Masters of photography
Andreas Paradise was born in 1969 in Athens, Greece where he still lives today. In 1988 he studied photography but some years later quit it and worked in the financial sector. He holds an MBA from Kingston University in London.Back in 2007 a meeting with Manos Lykakis and, later, with Platon Rivellis (founder of Photo Circle) reminded him that he had unfinished business with photography. Since then photography has again been his first and daily priority, and the main way in which he expresses himself. His teachers include Michael Ackerman, Jacob Aue Sobol and in 2011 he won a scholarship for a masterclass given by Anders Petersen.
He likes to think of himself more as an architect and a collector than as a photographer; an architect because he is trying to build his own world, and a collector because he is trying to gather the raw materials needed for that purpose. He is not a story teller, he is just trying to describe the world of his visions. The only proof of these visions is the millisecond that will remain eternally alive and will never be repeated again.
Stray dog’ is a long term black and white project that dwells on Istanbul and people, animals, objects on its streets. It simply developed out of the relation between the city and myself. I am trying to reach out to the viewer in an effort to unveil the complexity of ordinary scenes of life.
Most of the photographs emerged from an effort to interpret the movements of people in order to open for the viewer new channels of reflection. Which, in terms of the emotion it conveys, seems to have resulted in melancholy, desertion, irony, absurdity and even farce.
I’m an enthusiast DSLR photographer, and my home county is Hampshire, in the UK.
For me, photography is about the creative interpretation of a scene rather than a record. Photography is an art form and as such there are no rules, except to try and create an image that engages the viewer.
As you can tell from the examples here, my interests are primarily with coastal subjects, which especially lend themselves to black and white conversion, and the long exposure techniques I favour. Greatly inspired by the Japanese aesthetic, many here are minimalist in composition with long exposures creating an ethereal harmony between sky and sea.
When I have found my place on a city street or another urban location, I wait for the moment when each figure will harmonize beautifully—and that’s when I take my photo
Born in Taranto (Italy) in 1977, Giuseppe Di Giulio lives and works in Rome since 1996.
Self-taught photographer, he began taking pictures in 2001 during the university courses to produce a flier for a student association.
Still take pictures only during free time that his profession gives him.
In 2009 he held his first solo show at a club in Rome.
In 2009 his picture “the caress of the wind” has been selected among the finalists of the Metro Photo Challenge Italy.
ALFRED STIEGLITZ was most influential in establishing photography as an art form in the United States. He pursued this cause by editing and publishing magazines, organizing photographers, operating galleries and crafting his own creative photographic images many of which were printed in photogravure. He promoted the photogravure process as an original means of photographic printmaking.
Stieglitz secured hands-on experience with photogravure and used it extensively for his work and the images of fellow pictorialists around the turn of the twentieth century. He initially worked at the Photochrome Engraving Company, in New York, where he gained intimate knowledge of photogravure and other printing processes. In 1897, he issued Picturesque Bits of New York and Other Studies, a portfolio of his own large-format gravures, for which he personally made the film positives for plate making. At this time he marketed his individual photogravures as collectible, original works of art, numbering, signing and printing them in limited editions.
Stieglitz used the photogravure process for most of the illustrations in his groundbreaking periodicals, Camera Notes (1897-1903) and Camera Work (1903-1917). The photogravures in these journals, all personally approved by Stieglitz, enabled a larger audience for once to experience the artful qualities of photography. He was so confident of the quality of these gravures that he occasionally sent them to be displayed at international exhibitions of artistic photographs.
Stieglitz’s own work passed through three distinct phases. He began as a naturalist photographer sensitively portraying rural lifestyles. He then became a pictorialist, creating impressionistic pictures through soft-focus effects. Finally, he turned modern, embracing abstraction, photographic detail, and realistic tones
Fotógrafo, docente, comisario independiente y promotor de arte. En la actualidad trabaja para el Departamento de Artes Plásticas del Ayuntamiento de Alcobendas como Conservador y Comisario de la Colección Alcobendas de Fotografía. Es el vigente Director de la Escuela Internacional de fotografía Alcobendas PhotoEspaña PIC.A. Como profesor imparte clases en diferentes cursos de fotografía, forma parte del claustro de profesores del Máster PHotoEspaña en fotografía, además de realizar labores de asesoramiento a coleccionistas privados. Ha publicado más de ciento cincuenta artículos desde 1983 en numerosas revistas entre otras, Photo, Foto Profesional, Diorama – Foto, Revista FV, Europ-Art, El País, Diario El Mundo, ABC, Visual, La Fotografía…, también en libros y catálogos. Fue cofundador del Colectivo-28, perteneciendo a él hasta su disolución, y fundador y presidente de la Asociación “entrefotos” hasta el año 2005.
