Chris Simpson

CHRIS SIMPSON Born in 1952 in Zurich, raised in Africa and Mauritius. His unique way of seeing was influenced by the exoticism of the natural world around him. Simpson’s photographs, with their clean lines and uncluttered compositions, exemplify his innate understanding of the simplicity of natural beauty and form.

Educated in the UK and trained at art school in London in the early 1970s, his internship at Vogue Studios with David Bailey, Clive Arrowsmith and Olivero Toscani convinced him that his initial path was fashion.

He spent the next 20 years as a fashion photographer, living in both Paris and London. In the late 1980s, he was shooting high-profile advertising campaigns for British Airways, Mercedes-Benz, Bacardi Rum, Stella Artois and the Australian Tourist Board, taking time off between commissions to shoot pictures for himself.

1987 marked a turning point in his career when he travelled to the Northern Territory in Australia to photograph the Aboriginal people. The pictures he brought back, portraying the timeless, dreamlike quality of the land and the warmth and dignity of the people, were exhibited to great acclaim. That success ultimately led him to devote more of his time to taking his own pictures.

His globetrotting has taken him from remote regions such as the Atacama Desert and Easter Island, to the Himba tribe of Namibia and tobacco farmers in Cuba. His trip to Madagascar in 1997 resulted in many inspirational pictures, one of them being his signature picture Allée des Baobabs. At every location, he brilliantly captures the very essence and character of the landscape, the people and the atmosphere.

Richard Tuschman

RICHARD TUSCHMAN began experimenting with digital imaging in the early 1990’s, developing a style that synthesized his interests in photography, painting and assemblage. He has been exhibited widely, both in the US and internationally. Accolades and awards include Prix de la Photographie Paris (Gold Medal, People’s Choice), Critical Mass Top 50, International Kontinent Awards (1st Place, Fine Art Projects) and Center Project Launch Juror’s Award (chosen by Roger Watson, Fox Talbot Museum) among others. His photographs have been published on numerous online magazines/journals including Slate, LensCulture, LensScratch and Huffington Post. In 2016 he was named a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Photography. He currently lives and works in New York and Europe.

Vitas Luckus

Vitas Luckus was born on May 29, 1943 in Kaunas, Lithuania. At the age of eighteen, after graduating with a degree in drawing and painting, his parents gave him an AGFA camera, which initiated his fascination in photography. In the following years he developed a great interest in art photography and became a member of the Kaunas Photo Club, to which he was elected president a few years later.
According to Luckus, the conventional use of light and visual arrangement of a photograph would leave out essential elements that could retrieve the vitality and different levels of reality. He advocated a style in which there was no hierarchy of meaning: every element in the photographic composition was of equal importance. Only then was it possible to capture the “truth” and represent the essence of a scene, of life itself.
For his series, and last work, Attitude towards Old Photography, Luckus made montages from a large collection of photographic images other than his own. In the book he created of these works, text and titles were deliberately excluded to maintain the unity of his constructed realism. In his diary he wrote:
In the beginning I tried to classify my work according to social phenomena and photographical style, emphasizing the topic of life and death. This made me feel like a Lithuanian artist carving statues of God or the saints. When I put everything on the table, however, I felt like a god myself. In front of me I had an Asian and a Red Indian, a Negro, a white, a Moslem, a Buddhist, a Christian, the Czarist army, the Polish army, the Kaiser, the war, funerals and weddings. I shuffled thousands of images into a heap an found they were an orderly heap of life, because everything here was life and because all of us, whether a boxer, a Czar, a beggar or a half-naked woman were disclosed here. Archive photography seemed to me to reflect a bottomless well, waiting for someone to look into it and understand it.
Luckus was known to drink excessively and experienced ongoing confrontation with the authorities. This battle was set off by his refusal to adhere to the conventional standards of beauty, regulations that were firmly guarded by the Lithuanian government. In 1987, during a visit from several men to his home, Luckus got into an argument with one of the men, who was later identified as a KGB agent. The fight became violent and Luckus stabbed and killed the man. Only moments after the incident, Tanya Luckiene, his wife, found Luckus: he had jumped to his death from their balcony.
Together with Aleksandras Macijauskas, Vitas Luckus is considered to be a reformer of the traditional romantic realism within Lithuanian photography.

