Masters of photography
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Photographer Lemvo Jean Abou Bakar Depara captured the life of beautiful young people living in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s during the 1950’s-70’s, a time when fashion, music, clubs and night-life was greatly influenced by Europe and the West.
Depara purchased his first video camera to record his wedding in 1950; four years later, he was made official photographer to the Zairian singer Franco. In 1975 he became official photographer to the National Assembly of Democratic Republic of Congo. He also took many photographs of the social scene of Kinshasa. He opened his studio, Jean Whisky Depara, in Kinshasa. He worked there until 1956 making portraits, family photographs and pictures of celebrations. In that time Kinshasa was a center for music where rumba and cha-cha were played the whole night. Many people from West Africa came there to spend the night in the clubs and cafes.
Depara mixed with the public as a photographer. He was famous for his love for women, whom he tried to seduce camera in hand. At his death in 1997 he left a large archive of untitled negatives; many of these have been reprinted and titled for sale since his death.
Aart Klein’s career as a photographer began in 1930 with the photo press agency Polygoon. Although he was working there initially as an office clerk, he also started doing some photography himself. During his nine years at Polygoon’s, Aart Klein grew into one of the agency’s foremost photographers. Unfortunately, the negatives of the photographs he made in that period have been lost. During the German occupation, Aart Klein held a number of small jobs as a photographer. In 1943, he was forced to do labour in Germany, where he continued working as a photographer. After a year, he obtained leave, and when he got back to the Netherlands he went into hiding. During the last year of the German occupation, Aart Klein worked for the resistance and his photographs were passed on to England.
After Holland’s liberation in 1945, he set up the photographers’ cooperative agency Particam with Maria Austria, Henk Jonker and Wim Zilver Rupe . The agency specialized in ballet, theatre and cabaret, and owed its monopoly in the field partly to the method Aart Klein and Maria Austria had developed to increase the sensitivity of slow films, so that there was no more need to use a flash during performances.
In 1956, Aart Klein left Particam and set up as freelance photographer. From that time on, he worked regularly for the quality paper Algemeen Handelsblad and was commissioned to produce a great number of photography books.
Infrastructure, urbanization, water and landscape are the thread that runs through Aart Klein’s whole oeuvre. In 1999, he explained the fascination these subjects held for him: ‘I really grew up with the idea of ‘the Netherlands rising’. Industry, the Delta Works and ports are subjects that strongly appeal to me.’ In contrast to many other photographers of his generation, people play a minor part in Aart Klein’s work and he developed his own vision on landscape photography.
He once said: ‘My photography is called black-and-white photography, but in fact it is just the other way round: white on black. Because if you don’t do anything, you get a black image. It’s only when you open the shutter that something happens: then you draw in white.’ The strong black-white contrasts originate from the period when Aart Klein participated in the cooperative photographer’s agency. Together with Maria Austria he devised a method of taking photographs in a theatre without having to use a flash. The negatives were ‘pushed’ in a well heated developer to achieve strong black-and-white contrasts. A major part of the artistic process took place while printing the negatives. In the dark room, Aart Klein determined quite precisely how he wished an image to be cropped.
The way he worked was often characterized as graphic; he thought this to be ‘a rather superficial characterization that ignored the content’. Just as many other socially committed photographers, Aart Klein was a member of the photography branch of the Gebonden Kunsten federatie GKf (Bound Arts Federation) and was a co-founder of the Nederlandse Vereniging van Fotojournalisten (Dutch Association of Press Photographers). Although his work has been associated with ‘subjective photography’, that trend is more a confirmation of what he was already doing than a source of inspiration. He never joined the more aesthetically oriented Nederlandse Fotografen Kunstkring (Dutch Photographers Art Society).
In 1986, the Museum for Modern Art De Beyerd in Breda organized a retrospective. On that occasion, a boxed set containing two portfolios with unknown work by Aart Klein made its appearance. In 1982, Aart Klein received the Capi-Lux Alblas Prize and in 1996, the Fonds voor Beeldende Kunsten, Vormgeving en Bouwkunst (Foundation for the Visual Arts, Design and Architecture) awarded him the photography prize for his entire oeuvre.
Albert Kahn (3 March 1860 – 14 November 1940) was a French banker and philanthropist, known for initiating The Archives of the Planet, a vast photographical project. Spanning 22 years, it resulted in a collection of 72,000 colour photographs and 183,000 meters of film.
