Xinjiang, Maxime Crozet

In the northwestern corner of China lies the huge province of Xinjiang (literally: “new frontier”), more rarely called East Turkestan. Until recently, this region was predominantly populated by Uyghurs, a Turkish-speaking and Muslim Sunni people; but also by Kazakhs, Hui, Kyrgyz, Mongolians, Tajiks and other minorities from Central Asia. The Hans (majority of Chinese ethnic group), who have arrived by millions in recent decades, now represent more than 40% of the local population. China’s efforts to quell a separatist movement and sinicize its border regions have turned Xinjiang into a vast social control and domestic surveillance laboratory. It is almost impossible to move around the region without feeling the relentless gaze of the authorities.

In search of new frontiers in the oases that punctuate the ancient Silk Road, beyond empty and solitary spaces, I filled my memory from these horizons with their faces uncovered. In the old alleys of Kashgar, during a game of Buzkashi (game of “catch goat”) or at a traditional Tajik wedding, I let myself be carried by different expressions in search of harmony… leaving at the edge of deserts, steppes and snow-capped peaks of Central Asia, some intimate footprints of peoples in decline facing a new cultural revolution in motion.

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Cass Bird

Cass Bird is a Brooklyn-based photographer who creates stunning fashion editorials, with a beguiling taste for that contemporary grit.
Cass Bird’s warm and intrepid depiction of her subjects provides insight into the gritty exuberance of contemporary love and life. Her photographs are featured regularly in magazines such as The New Yorker, Details, Dossier, Paper, and Rolling Stone, as well as in campaigns produced by Converse, Levi’s, Sony, and Nike. Cass made her directorial debut with a film for Sophomore, and then continued to go on to produce work for Levi’s, Lissy Trullie, The Raveonettes, and Sky Ferreira.
There is something different about Cass Bird’s pictures—you can feel it instantly—but it can be hard to put a finger on what exactly the difference is. It seems the subjects, often women, and often the most of-the-moment models or Hollywood stars, are simply responding differently to the taker of the photograph than they normally do. They seem not to be playing the sexpot in the conventional sense, and to be engaging instead in an interaction more playful, and perhaps more authentic. Look at enough of Bird’s pictures and you begin to realize what you are looking at is a female gaze, and how very rare this point of view is in celebrity portraiture.
So it makes perfect sense that Bird, who had dabbled in photography before attending Smith College, traces the origins of her sensibility to her days at that female-only, liberal-arts institution. “I think that’s really where it began for me,” Bird says. “It’s where I began understanding that aesthetics are secondary to curiosity and the individual expression of identity.”
Bird’s refreshing eye is regularly cast on fashion’s biggest stars — she has an ongoing and particularly dynamic collaboration with the model Daria Werbowy — but in the summers of 2009 and 2010, on her own time, she turned it on a group of young women less accustomed to posing in front of a camera. Bird cast these women, which included a couple of her interns as well as someone she met on the street, for their adaptable notions of femininity, and brought them to Sassafrass, Tennessee, to take the portraits which now make up her 2012 book, “Rewilding.”
“For me it’s a very modern way of expressing femininity,” Bird says of the pictures in the hardcover volume, which depict the group of androgynous-looking women climbing trees, forming human pyramids and just generally rollicking in their rural environment. “Whereas in the past to be masculine-presenting was interpreted as a rejection of femininity, I was able to see that femininity can be more inclusive than that.

Franco Pinna

 

He was born in La Maddalena, on July 29, 1925. In 1952 he moved to Rome and, after a brief experience as a cinedocumentary operator, constituted the cooperative Fotografi Associati together with Plinio De Martiis, Caio Mario Garrubba, Nicola Sansone, Pablo Volta, which was dissolved in 1954 due to economic difficulties. He followed the anthropologist Ernesto De Martino during several research expeditions in southern Italy (Lucania, 1952, 1956, 1959, Salento 1959), obtaining documents of great artistic and cultural value. In 1959 he published his first book, entitled La Sila, which was followed by Sardegna una civiltà di pietra (Sardinia, a stone civilization) (1961). Meanwhile, his photos appear in the magazines Life, Stern, Sunday Times, Vogue, Paris Match, Epoca, L’espresso, Panorama. From 1965 Pinna became the trusted photographer of Federico Fellini and made scene photos of his films Giulietta degli spiriti, 1965, up to Fellini’s Casanova in 1976; he also publishes some photo books (I Clowns, Fellini’s Film) inspired by his films. He died suddenly in Rome on April 2, 1978.