Chris Simpson

CHRIS SIMPSON Born in 1952 in Zurich, raised in Africa and Mauritius. His unique way of seeing was influenced by the exoticism of the natural world around him. Simpson’s photographs, with their clean lines and uncluttered compositions, exemplify his innate understanding of the simplicity of natural beauty and form.

Educated in the UK and trained at art school in London in the early 1970s, his internship at Vogue Studios with David Bailey, Clive Arrowsmith and Olivero Toscani convinced him that his initial path was fashion.

He spent the next 20 years as a fashion photographer, living in both Paris and London. In the late 1980s, he was shooting high-profile advertising campaigns for British Airways, Mercedes-Benz, Bacardi Rum, Stella Artois and the Australian Tourist Board, taking time off between commissions to shoot pictures for himself.

1987 marked a turning point in his career when he travelled to the Northern Territory in Australia to photograph the Aboriginal people. The pictures he brought back, portraying the timeless, dreamlike quality of the land and the warmth and dignity of the people, were exhibited to great acclaim. That success ultimately led him to devote more of his time to taking his own pictures.

His globetrotting has taken him from remote regions such as the Atacama Desert and Easter Island, to the Himba tribe of Namibia and tobacco farmers in Cuba. His trip to Madagascar in 1997 resulted in many inspirational pictures, one of them being his signature picture Allée des Baobabs. At every location, he brilliantly captures the very essence and character of the landscape, the people and the atmosphere.

Alex Saberi

Alex Saberi is a National Geographic photographer from London. He began photography as a hobby by mainly taking photos of Richmond Park and has had a photo book of the park published in 2012. .
The park was the perfect place to practice his photography skills which he went onto use on his photo trips around the world. Most recently he has been spending his time photographing the beaches, jungles and wildlife of Ubatuba in Brazil.
He has appeared in many digital camera magazines and publications. As well as this Alex has won several photography competitions, from winning the Environmental Protection Agency’s wildlife competition, to winning on several worldwide online competition websites. He came second in Landscape photographer of the year with his photo “One man and his Dog”, and appeared several times in both the British wildlife photographer of the year books and landscape photographer of the year books.
The vast majority of these photos are available for commercial use through my agent Nat Geo Creative. If not please contact me directly here

Minotaur Island, Mehran Khalili

In 2016, my family and I moved to Crete. The largest of Greece’s islands, it’s an idyllic place—rich in mythology, history, and nature.

Yet since I arrived, I’ve also felt a strange, dark energy here. Not from the people, but from the island itself. As if the nature and environment sometimes present an imminent threat.

This photo series is my attempt to exorcise this feeling; to bring it into the light so I can better understand it and, ultimately, rid myself of it.

Anders Beer Wilse

Anders Beer Wilse (12 June 1865 – 21 February 1949) was a Norwegian photographer whose photography visually documented Norway in the early to mid-20th century.Wilse was born in Flekkefjord, but grew up in Kragerø and decided early to become a sailor. After having graduated with a technical degree from the technical school in Horten in 1882, he emigrated to the United States in 1884. He did not find work in the beginning, but eventually settled in Seattle working for the United States Geological Survey. He is reported to have acquired his first camera in 1886. He opened a photography store in Seattle in 1897, after having visited Norway and married Helen Marie Hutchinson. In 1900, his wife and children moved to Norway, and Wilse himself joined them, opening a photography store in Christiania in 1901, after 17 years in the United States.Wilse traveled extensively in Norway, both on assignment and for his own interest. He brought his 10 kg camera to inaccessible places through rugged terrain, going as far north as Svalbard. He photographed both natural sceneries and people at work, including the fishing industry in Lofoten before the introduction of motorized boats. His photography business was also a commercial success, and he acquired among other things the entire archive of Axel Lindahl, who had photographed scenes in Norway in the 1880s and 1890s.Most of his negatives are now preserved at museums, including Norsk Folkemuseum, where more than 100,000 sceneries and ethnological images are held, Oslo Bymuseum for images related to the history of Oslo, the National Library of Norway for portrait photography, and the Norwegian Maritime Museum for maritime photographs.