In 1909, Kahn travelled with his chauffeur and photographer, Alfred Dutertre, to Japan on business and returned with many photographs of the journey. This prompted him to begin a project collecting a photographic record of the entire Earth. He appointed Jean Brunhes as the project director, and sent photographers to every continent to record images of the planet using the first practical medium for colour photography, Autochrome plates, and early cinematography. Between 1909 and 1931 they collected 72,000 colour photographs and 183,000 meters of film. These form a unique historical record of 50 countries, known as The Archives of the Planet.
Kahn’s photographers began documenting France in 1914, just days before the outbreak of World War I, and by liaising with the military managed to record both the devastation of war and the struggle to continue everyday life and agricultural work.
Pierre Edouard Leopold Verger (1902-1996) was a French photographer, ethnologist, anthropologist and researcher who lived most of his life in the city of Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia, in Brazil. Verger developed a photographic work of great importance, based on everyday life and the popular culture of five continents. Verger also wrote several reference texts on the Afro-Bahian culture and the Diaspora, focusing his research work on the study of the religious aspects of Candomblé, an issue that becomes his main interest point.
Verger is born in Paris on November 4 th 1902. From a middle-class upbringing, until his thirties Pierre Verger leads a rather conventional lifestyle, corresponding to his social condition, even if he intimately disagrees with those class values. The year 1932 marks a turning point: he learns photography from his friend Pierre Boucher and discovers his passion for travel. Verger buys his first Rolleiflex camera, and after the death of his mother decides to realise his deepest desire: to become a lonesome traveller. Since the death of his father and two brothers, Verger’s mother had been his sole remaining parent, who he did not want to hurt in choosing an anticonformism and roving lifestyle.
Between December 1932 and August 1946, Pierre Verger travels around the world, making a living exclusively from his photographic art. Negot iating his negatives with newspapers, photo agencies and research institutions, Verger takes pictures for various companies and even exchanges his services for travel tickets. Paris becomes his base, where he receives his friends – including Jacques Prévert’s party and the ethnologists from the Ethnographic Museum in Trocadero square – while making contacts for new trips. He has his work published in the best magazines of the time, but as stardom is not his aim, Verger is always on the brink of a new departure: “The sensation that there was a wide world out there didn’t leave me, and the longing to see it took me towards new horizons”.
Allison Joyce is a Boston born photojournalist based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. At the age of 19 she left school at Pratt Institute and moved to Iowa to cover the 2008 Presidential Race where she worked as a campaign photographer for Hillary Clinton. The experience inspired her travels around the world covering social issues.
As a regular contributor to Reuters and Getty Images her work has appeared worldwide, including: The New York Times, National Geographic, Mother Jones, Virginia Quarterly Review, TIME, Paris Match and Newsweek. Other clients have included Microsoft, Apple, FX and Action Aid. Her work has been honored by POYI (Pictures of the Year International) and the NYPPA (New York Press Photographers
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).
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.
The assignments that excite me the most are humanitarian pieces and stories related to people’s struggle for their citizenship and human rights against those who want to dominate them.
My life, said Karlheinz Weinberger in a 2000 interview on the occasion of his first major exhibition at the Museum of Design Zurich, started Friday evenings and ended Monday mornings. During the week, he was employed as a warehouse manager at the Siemens factory in Oerlikon, where he worked from 1955 until his retirement in 1986. He lived his whole life in the same apartment building. He moved only once, after the death of his mother, and then only from the second to the fourth floor.
Only with the aid of his camera, which he focused on the unusual, was he able to break free from the day-to-day monotony. He even had “Fotograf für das Ungewöhnliche” [Photographer of the Unusual] printed on his business card.
He made his first foray into photography as a high school student, with a so-called “Fünfliber-Kamera,” a small Agfa box camera that cost five Francs.
His subject was always man and his body: He openly photographed the shirtless workingmen in Zürich and, later, Southern Europe. Many of these photographs of young men were published under the pseudonym Jim in the international homophile magazine “Der Kreis [The Circle].”
In 1958, Karlheinz Weinberger discovered the ultimate “unusuals” in the Halbstarken, a group of young people that opposed assimilation and rebelled against the mainstream. They wore jeans, called “Bluejeans” then in Switzerland, rare for the time, which they embellished with studs, giant belt buckles and patches. They idolized Elvis Presley and James Dean and the clique became their universe. The Halbstarken, litterally the half-strong, established Switzerland’s first underground youth culture.
Karlheinz Weinberger photographed the Halbstarken with a Rolleiflex 2.8. In his apartment on the Elisabethenstraße, the kids could meet and listen to loud music. This astounding series, made in the years 1958 and 1963, is a collection of extraordinary portraits of the rebel youth in a post-war Switzerland in full economic expansion.
