Eikoh Hosoe

 

Eikoh Hosoe is a contemporary Japanese photographer who explores macabre aspects of human psychology. Often depicting seppuku fantasies and erotic images of the male body, his models included the famed author Yukio Mishima. “To me photography can be simultaneously both a record and a mirror or window of self-expression,” the artist said. “The camera is generally assumed to be unable to depict that which is not visible to the eye and yet, the photographer who wields it well can depict what lies unseen in his memory.” Born on March 18, 1933 in Yamagata Prefecture, Japan, he grew up amidst the devastation wrought by World War II. Hosoe went on to study at the Tokyo College of Photography where he met the avant-garde artist “/artists/ei-q/”>Ei-Q. In 1969, Hosoe’s most acclaimed series of photographs was published in his book Kamaitachi. The subject of the book references a folktale about a supernatural weasel which slices off human skin with sickle-like claws and teeth. In 2010, Hosoe was awarded the title of Japanese Person of Cultural Merit. He currently lives and works in Tokyo, Japan. Today, his photographs are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Frederick Sommer

Art is not arbitrary. A fine painting is not there by accident; it is not arrived at by chance. We are sensitive to tonalities.
The smallest modification of tonality affects structure. Some things have to be rather large, but elegance is the presentation of things in their minimum dimensions

Frederick Sommer

Connie Imboden

 

Connie Imboden’s photographs are in the permanent collections of many museums including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Baltimore Museum of Art, The National Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Bibliotheque Nationales in Paris, France, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany and many other public and private collections throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

Throughout the years, Imboden has shown her photographs in an extensive range of group and solo shows at galleries and museums within the United States, South America, Europe, and most recently China.

In 1993, Connie Imboden won the Silver Medal in Switzerland’s “Schonste Bucher Aus Aller Welt (Most Beautiful Book in the World)” Award for her first book of images entitled “Out of Darkness”. Her most recent book, “Reflections, 25 Years of Photography”, features photos from 1983 to 2009 charting Imboden’s artistic journey and offering new insights into her work and vision.

She teaches photography at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where her experience as a photographer began, as well as many workshops around the world.

Imboden is also the president of the board of governors of the William G. Baker Jr. Memorial Fund. The Baker Fund focuses its grant making exclusively to Arts and Culture and in 2008 initiated the Baker Artists Awards, an innovative online process offering significant prizes to emerging and established artists of any discipline.

Kay Jan AKA Slot

Kay Jan AKA Slot. K makes beautiful atmospheric photographs. She’s also an enigma because I can’t find out anything about her except that she lives in Taipei, Taiwan.
Her pictures are obviously influenced by fashion photography and she clearly loves modern digital techniques and photo manipulation however, not withstanding that fact, these are exceptional photographs. They cut through to the essence of human emotion, they are intense, incredibly seductive and Slot K’s ability to use light, to find new angles, to abstract the ordinary is simply quite extraordinary.
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Shoji Ueda

Shoji Ueda was born in 1913, in　Sakai-machi, Saihaku-gun (now Sakaiminato) in Tottori Prefecture.
In 1925, he entered the Yonago prefectural junior high school, where, during his third year, he immersed himself in photography. After graduating in 1931, he joined the Yonago Photography Circle. In 1932, he moved to Tokyo to attend the Oriental School of Photography. After graduating at the age of 19, he returned to his hometown and opened his own photo studio. In the same year he joined the Japan Photography Association (Nihon Kouga Kyoukai). Since around this time, he began to establish reputation as his photographs were repeatedly selected for publication in photography magazines and displayed in exhibitions. In 1937, he became one of the founders of the Chugoku Photographers Group (Chugoku Shashinka Shuudan) and frequently presented his work in the group’s exhibitions in Tokyo. His works such as “Four Girls Poses,” which featured group of posing people, drew wide attention.
In 1947, Ueda became a member of Ginryusha, a group of professional and amateur photographers established in postwar Tokyo. In 1949, Series My Family appeared in the magazine, the first of widely acclaimed works featuring Tottori’s beaches and sand dunes. In 1954, he won the Nika Prize, and in 1958 his works were selected by Edward Steichen for exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 1971 saw the publication of Children the Year Around, and in 1974, Series A piece of life began to appear regularly in “Camera Mainichi” magazine, which after all continued for 12-years. In 1978 and 1987, Ueda was invited to participate in the Arles Photo Festival in France. 1980 saw the opening of his My View exhibition in Tokyo, and in 1982 his work was selected for display at Germany’s Photokina Exhibition. From 1975 to 1994, Ueda taught at Kyushu Industrial University. 1993 saw a major solo exhibition in Tokyo and other exhibitions both inside and outside Japan.
In 1995, Shoji Ueda Museum of Photography was founded in Kishimoto-cho (now Houki-cho). In 1996, he was awarded a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the goverment of France. In 1998, he received the first Tottori Prefecture Prefectural Citizen Achievement Award.
Shoji Ueda died on July 4, 2000.