Sengo Pérez da Silva

Sengo Pérez da Silva, nacido en Melo, Uruguay, en 1961 es un fotografo uruguayo. Reportero gráfico profesional desde 1982, ha publicando en Semanario Brecha y diarios La República y El Observador (Uruguay) Revistas Veja e Isto é (Brasil) y Boston Globe (EE.UU.) En 1989 se radico en Brasil trabajando para los diarios O Estado de Sao Paulo y Jornal da Tarde. Desde 1990 en Perú como editor gráfico de suplementos en Página Libre, El Suplemento (diario Expreso), diarios Gestión, El Sol, Correo y las revistas deportivas Don Balón y El Gráfico. Productor periodístico de televisión en los canales América TV, canal 4 Y ATV, canal 9. Colaboraciones para las agencias Reuters, Associated Press, France Presse, EFE, la cadena de periódicos KRT (EE.UU.) Bild (Alemania), Houston Chronicle (EE.UU.), UNICEF, y las revistas Rumbos y Somos (El Comercio).

Juan Manuel Figueroa Aznar

Juan Manuel Figueroa Aznar, nacido en 1878, en Caraz, Ancash, fue un fotografo pionero peruano. Es considerado uno de los representantes más destacados del florecimiento fotográfico del Cusco entre inicios y la primera mitad del siglo XX. Artista multifacético, se concibió a sí mismo ante todo como pintor, sin sospechar que una de sus prácticas subsidiarias e intermitentes se apreciaría en las pocas pero importantes antologías del arte fotográfico peruano y latinoamericano. Su predilección por el retrato lo acercó a la fotografía y a una técnica en boga, el foto-óleo o la foto coloreada, técnica que combinaba los barnices de la tradición pictórica occidental con las tendencias modernas. A la manera de Max T. Vargas en Arequipa, en cuyo estudio trabajó como pintor de telones de fondo, introdujo una práctica muy poco frecuente para la época: retratar indígenas en el estudio, un escenario reservado a los pudientes. En la década de los veinte se asoció al círculo intelectual del indigenismo de Luis E. Valcárcel, quien lo nombró director artístico de la Misión Peruana de Arte Incaico que recorrió La Paz, Buenos Aires y Montevideo en 1923, llevando consigo a un equipo de músicos y actores cusqueños que fueron registrados por el lente del fotógrafo. Murio en 1951, en Paucartambo, Cusco.

Menonitas, Larry Towell

Larry Towell’s business card reads ‘Human Being’. Experience as a poet and a folk musician have done much to shape his personal style. The son of a car repairman, Towell grew up in a large family in rural Ontario, Canada. During studies in visual arts at Toronto’s York University, he was given a camera and taught how to process black and white film.
A stint of volunteer work in Calcutta in 1976 provoked Towell to photograph and write. Back in Canada, he taught folk music to support himself and his family. In 1984, he became a freelance photographer and writer focusing on the dispossessed, exile and peasant rebellion. He completed projects on the Nicaraguan Contra war, on the relatives of the disappeared in Guatemala, and on American Vietnam War veterans who had returned to Vietnam to rebuild the country. His first published magazine essay, Paradise Lost, exposed the ecological consequences of the catastrophic Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. He became a Magnum nominee in 1988 and a full member in 1993.
In 1996, Towell completed a project based on ten years of reportage in El Salvador, followed the next year by a major book, Then Palestine. His fascination with landlessness also led him to the Mennonite migrant workers of Mexico, an eleven-year project completed in 2000.
With the help of the inaugural Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, he finished a second highly acclaimed book on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in 2005, and in 2008 released the award-winning The World From My Front Porch, a project on his own family in rural Ontario where he sharecrops a 75-acre farm.

Rehahn

Réhahn is a photographer from Normandy, France, based in Hoi An, central Vietnam, since 2011. Led by his love of travelling and meeting people, he has visited more than 35 countries prior to making his home in the ancient town of Hoi An.

