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Manfred Baumann
Manfred Baumann
Manfred Baumann

Manfred Baumann

Country: Austria
Birth: 1968

Manfred Baumann was born in Vienna in 1968. The Leica photographer has since presented his works worldwide in the form of exhibitions, books, and calendars. His photographs are displayed in museums as well as in international galleries. Over the past years, Baumann has taken his place among the most influential photographers of our time. Via social media his range is more than 1 million!

He lives and works in Europe and the USA, and has already photographed such greats as Kirk Douglas, Sandra Bullock, Olivia Newton John, Martin Sheen, Don Johnson, Danny Trejo, William Shatner, Jack Black, Natalie Portman, Tony Curtis, Paul Anka, Lionel Richie, Kathleen Turner, John Malkovich, Bruce Willis, Juliette Lewis, Angelina Jolie, Toni Garrn, Michelle Rodriguez, Leah Remini, Evander Holyfield, as well as many international top models.

For Manfred Baumann, the fascination of photography lies in departing from the familiar and capturing an impression of the moment. He loves to explore the world through the eyes of a photographer.

To make visible that which others have not seen has been the objective of Baumann's exhibitions, such as End Of Line, in which he documented the final journey of death row inmates in Texas; Alive, where he photographed homeless persons on the street for one year; and his current project Special, which showcases Baumann's portraits of intellectually disabled persons. His ambition is to break with tradition and the conventional perspective.

The viewer of my photographs should discover the soul and history they embody and recognize that photography is the only language that can be understood all over the world. As an ardent animal welfare activist, vegetarian, and goodwill ambassador for Jane Goodall, he also ventured into the world of animal photography for the first time with the project Mustangs. The project's works and exhibition were shown in the Natural History Museum Vienna and the Leica Gallery in Los Angeles.

He teaches for the Leica Academy worldwide and does worldwide lectures & workshops. Manfred Baumann was 2017 Testimonial for Huawei international alongside with Robert Lewandowski. His Book and exhibition Vienna were shown at the Grand Hotel Vienna.

From February 2019 to May 2019, Baumann exhibited for the first time in Australia (in Melbourne and Sydney). In 2020 two new books will appear, the Lipizzaner the white horses and a Best of book with the name a photographer's life. It is the 15 and 16 illustrated books which have been published worldwide. Among Manfreds role models are great Master of Photography such as Alfred Eisenstaedt, Helmut Newton, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Richard Avedon, Herb Ritts, and Ansel Adams.

Manfred Baumann also photographed the late Tony Curtis. This was the Hollywood star's last official photo shoot and did much to bolster Baumann's considerable fame in the USA.

For more than 25 years, Manfred has been drawn to the most distant places in the world, where his breathtaking landscape photographs are created, and it is only natural that since 2013, he has cooperated with and photographed for National Geographic.

He lives and works in Vienna with his wife and muse Nelly Baumann, although his sojourns to his second home, Los Angeles, have become increasingly frequent and of longer duration. His clientele, however, come from all over the world.

Statement
"I GIVE THE MOMENT DURATION"
"Photographs are like songs that you sing into the world."
"HEART AND MIND – THE TRUE LENS OF THE CAMERA"
"The truth is the best picture!"


 

