Alberto Korda

Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez, más conocido como Alberto Korda (14 de septiembre de 1928 – 25 de mayo de 2001) fue un fotógrafo cubano. Es célebre por la famosa fotografía tomada al Che Guevara mirando el cortejo fúnebre de los muertos en el atentado terrorista al barco La Coubre, el 5 de marzo de 1960. En la década de 1940 cursó clases comerciales en el Candler College y en la Habana Business Academy, los dos situados en La Habana. Junto a Luis Pierce (Luis Korda) fundó los estudios Korda, donde trabajó entre 1953 y 1968, en los que realizaban toda especie de trabajos comerciales. Aunque su formación es autodidacta aprendió fotografía en un inicio con Newton Estapé y después con Luis Pierce. Con el triunfo de la Revolución Cubana en 1959, trabajó para la Revolución y acompañó a Fidel Castro como fotógrafo en distintos recorridos que el líder cubano realizaba en esos años. 1960 fue el año que cambiaría su vida, ya que fue durante este año cuando realizó la famosa fotografía El Guerrillero Heroico, la cual a consideración de grandes críticos es uno de los mejores retratos fotográficos y constituye la imagen más reproducida de la historia de la fotografía. Sin embargo parte de su grandeza se ha visto oscurecida a causa de que muchas de las fotos que se le adjudican podrían no haber sido hechas por el propio Korda sino que las habría comprado a otros fotógrafos contemporáneos suyos.
Fue fundador de la fotografía submarina en Cuba. En 1968 se dedicó a la misma en el Instituto de Oceanología de la Academia de Ciencias realizando el Atlas de Corales Cubanos. Su obra fotográfica se ha expuesto en las principales galerías del continente europeo y en América, así como en otras partes del mundo. Entre sus presentaciones personales están en 1962, Helsinki, Finlandia; 1985, Gallería H. Diafragma Canon, Milán, Italia; 1986, Galería Servando Cabrera, La Habana; 1988, “Festa de L’Unita”, Rosignano, Italia; Centro Cultural de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina; 1989, Maison de la Culture de la Seine Saint Denis, París, Francia; 1990, Galerie du Jour Agnés B, París, Francia; y en Kulturhuset Slurpen, Oslo, Noruega; 1991, 4.ª. Bienal de Fotografía de Córdoba Alcázar de los Reyes Cristianos, Córdoba, España; 1995, Museo Ken Damy de Fotografía Contemporánea, Brescia, Italia; 2000, Roy Boyd Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, EE.UU. y ademas muchas exposiciones colectivas. Entre los premios obtenidos están en 1959, Premio Palma de Plata. Mejor Fotorreportero del Año. Periódico Revolución, La Habana; 1960-1963; 1979 Tercer Premio. 5.º Premio Internacional de Fotografía Submarina “Maurizio Sana”, Italia; 1982, Distinción por la Cultura Nacional. Consejo de Estado, República de Cuba; 1994, Orden Félix Varela de Primer Grado, Consejo de Estado, República de Cuba. Sus principales obras se encuentran expuestas en Casa de las Américas, La Habana, Cuba, Center for Cuban Studies, Nueva York, EE.UU., Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione, Universidad de Parma, Parma, Italia, Consejo Mexicano de Fotografía, México, D.F., México, Fototeca de Cuba, La Habana, Cuba, Galleria IF, Milán, Italia, Galleria Il Diafragma Kodak, Milán, Italia, Maison de la Culture de la Sein Saint Dennis, París, Francia, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, La Habana, Cuba, Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Estados Unidos.
De 1968 a 1978 se concentró en la fotografía submarina, hasta que una exposición japonesa en 1978 estimuló el interés internacional en su trabajo. Apareció brevemente en una secuencia de la pelicula de Wim Wenders Buena Vista Social Club en 1999, aunque no fue nombrado. Korda sufrió un ataque cardíaco fatal en París en 2001 al presentar una exposición de su obra. Está enterrado en el Cementerio de Colón, de La Habana.