He is particularly renowned for his portraits of Vietnam, Cuba and India. The media regularly cites him as the Photographer who captures the souls of his models. Indeed, Réhahn spends time with the people he meets and builds a relationship with them before taking their photographs. Specialising in the ethnic groups of Vietnam, he travels the far reaches of this country on his motorbike in order to capture the latest images of these dying cultures.

Alfred Eisenstaedt

Born in Dirschau (now Poland), Alfred Eisenstaedt studied at the University of Berlin and served in the German army during World War I. After the war, while employed as a button and belt salesman in Berlin, he taught himself photography and worked as a freelance photojournalist. In 1929, he received his first assignment that would launch his professional career–the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm. From 1929 to 1935 he was a full-time photojournalist for the Pacific and Atlantic Picture Agency, later part of the Associated Press, and contributed to the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung and other picture magazines in Berlin and Paris. In 1935, he came to the United States, where he freelanced for Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Town and Country, and other publications. In 1936, Henry Luce hired him, along with Margaret Bourke-White, Peter Stackpole, and Thomas McAvoy as one of four staff photographers for the new LIFE magazine. Eisenstaedt remained at LIFE for the next 40 years and was active as a photojournalist into his eighties. In 1988, he was honored with ICP’s Infinity Master of Photography Award.
Eisenstaedt was among those Europeans who pioneered the use of the 35-millimeter camera in photojournalism as they brought their knowledge to American publications after World War I. He was also among the earliest devotees of available-light photography. Unlike many photojournalists in the postwar period, he was not associated with a particular kind of event or geographic area: he was a generalist. As such, he was a favorite among editors, not only for his quick eye, but also for his ability in making good photographs of any situation or event. His nonjudgmental but acutely perceptive eye and his facility with composition have made his photographs memorable documents of his era both historically and aesthetically.

Russell Lee

The Russell Lee Collection

Marcel Giró

Marcel Giró was born in Badalona (Spain) on October 20th, 1913, son of an industrialist in the textile industry. He was the second of six children.

He studied at the National School of Badalona and later in the Industrial School of Terrassa, while working at the family factory.

Since his youth he was fond of mountain trekking and photography.
At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War he enlisted as a volunteer to the Pirenaico Regiment, depending on the Generalitat of Catalonia. In 1937, disappointed by the constant fighting between the different factions fighting against Franco, he decided to exile.

He walked through the Pyrenees from Berga to France where he spent nearly two years doing all kinds of jobs. Finally in 1940 he was able to travel to Colombia with two Catalan companions, where they set up a small textile business.

He married Palmira Puig, and they moved to Brazil, where they settled.
In Brazil Giró resumed his hobby and ended devoted to professional photograpy. In 1953 he opened his own studio in Sao Paulo, Estúdio Giró.

Marcel Giró became one of the leading photographers of the country, an active member of what became known as Escola Paulista. This movement, pioneer of modern photography in Brazil was born around Foto Cine Club Bandeirante, in the 50s, with photographers like Jose Yalenti, Thomaz Farkas, Benedito Junqueira Duarte, Gertrudes Altschul, Eduardo Salvatore, Chico Albuquerque, Geraldo de Barros, Rubens Teixeira Scavone, Ademar Manarini, Willian Brigata, Emil Issa, German Lorca, Moacir Moreira, Alfio Trovato and Gaspar Gasparian among others.

He exhibited his works all over Brazil and around the world. One of his photos, Luz e força, was selected for the exhibition Photography in the Fine Arts (New York, 1968) and is part of the collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Currently there are works of Giró at the Art Museum of Sao Paulo (MASP), the MoMA in New York and in numerous private collections around the world.
Giró was also one of the pioneers of advertising photography in Brazil. In his studio worked young assistants that later become world-renowned as great photographers like JR Duran and Marcio Scavone.

After the death of his wife in 1978, he left professional photography and artistic photography. He sold the studio and returned to Catalonia.

During the 80’s and 90’s, he traveled with his partner Paquita Raigal and began to paint with a very close criteria to his Photography works of the 50s.

He died in Mirasol (Barcelona) on August 24th, 2011, at age 98.