David Seymour

David Szymin was born in 1911 in Warsaw into a family of publishers that produced works in Yiddish and Hebrew. His family moved to Russia at the outbreak of the First World War, returning to Warsaw in 1919.
After studying printing in Leipzig and chemistry and physics at the Sorbonne in the 1930s, Szymin stayed on in Paris. David Rappaport, a family friend who owned the pioneering picture agency Rap, lent him a camera. One of Szymin’s first stories, about night workers, was influenced by Brassaï’s Paris de Nuit (1932). Szymin – or ‘Chim’ – began working as a freelance photographer. From 1934, his picture stories appeared regularly in Paris-Soir and Regards. Through Maria Eisner and the new Alliance agency, Chim met Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa.
From 1936 to 1938 Chim photographed the Spanish Civil War, and after it was over, he went to Mexico on an assignment with a group of Spanish Republican émigrés. On the outbreak of the Second World War, he moved to New York, where he adopted the name, David Seymour. Both his parents were killed by the Nazis. Seymour served in the US Army (1942-45), winning a medal for his work in intelligence.
In 1947, along with Cartier-Bresson, Capa, George Rodger, and William Vandivert, he founded Magnum Photos. He was commissioned by UNICEF the following year to photograph Europe’s children in need. He went on to photograph major stories across Europe, Hollywood stars on European locations, and the emergence of the State of Israel. After Robert Capa’s death, he became the new president of Magnum. He held this post until 10 November 1956, when, traveling near the Suez Canal to cover a prisoner exchange, he was killed by Egyptian machine-gun fire.

Rennie Ellis

Rennie Ellis, photographer and author, who with his images and words has taunted, titillated and tickled our collective fancies for years, has left behind a treasure trove of over half a million images spanning over three decades.

Ellis’ photography has concentrated on documenting both popular culture and the demi-monde and examining Australia as a hedonistic society. In his own intuitive way he was committed to capturing on film those moments in time that offer insights into the human condition.

Robert Hanley Willoughby

Bob Willoughby, whose photographs have transformed the images of Hollywood’s biggest stars, is a true pioneer of 20th century photography. He was the first “outside” photographer hired by the major studios to create photographs for the magazines, and was the link between the filmmakers and major magazines of the time, such as Life and Look. Born June 30th, 1927 in Los Angeles, his parents were divorced by the time he was born and he was raised by his mother. Bob was given an Argus C-3 camera for his twelfth birthday, providing the catalyst for what would become the key to his future. After high school, he studied cinema at night at the USC Cinema Department and design with Saul Bass at the Kahn Institute of Art. At the same time he apprenticed with a number of Hollywood photographers; Wallace Seawell, Paul Hesse, and Glenn Embree, gleaning technical and business know-how. His first magazine assignments were for Harper’s Bazaar in the early ’50s when famed art director Alexey Brodovitch became aware of his work. His career took off in 1954 when Warner Bros. asked him to photograph Judy Garland’s final scene on the set of A Star Is Born. His portrait of the freckle-faced star became his first Life cover. From then on his production was phenomenal. His images were in print literally every week for the next twenty years. As the first “special” he covered the making of over 100 films, including the 1960s movies The Graduate, My Fair Lady, Rosemary’s Baby and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. His body of work, documenting this historic era of filmmaking, is unsurpassed. He captured with wonderful perception the most famous actors and directors of the time on and off the set, in unguarded moments of repose, vulnerability and high drama. He had a unique ability to capture what was essential to each film. Sydney Pollack said in the introduction to Bob’s autobiography: “Sometimes a filmmaker gets a look at a photograph taken on his own set and sees the ‘soul’ of his film in one still photograph. It’s rare, but it happens. It happened to me in 1969, the first time I looked at the work of Bob Willoughby during the filming of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?.” Bob also had a remarkable understanding of the needs of each individual magazine; he could be shooting for seven different publications and know exactly what each one needed in terms of editorial content and design layout.
While Willoughby is most famous as the great chronicler of Hollywood, before he began covering film production he had already made an astonishing series of images of jazz musicians. Willoughby had a huge appreciation of jazz both in its technical aspects and its ability to raise the roof in performance. He had a masterful feel for the character of the artists, and he was able to convey it even in the difficult lighting conditions of recording studios and stage. He was responsible for a number of technical innovations, including the silent blimp for 35mm still cameras, which became common on film sets. He was the only photographer working on films at the time to use radio-controlled cameras, allowing him unprecedented coverage in otherwise impossible situations, and he had special brackets built to hold his still cameras on or over the Panavision cameras. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Hollywood honored Willoughby with a major retrospective exhibition of his work. He was awarded the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Still Photography in New York in 2004.