Vladimir Lagrange

Vladimir Lagrange was born in 1939 in Moscow. His interest in photography came from his parents: his father worked as a correspondent for the Pravda newspaper, and his mother was a photo editor. In 1959, he comes to work in the TASS photo chronicle as a student of a photojournalist, where he will spend four years, and then for a long time his professional life will be associated with the magazine Soviet Union.
Vladimir Lagrange is known as the “thaw photographer”, a time when the pictorial canon is changing: romantic young people come to replace courageous heroes in magazines and newspapers, and instead of hard work you could see walks around the city. Vladimir Lagrange was one of the first to understand what forms of expression a new generation is looking for. Vladimir Lagrange was one of the first to understand what forms of expression a new generation is looking for. He spoke to the youth with a new language, being himself a young professional, immersed in the life of the thaw.
In 1962, the exhibition “Our Youth” – one of the main events of the year for domestic reporters ─ opens Lagrange’s photo “Doves of Peace”, which the entire exhibition is built. In May 1962, the magazine “Soviet Photo” publishes this picture on a turn, and it will forever remain the “calling card” of the author. In May 1962, the magazine “Soviet Photo” publishes this picture on a turn, and it will forever remain the “calling card” of the author. The action in the frame takes place on Red Square, but Lagrange shifts accents from official symbols to human emotions, with the result that the whole system of perception works differently, even the Kremlin seems to be “unfrozen”.
In 1963, Lagrange began working in the magazine “Soviet Union” and will stay there for more than a quarter of a century. The magazine, which continued the work of the famous “USSR in construction”, largely created the myth of the USSR. Many doors opened in front of the journal’s correspondent, and Vladimir Lagrange drove the country up and down. In 1987, American publishers implement the large-scale project “One Day in the Life of the Soviet Union,” in which Vladimir Lagrange also participates as a guest author.
Vladimir Lagrange is one of the few authors who traveled abroad during the Soviet era. In 1964 he traveled to France. “I will not write here in detail about those impressions, attitudes, surprise that overwhelmed me,” said the photographer. He photographed a country which was unknown to him and an unusual everyday life, and after returning, overnight printed more than two hundred photographs, most of which were not published. In addition to France, the photographer traveled to Italy, Poland and Afghanistan, where he went to shoot already on the withdrawal of troops.
In 1991, the journal Soviet Union was closed. The era of the USSR has ended. Vladimir Lagrange first goes to Rodina magazine, and then to the Moscow bureau of the French agency Sipa Press and continues to shoot a social report. Despite the change in external circumstances, the photographer remains true to his profession.
The works of Vladimir Lagrange are presented in museums and private collections, his exhibitions were held both in Russia and abroad, and in 2002 the author was awarded the highest award of the professional guild of photographers and the Union of Journalists “Golden Eye of Russia”.

Sol Eide

Home

Arkady Shaikhet

Arkady Samoylovich Shaikhet was a prominent Soviet photojournalist and photographer. In the history of Soviet photography, Shaikhet is known for a type of journalistic photography called “artistic reportage,” and for photographs of industrialization in the 1920s and 1930s.
His first photographs were published in 1923 and in 1924 he joined the staff of the national magazine Ogonyok. His images were used for their covers from the magazine’s first issue. Shaikhet was one of the founders (together with journalist Mikhail Koltsov) of Soviet Photo in 1926. Starting in 1930 he contributed to USSR in Construction, another Soviet journal.
During the Second World War he created a series of images of the Battle of Stalingrad and later of liberation of Kiev, Ukraine.
The Sovfoto agency, which from 1932 distributed Soviet photography in the West, holds examples of his photojournalism.

Popi Efthimiadou

Busy with photography from an early age, largely self-taught.
I have exhibited my work in Thessaloniki, Athens and Amsterdam.
I photograph the beauty of daily life. I am also busy with abstract and minimalist photography.
Home

Philip-Lorca diCorcia

 

Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s photographs straddle truth and fiction by combining real people and places—but not necessarily people and places that naturally go together. The theatricality of his images is carefully constructed: he arranges the objects of each scene and devises precise lighting and framing for every project. His work is often described as cinematic, a description that diCorcia deplores. He insists that his pictures suggest rather than elucidate a full narrative. His brand of storytelling results in unstable, unfixed images that point in certain directions but never provide a definitive map.
His earliest work, from the late 1970s, featured his friends and family in scenes that evoke loneliness, contemplation, ennui, or, occasionally, humor. In Mario, diCorcia’s brother stares into an open refrigerator, his late-night mission to unearth a snack infused with inertia. The photograph couples an impression of complete stillness with the eerie, seemingly contradictory sense of witnessing a fleeting moment. Peter Galassi, former chief curator of MoMA’s Department of Photography, described the production of this image: “The subject was utterly ordinary but the photograph was carefully planned. The camera was on a tripod and the lighting was supplemented by an electronic flash hidden in the refrigerator and triggered at the moment of exposure. DiCorcia leveled the camera, adjusted and readjusted the lighting, made several Polaroid test shots and more than a few exposures, each aiming at the envisioned result.”1 DiCorcia’s acute attention to detail has become the hallmark of his process and has influenced a generation of photographers (including Katy Grannan, Justine Kurland, Alex Prager, and Alec Soth, among others) who work with controlled situations and semi-anonymous portrait subjects.
DiCorcia did not set out to become a photographer. While attending the University of Hartford, he studied with Jan Groover, who planted the idea that a photograph is not necessarily an artifact documenting a specific sliver of time; rather, a photograph should result from careful planning and orchestration. Early- and mid-20th-century photographers who also took this approach include Paul Outerbridge, Philippe Halsman, and Bill Brandt. During his graduate studies at Yale University diCorcia begin to classify himself as a photographer by first determining the kind of image-maker he did not want to be. Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Tod Papageorge—who rapidly shot many exposures in order to get to a few final images—attempted to capture the real world at a particular moment in time from a specific point of view. Their mid-20th-century work presented diCorcia with a strand of street photography to push against at exactly the same time that color processes began to be used outside of advertising and news photography. DiCorcia deliberately chose to print in color since it was an underutilized format in fine-art photography.
MoMA presented diCorcia’s first solo museum exhibition in 1993, featuring his series Hustlers, which was made in Los Angeles between 1990 and 1992. He photographed male prostitutes he approached on Santa Monica Boulevard, paying them whatever they typically charged for their services to instead pose in scenarios he had prepared for the photo sessions. The titles of these photographs, such as Eddie Anderson; 21 Years Old; Houston, Texas; $20, list only the facts. Yet by inserting their bodies into prepared scenes in hotel rooms or on the street, diCorcia made portraits that operate in tandem with—but do not exactly reproduce—the fantasy roles these men were usually conscripted to play.
Having worked outside on the Hustlers series, diCorcia delved further into street photography. As he explained, “The elements which call into question the normal relationship of appearance to truth in photography are, for most artists of my generation, tools to enrich the experience of work rather than ends in themselves.”2 Taking the work of Garry Winogrand in particular as a starting point, diCorcia reinvigorated the genre in the 1990s by freezing the ebb and flow of a city sidewalk in images such as Los Angeles and New York. By arranging flashes and stationing his camera at a precise location, he suspended slices of time in images that have the quiet stillness of Old Master paintings. For his series Streetwork (1993–97) and Heads (2000–01), he took thousands of photographs, of which he selected only a handful for inclusion. Unlike other practitioners of street photography, diCorcia never wanted his images to propagate a moral truth or instigate social change.

Sergio Larrain

 

 

 

 

