Sunday, July 29, 2007
National Foundation for India
NFI announces its 13th National Media Fellowships Programme..see the link above...and apply..GOOD LUCK TO ALL INDIAN PHOTOJOURNALISTS....KP
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
CASTING A SPELL..a journey of my friend, roomate and a collegemate
VIJAY GEORGE (The Hindu)
Sunil Babu mesmerises viewers with his ability to create reel sets that make his films a real experience for cine buffs.
A scene from `Ghajini.'
The wizard Digambaran makes his way into the manthrikappura. He is in the process of transmigration. The tall pillars, ponds and a huge ennathoni add to the mysterious ambience. As Santosh Sivan's camera creates magic, Sunil Babu watches the action on a monitor with a satisfied smile.
Rave reviews
Sunil, art director of `Ananthabhadram,' has reason to smile. His work in the film has been receiving rave reviews. Sunil, who began his career as an assistant to art director Sabu Cyril, has blossomed into one of the best art directors in South India, with films such as `Lakshya,' `Iqbal,' `Ghajini,' `Durgi' and `The Police' to his credit. However, it was the settings of `Ananthabhadram' that has made viewers in Kerala notice his creativity, which, perhaps, films with bigger budgets did not fetch for him.
The shadowy manthrikappura and the song sequences wherein some of Raja Ravi Varma's paintings were recreated on celluloid by Kavya Madhavan and Prithviraj mesmerise viewers with their attention to detail and superb lighting effects.
It was his fascination for painting that took Sunil from Changanasherry to the Chamarajendra Academy of Visual Arts in Mysore where he completed his graduation in fine arts. "I had seen these huge portraits in my mother's house and had fallen in love with colours as a child. Perhaps, a colour box that my uncle gave me was the most treasured gift during my childhood," he recalls.
Soon after his graduation, he met Suresh Balaji who introduced him to Sabu Cyril. He started assisting him for the Miss World pageant in 1996 and then for a number of films, which includes `Major Saab,' `Hey Ram,' `Kannathil Muthamittal,'
`Kilichundan Mambazham,' `Lesa Lesa' and `Main Hoon Na.'
Sunil is grateful to Sabu for "giving me the confidence, as I needed it badly especially during those years when I was a beginner. He is never hesitant to give you more responsibilities and is an amazing person to work with."
Sunil became an independent art director with Rajesh Touch River's `In the name of Buddha.'
And soon he was working with directors in Bollywood. How was it working with Farhan Akhtar in `Lakshya'? "He is very focussed and very strict on the sets. We had recreated Ladakh inside Film City for the film," he says.
Recounting his experience with directors he has worked with he adds, "In `The Police,' directed by V.K. Prakash, with whom I have done numerous ad films, the whole unit was like a big family."
Perhaps, this gifted artist treats each film like a canvas that he fills in with colours, shades and tones. Each film is a challenge as he tries to meet the director's requirements.
DREAM MERCHANT: Sunil Babu:
"For instance, `Ghajini' would have been a challenge for any art director as it had shots that showed the flat where Surya lives, which was created for the movie," he says.
In Nagesh Kukunoor's recent hit `Iqbal,' "everything had to look realistic. I made around six to seven cricket pitches for the film." Sunil believes that an imaginative cinematographer is essential to make the best of an art director's craft.
"I feel lucky to have worked with the best in the business so early in my life," he says.
Budgets not a constraint:
He dispels the notion that only big budget films can afford sumptuous sets that are a visual treat for cine buffs.
Though Malayalam films have much smaller budgets when compared to films in Hindi and Tamil, he emphasises that huge sums of money are not mandatory for making a good film.
"It's the story and the way it is narrated that is more important than the budget. Although the opulence is less in Malayalam films when compared to other languages, we do make quality films here."
Now, he is getting ready for Santosh Sivan's next film, a story set in the 1930s, which is being made in English.
Is he planning to become a director himself?
"It's a dream and I hope it becomes a reality soon."
Sunil Babu mesmerises viewers with his ability to create reel sets that make his films a real experience for cine buffs.
A scene from `Ghajini.'
The wizard Digambaran makes his way into the manthrikappura. He is in the process of transmigration. The tall pillars, ponds and a huge ennathoni add to the mysterious ambience. As Santosh Sivan's camera creates magic, Sunil Babu watches the action on a monitor with a satisfied smile.
Rave reviews
Sunil, art director of `Ananthabhadram,' has reason to smile. His work in the film has been receiving rave reviews. Sunil, who began his career as an assistant to art director Sabu Cyril, has blossomed into one of the best art directors in South India, with films such as `Lakshya,' `Iqbal,' `Ghajini,' `Durgi' and `The Police' to his credit. However, it was the settings of `Ananthabhadram' that has made viewers in Kerala notice his creativity, which, perhaps, films with bigger budgets did not fetch for him.
The shadowy manthrikappura and the song sequences wherein some of Raja Ravi Varma's paintings were recreated on celluloid by Kavya Madhavan and Prithviraj mesmerise viewers with their attention to detail and superb lighting effects.
It was his fascination for painting that took Sunil from Changanasherry to the Chamarajendra Academy of Visual Arts in Mysore where he completed his graduation in fine arts. "I had seen these huge portraits in my mother's house and had fallen in love with colours as a child. Perhaps, a colour box that my uncle gave me was the most treasured gift during my childhood," he recalls.
Soon after his graduation, he met Suresh Balaji who introduced him to Sabu Cyril. He started assisting him for the Miss World pageant in 1996 and then for a number of films, which includes `Major Saab,' `Hey Ram,' `Kannathil Muthamittal,'
`Kilichundan Mambazham,' `Lesa Lesa' and `Main Hoon Na.'
Sunil is grateful to Sabu for "giving me the confidence, as I needed it badly especially during those years when I was a beginner. He is never hesitant to give you more responsibilities and is an amazing person to work with."
Sunil became an independent art director with Rajesh Touch River's `In the name of Buddha.'
And soon he was working with directors in Bollywood. How was it working with Farhan Akhtar in `Lakshya'? "He is very focussed and very strict on the sets. We had recreated Ladakh inside Film City for the film," he says.
Recounting his experience with directors he has worked with he adds, "In `The Police,' directed by V.K. Prakash, with whom I have done numerous ad films, the whole unit was like a big family."
Perhaps, this gifted artist treats each film like a canvas that he fills in with colours, shades and tones. Each film is a challenge as he tries to meet the director's requirements.
DREAM MERCHANT: Sunil Babu:
"For instance, `Ghajini' would have been a challenge for any art director as it had shots that showed the flat where Surya lives, which was created for the movie," he says.
In Nagesh Kukunoor's recent hit `Iqbal,' "everything had to look realistic. I made around six to seven cricket pitches for the film." Sunil believes that an imaginative cinematographer is essential to make the best of an art director's craft.
"I feel lucky to have worked with the best in the business so early in my life," he says.
Budgets not a constraint:
He dispels the notion that only big budget films can afford sumptuous sets that are a visual treat for cine buffs.
Though Malayalam films have much smaller budgets when compared to films in Hindi and Tamil, he emphasises that huge sums of money are not mandatory for making a good film.
"It's the story and the way it is narrated that is more important than the budget. Although the opulence is less in Malayalam films when compared to other languages, we do make quality films here."
Now, he is getting ready for Santosh Sivan's next film, a story set in the 1930s, which is being made in English.
Is he planning to become a director himself?
"It's a dream and I hope it becomes a reality soon."
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
personalities
Radio jockey Asef in his studio. Dubai. (C) AMG photography: kiran prasad & art design by nikhil asok
Monday, June 18, 2007
the angkor photography festival-november 18-28, 2007, siem reap, cambodia
It is never late to know who is who...cheers..kp
participants
Antoine d'Agata
http://www.magnumphotos.com
Antoine d'Agata is a member of Magnum Agency. He studied photography at the ICP in New York in 1990 under Larry Clark and Nan Goldin. An adventurous spirit in search of himself and always on the lookout for new adventures, Antoine d'Agata invites us on a journey. He does not try to illustrate the world but rather shows how he fits into it. The lyricism of the presentation and the exaggeration of the situations force us to question the reality of what we see. His first book, "Mala Noche", was published in 1998, followed by Hometown in 2001, the year he received the Niepce Prize. "Vortex" and "Insomnia" were published in 2003, and Stigm in 2005.
Achinto Bhadro
achinto@vsnl.com
Achinto Bhadro was born in 1959 prior to taking up photography as a profession, lived, worked and managed the Crafts Centre at Asha Niketan L arche International a community for the mentally challenged. He studied photography at Chitra Bani, Calcutta and at the London College of Printing on receiving the Charles Wallace Award. Over the years as an independent photographer his interest and assignments from National and International Development Agencies led him to cover issues of the Urban poor, children and women, and he contributed in many exhibits and books, in India, U.K., France, South East Asia.
Jan Banning
banning@solcon.nl
Jan Banning was born is 1954 in the Netherlands. He studied history and has been a photographer since 1981, concentrating on self-initiated projects, such as The Office and Aftermath of Wars. He has received many journalistic and cultural awards, among them a 2004 World Press Photo Award. His photo books are Vietnam: Doi Moi (1993), Traces of War and Survivors of the Burma and Sumatra Railways (2005). Banning s photographs have been published in Newsweek, Foreign Policy, Sunday Times Magazine, Le Monde 2 and NRC Handelsblad M. His work was exhibited at the Noorderlicht Festival (Groningen/Leeuwarden), the Kunsthal (Rotterdam), the Dorsky Gallery (New York), the Erasmushuis (Jakarta) and others and shown at Visa pour l Image (Perpignan). His photos have been purchased by the Ministry of Justice (Holland), the Open Society Archives (Hungary) and private collections.
Pablo Bartholomew
http://www.lightstalkers.org/pablobartholomew
Pablo Bartholomew is based in New Delhi, India. He divides time between photography, running long term photography workshops, and managing a software company that specializes in photo databases solutions and server based digital archiving systems. Between 2001 and 2003 ran photography workshop for emerging photographers in India with the support of the World Press Photo Foundation in Amsterdam. Pablo has also photographed societies in transition in different locations. He won the World Press Photo award for his series Morphine Addicts in India (1975) and the World Press Picture of the Year for the Bhopal Gas Tragedy (1985). He has taken part in several international exhibitions and published in Newsweek, Time, National Geographic and Geo amongst other prestigious magazines.
Françoise Callier
frcallier@wanadoo.fr
Françoise Callier was born in Belgium and moved to Paris in 1983. She worked for fifteen years with 2eBureau, a press and public relations office, agenting photographers like Helmut Newton and Jean-Paul Goude. She worked for seven years for the Photojournalism Festival Visa pour l Image in Perpignan France. French correspondent for Corbis for three years, she also did volunteer work with disabled children and at a children s hospital. Currently helping the Kogi Indians to recoup parts of their ancestral lands in Colombia, Françoise Callier is an avid traveller who has visited Antarctica and wrote stories about a mischievous king penguin girl called Lila. Her books Silly Lila, Lila on Ice, Lila in Africa and ABC in the Wild are for sale on Amazon.com
Thierry Chantegret
http://www.agence37.com
Thierry Chantegret, photojournalist, explores the relationship between cities and their inhabitants. He has worked in various countries such as India and Argentina, but more recently in a small French town, Charleville Mezieres, where the Poet Arthur Rimbaud was born and raised. The Ardennes Museum commissioned him to help commemorate the town's 400th birthday, and allowed him to work in the poet s house. Thierry now plans to settle in Charleville Mezieres, which has been severely affected by unemployment. In addition to developing his personal artistic creations, he also organises educational workshops with schools and welfare centers.
