Brassaï

Gyula Halász, or Brassaï – the pseudonym by which he has become much better known – is widely celebrated for his signature photographs of Parisian night life, and especially his book of collected photographs, Paris by Night. His breadth of range is however more expansive than that seminal collection might suggest. As a photographic freelancer and photojournalist, he contributed most to the idea of vernacular photography though, thanks in part to the Surrealists, he is often attributed with blurring any obvious distinction between what might be called street photography and what might qualify as fine art. Ultimately, it was his curiosity for the lived phenomena of twentieth-century urbanization, and of Paris in particular, that determined the subjects onto whom, and on which, he turned his lens.

Fernando Penim Redondo

Fernando Penim Redondo, es un fotografo portugues, nacido en la ciudad de Lisboa en 1945. Desde muy temprano se interesó por la fotografía como autodidacta. Sus primeras fotografías de viaje se realizaron en la ciudad de Madrid en 1961, hace más de 50 años. A finales de los años 60, como oficial de marina durante la guerra en África, realizó sus primeros trabajos, de los que resultó un acervo sobre tipos étnicos y actividades de la población guineana. China, India, Egipto, Nepal, Perú y la Patagonia, entre otras, le permitieron la constitución a lo largo de los años de un gran banco de imágenes. Habiendo trabajado toda la vida en el ámbito de las tecnologías de la información sólo recientemente tuvo la oportunidad de mostrar sus trabajos fotográficos, en particular mediante la realización de un conjunto de exposiciones individuales y colectivas . Publicó reportajes fotográficos en la prensa y tiene trabajos en el libro “Camera Craft – Black & White” de la editorial AVA Publishing SA, editado en 2005. Ha producido recientemente un conjunto de libros en auto-publicación en la editorial BLURB. Tiene fotografías en la colección del Centro de Exposiciones de Odivelas y en varias colecciones privadas.

José Carlos Costa

José Carlos Costa was born in August 1978, in Braga (Portugal). Although he has a scientific background, with a PhD in Chemical and Biological Engineering from the University of Minho, photography has always been his chosen form of artistic expression, showing the world not as we see it, but as he interprets it, sometimes introspective as a B&W long exposure, and other times as colorful as the landscapes of the National Parl Peneda-Gerês. His favorite themes are urban and seascapes, architecture and travel. He usually tries to introduce a fourth dimension – the time – in his photos, especially through the use of long or multi exposures. Additionally he likes to give a surreal atmosphere to the photos where the light shine through a dark mood

 

 

Gunnar Smoliansky

Gunnar Smoliansky is one of Sweden’s major photographers. He was born in 1933 in Visby, on the island of Gotland, and has devoted himself to photography since the early 1950s. Smoliansky has been an independent artist since the 1970s, working almost exclusively with the photographic image. His oeuvre is unique, although conscious of its place in the history of photography. He became acknowledged for his photography through his early independent work, and a career that led him to work as a photographer’s assistant and attend night school under Christer Strömholm. Between 1956 and 1963 he was an industrial photographer.
Gunnar Smoliansky works exclusively in black and white, and always develops his photographs himself. Throughout his career, he has transformed his photographed motifs into completed photos in the darkroom. Stockholm is the main focus of Smoliansky’s photographic world, particularly the areas of Södermalm and Saltsjö-Boo, the two parts of the city he has lived and worked in for most of his life. From a geographic point of view, the photographs of Gunnar Smoliansky are quite restricted in range. This has not, however, kept him from being regarded as one of the world’s great photographers.

Michal Cala

Michal Cala  is a Polish photographer. Having graduated from Warsaw University of Technology, he moved to Tychy and from 1975 to 1992 he photographed the Silesian landscape. The most important result of his work was a series of black-and-white photographs called Silesia. He was particularly interested in labourers’ housing districts, old ironworks, coal mines and enormous coal heaps. He was also taking pictures of people, who lived in that environment. The author is a laureate of many photography competitions. On two occasions he won Grand Prix at Biennale of Polish Landscape in Kielce in 1979 and 1983. As a result of his partnership with Galeria Zderzak in Kraków in years 2004-2006 he published black-and-white album Silesia. The second important black-and-white series created by Michał Cała is Galicja (about south-east Poland). He was also the author of the exhibition Paysages de Pologne shown in Galerie Contraste in Bordeaux in 1985.