Sergio Larraín Echeñique, fotógrafo. Nació en Santiago, Chile, el 5 de Noviembre de 1931. Falleció en Tulahuen, Ovalle, Chile, el 07 de febrero de 2012.
Creció en un ambiente familiarizado con las artes y la cultura; su padre, Sergio Larraín García Moreno, fue uno de los arquitectos más destacados de América del Sur, amigo de pintores como Josef Albers y Roberto Matta.
Entre 1949 y 1953, viajó a Estados Unidos donde estudió Ingeniería Forestal durante un año y medio, inicialmente en la Universidad de California, Berkeley, y más tarde en la Universidad Ann Arbor en Michigan. Durante estos años trabajó para conseguir estabilidad económica, lo que lo llevó a poder comprar su primera cámara fotográfica, una Leica IIIC, que le cambió la vida.
Dejó los estudios para volver a Chile, de donde partió nuevamente a un viaje familiar por Europa y Oriente Medio, para intentar calmar el dolor profundo por la muerte accidental de su hermano menor. Este viaje ayudó a que el artista tomara la decisión de adoptar la fotografía como su forma de expresión. A su vuelta en Santiago, se retiró a vivir en la comuna de La Reina, un área semi rural en esos años. Colaboró con instituciones como el Hogar de Cristo y Fundación Mi Casa, para apoyar a los niños que viven en situación de calle. Una serie de estas imágenes las recibió Edward Steichen, curador de fotografía en el Museo de Arte Moderno de Nueva York, quien las compró. Entre 1956 y 1959, trabajó como fotógrafo freelance y también para la revista internacional brasilera «O Cruzeiro»
En 1958, expuso sus fotografías en el Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Santiago, junto a las pinturas de Sheila A.W. Hicks, artista norteamericana becada en Chile por la Comisión Fullbright.
En 1959 fue becado por el British Council para viajar a Londres por cuatro meses, donde realizó su afamada serie sobre dicha ciudad. Ese mismo año, Sergio Larraín conoció a Henri Cartier-Bresson, fotógrafo francés, quién le propuso incorporarse a la agencia Magnum, que provee de material fotográfico a las grandes revistas europeas y norteamericanas. Larraín se instaló en París, donde colaboró con algunas de las revistas especializadas más prestigiosas. Destacan su reportaje a la Mafia Siciliana, su reportaje al matrimonio de Farah Diva y el Sha de Irán, y el reportaje elegido por la revista francesa Paris Match, donde publicaron 16 páginas a color sobre la Isla Juan Fernández.
A comienzos de los años 60 regresó a Chile, con el propósito de ahondar en las temáticas que más le interesaban, sin las exigencias comerciales de la prensa internacional: la gente y el entorno de Valparaíso, que ya había fotografiado en numerosas ocasiones. Trabajó con el poeta Pablo Neruda, en la realización de un libro para la Editorial Lumen de Barcelona, y luego para realizar fotografías sobre Valparaíso que fueron publicadas primero en la revista DU. Atlantis, en 1966, acompañadas por un texto de Pablo Neruda.
Mucho después, en 1991, la Editorial Hazan publicó el libro Valparaíso con ocasión de la exposición de Les Rencontres de la Photographie de Arles. En esta época fotografió la casa del poeta en Isla Negra, Chile, trabajo publicado en su libro Una casa en la arena.
En 1965, movido por la meditación transcendental y las filosofías orientales, se alejó en la práctica de las colaboraciones con Magnum. En 1969 se instaló en Arica, al Norte de Chile, para seguir durante tres años las enseñanzas del maestro espiritual boliviano Oscar Ichazo.
A partir de 1973, Sergio Larraín se trasladó a Ovalle, para dedicar la mayor parte de su tiempo a la lectura, la pintura al óleo, la meditación, el yoga, profundizar en el desarrollo personal y muy poco a la fotografía.
En 1999, El Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, IVAM, de España, le dedicó una retrospectiva, cuyo éxito provocó que lo asediaran en los medios internacionales. A consecuencia de lo cual, exigió que en el futuro se lo mantuviera al margen de toda reflexión sobre su obra.
No obstante, hasta el final continuó enviando a la agencia sus hojas de contacto, con sus últimos negativos para que Magnum custodie el conjunto de sus fotografías.

Don Hudson

I was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1950 and have lived in the area my entire life. In 1972 I decided to act on my love of photography and enrolled in art school. During my two years there I studied the language, both the history and the history-in-making, honed my technical skills, and most importantly, began an association with like-minded souls playing the game of photography. For 40 years, through peaks and valleys of activity, my playing of the game has been about my personal relationship with how the camera describes the appearance of truth in a photograph. You will have to look at the photographs for further explanation. I consider myself a thoughtful, and proudly amateur photographer. A book of my photographs from the last century, From The Archives, has recently been published in France.