Greg Constantine
http://www.gregconstantine.com
Greg Constantine was born in the United States. Since 2003, he has worked on stories about: North Korean refugees; life in modern-day Tokyo; struggling communities on the US Mexico border, and the lives of paroled women in Watts, Los Angeles. His photographs have been featured in several international publications and have been utilized by Refugees International, Human Rights Watch and Medecins Sans Frontieres. His work has been exhibited in South Korea, Los Angeles, Washington, DC and Pittsburgh. His recent, on going project, Nowhere People, documents the effects statelessness has on minority groups in Asia. Photographs from this project have been nominated for UNICEF Photo of the Year and will also be exhibited in Bangladesh at the international photography festival, Chobi Mela IV.
Thomas De Cian
http://www.lightstalkers.org/thomasdecian
Thomas De Cian was born in Italy in 1978. He studied journalism in Australia and has been a freelance photojournalist since 2001. After graduating, his passion for photography brought him to Southeast Asia and he is been living in the region since 2002 His black and white reportages focus on social and political issues throughout Asia and want to show the sheer humanity that can lie behind even the most unusual an desperate situations. It is in these very situations that the strength and the instinct of survival come out, by contrast men reveal their most human side and can even find the time for a moment of happiness. Thomas is currently based in Bangkok, Thailand.
Christine Cibert
chcibert@aol.com
Christine Cibert is a French art curator and a free-lance journalist. She majored in Japanese language and culture and in Art History studies at Paris University. Afterwards, she moved to Tokyo where she has been living and working for more than ten years, as an art dealer and a curator, organizing cultural events, exhibitions for painters and photographers into art galleries, cultural centers and museums in Japan and in France. She also has been writing on art, cultural and social subjects for French and Japanese newspapers and magazines : France-Japon Eco, Agence France Presse, Jipango, Wasabi, Les Voix, Cambodge Soir, Kateigaho International Edition, L'Art Aujourd'hui, Univers des Arts, Cahiers d'art and France Culture Radio. Since several years, she also has developed her activities to South-East Asia (Cambodia, Vietnam).
Olivier Culmann
http://www.tendancefloue.net
Olivier Culmann, member of Tendance Floue, photographer's collective, photographs people watching TV. And their TV sets. The viewers' eyes are glued to the screen, hypnotized by the images that flicker by. Olivier Culmann captures that instant during which attention subsides and consciousness slumbers, rocked to sleep by the phosphorescence of the cathode ray tubes. At that instant, their bodies often become comfortable, they curl up on the couch and then collapse. Nothing could be more banal. And nothing more unsettling. Because that is how, in quasi immobile passivity, when the brain has gone numb, that we, television viewers receive the world in its entirety. Not the real world, but an image of that world, a ghostly version of reality.
Binh Danh
sunleafprints@yahoo.com
Binh Danh received a MFA degree in Studio Art from Stanford University and a BFA in Photography from San Jose State University. He invented a unique process for printing photographs onto the surface of leaves by exploiting the natural process of photosynthesis. Combining the diverse disciplines of art, history, and science, Danh extensively researches the subject matter he is drawn too. He is a recipient of a 2004 Artist Project Award from the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, CA and his work is in the collection of de Young Museum, the Corcoran Art Gallery, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Oakland Museum of California. He is represented by Haines Gallery in San Francisco.
James W. Delano
http://www.jameswhitlowdelano.com
James W. Delano is a romantic. His duotone photographs evince a poet's eye - dreamy, impressionistic, subtle, often melancholic. His photographs portray the ironies and contradictions of 20th-century Asia. The duotone prints themselves contribute to the sense of timelessness. Describing his working method, James says: "I must pass by quickly and quietly in order to capture the 'out of the corner of my eye' immediacy that I seek before I disturb the scene."
Agnes Dherbeys
http://www.evephotographers.com/
Agnes Dherbeys is a French photographer distributed by French Cosmos Agency and a founder member of EVE. She graduated with honours from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques of Lyon and from a Master 2 of Sciences of Information and Communication from Celsa, Sorbonne IV. She learned photography when she moved to Bangkok in 2001, and has since mainly worked in Nepal, East Timor, Cambodia and Thailand, with parentheses in Palestinian Territories. Her work has been published in Newsweek, Le Monde 2, Liberation, the South China Morning Post Magazine, Marie Claire, Days Magazine. She was winner of the Foundation Lagardere grant 2005, for her project in East Timor, titled: “From Independence to Dependence.”
Stephen Dupont
stephendupont@bigpond.com
Stephen Dupont is an international award winning Australian photojournalist and a member of Contact Press Images. His reportages has been featured in The New Yorker, Newsweek, French and German GEO, Liberation, The Sunday Times Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and Time, and has earned him photography's most prestigious prizes, including a Robert Capa Gold Medal citation from the Overseas Press Club of America in 2006, and first places in the World Press Photo and Pictures of the Year International. Having exhibited his work in London, Paris, New York, Sydney, Tokyo, Shanghai, and at Perpignan's Visa Pour L'Image, in 1999 Dupont was a founding member of the first festival of photojournalism in Australia: REPORTAGE-A. He works on long term projects around war, conflict and social issues.
Hosoe Eikoh
Hosoe Eikoh, Freelance photographer, Professor Emeritus at Tokyo Institute of Polytechnic, Director of Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts. Also currently serves as vice chair of Japan Professional Photographers Society and Japan Society for Arts and History of Photography. Born in 1933, after studying at the Tokyo College of Photography, Hosoe gained recognition with Barakei (Ordeal by Roses), a 1963 collection of portraits of novelist Yukio Mishima, and was awarded the Minister of Education's Arts Encouragement Prize in 1970 for Kamaitachi, a photo essay on Tatsumi Hijikata, founder of the Butoh Dance movement. In addition to his numerous publications and his works kept in many Art Collections, he also participated to many Individual and Selected Group Exhibitions in Japan and all over the world. As a photographer of international renown, he has also contributed to the internationalization of Asian photography. Hosoe was awarded the Medal with Purple Ribbon of Japan in 1998 and the 150th Special Anniversary Medal of the Royal Photographic Society in 2003.
Brendan Esposito
http://www.smh.com.au/ftimages/2005/10/05/1128191773885.html
Brendan Esposito has been a press photographer for almost 20 years. He works for The Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Telegraph, and is a stringer for AFP and Reuters. His assignments have included royal, papal and presidential tours. Esposito's extensive photography of the last remaining circuses in Australia was exhibited at the NSW Library. His last assignment, on street children addicted to glue sniffing in Siem Reap, has been exhibited at the inaugural festival. He is a new talent discovered during VII's workshop in February 2005.
Claude Estebe
Claude Estebe is a photo-historian. He published Les Derniers samouraïs and Le Crépuscule des geishas. He is currently working on a book about the dawn of japanese photography from his phd thesis. His photographic works questions the "cultural body" : mannequins (Perfect skin, 1994) , dancers (with Matoma and Susan Buirge)… His last work, Eloge des jambes, begun during a residence at Villa Kujoyama in 2000, completes an exhibition at Gallery U in Tokyo from 2003. This is gaze between sociology and voyeurism about japanese attitudes that seem a "cultural invariant". In a country of fast moving fashion, uchimata gait remains unchanged since centuries…
Thierry Falise
http://www.thierryfalise.com
Thierry Falise is a Belgian photojournalist based in Bangkok since 1991. He is a regular contributor (text and photos) to magazines and dailies such as L'Express, Le Point, Paris-Match, Le Figaro Magazine, Marie France, VSD, Grands Reportages, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Sunday Times and many more. In 2003, with a French colleague, he was arrested during a forbidden trip to the Laos jungle where he had met members of the abandoned Hmong community, once allies of the CIA during the Indochina war. Both reporters were sentenced to 15 years in prison but, thanks to a vast international solidarity campaign, were released after five weeks.
Philip Jones Griffiths
http://www.magnumphotos.com/cf/htm/TreePf_MAG.aspx?Stat=Photographers_Portfolio&E=29YL53IRGC5
Philip Jones Griffiths photographed in Vietnam from 1966 to 1970 and became famous for his book on the war, Vietnam Inc. Out of print in a few weeks, Vietnam Inc. crystallized public opinion and was essential in shaping Western misgivings about the US involvement in Vietnam and ultimately helping to bring the war to an end. Jones Griffiths, one of the very few photographers with his own agenda, was able to concentrate on conditions behind the headlines, and Vietnam Inc. is also a documentary study of Vietnamese folk life. In 1980, Griffiths moved to New York to assume the presidency of Magnum, a post which he held for a record five years.
Katharina Hessesettled
http://www.digitalrailroad.net/kathchina
Katharina Hessesettled down in Beijing in the mid-1990s after finishing a graduate degree in Chinese studies at Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (I.N.A.L.C.O) in Paris. She initially worked as an assistant for German TV (ZDF) and then freelanced for Newsweek from 1996 to 2002, where she did both reporting and photography. In 2003 and 2004 Hesse covered China for Getty's news service. She is self-taught in photography, albeit with a temporary apprenticeship under Peter Turnley. Currently she is an accredited photographer based in Beijing.
Claudio Hils
http://www.claudio-hils.com
Claudio Hils is a photographer, curator and communication designer. He has published numerous books on photography and the history of photography. His own photographic and artistical work is located at the thin line between artistical studies and social and political landscapes So he published the project RED LAND, BLUE LAND about the history of war. Furtheron he realised the project ARCHIVE_BELFAST which explores contemporary approaches to history, informed by ideas of identity and cultural inheritance, which increasely challenge the exclusivity of the archive. The here showed project DREAM CITY explores differences and similarities about the worldwide developments of urban space. He teaches photography at the University of Applied Sciences Vorarlberg in Austria and the University of Design Schwäbisch Gmünd in Germany.
Malcolm Hutcheson
malcolmhutcheson@yahoo.co.uk
Malcolm Hutcheson found himself growing up, feeling a responsibility to understand as much as he could of the big topic i.e. LIFE. It's not surprising that when he was eight he was not managing to understand anything; but unknown to him many others had felt the same way and invented photography to solve this very problem. As years passed he grew sad at all the beautiful things he had known that ceasing to exist and decided that whenever possible he would try to keep some of them with him. He found himself in Pakistan where he stayed to take photographs of what was not going to be there tomorrow. Currently working in Lahore on documenting the lives of residents of the Walled City, creating an Archive of 20th century photography in the Punjab including preserving the practise of “Ru Kitch” or “Minto” Photography, documenting historic monuments and buildings in Pakistan and developing a photographic style that will satisfy the above.
Stuart Isett
http://www.isett.com
Stuart Isett is a Swiss-born, American photographer based in Seattle, USA. After spending over a decade living and working in Asia and Europe, based in Bangkok, Tokyo and Paris, he moved to Seattle in 2006. His interest in Asia started in the early 1990s while working along the Thai-Cambodian border. He worked on a 3-year project on the city's Cambodian street gangs which was shown at the 2005 Angkor Photography Festival. Isett continues to work on documentaries in Asia and his work regularly appears in The New York Times, Time and Newsweek magazines among others. He is currently finishing a book project on Kyoto titled 'Kyotoland' which has been shown at the 2006 Reportage Festival in Australia, and at the Daegu Photo Biennale in Korea.
