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Enter AAP Magazine 54 Nature: Landscape, Wildlife, Flora & Fauna
Enter AAP Magazine 54 Nature: Landscape, Wildlife, Flora & Fauna
Hidetoshi Ogata
Hidetoshi Ogata
Hidetoshi Ogata

Hidetoshi Ogata

Country: Japan
Birth: 1987

Hidetoshi Ogata, born in Osaka, Japan in 1987, is a Japanese photographer. After taking an MSc in Biochemistry, he visited many places around the world to photograph landscapes. His fascination with traditional Japanese fire festivals began when he was 26 and photographed the annual Yassai Hossai fire festival at his birthplace Osaka. Since then, he has travelled around Japan photographing traditional local lore about fire preserved from the past, as part of his ongoing, long-term project, "In Awe of Fire". Ogata has also been working on wild macaques and regularly visits places like Nagano prefecture, Awaji island in Hyogo, and Shodoshima island in Kagawa. He was the 13th Smithsonian Photo Contest Natural World Winner and the National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year 2018 People's Choice nomination. His work has been recognized in various photography competitions, including the LOOK SMITHSONIAN exhibition in Shanghai, and has appeared in magazines, TV programs and Web pages throughout the world such as the Washington Post, NY Daily News, the Daily Mail, CBS, Beijing TV and TV Tokyo.

Awards: International Photography Awards (IPA) 2015 Honorable Mention
The 13th Smithsonian Photo Contest, Natural World Category, 1st Prize Winner
International Photography Awards (IPA) 2016 Honorable Mention
Outdoor Photographer of the Year 2017 Shortlist
National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year 2018 Nature People's Choice nomination

Media: The Washington Post, USA TODAY, NY Daily News, The Daily Mirror, The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, El País, CBS News, National Geographic, National Geographic Travel

Publications: Garuda Indonesia Colours December 2017
Outdoor Photographer of the Year Portfolio III

