Steve Geer

There is something wonderful about a great photograph of life on the street. I think it’s because we humans are naturally nosy. We like to stare, absorb the details and imagine the facts, but on the street, we don’t have permission to stare. All we get is a glimpse. The great thing about a street photograph is that we have permission to stare.

In 2017 I started to experiment with motion-blurred street photography – the sort where the camera is fixed in place and the subjects are moving. I was using motion-blur to eliminate the very detail that we like to stare at in a street photograph, but I reasoned that the resulting images would have a look and feel closer to the glimpse we might get of strangers on the street. My theory was that, with less detail, there would be more room for the viewers imagination to wander – more imagination space. The great thing about theories is that they drive us to experiment and when we experiment, we learn.

The first thing I learnt was that to simulate a glimpse I needed just the right amount of motion-blur to eliminate just the right amount of detail. I was taking close-up images of pedestrians with a wide-angle lens. I found that a shutter speed of 1/6 second created photographs with a strong glimpse-like impression of the subject. The resulting images led to another discovery. When we walk some parts of us move more rapidly than other parts. One leg, for example, will be stationary while the other is in full swing. Motion-blur, which is produced by the camera’s technology, renders human movement in graceful arcs and soft brush strokes. It produces an image that is more poem-like than the detailed essay of a straight street photograph. Motion-blur renders the poetry of motion.

A poem does not have to be factual. Sometimes there is more truth in fiction than in out-of-context facts. Some of the photographs in One-Sixth of a Second are single shots. Others are combinations of two or more images from a sequence of exposures. Their compositions offer the imagination space of a poem, at least that is my intent.

All of the photographs in the series One-Sixth of a Second were taken in Chicago. That’s where I live.

Website: http://www.stevegeer.com

Karina Bikbulatova

I was born in Russia in 1995. I graduated from the University of Culture and Art in Moscow for a photography course. I also studied at the Academy of fine arts in Florence. I am also a finalist and winner of many international photography competitions and awards. For me, photography is a convenient and universal language. There are things I don’t want to talk about, because I find it difficult to find words in Russian, Tatar, English, Italian, and the plastic language comes to the rescue, the language of photography, which I know better than others.

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Marcos Ferreiro

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Daniel Castonguay

In 1979, as a member of a youth association, I had to choose an activity for the upcoming session. Naturally interested in science and experimentation, photography seemed a very fascinating activity since I could have access to a dark room and improve my knowledge in that particular field, I then discovered that photography was an endless source of learning. We were a group of audacious youngsters who wanted to learn. However, since the resources were limited to the few books left in the lab, we still managed to get by with the trial and error method and personally, it is still an integral part of the photographer’s work even today.

Our working methods of the time did not really have a technical framework and limits, the technical words and the specific methods of creation were totally unknown to us, the only known basis was the essential, how to finish a roll and how to finish a photo purely for black and white imaging.

Personally, even in those years, I did not like to depict things as they were and especially in street photography where the imaging must follow strict rules. This naivety and candor allowed us to be creative to the point of creating overlays that could be used in a dark room. A plate of glass over the paper and various translucent materials were added on the glass as long as the light could pass through, not to mention our motley techniques for dodging, burning, sabattier effect, multiple exposure and so. And that’s how my fascination with textures and post-production started

Philomena Famulok

With my images I tell about me and my inner darks.
I am a photographer and visual artist from Germany. Mainly I work with self-portraiture, with different cameras and techniques, analog and digital. I am creating collages, mixing painting with photography and sometimes write little texts as an addition to my images.
My primary focus is on subjective and personal documentary, conceptual and fine art photography.
In various series and projects I deal with personal questions about identity, reality, perception and various forms of remembering.
In the process I am expressing mostly internal processes: The aching, disturbed and traumatized parts of life and identity are of particular importance for me in my work.
My visual language is associatively, lyrical and reduced and always with a spotlight on the personal, emotional and psychological meaning of an image

Anna Bodnar

I’m born in 1982 in Poland. I’m philologist and a computer graphic artist. Presently, I’m a joint owner of an advertising agency. Since March 2008 I’m also a member of an Association of Polish Art Photographers, and from 1 january 2011 member of Royal Photographic Society.Visual art interested me always; it shows more than words can ever do. Throughout the years, I have been looking for different artistic ways of expressing myself. What I do is my passion and I am simply crazy about it. This passion, emotions, distaste to the unreal and plastic world are deep down in me. It is understanding myself; it is understanding other people; it is something unspoken of; it is a taboo. It is love to freedom that I have not known yet.. My usual sources of inspiration are day-to-day life and literature. M work and my art expresses who I am and therefore, I have a very emotional about it. I use regular photos, as well as different processing software programs for my graphic works.