Alain Laboile

Born on May 1, 1968 in Bordeaux, France, Alain Laboile is a photographer and father of six.

In 2004, as he needed to put together a portfolio of his work as a sculptor, he acquired a camera, and thus developped a taste for macrophotography, spurred by his passion for entomology.

Later on, he pointed his lens towards his growing family which became his major subject : a life on the edge of the world, where intemporality and the universality of childhood meet.

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Spirituality, Industry, and Death on the Ganges, Giulio Di Sturco

The Ganges River is a symbol of Indian civilization and spirituality—it is a source of poetry and legend that is older than Athens or Jerusalem. For centuries, people have journeyed here to find the heart of Hindu culture in India. As part of the preservation and renewal of ancestral traditions, food, flowers and other religious offerings are set afloat across its waters every day. But now, the Ganges is on the brink of an ecological crisis.

It is a common belief among Hindu pilgrims that these waters are so pure and holy that they are exempt from any harm. And yet, every year, roughly 32,000 corpses are cremated in Varanasi, contaminating the waters and those who bathe in it. With the addition of rotting animal carcasses, a foamy layer of scum is often seen along some parts of the river. In addition, the cities on its banks have inadequate sewer systems and sewage treatment plants, adding to the toll of children who suffer and die from water-borne diseases. Thus, India’s green revolution has also been detrimental: formerly barren lands are heavily irrigated and fertilized, leading to an exploitation of water resources and fertilizer runoff into the river.

In the past, the river goddess Ganga flowed wild and free, ripping through the Indian landscape with vigor and might, beginning with the roaring, icy waters in the Himalayas and running down to the Bay of Bengal. But now, water availability in the Ganges basin is highly dependent on the monsoon. Due to global warming, dramatic changes in the climate have significantly altered the timing, intensity, and duration of the rainfall, changing the amount of available water. The Ganges is already running dry in many places, and as weather patterns become irregular, parts of the river simply cease to exist for periods of time, dramatically affecting the lives of people who depend on the river for their livelihood and spiritual well-being

This series aims to add fuel to the current discussion surrounding the fate of the Ganges at this historical junction, where we have the power to shape not only the physical but also the spiritual geography of a nation. The main character in this story is a non-human entity: a river. And yet, I decided to treat the Ganges as a human being, and create a series that flowed as if I was documenting the life of a person. Indeed, the Ganges recently became the first non-human entity in India to be granted the same legal rights as the country’s people.

Throughout the course of this project, I traveled the entire length of the Ganges. For more than eight years, I documented the lives of the people who live along the river, witnessing firsthand the devastating effects of climate change, industrialization, and urbanization. In Hindu mythology, the Ganges is considered a “Tirtha,” which means a crossing point between heaven and earth. My fear is this bridge may crumble in our lifetime.

—Giulio Di Sturco

México 1933, Paul Strand

Paul Strand, photographer whose work influenced the emphasis on sharp-focused, objective images in 20th-century American photography.

When he was 17 years old, Strand began to study photography with Lewis W. Hine, who was later noted for his photographs of industrial workers and immigrants. At Hine’s urging, Strand began to frequent “291,” the gallery begun by Alfred Stieglitz, the leader of the Photo-Secession group. There, Strand met Stieglitz and was exposed to the avant-garde paintings of Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, and Georges Braque that were on display in the gallery. These works inspired him to emphasize abstract form and pattern in his photographs, such as Shadow Pattern, New York and Wall Street (both 1915). In one of the boldest photographs of the period, White Fence (1916), Strand deliberately destroyed perspective to build a powerful composition from tonal planes and rhythmic pattern.

Strand rejected the then-popular style of Pictorialism, which emulated the effects of painting in photographs by manipulating negatives and prints, in favour of achieving the minute detail and rich, subtle tonal range afforded by the use of large-format cameras. He relied on strictly photographic methods, realizing that the camera’s objectivity is at once its limitation and its chief asset. The purity and directness of Strand’s depictions of natural forms and architecture presaged the work of other American photographers who sought to express abstract formal values through the unadorned photographic image. Strand’s objective photographs of urban subjects were published by Stieglitz in the last two issues of his influential magazine Camera Work and were given a show at “291.” Much of the work in that show featured everyday objects, such as bowls and furniture, which were sharply lit and shot at such close range that they verge on seeming abstract.