TV: BTV, Sichuan Satellite TV, TV Tokyo
Photo Exhibition: LOOK SMITHSONIAN Seoul, LOOK SMITHSONIAN Shanghai
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Imed Kolli
France/Algeria
1995
Imed Kolli is a 24-year-old photographer based in Algeria. By the time I was 16, my real eduction came from observing what is happening around me and observing that richness don't comes without struggle, and I was looking for a way to translate what I was seeing through my eyes and photography became my voice in this very big confusing world. I started to realize that photography has the power to change prescriptive on life and surprise people with something they don't usually see and sometimes they don't have any idea existed, and it began to push my life in such dramatic direction towards telling the larger story of what it means to be a human, so I bought my first camera , and that was the beginning. To say that my work is evocative would be something of an understatement. Specializing in harrowing, monochrome photos of people living on the fringes of society. I have been doing photography for the last 7 years, I specialized in street documentation photography toward telling the larger story of what it means to be a human and capturing the human condition. In the last 5 years, I had what you would call much a formal eduction by getting my Bachelor degree majoring photography at the highest institute of perfuming arts and audio visuals here in Algeria, I also had the chance to follow my main passion by continuing my master of fine art online degree program at the Academy of Art University in San-Fransisco. My passion for photography has actually never been stronger than it is today and it's 6 years that I've been making pictures that I've involved in visual storytelling. Most of what I know about the world has come through this medium, through practicing it through, learning about it. I've often said that photography is sort of like a condition that you catch and I caught it when I was 18 years old within about three months of learning about photography and I would say that today 7 years later that condition has never been more severe. During years I became obsessed with the idea of combining photography and documenting the human condition and that maybe that could be a way to bring these theories to the audience and perhaps get to learn and tell about the stories that need to be tell. My practice has always been predicated on international work mostly documenting work, documenting the human condition, but I've also done probably the largest project of my career so far ETERNAL FACES was obviously a domestic project, I spent 3 years on that and actually even since that project, I've continued to look at the issue of aging more so through film and multimedia and as time goes on and this is kind of connected to the question about my passion for photography. I feel like my repertoire for the kinds of stories that I want to do, the kinds of issues that I'm interested in are actually expanding, they're not narrowing, so I'm much more open to working on stories that in the past I might have considered you know softer or irrelevant. I'm talking about the world that is grinding out a lot of a critical issues that humanity is facing today, social issues political issues resource, issues you know climate change, how to deal with a permanent underclass of homelessness, I believe there's so many issues in the world that are critically important to look at. Statement This work is being classified as a Street-Portrait Photography which could actually offer a new way of prescriptive of people's portraits in black and white. I tried to reach the authenticity of people who had contracted the bitterness or resentfulness through their lives. The idea comes from street photography and how to shoot homeless, poor people in a beautiful manner from basic. It was all about dramatic situations and the spirituality of portraiture. To me, the most important characteristic was having a sharp eye and being aware of the environment around me. This means looking out for, not just colors, shapes, lights, shadows and so on, but observing my subjects and how they appear and act as well. I exposed the hardships and poor conditions of life of the deprived people through face expression. I did this in an attempt to assuage these problems. Vividly I wanted to expose the realities of squalid living and misery faced by homelessness every day. Harrowing street-portraits photography combined with emotion storytelling, were intended to engage and inform the audience and exhort them to act. What I accomplished by taking these photographs from the streets was to inform the world, How people are suffering every day. I wanted to show the life of these people lived, I had experimented with illustrations that dramatized the devastating human cost of the emotional expressions. I realized finally that only photographs seemed to capture the reality with sufficient resolution to change hearts. The singular emphasis in others on subjects, divested of a story, is all the more remarkable for this reason. In this project, I emphasized the reflective mode over the nature of my body of work envisaging,.The images chosen for The -Eternal Faces- did privilege the inventorial, world of observation and artistic classification as it reflects reality, with the objects taken out of context. There is no doubt that my body of work has profoundly shifted the way that we perceive these people in reality, the sensual appeal of reflection outcome intents in the real world has proved irresistible to photographers including my project Eternal Faces. Beginning with the intent to reflect these people's realities and finding expression in practitioners of widely differing outlooks and goals. Photographing these kind of subjects acquire an aura by being taken from their casual, often overlooked, position and put under intense scrutiny. The outcome intent tool which should look upon my project dispassionately is capable of creating images, filtered through the imagination, which compellingly engages the viewer's imagination and emotions. It wasn't empathy, It wasn't sympathy, it was more of a forced, intrinsic, and integral self-reflection. What I did is photograph emotions, I was photographing the initial moment when I laid eyes on the human being beautiful face shape that reflects the whole story of what it means to be broke, Injured, homeless, beggar and poor underprivileged and sometimes even hopeless. I gave with the often willing and knowing collaboration of my subjects, a metonymic typology of people who lived in dark side of society, representing for us the poor, homelessness, the other half. I was after the general truth of a general category, and the finer truths of individuals necessarily caught my inspiration to pick up this precise subject matter to photograph. The center of each picture was the subject matter: a person and his or her experience at that moment in time. To me and many other progressives, the rock bottom status added them from personal contact with the impoverished even when Christianity and the Social Gospel created a burden to extent charity to the disfranchised and discarded in society. I came imbuing them with the iconic soul of humanity and left almost engaging a subject in eyes contact. All of my photographs with human subjects refer to not where the subject is located, but the person before the lens and how did I visualize their emotions and feelings in a humanitarian neutral way. My images are intended to resonate with the viewer on a spiritual and human level and I try to pack in the metaphysical…attributes which tell their own story. I try to provoke an imaginative and intelligent response from the viewer with a purely visual reference.