Sangeeta Isvaran
http://www.narthaki.com/info/intervw/intrvw77.html
Sangeeta Isvaran is a dancer, choreographer and researcher from India. A passionate believer in the power of art as a dynamic and exciting medium to foster empowerment and social change, she has worked with many different underprivileged groups such as street children and refugees. Using a combination of arts - classical, popular, martial, circus, Bollywood - from the different domains of dance, music, visual arts, poetry and literature, her work focuses on helping individuals express how they perceive their lives.
Ed Kashi
http://www.edkashistock.com/T/1159883949226
Ed Kashi has dedicated his photographic career to documenting the social and political issues that define our times. Kashi, with a degree in photojournalism from Syracuse University, has been photographing professionally since 1979. He has since photographed in over 60 countries and his images have appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, Time, Fortune, Geo, Newsweek and many others. In December 2002, Kashi and his wife Julie Winokur founded Talking Eyes Media, a non-profit educational multimedia company that explores social issues through visually compelling materials. The first documentary project for Talking Eyes Media produced a book (1993) and travelling exhibition on uninsured Americans called, Denied: The Crisis of America's Uninsured. The exhibition continues to travel across America.
Gary Knight
http://www.viiphoto.com
Gary Knight, co-founder of the Angkor Photography Festival, is a British photographer now residing in France. Also founder of the agency VII - today's reference in photojournalism - he has covered most of the world's conflicts over the past 15 years, from ex-Yugoslavia to Iraq's war, for the American magazine Newsweek. His work focuses mainly on poverty and defending human rights. Through VII, he organizes photography workshops that share the experiences of the agency's exceptional members.
Antonin Kratochvil
http://www.viiphoto.com
Antonin Kratochvil is Czech but lives in New York when he is not abroad reporting. This ex-political refugee is an unusual photographer. His work ranges from reporting on street children in Mongolia for the Museum of Natural History, to covering war in Iraq for Fortune or shooting portraits of David Bowie for Detour or of Deborah Harry for an advertising campaign for the American Civil Liberties. His latest book, Vanishing is the culmination of 15 years of reflection on natural and cultural phenomena facing extinction.
Kalpesh Lathigra
kalpesh.lathigra@btinternet.com
Kalpesh Lathigra was born in 1971 in London. Kalpesh studied Law at University before dropping out to pursue photography. He went to the London College of Printing to take a Postgraduate Diploma in Photojournalism and was awarded The Independent Newspaper's Photography Scholarship, after spending a year on staff he turned freelance working for national newspapers until 2000 when he was awarded a 1st prize in the World Press Photo (Arts category). He left newspapers in 2000 to concentrate on long term projects. In 2004 Kalpesh was awarded The W. Eugene Smith Fellowship for the “Brides of Krishna” and in 2005 a Winston Churchill Fellowship. Recently Kalpesh has been working on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, USA looking at the life of the Lakota Sioux tribe. Kalpesh's work has appeared in The Sunday Times Magazine (UK), The Guardian Magazine, The Independent Magazine, Geo, Marie Claire, Le Monde, etc...
Atul Loke
atulloke@yahoo.com
Atul Loke is an Indian photojournalis. He's work have been published in major international and national magazines and newspapers. He is the recipient of Japan's Young Portfolio Award (2002), a three months photography fellowship in Europe in Year 2002 to brush up photography and photo-editing skills with renowned photographers from National Geography and Magnum Agency and was part of the prestigious World Press photo to be a part of three years seminar in India and worked on their projects in the year 2000-06. He has been covering major national & social issues across the country and currently working on the personal book project in Mumbai.
Christophe Loviny
http://www.jazz-editions.com
Christophe Loviny, co-founder of the Angkor Photography Festival, is a photojournalist and editor. A specialist of Southeast Asia for over 25 years, he was based in Angkor from 1989 to 1994. His work on Cambodia has been published in The Sunday Times Magazine, Asiaweek, Geo, L'Express, Paris-Match, Stern, Le Figaro-Magazine, etc... He is the author of several illustrated books, one of which is "Les Danseuses Sacrées d'Angkor" (Seuil), a collection of texts and photographs on the identity of Cambodia. His latest book is "Cuba by Korda" (Ocean Press).
John McDermott
http://www.asiaphotos.net
John McDermott is an American photographer based in Asia for the last 12 years. After working as an editorial and commercial photographer in the US and Asia, he developed a fine art photography project focused on cultural heritage across Asia, documenting and portraying ancient sites and cultures that inhabit them at present. His work has been published in Time, Newsweek, Archaeology Magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, Travel & Leisure, and The New York Times. He has contributed to books including "A Day in the Life of Thailand", "The Extraordinary Museums of Southeast Asia", and "Southeast Asia - Passage through Time".
Marti Mueller
Marti Mueller is a writer, photographer, filmmaker, environmentalist, and social activist. She has spent a lifetime defending nature, spiritual principles, and the rights of indigenous people. Marti has received a Rolex citation for her work in environmental education. She was selected as an official speaker for the 2005 Universal Expo in Aichi, Japan as one of One Hundred People in the World Who Love the Earth. Marti's photos have been exhibited in London, Paris, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Tokyo, Phnom Penh, and Madras. Her work is part of permanent collections in several museums, including the Louvre in Paris. Her recent book on meditations on nature, This Earth of Ours, has a prologue by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
Justin Mott
http://www.justinmott.com
Justin Mott entered the Journalism department at San Francisco State University in 2003, where he grew an affinity for photojournalism. In 2005 he traveled to Siem Reap, Cambodia to participate in the weeklong workshop with Gary Knight from VII. It was during this workshop where he discovered his passion for documentary photography and his fervor for documenting social issues in SE Asia. Domestically Justin has done freelance work for numerous Bay Area newspapers. Globally his work has taken him throughout SE Asia recently working with MSF (Medecins San Frontieres) documenting HIV and Tuberculosis patients and to Venezuela for a multimedia project for Global Exchange. As of October 2006 he joined the photo agency WPN and will based in SE Asia beginning December 2006.
Wawi Navarroza
http://wawinavarroza.multiply.com
Wawi Navarroza is a young Filipino artist who uses photography to depict the imaginary world behind her eyes where visions, observations, emotions, and thoughts crystallize into symbolic portraits and visual poems. Her works have been awarded in a number of occasions, such as: the Art Association of the Philippines (2000, 2003), and in "Con Otros Ojos" Barcelona, Spain (2000). In 2006, she received citation as one of the awardees for the Ateneo Art Awards, the Philippines' premiere gallery and museum of Philippine contemporary art. Her successful photo series entitled "Polysaccharide: The Dollhouse Drama" (2005) commenced its international tour; in Malaysia at the University Sains Malaysia Museum & Gallery and in the Netherlands for the Noorderlicht Photography Festival main exhibition entitled "Another Asia" at the Fries Museum. It continues its journey at the Angkor Photography Festival. Currently, she is at work on her next major solo exhibition for January 2007 at the Silver Lens Gallery (Manila).
Roland Neveu
http://bklink.blogspot.com/
Roland Neveu is one of the few reporters who witnessed the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975. For two decades, he covered hot spots like the first Soviet POW in Afghanistan, the siege of Beirut, war in Lebanon, El Salvador's bloody feud, the NPA struggle in the Philippines and the fall of its dictator, Ferdinand Marcos. He also photographed the first images of AIDS in Uganda, shot TV stories on Aids, the Touareg rebellion in Mali and Kurdish refugees (Turk-Irakian border). In the late 1980s, he began working on film sets as a stills photographer for directors like Oliver Stone, Brian de Palma, Ridley Scott and Matt Dillon, whose film, "City of Ghosts" was shot in Cambodia. Neveu's book, "Years of Turmoil", relates 30 years of covering Cambodia.
Liza Nguyen
http://www.liza-nguyen.com/
Liza Nguyen was born in France and splits her time between Paris and Dusseldorf where she followed Thomas Ruff workshop at the Fine Art Academy of Dusseldorf in Germany. Her work explores representation, memory and aesthetics: how to represent the past, how memory is built in the present and how to create the link between aesthetics and ethics. She has exhibited her work in Europe, Asia, Canada and United States. Her artist book "My father" received several awards in France, including "La Bourse du Talent" and is published by Schaden.com. "Souvenirs of Vietnam" received recently the "Prix Fnac de la Photographie" and won the International Biennial of Art of Lulea award in Sweden.
Patrick de Noirmont
http://www.onasia.com
Patrick de Noirmont is part of the group who created the photo-agencies AFP and Reuters. While based in South Africa and Southeast Asia for over 10 years, he covered the Russian troops' retreat from Afghanistan, the Gulf War in 1991, the transition of South Africa from apartheid to the election of President Nelson Mandela and the arrival of the Taliban in Afghanistan. This year, he worked on the consequences of the tsunami in Thailand for the German magazine Stern. He lives between Paris, where he works for AP, and Bangkok, where he is associated with Onasia.
Sudharak Olwe
sudharakolwe@yahoo.co.in
Sudharak Olwe was born on 1966. At twenty, with an urge to be divergent he realized that photography was his calling. For past 16 years Olwe has published cutting edge photo essays in India's leading publications while working for the Times of India in Bombay. He has exhibited work on social issues from India to Bangladesh, Sweden, Portugal and Holland. In 1999-2000 he was the recipient of the National Foundation Media Fellowship. In 2001, he was the only Indian photographer to be invited at “World Press Photo Exhibition”, for his stories on gender and the environment. In 2004 he published his book, “Spirited Souls: Winning Women of Mumbai”, last year he was honoured with the All Roads Photographers Award from National Geographic which included an exhibition of his work on street workers of Mumbai in Los Angeles, California and Washington DC. He is current at work on a book about Indian NGO. He is heading photography promotion trust, registered public charitable trust, based in Mumbai, India.ppt was form to support, showcase and encourage the use of photography as a powerful tool for social change.ppt conducts free workshop for children in order to give them a voice.
Sherman Ong
http://www.shermanong.com/
Sherman Ong is a photographer and filmmaker. Currently, his photographs are on a travelling group exhibition under the Goethe Institut ArtConneXions and in Another Asia, Noorderlicht Photo Festival, Netherlands. His film works straddle both fiction and documentary, and have been exhibited in Europe, US, Brazil and Asia. His films have won awards in Hong Kong, Greece, Italy, Indonesia and Malaysia. He is an alumni of the 1st Berlinale Talent Campus 2003 and has premiered works at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Int'l Documentary Festival Amsterdam, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, International Electronic Art Festival VideoBrasil and the Yokohama Art Triennial, Japan. In 2004, he served as a jury member at the La Cittadella del Corto International Short Film Festival, Italy. He is an Associate Artist of the Substation (Singapore).
S. Smith Patrick
http://www.cinesmith.net
S. Smith Patrick is a documentary filmmaker whose projects focus on human rights and indigenous cultural issues. Her award-winning film “The Children of Ibdaa: To Create Something Out of Nothing” explores the lives of Palestinian refugee children who perform in a dance troupe to express the history and aspirations of the Palestinians in a non-violent way. Her current project, “Seeing Siem Reap”, chronicles Cambodia street children as they transform during a photography and dance workshop and explores the affects of tourism and colliding cultures that surround Angkor Wat.
Jack Picone
http://www.jackpicone.com
Jack Picone covered eight wars in the 1990s. He achieved some notable news coverage, and was particularly intent on capturing the plight of ordinary people caught up in the extraordinary violence in places like Yugoslavia, Somalia, Rwanda, Palestine, Liberia, Sudan and Soviet Central Asia. For the last decade Jack has been committed to documenting the pandemic of HIV/AIDS for the London-based Terence Higgins Aids Trust as part of the huge "Positive Lives" project. Now based in Bangkok, Jack works on global assignments. His clients include Time, Life, Liberation, Der Spiegel, Stern, Mare, L'Express, Colors, Tempo, Granta, Marie Claire, The Independent (UK), The Observer, as well as organizations such as CARE, ActionAid, MSF and others.