Pedro Valtierra

Pedro Valtierra nació en Fresnillo, Zacatecas, el 29 de junio de 1955. Se inició en 1973 como auxiliar de laboratorio de fotografía y a partir de 1975 se desempeñó como fotógrafo en la Presidencia de la República. En 1977 ingresó al periódico El Sol de México y un año después se incorporó al diario unomásuno que dirigía Manuel Becerra Acosta.
En 1984 creó la Agencia de fotografía Imagenlatina; el mismo año fue fundador y jefe de Fotografía del diario mexicano La Jornada en un primer periodo de 1984 a 1986 y por segunda ocasión de 1995 al 2000.
En 1986 fundó la Agencia de fotografía Cuartoscuro, de la que es director hasta la fecha y desde 1993 edita la revista del mismo nombre, de la que también es director.
Fue presidente de la Sociedad de Autores de Obras Fotográficas de 1988 a 1991. De 1990 a 1992 dirigió la revista Mira junto con el periodista Miguel Ángel Granados Chapa.
En 2006 fundó la Fototeca de Zacatecas Pedro Valtierra, la cual dirige hasta la fecha. El fotógrafo ha destacado por su gran labor fotoperiodística dando testimonio de los sucesos noticiosos internacionales más importantes en los últimos 30 años, entre los que se hallan: la Revolución Sandinista, (1979), el movimiento revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas de la Resistencia Nacional (FARN) en la República de El Salvador (1980), la lucha de la Unión Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca en 1982 y ese mismo año el levantamiento del Frente Polisario de la República Árabe Saharauí Democrática en contra del gobierno de Marruecos en 1982, la caída en Haití del dictador Jean Claude Duvalier en 1986, la visita del Papa Juan Pablo II a Cuba en 1988 y fotorreportajes en Venezuela, Colombia, Panamá, Chipre, entre otros países.
En el ámbito nacional, Pedro Valtierra realizó una cobertura fotográfica sobre diversos acontecimientos de gran importancia histórica para nuestro país tales como la nacionalización de la banca en 1982, los terremotos de 1985, los conflictos poselectorales de 1988, el levantamiento armado del Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) en 1994, el asesinato de Luis Donaldo Colosio, además de reportajes sobre diversos aspectos socioculturales de México: la comunidad Oaxaqueña del El Trapiche, Xococapa en la Sierra de Veracruz y Golochán en Chiapas, la migración, los indígenas de la Sierra Tarahumara, entre muchos otros. Ha retratado a destacados personajes de la historia reciente de México y otras partes del mundo, ex presidentes, políticos, líderes religiosos, empresarios, escritores, artistas: Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Jaime Sabines, José Saramago, Gabriel García Márquez, Elena Poniatowska, Carlos Montemayor, Rufino Tamayo, José Luis Cuevas, Gabriel Figueroa, Carlos Monsiváis, María Felix, se cuentan entre éstos.
Desde 1984 imparte talleres y conferencias de fotoperiodismo mexicano contemporáneo en medios de comunicación y universidades.
En el medio editorial Pedro Valtierra ha participado en diversas publicaciones, entre las que se encuentran, en 1980, La Batalla por Nicaragua publicado por el periódico unomásuno en 1980 por y ese mismo año también participa en el libro Nicaragua, un país propio editado por la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Horacio Coppola

Coppola was born in Buenos Aires, the youngest of 10 children. His parents, Italian immigrants, were well off, and he studied art, music, law and languages. He was about 20 when he began taking photographs.
He traveled to Europe in the 1920s and ’30s. Photography was coming into its own as an art form, with pictures being shot from odd angles and cropped for effect.
He met his future wife in Germany. Later, in London, he took portraits of famous artists, and worked on a book about Mesopotamian artifacts in the Louvre and the British Museum. He and his wife went back to Argentina in 1936. That year, he was commissioned to photograph Buenos Aires for its 400th anniversary, and produced streetscapes that captured the romance, vitality and squalor of a great city.
He and Ms. Stern had a daughter, Silvia, and a son, Andres. They later divorced. In 1959, Coppola married Raquel Palomeque, a pianist.
Coppola was the author of the photographs that appeared in the first edition of “Evaristo Carriego” (biography) (1930) by Jorge Luis Borges. He was one of the pioneers photographers from Argentina and a key figure in Modernism. He studied in the Bauhaus during the thirties.
He was named “Illustrious Citizen of Buenos Aires” and at 100 had a retrospective exhibit at the Malba Museum in Buenos Aires.