Mauro Pinto

Born in 1974, lives and works in Maputo, Mozambique.

In the early 1990s, Mauro Pinto studied photography at Monitor International School in Johannesburg and during this period he made a internship with the photographer José Machato. Then, he moved to Maputo where he worked next to the pioneer of photojournalism in Mozambique, Ricardo Rangel and where he will be placed next to the Norwegian photographer Trygve Bolstad or Karl Kugel from Reunion Island.

In 2002, he participated in the exhibition « TO MATOLA » in « Espace 1789 Saint-Ouen » in Paris and in 2010, he participated in the second edition of El Ojo Salvaje, at Paraguay, and has become the first african artist to expose there.

Mauro Pinto interrogates the visual creation, information and communication. His works capture the essence of space thanks to a clever play with contrasts that can be seen provocative. Today, his work makes him one of the most recognized contemporary photographers of Mozambique.

Marilyn Silverstone

A photograph is a subjective impression. It is what the photographer sees. No matter how hard we try to get into the skin, into the feeling of the subject or situation, however much we empathize, it is still what we see that comes out in the images, it is our reaction to the subject and in the end, the whole corpus of our work becomes a portrait of ourselves

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Margaret Michaelis-Sachs

Margaret Michaelis-Sachs was an Austrian-Australian photographer of Polish-Jewish origin. In addition to her many portraits, her architectural scenes of Barcelona and her images of the Jewish quarter in Kraków in the 1930s are of lasting historical interest.

Born in Dzieditz near Bielsko in southern Poland (then Austria-Hungary) on April 6, 1902, she was the daughter of Heinrich Gross, a well-to-do Jewish doctor. She studied photography at Vienna’s Graphische Lehr-und Versuchsanstalt from 1918 to 1921

In 1922, still in Vienna, she first worked for a period at the Sudio d’Ora before spending a number of years at the Atelier für Porträt Photographie. She went on to work for Binder Photographie in Berlin and Fotostyle in Prague, and finally returned to Berlin in 1929 to work intermittently for a variety of studios during the hard times of the Depression.

In October 1933, she married Rudolf Michaelis who, as an anarcho-syndicalist, was almost immediately arrested and imprisoned by the Nazis. In December 1933, after Rudolf’s release, the couple moved to Spain but they separated shortly afterwards. In Barcelona, Michaelis opened her own studio, Foto-elis. Collaborating with a group of architects, she produced documentary images of progressive architecture which were published in Catalan journals such as D’Ací i d’Allà and, after the start of the civil war, Nova Iberia.

After returning to Poland in 1937, she obtained a German passport, went to London and, in September 1939, emigrated to Australia, first working as a house maid in Sydney. In 1940, she opened her “Photo-studio”, becoming one of the few women photographers in Sydney. She specialized in portraits, especially of Europeans, Jews and people in the arts, many published in Australia and Australian Photography. A member of the photographers’ associations of New South Wales and Australia, in 1941 she was the only woman to join the Institute of Photographic Illustrators.