After serving in World War I, Strand collaborated with the painter and photographer Charles Sheeler on the documentary film Mannahatta. While working as a freelance movie cameraman, he devoted his free time to still photography, capturing the beauty of natural forms through dramatic close-ups in Colorado (1926) and Maine (1927–28). In his photographs of the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec (1929) and of New Mexico (1930), he achieved a new understanding of landscape, revealing a deep awareness of what he called “the spirit of place.”

In the 1930s, Strand became increasingly concerned with addressing social issues, and so he switched his focus from photography to motion pictures as a means to reach a greater audience and to tell a clearer story. Appointed chief photographer and cinematographer by the Mexican government in 1933, he made the motion picture Redes (“The Wave”) about Mexican fishermen. He returned to the United States and worked as a cameraman for the director Pare Lorentz on the government-sponsored documentary film The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936). In 1937 Strand formed Frontier Films to make documentaries with social and political content. Of the nonprofit company’s seven films, Strand photographed only Native Land (1942).

After World War II, unhappy with the political situation in the United States, Strand moved to France and worked throughout Europe. From then on, much of his work focused on issues of community life. In his later years he produced a number of photographic books in which he could mimic the effects of film by laying out a narrative sequence of images, often accompanied by text.

Christian Lamontagne

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François Kollar

Francois Kollar (1904-1979) was born in Hungary. In 1923 he moved to Paris, where he worked as a studio manager for the printing company Draeger. At 24 he became a professional photographer, setting up his own studio in 1930. Kollar employed many of the new vision photographic techniques and found commercial work with several fashion magazines, as well as advertising agencies. Throughout his photographic career, he was drawn to industrial subjects. Kollar often photographed people in their roles in the production process; likely, he was influenced by his first jobs working on the railways and as a lathe operator in a car factory.

Mario Tursi

Mario Tursi was born in Rome on 9th August 1929 from a family of photographer; his father was a photoengraver and his mother a photographer and manager of photographic labs.

Since an early age he began to use the camera. In the years 1943-44 he made his professional apprenticeship working as “street photographer” for Studio Lombardini.Soon after the Liberation he was hired by Felice Giordani, official Vatican photographer, for whom he worked for a couple of years, until 1948 when he started as photo reporter for agency VEDO (Visioni Editoriali Diffuse Ovunque), the most important Italian agency at the time, run by Adolfo Porry Pastotel. He began to work also for the Associated Press and made several reportages around the world.

In 1956 he took over the agency VEDO and became the manager. During that time he started to go on film sets for some specials. Within years, his visits on film sets from irregular became more and more frequent, extended also to international productions. In 1962, with Mare matto directed by Renato Castellani, he debuted as still photographer, followed by, two years later, Let’s Talk About Men by Lina Wertmuller.

Closed down the agency VEDO in 1965, he definitely focused on cinema photography beginning, among other things, working with Visconti, who wanted him on the set of all his latest films.

Since then he has worked with mainly all of the major Italian directors from Pasolini to Petri, from Rosi to Lattuada to Scola. He worked a lot also with younger directors such as Giuseppe Bertolucci, Massimo Troisi and Roberto Benigni. Often he was asked to work abroad as recorded by the films The name of the Rose by Annaud, Pirates by Polanski, The Last Temptation of Christ by Scorsese and The Horseman on the Roof by Rappeneau.

In 1979 he received a special mention for the still photographs taken for Stay as You Are during the 8th edition of “The Hollywood Reporter” Key Art Awards and, in 1989, he won in Cannes the Grand Prix of Cinema Photography for the shots on The Last Temptation of Christ. In recent years he followed the making of Kundun by Scorsese, Dangerous Beauty by Herskovits, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Hoffman, Titus by Taymor and U-571 by Mostow. His last work was on the set of Gangs of New York by Martin Scorsese, film he recorded entirely.

Considered among the greatest still photographers of Italian cinema, Mario Tursi died in Roma on 1st September 2008.