Mario De Biasi

 

Deported in Germany, Mario de Biasi begins to take photographs in 1944 thanks to a camera found in the rubbles of Nuremberg. He becomes famous with his portraits of actresses such as Claudia Cardinale, Brigitte Bardot or Sophia Loren alongside the depiction of the Iran Shah’s wedding. Yet what earned the Italian photographer the nickname of the ‘Italiano pazzo’ (the mad Italian) was his reports of conflicts such as the Hungarian revolution of 1956 or extreme experiences such as his Siberian exploration, throughout the world. Uniting the glamour of actresses to social episodes, Mario de Biasi created one of his most iconic images thanks to a group of Italian men observing the curvaceous back of Moira Orfei.

Shomei Tomatsu

A photographer looks at everything, which is why he must look from beginning to end. Face the subject head-on, stare fixedly, turn the entire body into an eye and face the world.

Shinya Arimoto

Born in Osaka
, Japan, in 1971, Shinya Arimoto received his degree in Visual Arts from Osaka University and now lives in Tokyo, where he runs his own photography gallery. His work has been exhibited widely around Japan and was awarded the Taiyo Award in 1998.

Harry Gruyaert

 

Born in Antwerp in 1941 and a member of Magnum Photos since 1982, Harry Gruyaert revolutionized creative and experimental uses of color in the 1970s and 1980s. Influenced by cinema and American photographers, his work defined new territory for color photography: an emotive, non-narrative, and boldly graphic way of perceiving the world.

In 1972, while living in London, Gruyaert created the striking series TV Shots by turning the dial on a television set at random and photographing the distorted images he saw there. A later series, Made in Belgium, portrays his ambivalent relationship with his homeland in a palette of saturated tones. In his most recent work, he embraces the possibilities of digital photography, taking further creative risks to capture light in new ways.

Gruyaert’s images are autonomous, often independent of any context or thematic logic. This volume, the first retrospective of his work, is a superb overview of his personal quest for freedom of expression and the liberation of the senses.

Save

Kristina Syrchikova

Kristina Syrchikova is a documentary photographer and a visual storyteller based Samara, Russia.

Her work primarily focuses on social and human rights issues in post-Soviet space. 

Kristina first studied information technology, before turning to contemporary photography at the FotoDepartament Institute and documentary photography at the DocDocDoc School in St Petersburg. 

Kristina’s work has been recognized with industry awards such as New Talents, Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award 2018, The Kolga Photo Award, Efremov Report Photography Competition, ESPY Photography Award, Young photographers of Russia among others.

Her work has been presented in exhibitions and screens in Russia and abroad, including Asian Women Photographers’ Showcase (Objectifs, Singapore, 2017), Orvieto Fotografia 2017 (Palazzo Coelli, Orvieto, Italy, 2017), Third Documentary Photography Days (Photography Foundation of Turkey, Istanbul, Turkey, 2016), Evolution of sight. 1991−2016 (Photobiennale 2016, Central exhibition hall Manege, Moscow, Russia).
Her work has appeared in multiple online and print publications worldwide including Musee Magazine (USA), Der Greif (Germany), COLTA.RU (Russia), Takie Dela (Russia), IM Magazine, Foto&video (Russia), dekoder, Science and Life (Russia), Russian reporter, Splash & Grab, Bird In Flight, Dodho Magazine, FOG (Germany).
She is a member of The Russian Union of Art Photographers.

www.syrchikova.name

Jeremy Mann

Home

Dougie Wallace

Glasgow born, London-based photographer Dougie Wallace is a shutterbug whose artistic vision extends outside of the realm of traditional fashion photography.
Dougie Wallace’s website describes him as a “documentary photographer,” and the snaps included in this collection of his street photography only serves to strengthen the claim. His street style shots eschew the conventions associated with the burgeoning field of candid street photography. Instead of taking pictures of well-coiffed and elegantly dressed streetwalkers, Dougie Wallace shoots subjects that are notable for their ridiculousness.
Some highlights of Dougie Wallace’s street flicks include a shot of a well-oiled, slightly overweight, middle-aged man clad only in a blue speedo and 1970s aviator frames. The image, like most of Dougie Wallace’s, is hard to turn away from and leaves the viewer with conflicting feelings of humor, intrigue, and confusion.