Vandy Rattana
vandyrattana@yahoo.com
Vandy Rattana is a young photographer, student at Panasastra University in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He has been part of the collective Four Cambodian photo exhibition at Popil PhotoGallery in December 2005, organized by Visual Arts Open, a project of Saklapel art association. Pictures shown here are extracted from his new essay — "Looking in the Office" — that he will exhibit at Popil PhotoGallery in November 2006. A selection of this exhibition will be shown at Siem Reap Photo Festival late November. Below you can read an extract of the artist statement for the show coming at Popil.
Jerry Redfern
Jerry Redfern is a freelance photographer based in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Sometimes, you can even find him there. He generally works on features, documentary and wildlife stories in Southeast Asia, often working with his wife, author Karen Coates. OnAsia Images, in Bangkok, represents his work to the wider world.
Martin Reeves
http://www.thehiddenrealms.com
Martin Reeves, has been held by Asia in a spell for two decades. Being a passionate photographer he sought a film that could portray Asia as to how he had envisioned it, in an enchanted and mysterious way. His quest began in India in 1986, when he set out with some infrared b/w film. The images that appeared revealed a hidden realm. He became captivated, bewitched and intrigued by the notion of infrared light (which is invisible to the naked eye) manifesting into photographs. Its dreamlike look seemed to uncover a dimension that really does exist beyond the confines of our visual spectrum.
Dominic Rouse
http://www.dominicrouse.com
Dominic Rouse, his work is exhibited internationally. In 2002 he showed at the XII Encuentros Abiertos de Fotografia in Buenos Aires and also at the Benham Gallery in Seattle with Jerry Uelsmann. The same year he had his first London show and also exhibited at the Schneider Gallery in Chicago. In 2003 he had his first US solo show at the Carmel Center for Photographic Art and exhibited at the Honolulu Academy and FotoFest in Houston in 2004. He was awarded the Ultimate Eye Foundation grant in 2002 and in 2006. His advertising work has also won recognition at the International Digital Exhibition Awards (London1999 & 2000). In 2003 he won the 'Special Photographer' category in the first International Photography Awards (Photography's Oscars) in Los Angeles. In 2005 he was awarded first prize in The Photo Review's Annual Competition, a Gold Award by America's Black and White Magazine for 'The cunning of unreason', and was the winner of Artrom Gallery's International Digital competition in Rome and Los Angeles Center for Digital Art's International juried competition.
Eric Sander
http://www.ericsander.com/edition
Eric Sander, his work has been published in the world's most prestigious magazines : Time Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, Figaro Magazine, Paris-Match, Grands Reportages, Geo. He grew up in France where he started his career as a photo Editor at Gamma photo Agency in Paris. In 1983, he chose to become a freelance photographer and soon after, settled in Los Angeles to follow his passion: cover in depth stories and portraits. In 2001, he came back to Paris to renew with his roots. While working on assignment for international magazines and corporations, Eric Sander concentrates his personal work on strong themes for the publishing world (6 books published in 2006-one on Cambodia) and international magazines.
Raffaela Scaglietta
Raffaela Scaglietta Italian photo-journalist and video-maker, based in Rome. She's working for various media including the Italian Tv Rai 3 for whom she is preparing a series of short investigative documentaries on home affairs and justice. She is also a contributor of Il Giornale and the Italian Vogue. Previously she was a correspondent from Tokyo for Ansa agency, covering Japan, South Korea and South East Asia. From Japan she was a contributor for Repubblica, Il Corriere della Sera, Panorama, Vogue and Diario. In 1999 she received a Fulbright Scholarship and went to New York to produce a film on anti-globalization and an art documentary Eye-link presented in Japan. From 1996 till 1999 she was based in Brussels where she was correspondent for Il Mondo, Il Corriere della Sera and the Italian tv Tmc covering European integration and corruption.
Uwe Schober
http://www.rupertbeagle.com
Uwe Schober is a self-taught photographer who will commence studying photojournalism and documentary photography at the London College of Communication from January 2006. Over many years he has attended workshops with distinguished photographers such as Gary Knight, Antonin Kratochvil, James Nachtwey, Bruce Gilden, Bill Allard, Walter Schels and David Alan Harvey. He is working on a long-term photographic project on Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. He has just self-published his first photography book on Khmer Boxers.
Vincent Soyez
http://www.vincentsoyez.com/
Vincent Soyez is a French photographer based in New York. After working more than 10 years in Paris he moved to the United States to work in commercial photography. He shoots fashion, portraits, music album covers and contributes to magazines such as The Source, Zink, Complex, Interview, GQ, ESPN, FHM and Fortune. Recently he started to travel to Cambodia to develop a personal body of work that will be presented during the festival.
John Stanmeyer
http://www.viiphoto.com/
John Stanmeyer is a co-founding member of VII and a contract photographer with Time Magazine since 1998. Presently living in Indonesia, this American has spent over seven years focusing on Asian issues. Over the last five years, he has been working on a book about AIDS throughout Asia, while at the same time continuing his photographic documentation for another book on the radical changes in Indonesia since 1997. Stanmeyer has received numerous awards, including the Robert Capa, Magazine Photographer of the Year, World Press and Picture of the Year.
Dieter Telemans
http://www.dietertelemans.com/
Dieter Telemans was born and brought up in Burundi and is now based in Brussels, Belgium. He is a member of the agency Panos Pictures in London. Most of his work takes him back to his roots. He focuses on the positive sides of African countries that often only make our news in a negative way. He worked on the African music scene and published the book "Heart of Dance". Today he is documenting water-related troubles in the world. For this he covered water shortages in Shaanxi (China) and floods in Dhaka (Bangladesh). The exhibition "Troubled Waters" will travel around Europe, starting in the Belgian Parliament on World Waterday, the 22th of March 2007.
Andrew Testa
www.lightstalkers.org/andrewtesta
Andrew Testa was born in London, in 1965. He began his photographic career in the early 1990s working as a freelance for the Guardian and Observer newspapers. Throughout the decade he documented the growing Environmental Protest movement, the only major political movement during an era when politics on both the right and left became increasingly stagnated. In 1999 he shifted his attention to international current affairs covering the war in Kosovo and moved to the Balkans at the end of the year which he used as a base to cover events throughout Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East. He now splits his time between New York, London and Kosovo. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times, The Guardian and The Observer and his work has been published in Newsweek, Stern, Geo, Mare ,Paris Match, Time, Der Spiegel, The Sunday Times Magazine, the Independent magazine, Mother Jones.
Hazel Thompson
http://www.hazelthompson.com/
Hazel Thompson is a British photojournalist based in London. Hazel now works freelance for editorial, commercial and charity assignments worldwide. Her reportage work centres around social issues, identity, religion and humanitarian subjects. With her images being published internationally in The New York Times, Time, Observer Magazine, Sunday Times Magazine, Days Japan, Sondag, Photo District News and more. Hazel has gained recognition for her work by winning a number of awards, most recently for her images of children illegally imprisoned in the Philippines called "Kids Behind Bars", winning The Observer Hodge Award and CARE International Award for Humanitarian Reportage at Visa pour l'image.
John Vink
http://www.johnvink.com/
John Vink studied photography at the fine arts school of La Cambre in 1968 and became a free lance photographer in 1971. He joined Agence Vu in 1986 and was awarded the E. Smith Prize that same year for his work Water in Sahel. Between 1987 and 1993 he worked on a project about refugees in the world, which was exhibited at the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris. He was nominated at Magnum in 1993 and became a member in 1997. He is now based in Cambodia, a country he visits since 1989. He has published "Refugies", "Avoir 20 ans a Phnom Penh" and "Peuples d'en Haut", a book about people with a strong cultural identity living in the mountains of Laos, Guatemala and Georgia. His latest book, "Poids Mouche", is about Khmer boxing.
Sophie Zenon
http://www.nazcapictures.com/
Sophie Zenon works simultaneously on personal work, commissioned assignments from the press or institutions, and exhibitions. She is interested in the relations between man and space, man and nature, man and the sacred. Her pictures of Mongolia, which she has visited yearly since 1996, won the Nomad Chronicles prize. This allowed her to photograph the fishermen from the Amour River (Far East Siberia), a project that focuses on the complexities of the relations between man and the river. With the assistance of the AFAA and the French Embassy, Sophie set up a photography cooperation project between France and Mongolia.
Laurent Zylberman
http://www.365degrees.org/
Laurent Zylberman started photography when staying in London for a French punk-rock magazine. Later on founded the Graphix-Images photo-agency in Paris. With an angle on environmental concerns, the human dimension of his work has come to prevail. Based in Taiwan for 5 years, then Mexico for a further 5, Laurent stringed for Sygma from 1981 to 1997. He has contributed to various local and international publications with wide-ranging topics such as the solar eclipse in Mexico, Kolkhozes in Turkmenistan, Vietnamese boat people, Muslim boarding schools in Indonesia, democratization in Mongolia and Alaskan oil-riggers. He is now based in Paris to work on/with segregated people, along at his daily photo diary.
participants
Antoine d'Agata
http://www.magnumphotos.com
Antoine d'Agata is a member of Magnum Agency. He studied photography at the ICP in New York in 1990 under Larry Clark and Nan Goldin. An adventurous spirit in search of himself and always on the lookout for new adventures, Antoine d'Agata invites us on a journey. He does not try to illustrate the world but rather shows how he fits into it. The lyricism of the presentation and the exaggeration of the situations force us to question the reality of what we see. His first book, "Mala Noche", was published in 1998, followed by Hometown in 2001, the year he received the Niepce Prize. "Vortex" and "Insomnia" were published in 2003, and Stigm in 2005.
Achinto Bhadro
achinto@vsnl.com
Achinto Bhadro was born in 1959 prior to taking up photography as a profession, lived, worked and managed the Crafts Centre at Asha Niketan L arche International a community for the mentally challenged. He studied photography at Chitra Bani, Calcutta and at the London College of Printing on receiving the Charles Wallace Award. Over the years as an independent photographer his interest and assignments from National and International Development Agencies led him to cover issues of the Urban poor, children and women, and he contributed in many exhibits and books, in India, U.K., France, South East Asia.
Jan Banning
banning@solcon.nl
Jan Banning was born is 1954 in the Netherlands. He studied history and has been a photographer since 1981, concentrating on self-initiated projects, such as The Office and Aftermath of Wars. He has received many journalistic and cultural awards, among them a 2004 World Press Photo Award. His photo books are Vietnam: Doi Moi (1993), Traces of War and Survivors of the Burma and Sumatra Railways (2005). Banning s photographs have been published in Newsweek, Foreign Policy, Sunday Times Magazine, Le Monde 2 and NRC Handelsblad M. His work was exhibited at the Noorderlicht Festival (Groningen/Leeuwarden), the Kunsthal (Rotterdam), the Dorsky Gallery (New York), the Erasmushuis (Jakarta) and others and shown at Visa pour l Image (Perpignan). His photos have been purchased by the Ministry of Justice (Holland), the Open Society Archives (Hungary) and private collections.