Vincent de WILDE d’ESTMAEL

Vincent de Wilde has developed a passion for photography since his teenage years. He studied at the Brussels Photography School while being a barrister. In 1995, he headed to Africa where he worked in the areas of justice, rule of law and human rights: 6 years in Rwanda right after the genocide, 3 years in Cameroon (in the prisons) and 2 years during the war in Côte d’Ivoire. Since March of 2007, he has been living in Phnom Penh, Cambodia where he works as an international prosecutor at the Tribunal competent to try the crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge leaders and most responsible in 1975-1979. During the last 11 years, he is a privileged witness to the quick and drastic transformations of the country and of Phnom Penh in particular. He enjoys black and white street photography and tries to capture all the details that bring a society to life. He aims to show the beauty, humanity and emotions of the people met randomly in the city streets through the lens of their own daily life. He likes to play with contrasts to denounce glaring social inequalities. He aims to capture moments of spontaneity, peculiarity and humour. Apart from street photography, he also focuses on the work activities of fishermen, construction workers, salt workers and brick makers. His artwork was recently shown in 5 distinct events in Phnom Penh and Brussels: “The Three Lives of Boeng Kak” (collective exhibition) at the Bophana Cultural Centre in 2015; “Between Salt and Earth” and “Supervivere: Cambodia Today”, a large twofold exhibition at the Governor’s House (2015-2017), Phnom Penh (and also in Brussels in July 2016); and “In the Endless Jungle of Phnom Penh” (collective exhibition) at the Cloud Bar in Phnom Penh (2017). His next major exhibition is scheduled in June 2020 at the Institut Français du Cambodge in Phnom Penh

Jack Ronnel

I specialize in Black & White reportage and documentary-style portrait Photography.
I work with both digital (mostly) and film (for some projects).
I am shooting Documentary style dynamic portraits. The portraits are usually intense and raw, trying to capture some of the energy and vitality of the subjects.
The “Dragon Portrait Sessions” and the “Riders Portrait Sessions” are Documentary Portraits Series with the objective to create a Photographic Typology by means of black & white dynamic portraits of people sharing a common subculture, often associated with the “wild side”. The sessions are shot on-site, using natural light.
I am shooting reportage photography with musicians, artists, artisans, craftsmen, professionals, as well as special projects and assignments.
In my photography, I enjoy emulating classic b&w film, with a contrasty and grainy look that appear more “alive”, creating drama and a classical quality.
I develop and print my work, as for me it is crucial to control the process and get the exact results I look for. It is very difficult to find a 3rd party who is able to produce a very high quality black & white print and the availability of highest quality matte cotton paper is rather limited. When showing my photos / portfolio, nothing can replace a good print.
I love teaching. I am coaching photographers to be more creative and expressive using Black & White. I give lectures on the subject of Developing and Printing in Black & White.
There are many artists that inspire me, with their aesthetics, clarity, precision of their work, the drama they create, including architects such as Foster, Gehry, Calatrava; composers such as Bach, Bruckner, Mahler; painters such as Modigliani, Klimt, Egon Schiele.
I am inspired by several masters of Documentary and Portrait photography, such as Yousuf Karsh, Elliott Erwitt, Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz, Erving Penn, Platon. In addition, photographers such as Sebastiao Salgado and Anton Corbijn influenced me and drove me towards the special Tri-X 400 film look
My guiding principle in photography is to remain an amateur, in the true sense of the word: someone who does something for the love of it, rather than being a “professional”, who does something for money. As Andre Kertesz stated:“ I am an amateur and intend to remain one my whole life long… The photographer’s art is a continuous discovery, which requires patience and time…”

Emil Mayer

Emil Mayer (1871 – 1938) was a Viennese street photographer in the early 20th century. He was almost certainly the greatest of the European bromoilists in the 1920s and 30s. He and his wife committed suicide in 1938 when the Nazis annexed Austria and much of his work was destroyed.

Emil Gataullin

Emil Gataullin is a Russian photographer, based in the Moscow region Korolyov, Russia.
His oeuvre was largely unknown in the west until he submitted some black-and-white photographs of village life in Russia to the Alfred Friend Photography Award in 2014. His picture of two boys, upside down on a swing, became the Peace Photo of the Year. Gataullin’s photographs are characterized by a quiet, slightly melancholy, poetry. The pictures are a reflection of Emil Gataullin’s life, beginning with his childhood in a small town beyond Moscow where he spent almost all his holidays with his grandmother and his uncle. His memories reach back into experiences where he tended cattle, gathered mushrooms and went fishing. Gataullin describes these memories as the best time of his life, which is a key sentence for understanding his escape from Moscow, his return to the village, where he lives with his wife and daughter in a suburban estate from the Khrushchev period. Through his camera, he gropes towards a non-verbal communication and pays attention to the people and things he sees.