Manfred Baumann's Video

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Polly Gaillard
United States
1965
Polly Gaillard is a fine art photographer, writer, and educator. She is part-time Professor of Art at Furman University and has taught photography workshops and college courses for more than ten years including summers abroad teaching American students in Prague, Czech Republic, and Cortona, Italy. Polly received a Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2010. She has exhibited her fine art photographs nationally and published a limited edition artist book, Pressure Points, with a foreword by actress Jamie Lee Curtis. Polly's photographic skills traverse contemporary art, documentary, portrait, and traditional photographic practices. She lives in Greenville, SC with her daughter. You, From a Distance Making portraits in a pandemic is challenging if you like to get closer than six feet to your subject. 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At times, the process calls for a third person to hold the camera phone, sometimes that assistant is a six-year-old girl, a father, a husband, or a cousin. During the awkwardness of the portrait session, there are moments of laughter when cats photobomb the sitting, a mother walks in the room wanting to reclaim her office space, a dad saunters by with a laundry basket, a sibling or grandchild screams from an adjoining room, and many phones crash to the floor from their perch of prime picture-taking position. We laugh together across connected distances about the absurdity of the situation and that I am trying to make a meaningful portrait amid unpredictability. Strangely, I find the absurdity satisfying; everything feels peculiar at this moment in time. For a more technically astute photographer than myself, the lack of technical command over making screen portraits would be unnerving. In essence, the image is blurry if the Wifi connection isn't clear. 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You, From a Distance reflects the way I have experienced life during the Covid-19 pandemic- a personal feeling of distance and loss but with a desire to hold onto normalcy of making pictures, albeit without influence over the outcome. I am interested in these new ways of seeing each other and being together without being together - I look at you on my computer, in return, you look back at me through a phone or laptop while you can also see yourself in the frame. Who are we looking at - ourselves or others? The intersection of gazes is countless at times; it excites and confuses me. The process of looking and seeing divided by screens changes everything I have learned about image-making. The portraits become my memory of shared moments across time zones with distant faces; the four walls of my house expand into the space of others' homes. The intimacy I feel with the subject ironically is far greater than the portraits I make in-person in a time before social distance. 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Netherlands
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Dutch photographer Niki Feijen immortilizes an astonishingly intact glimpse into the past. This autodidact specializes in documenting and capturing historic architecture and abandoned buildings. Each photo fuses together the conflicting notions of beauty and decay and corresponds with his desire to capture and silently communicate with his audience about the subject's very essence. Niki wants to recreate the exact same scene as he sees while standing in a location but the lightspectrum your eye can capture is much, much wider than a camera can capture. Photographing a dark setting with extreme highlights like a window causes the highlights to wash out into white or dark areas can become obscure black blobs. It's impossible to shoot a photo that captures both ends of this spectrum. Since Niki does not use any artificial lighting he uses different exposures to capture a much wider light spectrum than a traditional photograph. The result is a hyper realistic photo which would replicate the exact same thing you would see standing inside the location yourself. In 2010 Feijen visited the quintessential location of desertion: the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. After a catastrophic nuclear accident occurred in 1986 the entire city of Pripyat, all 50,000 inhabitants, were evacuated within 48 hours. Most of the belongings of the evacuated inhabitants were left behind and never returned to again. The incredible deafening silence of this location, in its absence of the living, permeates the senses and mind of visitors who venture to there to this day. Feijen is currently travelling around the globe looking for more hidden gems tucked away behind 'Do Not Enter' signs. Curious about what lies on the other side, he goes in search of the hidden world that is often in plain sight. When Feijen comes across impressive yet eerie locations, such as homes located in ghost towns, asylums, decaying hospitals, abandoned castles and long forgotten hotels, he intends to preserve the what is left of the past by encapsulating these forgotten masterpieces' ethos in a photo before they crumble and collapse. The impressions left from these places are represented in visual form for the public in three separate books. All works, 'Disciple of Decay' (April 2013) 'Frozen' (September 2014) and 'Tempus Fugit' (December 2017), have been independently published. The first sold out in six months. On top of these publications, Feijen's photographs are exhibited at art galleries and international art fairs several times a year. His works have been featured by NBC, BBC, The Huffington Post, ABC News, The Daily Mail and Chase Jarvis, among a variety of others. As of 2014 Feijen's work is part of the Sir Elton John Photography Collection where his name is among legendary photographers as ; Edward Weston, David LaChapelle, Diane Arbus and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Toby Old
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Toby Old was born in Stillwater, Minnesota in 1945. He started out majoring in biology at Hamline University, then moved on to the University of Minnesota where he trained to be a dentist. At the height of the Vietnam War he was drafted into the Army Dental Core. While serving in North Carolina, he began to explore art history and photography. After a 1976 summer workshop at Apieron Photographic Workshops in Millerton, New York, Old moved to New York City. He began working on his first extended series of the disco scene in 1976-1981. For this body of work, Standard Deviation, he was awarded a grant from the New York State Council of the Arts. In 1981 he received an NEA Survey Grant to document lower Manhattan below Chambers Street, and has continued photographing this section of the city since, includes an extended series on the boxing world. In the late 1980s he moved to upstate New York, where he began to document local events including county fairs and Civil War reenactments. He also began photographing national events such as the Kentucky Derby, Frontier Days, Mardi Gras, and spring break. Toby Old’s book, Times Squared, was offered through the 2005 Subscription Program and is still available for purchase in the Light Work Shop. Old participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence Program in 1980. Toby Old captures animation in his photography, depicting both realistic and exciting observations of human life. Drawing on the inspiration of photographers of the 1960s, he has traveled the country photographing in many different environments, including street performances, beaches, fairs, fashion shows, nightclubs, boxing events, parks, and Fourth of July celebrations. His images capture extraordinary moments in human action and social and cultural experiences as they unfold. His photographs are not the kind to be taken in quickly, but images to be examined and scrutinized for details. According to Ted Hartwell, curator of photography at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, “Old’s work has always been characterized by a solid technical mastery of the medium-format camera as the tool for his wonderfully zany, insightful, and intelligent observations of the American scene.”Source: Light Work
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