Arritmia, Fabrizio Quagliuso

There is such a thing as an irregular rhythm syndrome, where the heartbeat is inconsistent; it races, slows down or flutters. There are times when the heart skips a beat, others when it frantically chases the following one to the point of breathlessness, swarming, oscillating. Somewhere between a hollowness and a fullness, the needle of our internal compass is marking out a route of truth and justice, away from the illusions of the ego and drawing us towards our instinctive selves, towards the human nature that dwells in the nature of this world and the world of nature that dwells within the human.
Mia makes this journey in reverse, from the outside moving inwards, in an ascending motion that brings the unconscious to the surface. With every step she takes, with every skipped or hastily recovered heartbeat, she seems to walk along footpaths inside a dream. And then, the mist dividing imagination and reality clears, becoming penetrable like butter meeting a blade, nullifying boundaries and distances, allowing the experience of the Whole and the One.
Mia. In Italian “mine”, belonging to me. Because when one belongs to her own, it is herself that she wants to return to

Mário Cravo Neto

Mario Cravo Neto was born in Salvador, Bahia in 1947. The son of Mario Cravo Junior, a well-known Brazilian sculptor, Crave Neto (grandson) started creating art at an early age. Initially interested in sculpture, Crave Neto turned his attention to photography in the late sixties. At the age of twenty, Cravo Neto moved to New York for two years to take classes at the Art Students League and set up a photo studio. It was this experience in New York that solidified his love for photography.
Shortly after returning home to Brazil, Crave Neto was in a car accident that left him bedridden for a full year. Having worked as as street photographer in New York, he suddenly found himself unable to walk, and in need of a new way of working. Forced to re-evaluate his photography, he set up lights and began shooting in the studio, which he continues to do today.
Combining spiritual, mystical and religious elements — eggs, birds, animals, fish and bones — with nude torsos, Cravo Neto creates sensual images which unite man and nature, the erotic and the spiritual. His images reveal a psychological portrait of the Indigenous, Portuguese and African communities that co-exist in Bahia today. Often evoking a ritual look, Cravo Neto’s photographs invite the viewer to wander through black spaces, to linger on specific objects that are both elegant and primitive.
One of this most renown images features a man with two fish slung over his shoulder, reminiscent of a market scene, yet layered with sexual and religious overtones; a man facing the camera, his chin thrown back, holding a large white bird over his care chest in an act of sacrifice; the wrinkled forehead of a man whose eyes are covered by the tails of two tiny white birds, obscuring his eyesight but not his vision.

 

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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Masatoshi Naito

Born in Tokyo in 1938, Masatoshi Naito graduated from Waseda University in applied sciences and trained as a research scientist. A keen interest in the folkloric traditions of Japan led him to pursue a career in photography. His work on the ethnological customs of the region of Tohoku became the focus of his seminal 70’s series: Ba Ba Bakuhatsu (Grandma Explosion).

Early on in his career, Naito photographed the mummies of Buddhist priests who had died fasting for the salvation of starving farmers in Dewa Sanzan and then started making photographs that focused on the folk religions and ethnology of Tohoku. In this body of work (1968-1970), Naito portrays female shamans “Itako” who invoke the spirits of the dead. Female Shamanism used to be a widespread phenomenon within Japan, today it is limited to this region where the more esoteric sides of Eastern religion are still practiced. These female shamans photographed starkly by Masatoshi Naito are celebrating death. They mourn the dead by performing rituals and dancing all night to evoke the spirits of the deceased. These women are exuberant and celebrate death not life. Naito pays homage to this time-old tradition with his bright flash, graphically illuminating the characters he depicts. As Naito observed: “The vitality of women comes from the earth. They embrace everything like goddesses and the title Ba Ba Bakuhatsu (Grandma Explosion) came to my mind naturally.”

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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Emme Divi

Marcella Dalla Valle, graduated in Literature, she was born and is currently living in Italy. Also Known as Emme Divi. She is in love with using natural light based on the high contrast and lot of darkness. Her images are a visual dialogue between photography and poetry: the dimention of anxiety, when the image reflects the instinct, nothing is defined, because the wish is the unconscious as an open work.