Laurie Simmons

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Kenneth Josephson

Kenneth Josephson is recognized as an early and influential practitioner of Conceptual photography. His black and white images famously layer pictures within pictures, focusing on the act of picture-making, offering playful commentary on photographic truth and illusion, and using the photograph itself to question the veracity of the medium.
Josephson earned a BFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1957, where he studied under Minor White. In 1960, he earned an MS from the Institute of Design of the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, where he was strongly influenced by Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. Josephson was a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1967 -1997), and a founding member of the Society for Photographic Education. He is the receipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship (1972), and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships (1975 and 1979). His work is in the collections worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian, Washington D.C.; the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Bibliotheque National, Paris; and Fotografiska Museet, Stockholm.

Zsuzsanna Dofka

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Virna Haffer

Virna Haffer was a gifted and innovative photographer who made lasting contributions to photography in the Northwest and nationally. She was a self-taught photographer raised in the utopian community of Home Colony, Washington who began exhibiting her work professionally in the 1920s both independently and as a member of the Seattle Camera Club. She went on to show her work extensively in American and European photographic salons and museum exhibitions earning an international reputation. Her body of work includes pictorialist and surrealist images from the 1920s and 1930s, documentary and straight photography from the 1930s and 1940s, and experimental work with photograms and other non-film photographic processes starting in the 1950s. Her book Making Photograms: The Creative Process of Painting with Light, published in 1969, still serves as a reference manual for contemporary artists interested in this process.

Denis Roche

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Susan Dofka

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Roberto Kusterle

 

Roberto Kusterle was born in Gorizia in 1948, where he still lives and works.

He began with painting and installation in the 1970’s, before identifying photography as the ideal means for his artistic expression.

During the following years the principal themes of his poetics emerged: a continuity between the human, animal and vegetable world, the mediating role of the body, the negation of the gaze, the constant practice of irony, ambiguity and displacement to shape an idea and to make the viewer wonder.

Photography is used to maintain the tension between fiction and reality. Kusterle has a very personal approach to the camera: the actual taking of the picture is only the last step in a complex and articulated creative process.

Hélène Desplechin

I want to show emotion and I want to have emotions. This is one of my main objectives with photography. Life is made of feelings, that’s what I choose to look for. It’s necessary to have the feeling one wants to transmit; sensitivity is the base. I’m looking for the little things that move me. It’s an infinite search for beauty, trying to see a kind of magic in details. Learning to see things that people don’t see and then share it with them. And the more life goes on, the more I learn to enjoy those details.
My inspiration is simple curiosity, constant observation, and astonishment by what surrounds me. A part of it is willingness to enjoy every part of it. Everyday life, is what inspires me. And that fundamental need, that I was born with, to create and to share with others my emotions.
Hélène Desplechin.

Roger Ballen

One of the most influential and important photographic artists of the 21st century, Roger Ballen’s photographs span over forty years. His strange and extreme works confront the viewer and challenge them to come with him on a journey into their own minds as he explores the deeper recesses of his own.

Roger Ballen was born in New York in 1950 but for over 30 years he has lived and worked in South Africa. His work as a geologist took him out into the countryside and led him to take up his camera and explore the hidden world of small South African towns. At first he explored the empty streets in the glare of the midday sun but, once he had made the step of knocking on people’s doors, he discovered a world inside these houses which was to have a profound effect on his work. These interiors with their distinctive collections of objects and the occupants within these closed worlds took his unique vision on a path from social critique to the creation of metaphors for the inner mind. After 1994 he no longer looked to the countryside for his subject matter finding it closer to home in Johannesburg.