Pablo Bartholomew
http://www.lightstalkers.org/pablobartholomew
Pablo Bartholomew is based in New Delhi, India. He divides time between photography, running long term photography workshops, and managing a software company that specializes in photo databases solutions and server based digital archiving systems. Between 2001 and 2003 ran photography workshop for emerging photographers in India with the support of the World Press Photo Foundation in Amsterdam. Pablo has also photographed societies in transition in different locations. He won the World Press Photo award for his series Morphine Addicts in India (1975) and the World Press Picture of the Year for the Bhopal Gas Tragedy (1985). He has taken part in several international exhibitions and published in Newsweek, Time, National Geographic and Geo amongst other prestigious magazines.
Françoise Callier
frcallier@wanadoo.fr
Françoise Callier was born in Belgium and moved to Paris in 1983. She worked for fifteen years with 2eBureau, a press and public relations office, agenting photographers like Helmut Newton and Jean-Paul Goude. She worked for seven years for the Photojournalism Festival Visa pour l Image in Perpignan France. French correspondent for Corbis for three years, she also did volunteer work with disabled children and at a children s hospital. Currently helping the Kogi Indians to recoup parts of their ancestral lands in Colombia, Françoise Callier is an avid traveller who has visited Antarctica and wrote stories about a mischievous king penguin girl called Lila. Her books Silly Lila, Lila on Ice, Lila in Africa and ABC in the Wild are for sale on Amazon.com
Thierry Chantegret
http://www.agence37.com
Thierry Chantegret, photojournalist, explores the relationship between cities and their inhabitants. He has worked in various countries such as India and Argentina, but more recently in a small French town, Charleville Mezieres, where the Poet Arthur Rimbaud was born and raised. The Ardennes Museum commissioned him to help commemorate the town's 400th birthday, and allowed him to work in the poet s house. Thierry now plans to settle in Charleville Mezieres, which has been severely affected by unemployment. In addition to developing his personal artistic creations, he also organises educational workshops with schools and welfare centers.
Greg Constantine
http://www.gregconstantine.com
Greg Constantine was born in the United States. Since 2003, he has worked on stories about: North Korean refugees; life in modern-day Tokyo; struggling communities on the US Mexico border, and the lives of paroled women in Watts, Los Angeles. His photographs have been featured in several international publications and have been utilized by Refugees International, Human Rights Watch and Medecins Sans Frontieres. His work has been exhibited in South Korea, Los Angeles, Washington, DC and Pittsburgh. His recent, on going project, Nowhere People, documents the effects statelessness has on minority groups in Asia. Photographs from this project have been nominated for UNICEF Photo of the Year and will also be exhibited in Bangladesh at the international photography festival, Chobi Mela IV.
Thomas De Cian
http://www.lightstalkers.org/thomasdecian
Thomas De Cian was born in Italy in 1978. He studied journalism in Australia and has been a freelance photojournalist since 2001. After graduating, his passion for photography brought him to Southeast Asia and he is been living in the region since 2002 His black and white reportages focus on social and political issues throughout Asia and want to show the sheer humanity that can lie behind even the most unusual an desperate situations. It is in these very situations that the strength and the instinct of survival come out, by contrast men reveal their most human side and can even find the time for a moment of happiness. Thomas is currently based in Bangkok, Thailand.
Christine Cibert
chcibert@aol.com
Christine Cibert is a French art curator and a free-lance journalist. She majored in Japanese language and culture and in Art History studies at Paris University. Afterwards, she moved to Tokyo where she has been living and working for more than ten years, as an art dealer and a curator, organizing cultural events, exhibitions for painters and photographers into art galleries, cultural centers and museums in Japan and in France. She also has been writing on art, cultural and social subjects for French and Japanese newspapers and magazines : France-Japon Eco, Agence France Presse, Jipango, Wasabi, Les Voix, Cambodge Soir, Kateigaho International Edition, L'Art Aujourd'hui, Univers des Arts, Cahiers d'art and France Culture Radio. Since several years, she also has developed her activities to South-East Asia (Cambodia, Vietnam).
Olivier Culmann
http://www.tendancefloue.net
Olivier Culmann, member of Tendance Floue, photographer's collective, photographs people watching TV. And their TV sets. The viewers' eyes are glued to the screen, hypnotized by the images that flicker by. Olivier Culmann captures that instant during which attention subsides and consciousness slumbers, rocked to sleep by the phosphorescence of the cathode ray tubes. At that instant, their bodies often become comfortable, they curl up on the couch and then collapse. Nothing could be more banal. And nothing more unsettling. Because that is how, in quasi immobile passivity, when the brain has gone numb, that we, television viewers receive the world in its entirety. Not the real world, but an image of that world, a ghostly version of reality.
Binh Danh
sunleafprints@yahoo.com
Binh Danh received a MFA degree in Studio Art from Stanford University and a BFA in Photography from San Jose State University. He invented a unique process for printing photographs onto the surface of leaves by exploiting the natural process of photosynthesis. Combining the diverse disciplines of art, history, and science, Danh extensively researches the subject matter he is drawn too. He is a recipient of a 2004 Artist Project Award from the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, CA and his work is in the collection of de Young Museum, the Corcoran Art Gallery, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Oakland Museum of California. He is represented by Haines Gallery in San Francisco.
James W. Delano
http://www.jameswhitlowdelano.com
James W. Delano is a romantic. His duotone photographs evince a poet's eye - dreamy, impressionistic, subtle, often melancholic. His photographs portray the ironies and contradictions of 20th-century Asia. The duotone prints themselves contribute to the sense of timelessness. Describing his working method, James says: "I must pass by quickly and quietly in order to capture the 'out of the corner of my eye' immediacy that I seek before I disturb the scene."
Agnes Dherbeys
http://www.evephotographers.com/
Agnes Dherbeys is a French photographer distributed by French Cosmos Agency and a founder member of EVE. She graduated with honours from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques of Lyon and from a Master 2 of Sciences of Information and Communication from Celsa, Sorbonne IV. She learned photography when she moved to Bangkok in 2001, and has since mainly worked in Nepal, East Timor, Cambodia and Thailand, with parentheses in Palestinian Territories. Her work has been published in Newsweek, Le Monde 2, Liberation, the South China Morning Post Magazine, Marie Claire, Days Magazine. She was winner of the Foundation Lagardere grant 2005, for her project in East Timor, titled: “From Independence to Dependence.”
Stephen Dupont
stephendupont@bigpond.com
Stephen Dupont is an international award winning Australian photojournalist and a member of Contact Press Images. His reportages has been featured in The New Yorker, Newsweek, French and German GEO, Liberation, The Sunday Times Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and Time, and has earned him photography's most prestigious prizes, including a Robert Capa Gold Medal citation from the Overseas Press Club of America in 2006, and first places in the World Press Photo and Pictures of the Year International. Having exhibited his work in London, Paris, New York, Sydney, Tokyo, Shanghai, and at Perpignan's Visa Pour L'Image, in 1999 Dupont was a founding member of the first festival of photojournalism in Australia: REPORTAGE-A. He works on long term projects around war, conflict and social issues.
Hosoe Eikoh
Hosoe Eikoh, Freelance photographer, Professor Emeritus at Tokyo Institute of Polytechnic, Director of Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts. Also currently serves as vice chair of Japan Professional Photographers Society and Japan Society for Arts and History of Photography. Born in 1933, after studying at the Tokyo College of Photography, Hosoe gained recognition with Barakei (Ordeal by Roses), a 1963 collection of portraits of novelist Yukio Mishima, and was awarded the Minister of Education's Arts Encouragement Prize in 1970 for Kamaitachi, a photo essay on Tatsumi Hijikata, founder of the Butoh Dance movement. In addition to his numerous publications and his works kept in many Art Collections, he also participated to many Individual and Selected Group Exhibitions in Japan and all over the world. As a photographer of international renown, he has also contributed to the internationalization of Asian photography. Hosoe was awarded the Medal with Purple Ribbon of Japan in 1998 and the 150th Special Anniversary Medal of the Royal Photographic Society in 2003.
Brendan Esposito
http://www.smh.com.au/ftimages/2005/10/05/1128191773885.html
Brendan Esposito has been a press photographer for almost 20 years. He works for The Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Telegraph, and is a stringer for AFP and Reuters. His assignments have included royal, papal and presidential tours. Esposito's extensive photography of the last remaining circuses in Australia was exhibited at the NSW Library. His last assignment, on street children addicted to glue sniffing in Siem Reap, has been exhibited at the inaugural festival. He is a new talent discovered during VII's workshop in February 2005.
Claude Estebe
Claude Estebe is a photo-historian. He published Les Derniers samouraïs and Le Crépuscule des geishas. He is currently working on a book about the dawn of japanese photography from his phd thesis. His photographic works questions the "cultural body" : mannequins (Perfect skin, 1994) , dancers (with Matoma and Susan Buirge)… His last work, Eloge des jambes, begun during a residence at Villa Kujoyama in 2000, completes an exhibition at Gallery U in Tokyo from 2003. This is gaze between sociology and voyeurism about japanese attitudes that seem a "cultural invariant". In a country of fast moving fashion, uchimata gait remains unchanged since centuries…
Thierry Falise
http://www.thierryfalise.com
Thierry Falise is a Belgian photojournalist based in Bangkok since 1991. He is a regular contributor (text and photos) to magazines and dailies such as L'Express, Le Point, Paris-Match, Le Figaro Magazine, Marie France, VSD, Grands Reportages, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Sunday Times and many more. In 2003, with a French colleague, he was arrested during a forbidden trip to the Laos jungle where he had met members of the abandoned Hmong community, once allies of the CIA during the Indochina war. Both reporters were sentenced to 15 years in prison but, thanks to a vast international solidarity campaign, were released after five weeks.
Philip Jones Griffiths
http://www.magnumphotos.com/cf/htm/TreePf_MAG.aspx?Stat=Photographers_Portfolio&E=29YL53IRGC5
Philip Jones Griffiths photographed in Vietnam from 1966 to 1970 and became famous for his book on the war, Vietnam Inc. Out of print in a few weeks, Vietnam Inc. crystallized public opinion and was essential in shaping Western misgivings about the US involvement in Vietnam and ultimately helping to bring the war to an end. Jones Griffiths, one of the very few photographers with his own agenda, was able to concentrate on conditions behind the headlines, and Vietnam Inc. is also a documentary study of Vietnamese folk life. In 1980, Griffiths moved to New York to assume the presidency of Magnum, a post which he held for a record five years.
Katharina Hessesettled
http://www.digitalrailroad.net/kathchina
Katharina Hessesettled down in Beijing in the mid-1990s after finishing a graduate degree in Chinese studies at Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (I.N.A.L.C.O) in Paris. She initially worked as an assistant for German TV (ZDF) and then freelanced for Newsweek from 1996 to 2002, where she did both reporting and photography. In 2003 and 2004 Hesse covered China for Getty's news service. She is self-taught in photography, albeit with a temporary apprenticeship under Peter Turnley. Currently she is an accredited photographer based in Beijing.
Claudio Hils
http://www.claudio-hils.com
Claudio Hils is a photographer, curator and communication designer. He has published numerous books on photography and the history of photography. His own photographic and artistical work is located at the thin line between artistical studies and social and political landscapes So he published the project RED LAND, BLUE LAND about the history of war. Furtheron he realised the project ARCHIVE_BELFAST which explores contemporary approaches to history, informed by ideas of identity and cultural inheritance, which increasely challenge the exclusivity of the archive. The here showed project DREAM CITY explores differences and similarities about the worldwide developments of urban space. He teaches photography at the University of Applied Sciences Vorarlberg in Austria and the University of Design Schwäbisch Gmünd in Germany.