When the Halbstark movement broke apart, some of kids became bikers and formed motorcycle clubs. Karlheinz Weinberger followed them to their camps; he was invited to take part in club nights, rocker weddings, and even funerals.
These dropouts also found a retreat in Karlheinz Weinberger’s apartment, a refuge where no police, girlfriends, or gang members followed. There they could drink and smoke in freedom.
He also entertained in his apartment, in often-weekly sessions, certain men who he photographed over the years. The resulting series of photographs recall extraordinary rituals. In borderline mystic rites, men pulled out and masturbated while Karlheinz Weinberger endlessly photographed them.
These series of thousands of slides and color negatives, produced from the time of his retirement until his death in 2006, are especially intense. These near ritualistic sessions have a spiritual power that portray the pleasure, suffering, and aging of the male physique.
Most publications and exhibitions of Karlheinz Weinberger have heretofore primarily focused on the Halbstarken and Bikers. Thanks to meticulous recent archival work by the Estate, previously unknown works are now going to find an audience. In particular, early works as well as a selection from his final intense creative phase will be presented publicly here for the first time.
Esther Woerdehoff
The focus of this body of work is on the Middle East, on women and children especially. Lebanon in particular is interesting to me because of its key location between the West and the Arab world, witnessing a blend of Western and Arab cultures, of Christianity and Islam, of tradition and modernity all coexisting side by side.
The images shown here are a selection from four interrelated bodies of work: The Aftermath of War a photographic essay of life in Lebanon after the numerous wars the country has gone through, The Veil: Modesty, Fashion, Devotion or Statement studying the recent spread of the veil and its meanings among Muslim women in Lebanon, The Forgotten People representing life in the Palestinian refugee camps and The Arab Christians an often underrepresented and forgotten minority in the Arab World, but a minority with strong traditions and roots. These images do not have the intention of representing Lebanon as a country, a country with more facets than I can begin to describe, or to be political in any way, but to primarily focus on ordinary people going on with their daily lives in this complicated part of the world.
Throughout my work in Lebanon, be it after the war, in the refugee camps, in the suburbs of Beirut or in Southern Lebanon, I was welcome in people’s homes and I was humbled by people’s resilience, kindness and hospitality. As such, in these photos I focus mainly on the people who did not lose their humanity and their dignity despite what they have been and were still going through. I avoided the obvious images of grief and calamity, preferring to set my focus on the indomitable ability of the human spirit to continue with the minutiae of life – from the joyful to the mundane – even amid the most difficult of circumstance.
Pieter Hugo is a photographic artist living in Cape Town. Major museum solo exhibitions have taken place at The Hague Museum of Photography, Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Ludwig Museum in Budapest, Fotografiska in Stockholm, MAXXI in Rome and the Institute of Modern Art Brisbane, among others. Hugo has participated in numerous group exhibitions at institutions including Tate Modern, the Folkwang Museum, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, and the São Paulo Bienal. His work is represented in prominent public and private collections, among them the Museum of Modern Art, V&A Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, J Paul Getty Museum, Walther Collection, Deutsche Börse Group, Folkwang Museum and Huis Marseille. Hugo received the Discovery Award at the Rencontres d’Arles Festival and the KLM Paul Huf Award in 2008, the Seydou Keita Award at the Rencontres de Bamako African Photography Biennial in 2011, and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2012.
Valerio Bispuri was born in Rome in 1971 and after graduating in Literature he decided to devote his attention to photography. Professional reporter since 2001 he collaborates with numerous Italian and international magazines, among which L’Espresso, Il Venerdì, Internazionale, Le Monde, Stern. He has carried out reportages in Africa, Asia, Middle East, but it is in Latin America that Valerio worked the longest and has lived in Buenos Aires for more than a decade.
He has worked on “Encerrados” for 10 years, a long term photographic project on the life conditions in 74 prisons across all the countries in the South American continent, describing with an anthropological and journalistic approach, the inmates’ reality. This work has been exhibited at Visa pour l’Image in Perpignan, at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, at the University of Geneva, at the Browse Festival in Berlin and, in October 2014, at the Bronx Documentary Center of New York.
In November 2014 “Encerrados” became a book edited by Contrasto.
In 2015 Valerio finished another important photographic project that lasted for 8 years, denouncing the diffusion and the effects of a new low-cost drug called “Paco” that is killing an entire generation of youths in the suburbs of South American large cities. The work on “Paco” has been exhibited in Rome, Milan and Istanbul (catalogue published by International Green Cross).