Margaret Michaelis’ photographic career came to an end in 1952 as a result of poor eyesight. In 1960, she married Albert George Sachs, a glass merchant. She died on 10 October 1985 in Melbourne.

In her early life, Michaelis used the sharp focus and sometimes unusual vantage points of modernist photography while her portraits sought to reveal the psychological essence of her sitters. Her portraits were primarily focused on capturing the lives of Jewish immigrants. Of particular significance is the small set of scenes from the Jewish market in Kraków taken in the 1930s. Helen Ennis of the National Gallery of Australia stated the images “carry the weight of history, offering a visual trace of a way of life that was destroyed by fascism”.

Lisa Lesourd

Lisa Lesourd is a freelance Parisian Photographer.
She graduated from the CE3P school in Paris, where she studied the arf of photography.
She has a taste for portraits and impromptu snapshots of every day life.

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Lu Nan

Lu Nan is given the name “the most legendary photographer in China”. His legend comes from his unique characteristic and his mysterious creative experience. During fifteen years’ of his photography career, Lu has been a preacher of imagery. For many people in the Chinese photography world, he seems to be even more famous in the “art” circle. One of his early pieces Add One Meter to a Nameless Hill has become one of the classic images in the Chinese contemporary art history. Lu is the first Chinese photographer who’s recognized by the well-known Magnum Photos. He is also the only Chinese photographer that had been featured in the APERTURE magazine. Lu is constantly invited to participate in numerous exhibitions; however, he is extremely selective about the exhibitions he is involved with. Lu also refused to have his portrait taken by others, so it’s very rare to see any photo documentations of him. For fifteen years, Lu has been leading a life that’s almost like a monk, spending his time working and studying. Lu believes in that “good stuff comes out of reticence.”

Manuel Carrillo

Manuel Carrillo nació en la Ciudad de México en 1906. A la edad de 16 años, en 1922, Carrillo fue de México a Nueva York donde realizó varios trabajos antes de convertirse en campeón de vals y tango con Arthur Murray. Durante este período, en Nueva York, se puso a trabajar para la firma de Wall Street Neuss Hesslein, pero en 1930 regresó a su pais. Allí comenzó a trabajar para uno de los pioneros de la industria turística mexicana Albert L. Bravo. Carrillo luego abandonó esa posición para convertirse en el agente general de la oficina del Ferrocarril Central de Illinois en la ciudad de México, donde permaneció durante treinta y seis años, hasta su retiro. A la edad de 49 años, se unió al Club Fotográfico de México y la Sociedad Fotográfica de América. Su primera exposición internacional, titulada, Mi Pueblo, se llevó a cabo en 1960 en la Biblioteca Pública de Chicago y representa la vida cotidiana en el México rural. Desde 1975, el trabajo de Carrillo se ha visto en 209 exposiciones individuales y 27 exposiciones grupales en México, los Estados Unidos, y en todo el mundo. En 1980, la Sociedad Fotográfica de América nombro a Carrillo Ciudadano de Honor de El Paso, Texas, donde su archivo fotográfico esta en la Biblioteca Pública de El Paso. Su trabajo ha sido publicado en una variedad de antologías fotográficas y revistas. Carrillo murió en la Ciudad de México en 1989 a la edad de 83 años.

Felicia Simion

I am a photographer living in Romania. Oddball of the family and art lover since I was a weeping little girl.

I have received different awards in international competitions such as: PDN Faces, International Photography Awards (IPA), Paris Prix de la Photographie, Sony World Photography Awards, Travel Photographer of the Year, The Irish Times Photography Awards, and the Moscow International Photo Award.

 

Mírame y se color

Stamp with text closed for annual leave inside, vector illustration

Jindřich Štreit

 

Jindřich Štreit is a Czech photographer and pedagogue known for his documentary photography. He concentrates on documenting the rural life and people of Czech villages. He is considered one of the most important exponents of Czech documentary photography.