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
Edward Steichen
Luxembourg/United States
1879 | † 1973
Edward Steichen (1879 - 1973) was born in Luxembourg, but immigrated to the United States, to Milwaukee, in 1880. In 1894, Steichen began a four-year lithography apprenticeship with the American Fine Art Company of Milwaukee. After hours, he would sketch and draw, and began to teach himself to paint. Having come across a camera shop near to his work, he bought his first camera, a secondhand Kodak box "detective" camera, in 1895. In 1900, as Steichen headed to Paris to study painting, he stopped in New York. By that time he was an aspiring painter and an accomplished photographer in the soft-focus, Pictorial style and he made a pilgrimage to the Camera Club of New York to show his work to Alfred Stieglitz, the leading tastemaker in American photography. Stieglitz, vice-president of the Camera Club and editor of its journal Camera Notes, was impressed by the young artist from Milwaukee and bought three of his photographs-a self-portrait and two moody, atmospheric woodland scenes printed in platinum-for the impressive sum of five dollars each. Elated, Steichen then boarded the ship for Europe. Once in France, Steichen quickly abandoned his painting studies and began to focus his energies on photography. He learned the technical intricacies of the gum bichromate process, popular among the members of the Photo-Club de Paris, and developed a reputation as a portraitist of noted artists, writers, and members of society. Arriving back in New York in 1902, Steichen rented a studio on the top floor of a brownstone at 291 Fifth Avenue and hung out his shingle; his work as a professional portrait photographer flourished. That same year, Stieglitz announced the formation of the Photo-Secession-the name he gave to the loose-knit group of photographers he exhibited, published, and promoted during the next decade and a half-and the publication of a new, still more lavish journal, Camera Work. Over the fifteen-year, fifty-issue run of Camera Work, no other artist would be featured as prominently as Steichen, who had sixty-five photographs and three paintings reproduced in fifteen issues, including a "Special Steichen Supplement" in April 1906 and an all-Steichen double issue in 1913. In 1906, Steichen determined "to get away from the lucrative but stultifying professional portrait business" and return to France with his family in hopes of resuscitating his idled painting career. It was a move with numerous consequences. For one, it positioned him to embrace the Autochrome, the process for making glass-plate color transparencies introduced by the Lumière brothers in 1907. Steichen-who had experimented with various methods such as gum bichromate to introduce color into his photographs-was enthralled by the technique. Steichen also made what he called his "first attempt at serious documentary reportage" in the summer of 1907, using a borrowed hand camera. Steichen returned to the U.S. in 1914. Serving in the US Army in World War I (and the US Navy in the Second World War), Steichen commanded significant units contributing to military photography. After World War I, during which he commanded the photographic division of the American Expeditionary Forces, he reverted to straight photography, gradually moving into editorial and fashion photography. His portraits of Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Gloria Swanson, and other celebrities appeared in Vogue and Vanity Fair in the 1920s and 1930s. From 1947-1962, Steichen served as the Director of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art.. Among other accomplishments, Steichen is appreciated for creating the 1955 exhibition, The Family of Man, at the Museum of Modern Art consisting of over 500 photographs. Steichen purchased a farm that he called Umpawaug in 1928, just outside West Redding, Connecticut, and lived there until his death. Source: Howard Greenberg Gallery
Pat Rose
United States
Pat Rose is a photographer based in Portland, Oregon. Her work includes landscape, street, portrait and botanical photography. She is a retired teacher of English as a Second Language who has taught in Saudi Arabia and Turkey, as well as in Austin, Texas, and most recently at Portland State University. After picking up her first digital camera a few years before her retirement about a decade ago, she quickly developed many photographic interests. Landscape and street photography appeal to her love of wandering and exploring new places, while her interest in portraiture stems from a desire to work collaboratively with her subjects. In late February 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic was gaining traction in the world and just starting to spread in the US, she began exploring the genre of scanner photography, an alternative form of photography involving the use of a flatbed scanner rather than a conventional camera to make digital images. This kind of work seemed an excellent way to continue her creative efforts as she started practicing self-isolation at home during the growing pandemic. For her scanned images she has been using flowers and other botanical specimens to create "virtual" bouquets as a celebration of the beauty and grace still to be found in the world during these troubled times. Pat has shown her work in a number of group exhibitions in galleries across the country. In Oregon, her photography has been juried into exhibitions at the LightBox Gallery in Astoria and the Black Box Gallery in Portland, and her Landscapes of the Pacific Northwest series was juried into the 2018 Pacific Northwest Photography Viewing Drawers at the Blue Sky Gallery in Portland. Her work has also been juried into exhibitions in the A Smith Gallery in Johnson City, Texas, the SE Center for Photography in Greenville, South Carolina, and PhotoPlace Gallery in Middlebury, Vermont, among others. In addition, one of her landscapes graces the cover of the 2016 edition of The Creaky Knees Guide, Oregon published by Sasquatch Books in Seattle. Another of her landscape photographs appears in the 2017 German edition of the National Geographic Guide to National Parks of the United States, a travel guide published by NG Buchverlag GmbH in Munich. Pat has received several awards for her photography. Her landscape image titled Enchanted Forest was selected for the Juror's First Award at the 2017 Nature's Way exhibition at the LightBox Gallery in Oregon, and the image won the Grand Prize in The American Landscape 2021 Photo Contest presented by Outdoor Photographer Magazine. Her portrait titled Sophia With Roses won a Director's Honorable Mention in the 2020 Portraits exhibition at the A Smith Gallery in Texas, and the image won Second Place in The Face, 2020 Portrait Photo Contest presented by Digital Photo Pro Magazine. Her cityscape image titled Random Chaos won a Director's Honorable Mention in the 2020 Vistas exhibition at the A Smith Gallery in Texas. And her botanical image titled Still Life with Roses & Raffia won an Honorable Mention in the Still Life Amateur category in The 14th Annual International Color Awards. Pat also writes about photography for Oregon ArtsWatch, an online magazine about culture and the arts in the Pacific Northwest. Much of her photography and her CV can be found on her website.
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