Chang Chao-Tang

Chao-Tang Chang born in1943 November 17 in Panchiao City, Taipei County, Taiwan. Chang Chao-Tang is Taiwan’s most representative photographer. During the 1960s, in the conservative society of Taiwan, Chang Chao-Tang was a college student, profoundly moved and influenced by the social realist works in literature and surrealist painting. He published a series of absurd works that expressed his sense of ridiculousness and desolation. These included the works “Blurriness”, “White powder on peoples’ faces”, “Figure without a head”, and “Shaken-up image of the body”. He found the camera a direct way to relieve his oppression as well as release his rebellious energy. His unique style made a great impression on Taiwanese photography, and he not only had exhibitions at home but also received international appreciation. In 2013, he had his first major retrospective exhibition in the Taipei Fine Art Museum.

Rachel Woolf

I am a Denver-based independent visual journalist.

My fascination in photography began with a disposable Walgreens camera in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Now, I specialize in documentary photography, videography and portraiture. My work aims to intimately show aspects of humanity intersecting with economic and social issues.

Some of my clients include The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, US News and World Report, Bloomberg, Education Week, ESPN Magazine and Getty Images. I graduated from Ithaca College with a B.A. degree in Documentary Studies, attended the Eddie Adams Workshop XXVII in 2014 and the Missouri Photo Workshop in 2015.

My work placed 2nd in the National Press Photographers Association’s Best of Photojournalism Contemporary Issues Story competition and received “Best of Show” in the Michigan Press Photographers Association competition.

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Martha Micali

There is not a minute in my day when I am free of the sensation of walking a footbridge half a meter wide between two yawning chasms of nothingness. And it is this word, “nothing,” that I find every moment on the tip of my tongue…
Sometimes I vent by filling an entire page of the present diary with these sacred syllables, “No-thing.” Then, all of a sudden, confidence restored and self imbued with physical wellbeing, as after a shower or a successful defecation, I turn over a new leaf and start writing things again. How could I do otherwise? If in a game one can only cheat or lose, one cheats.
Ever since I have discovered that my dreams are nearly always self-slanders or spiteful gossip at my expense, I don’t pay them much attention, I simply brush them aside. And yet this latest one, with its masked and menacing folly of unreason, leaves a lump in my throat.

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Inge Morath

 

 

 

I personally arrived slowly at photography. I studied languages at university, took some courses in journalism, worked first as a translator and then as an editor for the Information Services Branch of the occupying American Forces in Salzburg, later in Vienna. In my spare time I wrote playlets for the Red-White-Red network and articles for various illustrated magazines, among them the Wiener Illustrierte. I started to be asked to supply some suitable photographs with my stories, which left me at a loss. I had never seriously occupied myself with photography; I did not even know a photographer. I had always been passionately interested in painting and drawing, but the artistic poverty of the “Third Reich,” where our only chance to see the major achievements of contemporary art was in (from my side at least) eagerly awaited exhibitions hung in school corridors under the title Entartete Kunst (degenerate art, including Picasso, etc.), provided no possibility for an education in visual matters. So I started to buy LIFE Magazine and photographic books and in my search for photographers I met Lothar Rübelt and Franz Hubmann and Erich Lessing and Ernst Haas.

Meanwhile I had become the Austrian editor of Heute magazine, published by the Americans in Munich, and started to work with Ernst Haas as a photography-writer team. Heute editor Warren Trabant forwarded a couple of our stories to Robert Capa, who summoned us to join the young Magnum Photos in Paris. Supplied with much food and a little money we boarded a train, left Vienna and stayed in Paris. Besides my work with Ernst, I started to write texts for the photographs sent to the Paris office by the then members of Magnum from all kinds of countries: Cartier-Bresson from the Orient, George Rodger from Africa, David Seymour from Greece, etc. I started to accompany different photographers on assignments for which also I had done the preparatory research, and later edited their contact sheets. I think that it is from this work that I learned the most.

A short marriage to an Englishman brought separation from Magnum and a move to London. I continued to write stories but found to my amazement that suddenly now that I was no longer accompanied by photographers the world around me seemed to be filled with things that wanted to be photographed. I had finally discovered my own way to express what interested or obsessed me in a way with which I could live. After the war I had often suffered from the fact that my native language, German, was for most of the world the language of the enemy, and although I was able to write stories in English or French it did not touch the roots. So turning to the image felt both like a relief and an inner necessity.