Malcolm Hutcheson
malcolmhutcheson@yahoo.co.uk
Malcolm Hutcheson found himself growing up, feeling a responsibility to understand as much as he could of the big topic i.e. LIFE. It's not surprising that when he was eight he was not managing to understand anything; but unknown to him many others had felt the same way and invented photography to solve this very problem. As years passed he grew sad at all the beautiful things he had known that ceasing to exist and decided that whenever possible he would try to keep some of them with him. He found himself in Pakistan where he stayed to take photographs of what was not going to be there tomorrow. Currently working in Lahore on documenting the lives of residents of the Walled City, creating an Archive of 20th century photography in the Punjab including preserving the practise of “Ru Kitch” or “Minto” Photography, documenting historic monuments and buildings in Pakistan and developing a photographic style that will satisfy the above.
Stuart Isett
http://www.isett.com
Stuart Isett is a Swiss-born, American photographer based in Seattle, USA. After spending over a decade living and working in Asia and Europe, based in Bangkok, Tokyo and Paris, he moved to Seattle in 2006. His interest in Asia started in the early 1990s while working along the Thai-Cambodian border. He worked on a 3-year project on the city's Cambodian street gangs which was shown at the 2005 Angkor Photography Festival. Isett continues to work on documentaries in Asia and his work regularly appears in The New York Times, Time and Newsweek magazines among others. He is currently finishing a book project on Kyoto titled 'Kyotoland' which has been shown at the 2006 Reportage Festival in Australia, and at the Daegu Photo Biennale in Korea.
Sangeeta Isvaran
http://www.narthaki.com/info/intervw/intrvw77.html
Sangeeta Isvaran is a dancer, choreographer and researcher from India. A passionate believer in the power of art as a dynamic and exciting medium to foster empowerment and social change, she has worked with many different underprivileged groups such as street children and refugees. Using a combination of arts - classical, popular, martial, circus, Bollywood - from the different domains of dance, music, visual arts, poetry and literature, her work focuses on helping individuals express how they perceive their lives.
Ed Kashi
http://www.edkashistock.com/T/1159883949226
Ed Kashi has dedicated his photographic career to documenting the social and political issues that define our times. Kashi, with a degree in photojournalism from Syracuse University, has been photographing professionally since 1979. He has since photographed in over 60 countries and his images have appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, Time, Fortune, Geo, Newsweek and many others. In December 2002, Kashi and his wife Julie Winokur founded Talking Eyes Media, a non-profit educational multimedia company that explores social issues through visually compelling materials. The first documentary project for Talking Eyes Media produced a book (1993) and travelling exhibition on uninsured Americans called, Denied: The Crisis of America's Uninsured. The exhibition continues to travel across America.
Gary Knight
http://www.viiphoto.com
Gary Knight, co-founder of the Angkor Photography Festival, is a British photographer now residing in France. Also founder of the agency VII - today's reference in photojournalism - he has covered most of the world's conflicts over the past 15 years, from ex-Yugoslavia to Iraq's war, for the American magazine Newsweek. His work focuses mainly on poverty and defending human rights. Through VII, he organizes photography workshops that share the experiences of the agency's exceptional members.
Antonin Kratochvil
http://www.viiphoto.com
Antonin Kratochvil is Czech but lives in New York when he is not abroad reporting. This ex-political refugee is an unusual photographer. His work ranges from reporting on street children in Mongolia for the Museum of Natural History, to covering war in Iraq for Fortune or shooting portraits of David Bowie for Detour or of Deborah Harry for an advertising campaign for the American Civil Liberties. His latest book, Vanishing is the culmination of 15 years of reflection on natural and cultural phenomena facing extinction.
Kalpesh Lathigra
kalpesh.lathigra@btinternet.com
Kalpesh Lathigra was born in 1971 in London. Kalpesh studied Law at University before dropping out to pursue photography. He went to the London College of Printing to take a Postgraduate Diploma in Photojournalism and was awarded The Independent Newspaper's Photography Scholarship, after spending a year on staff he turned freelance working for national newspapers until 2000 when he was awarded a 1st prize in the World Press Photo (Arts category). He left newspapers in 2000 to concentrate on long term projects. In 2004 Kalpesh was awarded The W. Eugene Smith Fellowship for the “Brides of Krishna” and in 2005 a Winston Churchill Fellowship. Recently Kalpesh has been working on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, USA looking at the life of the Lakota Sioux tribe. Kalpesh's work has appeared in The Sunday Times Magazine (UK), The Guardian Magazine, The Independent Magazine, Geo, Marie Claire, Le Monde, etc...
Atul Loke
atulloke@yahoo.com
Atul Loke is an Indian photojournalis. He's work have been published in major international and national magazines and newspapers. He is the recipient of Japan's Young Portfolio Award (2002), a three months photography fellowship in Europe in Year 2002 to brush up photography and photo-editing skills with renowned photographers from National Geography and Magnum Agency and was part of the prestigious World Press photo to be a part of three years seminar in India and worked on their projects in the year 2000-06. He has been covering major national & social issues across the country and currently working on the personal book project in Mumbai.
Christophe Loviny
http://www.jazz-editions.com
Christophe Loviny, co-founder of the Angkor Photography Festival, is a photojournalist and editor. A specialist of Southeast Asia for over 25 years, he was based in Angkor from 1989 to 1994. His work on Cambodia has been published in The Sunday Times Magazine, Asiaweek, Geo, L'Express, Paris-Match, Stern, Le Figaro-Magazine, etc... He is the author of several illustrated books, one of which is "Les Danseuses Sacrées d'Angkor" (Seuil), a collection of texts and photographs on the identity of Cambodia. His latest book is "Cuba by Korda" (Ocean Press).
John McDermott
http://www.asiaphotos.net
John McDermott is an American photographer based in Asia for the last 12 years. After working as an editorial and commercial photographer in the US and Asia, he developed a fine art photography project focused on cultural heritage across Asia, documenting and portraying ancient sites and cultures that inhabit them at present. His work has been published in Time, Newsweek, Archaeology Magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, Travel & Leisure, and The New York Times. He has contributed to books including "A Day in the Life of Thailand", "The Extraordinary Museums of Southeast Asia", and "Southeast Asia - Passage through Time".
Marti Mueller
Marti Mueller is a writer, photographer, filmmaker, environmentalist, and social activist. She has spent a lifetime defending nature, spiritual principles, and the rights of indigenous people. Marti has received a Rolex citation for her work in environmental education. She was selected as an official speaker for the 2005 Universal Expo in Aichi, Japan as one of One Hundred People in the World Who Love the Earth. Marti's photos have been exhibited in London, Paris, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Tokyo, Phnom Penh, and Madras. Her work is part of permanent collections in several museums, including the Louvre in Paris. Her recent book on meditations on nature, This Earth of Ours, has a prologue by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
Justin Mott
http://www.justinmott.com
Justin Mott entered the Journalism department at San Francisco State University in 2003, where he grew an affinity for photojournalism. In 2005 he traveled to Siem Reap, Cambodia to participate in the weeklong workshop with Gary Knight from VII. It was during this workshop where he discovered his passion for documentary photography and his fervor for documenting social issues in SE Asia. Domestically Justin has done freelance work for numerous Bay Area newspapers. Globally his work has taken him throughout SE Asia recently working with MSF (Medecins San Frontieres) documenting HIV and Tuberculosis patients and to Venezuela for a multimedia project for Global Exchange. As of October 2006 he joined the photo agency WPN and will based in SE Asia beginning December 2006.
Wawi Navarroza
http://wawinavarroza.multiply.com
Wawi Navarroza is a young Filipino artist who uses photography to depict the imaginary world behind her eyes where visions, observations, emotions, and thoughts crystallize into symbolic portraits and visual poems. Her works have been awarded in a number of occasions, such as: the Art Association of the Philippines (2000, 2003), and in "Con Otros Ojos" Barcelona, Spain (2000). In 2006, she received citation as one of the awardees for the Ateneo Art Awards, the Philippines' premiere gallery and museum of Philippine contemporary art. Her successful photo series entitled "Polysaccharide: The Dollhouse Drama" (2005) commenced its international tour; in Malaysia at the University Sains Malaysia Museum & Gallery and in the Netherlands for the Noorderlicht Photography Festival main exhibition entitled "Another Asia" at the Fries Museum. It continues its journey at the Angkor Photography Festival. Currently, she is at work on her next major solo exhibition for January 2007 at the Silver Lens Gallery (Manila).
Roland Neveu
http://bklink.blogspot.com/
Roland Neveu is one of the few reporters who witnessed the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975. For two decades, he covered hot spots like the first Soviet POW in Afghanistan, the siege of Beirut, war in Lebanon, El Salvador's bloody feud, the NPA struggle in the Philippines and the fall of its dictator, Ferdinand Marcos. He also photographed the first images of AIDS in Uganda, shot TV stories on Aids, the Touareg rebellion in Mali and Kurdish refugees (Turk-Irakian border). In the late 1980s, he began working on film sets as a stills photographer for directors like Oliver Stone, Brian de Palma, Ridley Scott and Matt Dillon, whose film, "City of Ghosts" was shot in Cambodia. Neveu's book, "Years of Turmoil", relates 30 years of covering Cambodia.
Liza Nguyen
http://www.liza-nguyen.com/
Liza Nguyen was born in France and splits her time between Paris and Dusseldorf where she followed Thomas Ruff workshop at the Fine Art Academy of Dusseldorf in Germany. Her work explores representation, memory and aesthetics: how to represent the past, how memory is built in the present and how to create the link between aesthetics and ethics. She has exhibited her work in Europe, Asia, Canada and United States. Her artist book "My father" received several awards in France, including "La Bourse du Talent" and is published by Schaden.com. "Souvenirs of Vietnam" received recently the "Prix Fnac de la Photographie" and won the International Biennial of Art of Lulea award in Sweden.
Patrick de Noirmont
http://www.onasia.com
Patrick de Noirmont is part of the group who created the photo-agencies AFP and Reuters. While based in South Africa and Southeast Asia for over 10 years, he covered the Russian troops' retreat from Afghanistan, the Gulf War in 1991, the transition of South Africa from apartheid to the election of President Nelson Mandela and the arrival of the Taliban in Afghanistan. This year, he worked on the consequences of the tsunami in Thailand for the German magazine Stern. He lives between Paris, where he works for AP, and Bangkok, where he is associated with Onasia.
Sudharak Olwe
sudharakolwe@yahoo.co.in
Sudharak Olwe was born on 1966. At twenty, with an urge to be divergent he realized that photography was his calling. For past 16 years Olwe has published cutting edge photo essays in India's leading publications while working for the Times of India in Bombay. He has exhibited work on social issues from India to Bangladesh, Sweden, Portugal and Holland. In 1999-2000 he was the recipient of the National Foundation Media Fellowship. In 2001, he was the only Indian photographer to be invited at “World Press Photo Exhibition”, for his stories on gender and the environment. In 2004 he published his book, “Spirited Souls: Winning Women of Mumbai”, last year he was honoured with the All Roads Photographers Award from National Geographic which included an exhibition of his work on street workers of Mumbai in Los Angeles, California and Washington DC. He is current at work on a book about Indian NGO. He is heading photography promotion trust, registered public charitable trust, based in Mumbai, India.ppt was form to support, showcase and encourage the use of photography as a powerful tool for social change.ppt conducts free workshop for children in order to give them a voice.