Trent Parke

Trent Parke was born in 1971 and raised in Newcastle, New South Wales. Using his mother’s Pentax Spotmatic and the family laundry as a darkroom, he began taking pictures when he was around 12 years old. Today, Parke, the only Australian photographer to be represented by Magnum, works primarily as a street photographer.
In 2003, with wife and fellow photographer Narelle Autio, Parke drove almost 90,000 km (56,000 miles) around Australia. Minutes to Midnight, the collection of photographs from this journey, offers a sometimes disturbing portrait of twenty-first century Australia, from the desiccated outback to the chaotic, melancholic vitality of life in remote Aboriginal towns. For this project Parke was awarded the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography.
Parke won World Press Photo Awards in 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2005, and in 2006 was granted the ABN AMRO Emerging Artist Award. He was selected to be part of the World Press Photo Masterclass in 1999. Parke has published two books, Dream/Life in 1999, and The Seventh Wave with Narelle Autio in 2000. His work has been exhibited widely. In 2006 the National Gallery of Australia acquired Parke’s entire Minutes to Midnight exhibition.

Morris Brown

I’m Trey Maurice born Morris Brown III, a street photographer based in New Orleans, LA. The first time I took the experience was on a filmmaking open house visit to New York City in the summer of 2010. I leisurely just shot buildings but I couldn’t help the obvious of so many people on the streets. People there were more interesting to shoot and it was then that I found the addiction.
In 2011, I took most of the year off to focus on my busy postal job at time before being laid off, and since then I have been shooting more consistently. My plans before then was to direct films and documentaries but with the high cost of film production, I chose to put it on hold for a while. I realized then I could tell stories with street photography more cheaply and quickly without completely abandoning my love for both arts. Recently I’ve decided to make an online appearance and hope to meet as many people on and offline with the passion. »

Issei Suda

Issei Suda was born in Tokyo in 1940 and graduated from the Tokyo College of Photography in 1962. He worked as a freelance photographer from 1971 and taught for many years at the Osaka University of Arts. He has had over 75 solo exhibitions, mainly in Japan, and his work is featured in numerous major museum collections around the world, including SFMoMA, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and The J. Paul Getty Museum. His publications include the monographs Fushi Kaden (1978), My Tokyo 100 (1979),Human Memory (1996) and Minyou Sanga (2007).

Image of Structure, Joshua Sarinana

My aim is to distill the architecture of Frank Gehry’s Stata Center – at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – to an emotional response of an isolated structure. As I conducted research across the street – where I studied how the brain encodes emotional associations to contextual cues – I became more and more drawn to this architectural work. In the three-month leadup to defending my thesis I worked hundred-hour weeks. The energy I poured into my PhD led to solitude, insomnia, and an overwhelming sense of doom, which nearly caused a physical and mental collapse. I saw the Stata Center almost every single day and for over 10 years I took photos of it, learning how to view it ever more clearly apropos my internal state. With this interaction I connected to this deconstructed architecture, while at the same time, undergoing psychological dissociation.

In my photographic work I seek to create a distinct – often dire – reality. This ominous quality of this series also speaks to the power of the buildings looming strength. I am not looking to have the viewer feel how I feel or see how I see, but to use it as a projective test to identify internal conflict that they may not have been aware of prior to viewing this work. The tension of being elevated and grounded by Gehry’s work, has for me, created a tense and silent drama that unfolds into surreal observation and removes it from the architectural context into the photographic space as a separate art object.

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Gabi Ben Avraham

My name is Gabi (Gavriel) Ben-Avraham. I am 59 years old, and married with three children. I work in a software company and live in a quiet neighborhood of Tel Aviv, the city which I grew up in, have never left and is a part of me and my hobby – photography. I enjoy cinema and music, and during the 1980’s photographed using film cameras. I then did not touch a camera for 20 years until I received a digital camera as a gift for my birthday from my wife a few years ago. The rest is history….
Process Description: “The Street is not a Studio”.
Sometimes I stand and wait for things to converge – a cyclist, a dancer, a child – moving along. They are not aware that they are moving towards a certain object, but I am. Street Photography is my favorite way of looking at the world. My camera has become an integral part of me and I cannot imagine myself without it. Everywhere I go I take it with me thinking ‘maybe today will be my lucky day and I will take the photo of my life’. Via the camera lens I am constantly looking around me, searching for that ‘decisive’ moment that will never return, unless I catch it. When pushing the button, I try to make some sense, restore order to the chaotic scheme of things in the composition. The components ‘speak’ with each other in a special dialogue, either by color, shape, or light. Capturing the elusive, special moment after which things will never be the same and making it eternal – that is my goal. Forgotten, transparent people in urban surroundings are being granted their moment of grace. The shadows, fragile outlines, reflections within daily lives that are not noticed in the busy and thick urban landscape and sometimes are even crushed by it – these are precious to me. Those expressions, compositions – flickering like dim lights on the horizon – I treasure these before they are lost in time. I enjoy looking at other photographers’ works and am inspired by websites such as IN-public and Magnum.

Michel Gravel

Andreas Paradise

 

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, Sevil Alkan

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.

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Trevor Cotton

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.

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Yusuke Sakai

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

Yusuke Sakai​

 

Giuseppe Di Giulio

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.