En sentido formal, las fotografías de Díaz-Maroto han evolucionado lentamente hasta sus últimas obras, centrando su interés en el paisaje contemporáneo, aumentando los formatos y demostrando abiertamente un dominio técnico que siempre es esencial en sus trabajos.
Viajero incansable, curioso y observador, imprime a sus trabajos una coherencia estilística, con dosis de naturalidad y de abierta visión.
Como fotógrafo se identifica con el reportaje cotidiano y con una tendencia creativa a la realización de “retratos ambientados”.
Izis (Israel Bidermanas) was born in Lithuania. From an early age he was fascinated by painting, and he left his Hebrew language school at 13 to be apprenticed to a photographer. Once trained, he spent three years wandering the country and photographing. He arrived in Paris, drawn by it being the city of the Impressionists in 1931, penniless and without any passport or other papers, and not speaking a single word of French.
After some weeks of living more or less on the streets he got a job in a photo studio, then open his own, becoming successful at highly posed professional portraiture. This paid the bills and allowed him to spend his spare time in art galleries.
When the Germans invaded he had to flee and go into hiding near Limoges. Eventually he was captured and beaten up with the French fighting them, and met the resistance leaders who had liberated the town. He asked if he could photograph them, but when they turned up to have their pictures taken all carefully dressed and clean-shaven he realised that the kind of formal portraiture he had practiced before the war was completely false. He persuaded them to be photographed as he had first seen them, desperate heroes in filthy clothes, fresh from the battle.
The pictures he produced were a sensation in Limoges. When he returned to Paris he was introduced to Brassai and was encouraged by him and others. Within a few months he had produced enough pictures for his first real exhibition in 1946.
Although this made him well known, it made no money, and he realised needed to get his work published. From 1950, his work was used regularly by Paris Match, and his first book, ‘Paris des Rêves (Paris Enchanted) came up in 1951.
For ‘Paris Match’ he photographed many writers and artists, becoming friends with many of them. In particular he became very close to the painter Marc Chagall, and they spent many hours walking round Paris together. Jacques Prévert also became a good friend and again they often walked around the city together. Prévert wrote the text for several of his books.
Izis was a great dreamer and a wanderer both of the streets and in his mind. He believed in photographs that seemed simple, but were in fact full of ambience, a ‘poetic realism’ that was much in vogue. His vision was gentle and warm without being sentimental. He photographed lovers, children at play, the circus, all seen with a freshness and playfulness.
Izis didn’t like to leave Paris, but made two exceptions to produce books on other places. His pictures in Israel from visits in 1952-4 reflect some of the optimism of the people building a new country. He also came to London to photograph several times in the early 50’s (producing a fine book, with text by Jacques Prévert). His pictures here capture the mood of the London fogs and the people; the best-known shows a man in a wasted East-End street lost in the simple pleasure of blowing bubbles.
I photographed the popular culture of the United States differently from American photographers. I saw the enormous vitality of the country. I didn’t see it as suffering. The urban photographers here took pictures that showed the negative side of the Depression, but my pictures show the almost bizarre, exotic qualities of the country. . . . I was seeing America with an outsider’s eyes – the automobiles, the speed, the freedom, the graffiti. . .
Fábio Costa (Fagu) was born in February 1978 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. An art director and amateur photographer, Fábio lives in Paris and has photographed daily since his birthday on February 23, 2005. He has made photography a lifetime project and intends to shoot every day for the rest of his life. His work is focused on street photography and graphics.
Ara Güler is a Turkish photojournalist, also known as Istanbul’s Eye.
Ara’s work is included in the collections of institutions worldwide, such as Paris’s National Library of France; New York’s George Eastman Museum; Das imaginäre Photo-Museum; Museum Ludwig Köln; and Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery.