Sherman Ong
http://www.shermanong.com/
Sherman Ong is a photographer and filmmaker. Currently, his photographs are on a travelling group exhibition under the Goethe Institut ArtConneXions and in Another Asia, Noorderlicht Photo Festival, Netherlands. His film works straddle both fiction and documentary, and have been exhibited in Europe, US, Brazil and Asia. His films have won awards in Hong Kong, Greece, Italy, Indonesia and Malaysia. He is an alumni of the 1st Berlinale Talent Campus 2003 and has premiered works at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Int'l Documentary Festival Amsterdam, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, International Electronic Art Festival VideoBrasil and the Yokohama Art Triennial, Japan. In 2004, he served as a jury member at the La Cittadella del Corto International Short Film Festival, Italy. He is an Associate Artist of the Substation (Singapore).
S. Smith Patrick
http://www.cinesmith.net
S. Smith Patrick is a documentary filmmaker whose projects focus on human rights and indigenous cultural issues. Her award-winning film “The Children of Ibdaa: To Create Something Out of Nothing” explores the lives of Palestinian refugee children who perform in a dance troupe to express the history and aspirations of the Palestinians in a non-violent way. Her current project, “Seeing Siem Reap”, chronicles Cambodia street children as they transform during a photography and dance workshop and explores the affects of tourism and colliding cultures that surround Angkor Wat.
Jack Picone
http://www.jackpicone.com
Jack Picone covered eight wars in the 1990s. He achieved some notable news coverage, and was particularly intent on capturing the plight of ordinary people caught up in the extraordinary violence in places like Yugoslavia, Somalia, Rwanda, Palestine, Liberia, Sudan and Soviet Central Asia. For the last decade Jack has been committed to documenting the pandemic of HIV/AIDS for the London-based Terence Higgins Aids Trust as part of the huge "Positive Lives" project. Now based in Bangkok, Jack works on global assignments. His clients include Time, Life, Liberation, Der Spiegel, Stern, Mare, L'Express, Colors, Tempo, Granta, Marie Claire, The Independent (UK), The Observer, as well as organizations such as CARE, ActionAid, MSF and others.
Vandy Rattana
vandyrattana@yahoo.com
Vandy Rattana is a young photographer, student at Panasastra University in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He has been part of the collective Four Cambodian photo exhibition at Popil PhotoGallery in December 2005, organized by Visual Arts Open, a project of Saklapel art association. Pictures shown here are extracted from his new essay — "Looking in the Office" — that he will exhibit at Popil PhotoGallery in November 2006. A selection of this exhibition will be shown at Siem Reap Photo Festival late November. Below you can read an extract of the artist statement for the show coming at Popil.
Jerry Redfern
Jerry Redfern is a freelance photographer based in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Sometimes, you can even find him there. He generally works on features, documentary and wildlife stories in Southeast Asia, often working with his wife, author Karen Coates. OnAsia Images, in Bangkok, represents his work to the wider world.
Martin Reeves
http://www.thehiddenrealms.com
Martin Reeves, has been held by Asia in a spell for two decades. Being a passionate photographer he sought a film that could portray Asia as to how he had envisioned it, in an enchanted and mysterious way. His quest began in India in 1986, when he set out with some infrared b/w film. The images that appeared revealed a hidden realm. He became captivated, bewitched and intrigued by the notion of infrared light (which is invisible to the naked eye) manifesting into photographs. Its dreamlike look seemed to uncover a dimension that really does exist beyond the confines of our visual spectrum.
Dominic Rouse
http://www.dominicrouse.com
Dominic Rouse, his work is exhibited internationally. In 2002 he showed at the XII Encuentros Abiertos de Fotografia in Buenos Aires and also at the Benham Gallery in Seattle with Jerry Uelsmann. The same year he had his first London show and also exhibited at the Schneider Gallery in Chicago. In 2003 he had his first US solo show at the Carmel Center for Photographic Art and exhibited at the Honolulu Academy and FotoFest in Houston in 2004. He was awarded the Ultimate Eye Foundation grant in 2002 and in 2006. His advertising work has also won recognition at the International Digital Exhibition Awards (London1999 & 2000). In 2003 he won the 'Special Photographer' category in the first International Photography Awards (Photography's Oscars) in Los Angeles. In 2005 he was awarded first prize in The Photo Review's Annual Competition, a Gold Award by America's Black and White Magazine for 'The cunning of unreason', and was the winner of Artrom Gallery's International Digital competition in Rome and Los Angeles Center for Digital Art's International juried competition.
Eric Sander
http://www.ericsander.com/edition
Eric Sander, his work has been published in the world's most prestigious magazines : Time Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, Figaro Magazine, Paris-Match, Grands Reportages, Geo. He grew up in France where he started his career as a photo Editor at Gamma photo Agency in Paris. In 1983, he chose to become a freelance photographer and soon after, settled in Los Angeles to follow his passion: cover in depth stories and portraits. In 2001, he came back to Paris to renew with his roots. While working on assignment for international magazines and corporations, Eric Sander concentrates his personal work on strong themes for the publishing world (6 books published in 2006-one on Cambodia) and international magazines.
Raffaela Scaglietta
Raffaela Scaglietta Italian photo-journalist and video-maker, based in Rome. She's working for various media including the Italian Tv Rai 3 for whom she is preparing a series of short investigative documentaries on home affairs and justice. She is also a contributor of Il Giornale and the Italian Vogue. Previously she was a correspondent from Tokyo for Ansa agency, covering Japan, South Korea and South East Asia. From Japan she was a contributor for Repubblica, Il Corriere della Sera, Panorama, Vogue and Diario. In 1999 she received a Fulbright Scholarship and went to New York to produce a film on anti-globalization and an art documentary Eye-link presented in Japan. From 1996 till 1999 she was based in Brussels where she was correspondent for Il Mondo, Il Corriere della Sera and the Italian tv Tmc covering European integration and corruption.
Uwe Schober
http://www.rupertbeagle.com
Uwe Schober is a self-taught photographer who will commence studying photojournalism and documentary photography at the London College of Communication from January 2006. Over many years he has attended workshops with distinguished photographers such as Gary Knight, Antonin Kratochvil, James Nachtwey, Bruce Gilden, Bill Allard, Walter Schels and David Alan Harvey. He is working on a long-term photographic project on Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. He has just self-published his first photography book on Khmer Boxers.
Vincent Soyez
http://www.vincentsoyez.com/
Vincent Soyez is a French photographer based in New York. After working more than 10 years in Paris he moved to the United States to work in commercial photography. He shoots fashion, portraits, music album covers and contributes to magazines such as The Source, Zink, Complex, Interview, GQ, ESPN, FHM and Fortune. Recently he started to travel to Cambodia to develop a personal body of work that will be presented during the festival.
John Stanmeyer
http://www.viiphoto.com/
John Stanmeyer is a co-founding member of VII and a contract photographer with Time Magazine since 1998. Presently living in Indonesia, this American has spent over seven years focusing on Asian issues. Over the last five years, he has been working on a book about AIDS throughout Asia, while at the same time continuing his photographic documentation for another book on the radical changes in Indonesia since 1997. Stanmeyer has received numerous awards, including the Robert Capa, Magazine Photographer of the Year, World Press and Picture of the Year.
Dieter Telemans
http://www.dietertelemans.com/
Dieter Telemans was born and brought up in Burundi and is now based in Brussels, Belgium. He is a member of the agency Panos Pictures in London. Most of his work takes him back to his roots. He focuses on the positive sides of African countries that often only make our news in a negative way. He worked on the African music scene and published the book "Heart of Dance". Today he is documenting water-related troubles in the world. For this he covered water shortages in Shaanxi (China) and floods in Dhaka (Bangladesh). The exhibition "Troubled Waters" will travel around Europe, starting in the Belgian Parliament on World Waterday, the 22th of March 2007.
Andrew Testa
www.lightstalkers.org/andrewtesta
Andrew Testa was born in London, in 1965. He began his photographic career in the early 1990s working as a freelance for the Guardian and Observer newspapers. Throughout the decade he documented the growing Environmental Protest movement, the only major political movement during an era when politics on both the right and left became increasingly stagnated. In 1999 he shifted his attention to international current affairs covering the war in Kosovo and moved to the Balkans at the end of the year which he used as a base to cover events throughout Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East. He now splits his time between New York, London and Kosovo. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times, The Guardian and The Observer and his work has been published in Newsweek, Stern, Geo, Mare ,Paris Match, Time, Der Spiegel, The Sunday Times Magazine, the Independent magazine, Mother Jones.
Hazel Thompson
http://www.hazelthompson.com/
Hazel Thompson is a British photojournalist based in London. Hazel now works freelance for editorial, commercial and charity assignments worldwide. Her reportage work centres around social issues, identity, religion and humanitarian subjects. With her images being published internationally in The New York Times, Time, Observer Magazine, Sunday Times Magazine, Days Japan, Sondag, Photo District News and more. Hazel has gained recognition for her work by winning a number of awards, most recently for her images of children illegally imprisoned in the Philippines called "Kids Behind Bars", winning The Observer Hodge Award and CARE International Award for Humanitarian Reportage at Visa pour l'image.
John Vink
http://www.johnvink.com/
John Vink studied photography at the fine arts school of La Cambre in 1968 and became a free lance photographer in 1971. He joined Agence Vu in 1986 and was awarded the E. Smith Prize that same year for his work Water in Sahel. Between 1987 and 1993 he worked on a project about refugees in the world, which was exhibited at the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris. He was nominated at Magnum in 1993 and became a member in 1997. He is now based in Cambodia, a country he visits since 1989. He has published "Refugies", "Avoir 20 ans a Phnom Penh" and "Peuples d'en Haut", a book about people with a strong cultural identity living in the mountains of Laos, Guatemala and Georgia. His latest book, "Poids Mouche", is about Khmer boxing.
Sophie Zenon
http://www.nazcapictures.com/
Sophie Zenon works simultaneously on personal work, commissioned assignments from the press or institutions, and exhibitions. She is interested in the relations between man and space, man and nature, man and the sacred. Her pictures of Mongolia, which she has visited yearly since 1996, won the Nomad Chronicles prize. This allowed her to photograph the fishermen from the Amour River (Far East Siberia), a project that focuses on the complexities of the relations between man and the river. With the assistance of the AFAA and the French Embassy, Sophie set up a photography cooperation project between France and Mongolia.
Laurent Zylberman
http://www.365degrees.org/
Laurent Zylberman started photography when staying in London for a French punk-rock magazine. Later on founded the Graphix-Images photo-agency in Paris. With an angle on environmental concerns, the human dimension of his work has come to prevail. Based in Taiwan for 5 years, then Mexico for a further 5, Laurent stringed for Sygma from 1981 to 1997. He has contributed to various local and international publications with wide-ranging topics such as the solar eclipse in Mexico, Kolkhozes in Turkmenistan, Vietnamese boat people, Muslim boarding schools in Indonesia, democratization in Mongolia and Alaskan oil-riggers. He is now based in Paris to work on/with segregated people, along at his daily photo diary.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
A conversation with Luc Delahaye By Jörg Colberg
Oops... a friend of mine just pointed out that i forgot to give credit to the person who did this interview, he also pointed out that i should also give the link instead of copying and pasting his hard work in to my blog...guys here is the link to the blog --Jörg Colberg is founder and editor of the fine-art photography blog Conscientious. (http://www.jmcolberg.com/weblog/). He works as a research scientist at Carnegie-Mellon University. (C) PopPhoto.com-June 2007
By Jörg Colberg
As a Magnum and Newsweek photographer, Luc Delahaye covered many of the most recent areas of conflict like, for example, Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan. Apart from other prizes, he won the World Press Photo three times. With time, his work evolved from standard photojournalistic practice, both towards other areas (for example, for his project "L'Autre" he stealthily took photos of Parisian subway passengers) and methods (he started to use a panoramic large-format camera for photojournalistic assignments). "History" might be considered the culmination of this development, a series of panoramic photos often showing vast scales, such as the whole UN assembly hall while President Bush was giving a speech, and printed quite large (4 by 8 feet). Most famously, his photo of a dead Taliban soldier, exhibited and sold by a commercial art gallery, caused a stir a few years ago. A year later, he resigned from Magnum. I talked to Luc about his earlier and current work.