Jane Evelyn Atwood

 

 

 

 

 

 

Born in New York and living in Paris since 1971, Jane Evelyn Atwood is one of the world’s leading photojournalists. In 1976, Atwood bought her first camera and began taking pictures of a group of street prostitutes in Paris. It was partly on the strength of these photographs that Atwood received the first W. Eugene Smith Award, in 1980, for another story she had just started work on: blind children. Prior to this, she had never published a photo.
In the ensuing years, Atwood has pursued a number of carefully chosen projects-among them an 18-month reportage of one regiment of the Foreign Legion, following the soldiers to Beirut and Chad; a four-and-a-half-month story on the first person with AIDS in France to allow himself to be photographed for publication in the press (Atwood stayed with him until his death); and a four-year study of landmine victims that took her to Cambodia, Angola, Kosovo, Mozambique and Afghanistan-always with the same personal and passionate approach.
Jane Evelyn Atwood’s work reflects a deep involvement with her subjects over long periods of time. Fascinated by people and by the idea of exclusion, she has managed to penetrate worlds that most of us do not know, or choose to ignore. She limits her stories to those which truly compel her, devoting to each subject the time necessary-in some cases, years-to explore it in depth. In 1989 she started to photograph incarcerated women, eventually managing to gain access to some of the world’s worst penitentiaries and jails, including death row. This monumental ten-year undertaking- encompassing forty prisons in nine countries of Europe and Eastern Europe, and the United States-remains the definitive photographic work on women in prison to date. It was published as a book in both English and French in 2000 and continues to be exhibited internationally. (see Books; Exhibitions)
Atwood’s particularity as a photographer lies in her in-depth approach, but she has also covered such news events as the Kobe earthquake of 1995, the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001, and the Democratic National Convention in 2004.
Jane Evelyn Atwood describes her method of work as “obsessive”. She does not move on to a new subject until she feels she has completely understood the one at hand and her own relation to it, and until she believes that her pictures reflect this understanding.

Jack Birns

Jack Birns (1919–2008) was an American photographer. He was well known in photographic circles as an award-winning foreign correspondent for Life magazine, and in the commercial diving world as President of BIRNS Incorporated.
In 1946 Birns moved to Los Angeles, California, and free-lanced as a magazine photographer for a year, during which time he set a record for free-lancers working for LIFE: 30 pages and a cover in 6-months’ work. LIFE hired Birns to cover the Civil war in China and during 1947 he set another record for LIFE staff photographers for pictures and pages, as he captured on film a vast country undergoing fundamental changes, and a society characterized by poverty, petty crime, homelessness and military rule. During this time, Birns was paired with journalist Roy Rowan. This energetic war coverage (China, Burma, India, Philippines, and Malaysia) won for Birns a coveted recognition from the prestigious Overseas Press Club of America. For the first time in its history the OPC established a special award for photographers to honor Birns’s work, and the award was given to Birns by General George C. Marshall, chief of staff during WWII and, later, Secretary of State.

Sara Zanella

 

I started photographing at high school with a Contax T3 with black and white film because I could develop them in my mother‘s bathroom and work independently. When I discovered photography I could find a way to see my daily life differently, I learnt to have a step inside my surroundings, into the nature of my relationships and environment and also a step outside of the everyday life, that let me read beyond the appearances and find another sphere of conception of time before more melancholic then as a endless river of events. From those years I have been photographing diaries, my home, my school, my classmates and my family, at the time I got a really deep encounter with the diaries of Noboyoshi Araki, Nan Goldin and Daido Moryama. In them I found those instincts that were driving me in the photographic process , for example, the closeness to the subject, the condition of solitude, the flowing of life and changes, the power of poetry and love and the movements of curiosity and restlessness that still nowadays are in the core of my work. In these years I acquired and experienced the power of photography. Images are like a window where we can access to a universal human layer, investigating the core of who we are.

I use my curiosity to travel and to explore places I’ve never been, photographing. The center of my work is the research as a human being in the world, the process knowing the world we are living in, the position of men in nature, a journey in the space and in the time in history of humanity and earth. My goal is building a record of this in a poetic and direct way.

What drive me is instinct and curiosity.