Ara’s philosophy on photography is that he attaches great importance to the presence of humans in photography and considers himself as a visual historian. According to him, photography should provide people with memory of their suffering and their life. He feels that art can lie but photography only reflects the reality. He does not value art in photography so he prefers photojournalism.
He has won several awards for his work, including Turkey’s Photographer of the Century, 1999; Master of Leica, 1962; France’s Légion d’honneur; Lifetime Achievement Lucie Award, 2009; and Turkey’s Grand Prize of Culture and Arts, 2005. In 2004, he was give honorary fellowship by Istanbul’s Yıldız Technical University.
Paul Russell is a British street photographer, based in Weymouth, Dorset. He is a member of the In-Public international street photography collective.
Russell’s work has been published in one self-published book of his own, in a few survey publications on street photography, and is in the collection of the Museum of London. He has had solo exhibitions in venues around the UK, and in group exhibitions in various locations worldwide.
Phil Coomes, writing for BBC News in 2011, spoke of him as “street photographer Paul Russell whose eye for a humorous moment is as keen as any you will find.”
Sevil Alkan is an architect and story-teller whose work focuses on documentary and street life.
She was born in 1979. She studied and completed her master degree in Bauhaus University- Urban Studies. She started photography in 2013 by using mobile device and she continues her works in Mobile Street and documentary photography. She founded H-art collective which is a mobile photography collective in 2014.
The yellow public phones, omnipresent in most Indian cities -drop a coin and it’s at your service. Like all other Indian Cities, Bangalore of course has many of them. When I moved to Bangalore back in 2005, without a local number to make calls on, I was dependent on these yellow Phones for communication. My wife also used these phones to call me whenever she ran out of mobile prepaid limit. With the mobile phone revolution and its easy affordability, everyone has now at least one and sometimes two mobile phones. This certainly is drawing a curtain over the yellow pay-phone’s future. The shop keepers, who used to make 250-300 Rupees of coins each day, inform me that it’s now even hard to get 20-30 Rupees a day out of these phones. Lately I have noticed them vanishing from many places. I decided to document this swiftly disappearing phenomenon and life around these pay phones, before they vanish from the landscape of urban life completely.
Willam Claxton earned his reputation with his moody black and white portraits of leading jazzmen of the 1950s and 1960s such as Duke Ellington or Charlie Parker and by believing that photography was ‘jazz for the eye’. Often accompanying musicians during their tours, the American photographer captured them at work should it be a meditative Chet Baker whose face reflects in his piano or a powerful Dinah Washington confronting her mic. Yet what William Claxton succeeded in the most was in representing jazz musicians in other settings than their sweaty and frantic New York clubs; choosing outdoor sunny sceneries and laid-back outfits that gave an innovative freshness to their depictions. He often said he had succeeded in celebrity photography by promising not to portray his subjects in a negative way and by finding common tastes such as Steve Mc Queen’s passion for sports car. Should it be that trust that enabled him to capture an over made-up aging Gloria Swanson or the stress of an agitated Judy Garland: no negative portrayals but clearly harsh realities.
Adolf Fassbender (1884-1980) was born in Grevenbroich, Germany, a small town near Cologne. Before entering the military, he initially assisted a photographer in Freiburg, Germany and subsequently worked in Dresden (where he also studied drawing and painting), Vienna (where he began specializing in hand-colored miniature portraits), and Antwerp. In 1911, he immigrated to the United States. He was first employed by the Selby Sisters and in 1921 opened his own New York studio. For the next seven years, he produced commercial, illustrative, and portrait photographs, some of which were exhibited at national conventions of the Photographers’ Association of America. He closed the business in 1928.
At about this time, Fassbender became interested in pictorialism and began making creative pictures with the camera. He exhibited in pictorial salons for twenty years, beginning in 1925, when his work was first accepted by London’s Royal Photographic Society. He presented solo shows in 1934 at the Camera Club of New York and in 1951 at the Smithsonian Institution. He joined camera clubs in New York, received honorary memberships from groups elsewhere, and was a founding member of the Photographic Society of America.
Fassbender shared his techniques and theories by writing for the photographic press. He began in the early 1930s with a short series of articles in Camera about various control methods. His article “Why Bother,” about the importance of manipulating the negative, was printed over time by three different publications. Most significant was his book Pictorial Artistry: The Dramatization of the Beautiful in Photography, published in 1937.