Tamara Merino

 

Tamara Merino is an independent documentary photographer and photojournalist based in Chile focusing on social and cultural issues, identity and migration. She has projects on female migration in Chile, opal mining in Australia, LGBT community in Mexico and local communities in Brasil, among others. Her work has appeared in multiple online and print publications worldwide including National Geographic, The Washington Post, Der Spiegel, Wired, Fish Eye Magazine, Joia Magazine, Folha de Sao Paulo, Roads and Kingdoms and Sydney Morning Herald, among others.
Tamara was selected to participate in the 2015 World Press Photo Latin America Masterclass and her work is currently exhibited in Washington D.C. as part of the 2017 World Press Photo side exhibition. She was finalist for the Magnum Foundation’s and Inge Morath Award 2016 and her work is part of the Photographic Museum of Humanity PHMuseum. Tamara was awardee for the Foundry Photojournalism scholarship 2017, was selected to participate in the “FIFV” Internacional Festival of Photography in Valparaiso 2017 and was selected for the Portfolio Review of ERRANTE International Photography Festival 2017.
Tamara has a degree in photography at the Universidad del Pacífico of Santiago, Chile and a residency of photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She is part of Women Photograph and Ladera Sur.

Kryn Taconis

Kryn Taconis (b. Rotterdam, 1918) was the only Dutchman who has ever been a member of the legendary Magnum photo agency. He made his first photographs during the Second World War, in the course of producing false documents for the resistance. He also worked for the Underground Camera, a group of Dutch photographers who secretly recorded the German occupation. After joining Magnum in 1950, he want to Algeria in 1957 to photograph the activities of the FLN (Front de Liberation National) there. For two weeks the recorded the guerrilla war that the Algerian resistance movement conducted from the woods against the French colonialists.The FLN fought with weapons captured from the French. Good contacts in the countryside provided for sufficient food and clothing. During the time he was with them, the resistance group attacked a French convoy. According to the French radio eight guerrillas were killed in the action, while in reality no one was even wounded.

Christopher Tovo

Born in Townsville, Australia in 1972, Christopher’s fascination for photography and art started at a very young age through the influence of his Italian father, Peter Tovo. Peter was a photographer who trained in Italy under Fornasa Tarcisiso before migrating to Australia.

As Christopher grew, so did his curiosity for his father’s camera collection. One day, to his father’s dismay, Christopher decided to dismantle one of the cameras, to ‘find out what happens inside’. Peter sent Christopher to the library with a list of three names. Richard Avedon, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa were the subjects of his homework and they proved to have an everlasting effect, along with many years of mentoring from his father.

Christopher attended photography school, albeit briefly. Traditional scholastic methods weren’t to his liking. Instead he took to apprenticing, which gave him a well-rounded education in photography and showed him how to apply his knowledge in the real world. He hasn’t looked back since.

Christopher’s scope as a photographer is both broad and deep. His uncomplicated, ‘gut instinct’ approach to his work exposes a subtle appreciation for life in all its diversity. A classicist at heart, Tovo subconsciously seeks out the timelessness in any given situation presented to him.

Tovo’s strengths lie in Portraiture and Reportage. He was a finalist in the 2006 Archibald Prize and has been commissioned by the Vatican, in conjunction with the Mary MacKillop Foundation, to photograph Pope John Paul II. Merely casting a quick glance over the many people and locations he has documented display his talent for engaging with his subjects and their environments, no matter how foreign.

Christopher has had a highly successful career as a commercial photographer, proving his ability to meld the worlds of art and commerce. His extensive client list includes: Rolling Stone, Nike, The Australian Ballet; Coca-Cola; Fosters; Crown Lager; Foxtel; The Sydney Morning Herald; Universal Records; Myer; Levi’s; Vodafone; Jack Daniels; The Australian Defence Force; Canon; The National Australia Bank; The Commonwealth Bank; Tennis Australia; Ford Motors; The Australian Football League; Schweppes; Qantas; Holden; and Adidas, to name a few.