Over the past thirty five years his distinctive style of photography has evolved using a simple square format in stark and beautiful black and white. In the earlier works in the exhibition his connection to the tradition of documentary photography is clear but through the 1990s he developed a style he describes as ‘documentary fiction’. After 2000 the people he first discovered and documented living on the margins of South African society increasingly became a cast of actors working with Ballen in the series’ Outland (2000, revised in 2015) and Shadow Chamber (2005) collaborating to create powerful psychodramas.

The line between fantasy and reality in his subsequent series’ Boarding House (2009) and Asylum of the Birds (2014) became increasingly blurred and in these series he employed drawings, painting, collage and sculptural techniques to create elaborate sets. There was an absence of people altogether, replaced by photographs of individuals now used as props, by doll or dummy parts or where people did appear it was as disembodied hands, feet and mouths poking disturbingly through walls and pieces of rag. The often improvised scenarios were now completed by the unpredictable behaviour of animals whose ambiguous behaviour became crucial to the overall meaning of the photographs. In this phase Ballen invented a new hybrid aesthetic, but one still rooted firmly in black and white photography.

In his artistic practice Ballen has increasingly been won over by the possibilities of integrating photography and drawing. He has expanded his repertoire and extended his visual language. By integrating drawing into his photographic and video works, the artist has not only made a lasting contribution to the field of art, but equally has made a powerful commentary about the human condition and its creative potential.

His contribution has not been limited to stills photography and Ballen has been the creator of a number of acclaimed and exhibited short films that dovetail with his photographic series’. The collaborative film I Fink You Freeky, created for the cult band Die Antwoord in 2012, has garnered over 125-million hits on YouTube. He has taken his work into the realms of sculpture and installation, at Paris’ Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (2017), Australia’s Sydney College of the Arts (2016) and at the Serlachius Museum in Finland (2015) is to name but a few. The spectacular installation at Les Rencontres d’Arles 2017, “House of the Ballenesque” was voted as one of the best exhibitions for 2017. In 2018 at the Wiesbaden Biennale, Germany, another installation “Roger Ballen’s Bazaar/Bizarre” was created in an abandoned shopping centre.

Ballen’s series, The Theatre of Apparitions (2016), is inspired by the sight of these hand-drawn carvings on blacked-out windows in an abandoned women’s prison.

Ballen started to experiment using different spray paints on glass and then ‘drawing on’ or removing the paint with a sharp object to let natural light through. The results have been likened prehistoric cave-paintings: the black, dimensionless spaces on the glass are canvases onto which Ballen has carved his thoughts and emotions. He also released a related animated film, Theatre of Apparitions, which has been nominated for various awards.

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Apocryphes, Olivier Christinat

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Samad Ghorbanzadeh

The most sorrowful songs of humans would be composed when your are hanged on the rope of time, between the ground and the air, yesterday and today, with a cold smile on your face and with a distressed mind to look upon the events that happened in the past and fearfully waiting for the coming events that will happen in the future. Does Samad Ghorbanzadeh stricken with sleepwalking? or this is just his midday wanderings to be freed from the turbulent dreams which are not letting him go. His works represents his inner side that takes us to a mysterious and obscure mind and they leave us there alone, with our apprehension. First charactered person in many of his photos is a teenager who became younger and smaller, like a person that is not getting maturer by the time that stopped for him, and he is involved with a luggage of wishes, imaginations, feelings and atrocity. Samad Ghorbanzadeh in facing the world with putting his model or subject in an unknown places is showing the destruction and disappearance of a lost and forgotten world which is just a wasteland and nothing more. The simple creation of photos with less elements and with centering them in the photos without any twisting and connecting them to visual games, makes the viewer to receive and understand his mysterious mind so easily. The photos don’t belong to any period of time, neither to past nor to future, but at the same time they look like the remnants of mankind’s destroyed memories which are just forcing to bring back a past in front of their faces and to impose the evanescence of human values and sometime beyond the time and the place it makes you to fall in a trap of fear that is like a massive punishment for your indiscreet sin, and for you to fear the falling into the time’s darkest potholes. Masterly implementation of his works, takes the audience so much close to the reality that even with being sure that they have been illustrated and causes them (the viewers) to get closer to a subjective and tangible reality which is like a swaying pendulum of a clock between dream and the reality.