After closing his studio in the late 1920s, Fassbender made his living as an instructor. He taught photography at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences from 1930 to 1935 and in the late 1940s at the Central Branch Brooklyn YMCA. He also conducted private and group classes at his Manhattan and New Jersey residences and lectured to camera clubs and professional conventions throughout the country. Over the course of his teaching career, from which he retired in 1970, he had more than 18,000 students.
Ruth Orkin was an award-winning photojournalist and filmmaker. Orkin was the only child of Mary Ruby, a silent-film actress, and Samuel Orkin, a manufacturer of toy boats called Orkin Craft. She grew up in Hollywood in the heyday of the 1920s and 1930s. At the age of 10, she received her first camera, a 39 cent Univex. She began by photographing her friends and teachers at school. At 17 years old she took a monumental bicycle trip across the United States from Los Angeles to New York City to see the 1939 World’s Fair, and she photographed along the way.
Orkin moved to New York in 1943, where she worked as a nightclub photographer and shot baby pictures by day to buy her first professional camera. She worked for all the major magazines in 1940s, and also went to Tanglewood during the summers to shoot rehearsals. She ended up with many of the worlds’ greatest musicians of the time including Leonard Bernstein, Isaac Stern, Aaron Copland, Jascha Heifitz, Serge Koussevitzky and many others.
In 1951, LIFE magazine sent her to Israel with the Israeli Philharmonic. Orkin then went to Italy, and it was in Florence where she met Nina Lee Craig, an art student and fellow American, who became the subject of “American Girl in Italy.” The photograph was part of a series originally titled “Don’t Be Afraid to Travel Alone” about what they encountered as women traveling alone in Europe after the war.
On her return to New York, Orkin married the photographer and filmmaker Morris Engel. Together they produced two feature films, including the classic “Little Fugitive” which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1953. From their New York apartment overlooking Central Park, Orkin photographed marathons, parades, concerts, demonstrations, and the beauty of the changing seasons. These photographs were the subject of two widely acclaimed books, “A World Through My Window” and “More Pictures From My Window.” After a long struggle with cancer, Orkin passed away in her apartment, surrounded by her wonderful legacy of photographs with the view of Central Park outside her window.
Mark Fearnley is a UK-based fine art street photographer who is completely impassioned by photography. He started off working as an interior decorative artist, painting grand houses using various paint effects. His love for art went further and Mark started painting abstract canvases, which in turn led to numerous exhibitions in different galleries around the country. From visiting these galleries and realising that photography uses much the same techniques as art, such as composition and focal point, and with his creative eye, his love for photography was born and this is where you find him today.
As a photographer Mark seeks to visualise a scene before it happens, often waiting to capture a moment that will hopefully then become a great photo. He has an addiction for black and white photography but is also just as at home working with colour.
As an artist, he enjoys experimenting with blur and abstract photography images, and you’ll be able to browse some in his website’s Portfolio. Mood and atmosphere play a big part in his photos. Another signature of Mark’s work is using the human element and negative space to add a narrative dimension: the rest of the storytelling is then left for you to decide for yourself.
Professionally, Mark offers fine art street photography workshops in London and everyone is welcome – from amateurs to professionals, mobile phone to DSLR users. Using a range of DSLRs and specialising in iPhone photography himself, an expert like Mark believes that the best camera you own is the one that you have with you.
Mark is inspired by global photographers such as Fan Ho, Januchi Hakoyama, Daido Moriyamo and Trent Park. In his website, you will find a spectrum of images in his Portfolio of his own travels around the globe showing examples of iPhone and DSLR photography.
Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, John Vachon received a bachelor’s degree in English literature from St. Thomas College at age twenty, followed by further studies at the Catholic University of America (1935–36). After being hired as an assistant messenger with the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1937, Vachon quickly developed his own photographic skills. He became a member of the FSA’s regular photographic staff and produced memorable documentary series in the Plains states. After moving to New York, Vachon in 1947 became a member of the Photo League, contributing numerous book reviews to the newsletter Photo Notes and participating in the 1948 exhibition This Is the Photo League. After working for many years as a staff photographer at Look magazine, Vachon became a visiting professor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1974.