I took up a period of apprenticeship with Simon Guttmann, who had the reputation of a querulous genius of the picture magazine world; he had played a role in the early days of the Berliner Illustrierte under the Ullsteins. Somewhere along the way, Robert Capa had been one of his apprentices, too. Now Simon Guttmann worked as an adviser to Picture Post. I bought a used Leica, worked incessantly and, as I was known as the only non-photographing person in this milieu and knew I would not be taken seriously if I suddenly showed up with photographs, I turned my name around and, as Egni Tharom, started sending my picture stories to any magazine I thought might be interested. Sometimes I sold something, sometimes I got letters praising my eye but deploring my technique. I spent nights in the darkrooms of professionals, learning a lot as a free assistant. For Mr. Guttmann I stood in front of theatres to take pictures of arriving luminaries, and covered catastrophes like floods and fires.

As I was selling more pictures, my confidence grew. I went back to Paris and worked for three months on a story about the Prêtres Ouvriers (worker priests), the first militant Catholic priests who, as “missionaries within their own country” and with permission from their orders, lived the life of workers in factories and the poorest quarters of Paris. It was a difficult story, and when I finally was finished, pictures enlarged and text written, I decided to risk it. I showed it all to Capa, asking his opinion about the photographs which he liked. So I confessed that I had taken them and after the first shock he said, “Ok, show me the rest of your work; if it is as good we’ll take you.”

So I was invited to join Magnum, first for a year as an associate, then as a full member. There followed many years of constant travel, shooting stories in different parts of the world, as well as industrial work, stills for movies and theatre, fashion, works for art magazines shot with big cameras and, more and more, portraits. In 1956, my first book Fiesta in Pamplona appeared. And so it has really more or less been going on until today.

Giovanni Nogaro

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Dario Mitidieri

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Pablo Guidali

En 1995 ingresa a la Facultad de Ciencias Económicas de la Universidad de la República (Uruguay). Tres años más tarde, luego de un año sabático de viaje por Europa y Medio Oriente, comienza a estudiar fotografía en forma paralela.
Desde 2002 hasta 2006 trabaja como fotógrafo para la revista Galería del semanario Búsqueda (Uruguay). Al mismo tiempo se desempeña como docente a cargo del taller de fotografía del colegio Latinoamericano (Uruguay).
En 2007 recibe una beca del Gobierno de Francia para realizar estudios de fotografía en dicho país.
En 2010 obtiene el Diploma Nacional Superior de la Escuela Nacional Superior de la Fotografía (ENSP) de Arles (Francia).
En 2010 su trabajo “Fiesta y la mar en coche” recibe el primer premio como libro fotográfico de autor nacional otorgado por el Centro de Fotografía (Uruguay).
En 2011 obtiene la Beca de Ayuda a la Creación, otorgada por el Gobierno de la Región PACA (Francia).
El proyecto “Fábulas”, realizado junto al fotógrafo Erwan Morére, obtiene en 2011 el primer premio del Fondo Concursable para la Cultura (categoría artes visuales) del Ministerio de Educación y Cultura de Uruguay.
En 2012 su trabajo “Beba” obtiene el primer premio en el concurso Fotolibro para autores latinoamericanos organizado por el Centro de Fotografía (Uruguay).
Ha realizado varias muestras colectivas e individuales en Uruguay, Francia y España.
En 2013 fue seleccionado como miembro artista de la Academia de Francia en España – Casa de Velázquez.
Actualmente vive en y trabaja Marsella.

Eugeni Forcano

 

Eugeni Forcano (Canet de Mar, 1926) entra en el mundo de la fotografía como un vendaval al incorporarse a la revista Destino, Ilamado por Vergés y Néstor Luján, en 1960. Autodidacta e intuitivo, mira con sagacidad, pasión e ironía cuanto le rodea. En 1964 Juan Perucho destacaba la profundidad humana de su obra. Y Josep Pla, siempre parco en elogios, dice de Forcano en 1966: “Es un gran fotógrafo, un gran artista. Es diferente e imprevisible. Singular”. José Corredor–Matheos afirma: “Nos hace ver que la realidad es sorprendente siempre”. Forcano tiene el don de la anticipación. Andrés Trapiello asegura que “lo más importante en sus fotografías es el latido de todo lo que aún vive”. Y Josep Maria Espinàs percibe que “a sus personajes se les oye hablar”.
La fotografía marcó su vida para siempre. Evolucionista y soñador, va cubriendo etapas: moda, ilustración, simbolismo… y una larga investigación sobre el color como nueva forma de expresión artística. Jorge Rueda escribió sobre ella: “Por fin has conseguido fotografiar los suspiros”. Javier Pérez Andújar lo define: “Es, sobre vanguardista, un fotógrafo vitalista que ha entendido el lenguaje de su tiempo”.
Todo parece confirmarlo. Josep Maria Huertas Claveria dice que “es uno de los grandes fotógrafos que ha dado Cataluña”.

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.