Luca De Vincentis

I am a fine art photographer based in Rome, Italy. I am fond of those shots that require a great physical effort, as the bond that links me to the model impersonating a certain character makes him feel for a while the pain and hell my heart spent my entire life within.

I love shooting at night between whores and smokey factories – where what I’m hunting for hides. Everything becomes dangerous and irresistible. I love fires, smokes, woods and the fog; people with irregular teeth, sounds in reverse, digestive systems and revolving doors; math, stairs, flesh and the names of prescription drugs.

When I take a shot, I’m not just quietly portraying the world around me. Oceans, cars, mountains and bodies are an extension of my own Calvary. The ultimate proof of the impossibility of life.

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Actus, Miguel Oriola

Cursa estudios de arte y música. En los sesenta se traslada a Madrid para estudiar arte dramático y ejerce la fotografía freelance. Desde 1977 comparte su dedicación con la docencia. Desde su primera exposición en 1971 ha realizado innumerables muestras en galerías nacionales e internacionales. Su obra está presente en colecciones publicas y privadas. En 1980 funda y dirige la revista POPtografia. Desde sus principios ha compaginado su obra personal con la editorial de moda, ilustración y campañas de publicidad. Ha colaborado en publicaciones como Vogue, Elle, Cosmopólitan, Tendencias, El Pais, Vanidad, etc. Es así mismo autor de cursos especializados y seminarios, y Director del Máster Internacional de Moda en EFTI (Escuela de Fotografía y Técnicas de la Imagen). En 1997 estancia de varios meses en NY. Con ocasión de PHE 2002 se organiza una retrospectiva que abarca obra de los últimos treinta años. En la actualidad vive y trabaja en Madrid dedicado exclusivamente al desarrollo de su obra personal, incluyendo el video, literatura y la docencia.

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Roberto De Mitri

Like many, the love for photography is something that accompanies me from the first moments of my life. Only in the last few years I have had the material opportunity to devote myself to it with passion, intensity and constancy. I’m not a photographer by profession. And any definition doesn’t affect my passion for photography.

For predisposition and predilection, I make photos exclusively in analog. And I develop my films by myself. 35mm, but especially medium format. I love photography in black and white. And I work mostly with long exposures of landscapes and urban contexts. I am completely self-taught. The little or very little that I know about photography, I’ve learned it by experience. Instinct and experience. Sensitivity and experience. Failures and experience.

What I try to recreate through my photos, what I try to bring out through them, is a feeling of alienation and loneliness.

Cities are like shells of social exclusion, crowded with ghosts. Individuals alone and isolated, alien to themselves and towards others. Anonymous faceless souls.

The landscapes of the sea are cold sterile lunar surfaces. Lifeless and unable to accommodate its seeds. Distant landscapes, perhaps dispersed in space, perhaps promised lands never existed.

This is the human condition. Unease, alienation, loneliness, lack of communication, dereliction.

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Shunji Dodo

Dodo was born in Osaka in 1947.He graduated in fine arts from Kyushu Sangyo University in 1970, and started teaching at Tōkyō Shashin Senmon Gakkō (now Visual Arts College Tokyo). Two years later he started work as a teacher of photography at Ōsaka Shashin Senmon Gakkō; in 1998 he was made head of the school, by that time renamed Visual Arts College Osaka.

Dodo was present when the film director Naomi Kawase, who had first been a student of his and was later teaching at Visual Arts Senmon Gakkō, had her first baby on 24 April 2004, in Nara. This was filmed as Tarachime and Dodo photographed the event; the photographs were exhibited in Nara, Tokyo, and Locarno, and published as Haha

Dodo’s book of large-format black-and-white photographs A Radiant Land: Kii Peninsula won the PSJ’s Annual Award for 1995; his later collection of large-format colour photographs of the peninsula, A Radiant Land with Thousands of Years, was exhibited in Nara City Museum of Photography in 2000 The latter work also won him the Ina Nobuo Award in 1999.

Dodo has said that his major influences were Shōmei Tōmatsu, especially his Ryūkyū series “Pencil of the Sun”, and Yutaka Takanashi, for the way in which Takanashi’s concentration on Tokyo showed Dodo his own possibilities in Osaka. Among the photographers he admires are Robert Frank and William Klein.