A retrospect of Christopher’s career has appeared in Australian Photography Magazine. He has also been invited to speak at schools, universities and photography colleges in both Sydney and Melbourne. In 2010 Christopher’s famous “Leopard on Toilet” shot earned him two honourable mentions in the 2010 International Photography Awards. In 2011 Capture Magazine named him fashion photographer of the year.

Christopher’s debut as director and cinematographer for “The Tradesman Series” saw him as a finalist in the prestigious One Show Awards in NYC, a screening at the New York Surf Film Festival, Byron Bay surf film festival and finalist in both Best Director and Best Cinematographer at The Melbourne Advertising and Design Club Awards. In 2013 Christopher received an honourable mention at the International Photography Awards for his ‘Corona’ series as well as Capture Magazine placing him in the top 5 travel photographers in Australia and New Zealand. In 2014 “Mark of a Champion” featuring Rod Laver earn’t a Grand Clio (the award show’s highest honour). Plus three New York Festival finalists and a highly commended in ADMA Print category in Australia. That same year Christopher also won a Gold Lion at Cannes for his print contribution to the RSL “Minute of Silence” campaign.

Roger Corbeau

Roger Corbeau, born November 20, 1908, in Haguenau, Alsace, was drawn to the cinema from a very young age. He moved to Paris in 1932 and began helping with props on film sets, first for Roger Richebé, then for Marcel Pagnol. 
Who hired Corbeau as a movie stills photographer in 1933. They worked together for six years. With his demanding work ethic and talent, Corbeau quickly became a force in the French cinema. His photographs serve as a fervent tribute to the actors who left their mark on the medium from the 1930s to the 1980s. Corbeau took pictures on the sets of 160 films.
Corbeau is not a stills photographer in the usual sense of the term. He quickly decided to break out of the promotional limits of his role, imposing his own vision on the actors and the film, going so far as to arrange the performers himself. Fascinated by the human face, Corbeau developed an art combining a keen dramatic sense with a search for an ideal beauty. Mostly shot with a Rolleiflex on 6 x 6 cm film, the photographs were cropped by Corbeau himself.
He attached enormous importance to the printing process. His prints were often dense, and he would create a blurred effect by placing a silk stocking under the enlarger lens. These characteristics are what make Corbeau’s visual universe unique and immediately recognizable. 
Corbeau died in Paris in September 1995, followed a major retrospective of his work, organized by the French Ministry of Culture at the Hôtel de Sully, Paris.

Ara Güler

 

Born on 16th August 1928, Ara Güler is a Turkish photojournalist, also known as Istanbul’s Eye. He studied at Getronagan Armenian High School. His father owned a pharmacy, but had many friends that belonged to the world of art. Ara came into contact with these people and they inspired him to opt for a career in films/cinema. He worked in film studios and joined courses of drama under Muhsin Ertuğrul. Later, he leaned towards journalism and abandoned cinema. In 1950 he joined Yeni Istanbul, a Turkish newspaper, as a photojournalist. During the same time, he studied economics from University of Istanbul. Then he started working for Hürriyet.

In 1958 when Time-Life, an American publication opened its Turkey branch, Ara Güler became its initial correspondent. Soon enough he started to get commissioned by other international magazines, such as Stern, Paris Match, and Sunday Times, London. In 1961, he was hired by Hayat magazine as the chief photographer.

In this time, he met Marc Riboud and Henri Cartier-Bresson, who recruited him to join Magnum Photos. Ara was presented in 1961 British Photography Yearbook. In the same year, the American Society of Magazine Photographers made him the first Turkish photographer to become the member of this organization.

In 1960s, Ara’s work was used in books by notable authors as a means of illustration and were shown at different exhibitions around the world. In 1968, his work was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in a show called, Ten Masters of Color Photography. Moreover, his photographs were also shown in Cologne’s fair, Photokina in Germany. Two years later,Türkei, his photography album was published. His images related to art and its history were featured in magazines, like Horizon, Life, Time, and Newsweek.

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.