness, she approaches her subjects with sensitivity, allowing subtle moments to emerge naturally rather than be imposed. Her series Til Death, selected as the Solo Exhibition for February 2025, reflects this long-standing commitment to photography as a space for reflection rather than spectacle. Drawn to moments that exist just outside the expected frame, Burkhart’s images suggest narratives without resolving them, leaving room for ambiguity, humor, and quiet connection. We asked her a few questions about her life and work.
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