Jörg Colberg: I think the first images that I saw from you were those published in "History", and I was instantly somewhat confused. Even though these photos are/were clearly photojournalism, in my head I also placed them into the context of contemporary photography. For example, "President Bush Addressing the U.N." reminded me of some of Andreas Gursky's work, like his photos of stock traders or of a rave. What was your motivation to move away from your run-of-the-mill photojournalistic practice - where one would have taken a photo of just President Bush and the podium at the UN - and to get vast panoramas instead?
Luc Delahaye: The picture you mention was made at a time – 2002 - when I was more interested in including the broad context of a given situation than I am now. It was probably in reaction to photojournalism, where I was coming from. I think that photojournalism is at its best when conceived as a series - the picture story. But I was never really interested in telling stories, I'm more into the production of individual images with strong narrative structures, and at that time there was a necessity to formalize clearly what I was standing for: simplicity, some clarity, the refusal of a "photographic style" and the mystification of reality that comes with it. Working with the complexity of the real was one thing. The other one, probably more difficult, was to work towards the restoration of the autonomy of the image.
JC: Can you be a little bit more specific by what you mean when you say "the autonomy of the image"? Also, I find it interesting that you're speaking of the complexity of the real. We've come to get used to the idea that reality is just so simple, that simple stories and simple images show us what is real and what isn't. But it seems to me that's just really not true, and you can look anywhere in the world where reality is just so much more complex than the black-and-white pictures people are presented. Is this something that you are interested in?
LD: If an image has a sort of organic unity - the internal coherence of a mesh of elements that work together, respond to each other and therefore produce "intelligence" – then you can say that it has a level of autonomy. It's self-sufficient in the sense that it doesn't rely on the outside to exist; and this is precisely a condition that makes possible an interesting relation with the outside, the viewer. I think that these qualities are sometimes emphasized by the size of the work - when some elements and information begin to exist, and when the image is independent from the context in which it is shown: the picture as a physical object. But I can't say that I am consciously trying to achieve this, it doesn't work that way. It's enough if I just recognize it when it's there or seems to be there.
JC: We've lately seen the development of photography that lives at the intersection of photojournalism and art. For example, recently, photography from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has reached art galleries, and books have been published. In a sense, there never was such a clear distinction between photojournalism and fine art in the first place, with many photographers, like Henri Cartier-Bresson, working right in that gray zone. But, I think, in the eye of the public, photography still is either art or photojournalism, or something that is not necessarily real or outright fabricated and something that is a depiction of reality. There are all kinds of problems I see with this. For example, shouldn't we a bit concerned if the aftermath of a natural (and, to a large extent, made-made) disaster can only be found in museums or art galleries - the places where many people expect to find, well, art - something that doesn't necessarily reflect "reality"? Don't we move things that need to be discussed in quite a bit of seriousness into a space which might suppress this discussion?
LD: A work of art is always a document: a document about the artist, about its time and the context in which it has been made; and sometimes a photograph contains enough information about a given situation that you can say it has some journalistic value. But it's different - in nature - from photojournalism, and I think ignoring the difference between the two generally produces something which is neither good journalism nor it is convincing art. That said, I don't really feel concerned by this issue - the issue of the classification of my pictures by their viewers.
JC: It's quite interesting that your work was discussed in three of my other interviews. In each case, your photo of the dead Taliban soldier from your "History" project was brought up, and I'm quite grateful that I now can talk with you about this particular photo. Can you maybe give us a bit of a background first? Under which conditions did you take the photo?
LD: I was staying since two weeks with a small group of Northern Alliance fighters in a farm on the frontline, waiting for the offensive. It eventually happened and in great confusion, on foot, we crossed the no man's land and reached the Taliban lines. That's where I made this image. The morning after, we reached Kabul.
JC: I think the photo has generated quite a bit of a controversy not because of its content, but because of how and where it was displayed (and sold). These days, people are quite used to seeing dead foreign (but certainly not their own) soldiers on a regular basis in their newspapers, but seeing a huge print of one in an art gallery is quite a bit different. And I sense a certain uneasiness about seeing it sold for a lot of money. I am sure you have encountered this problem before. What do you say to people who confront you about this?
LD: I'm avoiding these discussions.
JC: OK, let's not talk about it then. But then I'd be curious to find out why you're avoiding these discussions now? Do you think that the photo and its presentation have been a bit misunderstood?
LD: There can't be a misunderstanding, because I'm not "saying" anything through my pictures. They are just there. If they are good enough, they will not need me to justify them afterwards. In any case, photography is essentially a phenomenological practice: no matter how complex or obscure a picture can be, it will always show the nature of the photographer's relation to the real with a degree of clarity.
JC: The photo of the dead Taliban reminded me of paintings of old masters - who regularly showed historical or religious settings or events. The advent of photography made painters move their subject matter away from the realistic to something else, but it was never quite that obvious that photography was moving in. Maybe we're now at a point where photography creates our contemporary version of paintings of old masters? Is this something you had in mind?
LD: No, I don't feel the need to do what has already been done. I'm trying to work with what only belongs to photography, and I think there's more to be done.
This conversation was commissioned by American Photo.(c) Conscientious.
By Jörg Colberg
As a Magnum and Newsweek photographer, Luc Delahaye covered many of the most recent areas of conflict like, for example, Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan. Apart from other prizes, he won the World Press Photo three times. With time, his work evolved from standard photojournalistic practice, both towards other areas (for example, for his project "L'Autre" he stealthily took photos of Parisian subway passengers) and methods (he started to use a panoramic large-format camera for photojournalistic assignments). "History" might be considered the culmination of this development, a series of panoramic photos often showing vast scales, such as the whole UN assembly hall while President Bush was giving a speech, and printed quite large (4 by 8 feet). Most famously, his photo of a dead Taliban soldier, exhibited and sold by a commercial art gallery, caused a stir a few years ago. A year later, he resigned from Magnum. I talked to Luc about his earlier and current work.
Jörg Colberg: I think the first images that I saw from you were those published in "History", and I was instantly somewhat confused. Even though these photos are/were clearly photojournalism, in my head I also placed them into the context of contemporary photography. For example, "President Bush Addressing the U.N." reminded me of some of Andreas Gursky's work, like his photos of stock traders or of a rave. What was your motivation to move away from your run-of-the-mill photojournalistic practice - where one would have taken a photo of just President Bush and the podium at the UN - and to get vast panoramas instead?
Luc Delahaye: The picture you mention was made at a time – 2002 - when I was more interested in including the broad context of a given situation than I am now. It was probably in reaction to photojournalism, where I was coming from. I think that photojournalism is at its best when conceived as a series - the picture story. But I was never really interested in telling stories, I'm more into the production of individual images with strong narrative structures, and at that time there was a necessity to formalize clearly what I was standing for: simplicity, some clarity, the refusal of a "photographic style" and the mystification of reality that comes with it. Working with the complexity of the real was one thing. The other one, probably more difficult, was to work towards the restoration of the autonomy of the image.
JC: Can you be a little bit more specific by what you mean when you say "the autonomy of the image"? Also, I find it interesting that you're speaking of the complexity of the real. We've come to get used to the idea that reality is just so simple, that simple stories and simple images show us what is real and what isn't. But it seems to me that's just really not true, and you can look anywhere in the world where reality is just so much more complex than the black-and-white pictures people are presented. Is this something that you are interested in?
LD: If an image has a sort of organic unity - the internal coherence of a mesh of elements that work together, respond to each other and therefore produce "intelligence" – then you can say that it has a level of autonomy. It's self-sufficient in the sense that it doesn't rely on the outside to exist; and this is precisely a condition that makes possible an interesting relation with the outside, the viewer. I think that these qualities are sometimes emphasized by the size of the work - when some elements and information begin to exist, and when the image is independent from the context in which it is shown: the picture as a physical object. But I can't say that I am consciously trying to achieve this, it doesn't work that way. It's enough if I just recognize it when it's there or seems to be there.
JC: We've lately seen the development of photography that lives at the intersection of photojournalism and art. For example, recently, photography from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has reached art galleries, and books have been published. In a sense, there never was such a clear distinction between photojournalism and fine art in the first place, with many photographers, like Henri Cartier-Bresson, working right in that gray zone. But, I think, in the eye of the public, photography still is either art or photojournalism, or something that is not necessarily real or outright fabricated and something that is a depiction of reality. There are all kinds of problems I see with this. For example, shouldn't we a bit concerned if the aftermath of a natural (and, to a large extent, made-made) disaster can only be found in museums or art galleries - the places where many people expect to find, well, art - something that doesn't necessarily reflect "reality"? Don't we move things that need to be discussed in quite a bit of seriousness into a space which might suppress this discussion?
LD: A work of art is always a document: a document about the artist, about its time and the context in which it has been made; and sometimes a photograph contains enough information about a given situation that you can say it has some journalistic value. But it's different - in nature - from photojournalism, and I think ignoring the difference between the two generally produces something which is neither good journalism nor it is convincing art. That said, I don't really feel concerned by this issue - the issue of the classification of my pictures by their viewers.
JC: It's quite interesting that your work was discussed in three of my other interviews. In each case, your photo of the dead Taliban soldier from your "History" project was brought up, and I'm quite grateful that I now can talk with you about this particular photo. Can you maybe give us a bit of a background first? Under which conditions did you take the photo?
LD: I was staying since two weeks with a small group of Northern Alliance fighters in a farm on the frontline, waiting for the offensive. It eventually happened and in great confusion, on foot, we crossed the no man's land and reached the Taliban lines. That's where I made this image. The morning after, we reached Kabul.
JC: I think the photo has generated quite a bit of a controversy not because of its content, but because of how and where it was displayed (and sold). These days, people are quite used to seeing dead foreign (but certainly not their own) soldiers on a regular basis in their newspapers, but seeing a huge print of one in an art gallery is quite a bit different. And I sense a certain uneasiness about seeing it sold for a lot of money. I am sure you have encountered this problem before. What do you say to people who confront you about this?
LD: I'm avoiding these discussions.
JC: OK, let's not talk about it then. But then I'd be curious to find out why you're avoiding these discussions now? Do you think that the photo and its presentation have been a bit misunderstood?
LD: There can't be a misunderstanding, because I'm not "saying" anything through my pictures. They are just there. If they are good enough, they will not need me to justify them afterwards. In any case, photography is essentially a phenomenological practice: no matter how complex or obscure a picture can be, it will always show the nature of the photographer's relation to the real with a degree of clarity.
JC: The photo of the dead Taliban reminded me of paintings of old masters - who regularly showed historical or religious settings or events. The advent of photography made painters move their subject matter away from the realistic to something else, but it was never quite that obvious that photography was moving in. Maybe we're now at a point where photography creates our contemporary version of paintings of old masters? Is this something you had in mind?
LD: No, I don't feel the need to do what has already been done. I'm trying to work with what only belongs to photography, and I think there's more to be done.
This conversation was commissioned by American Photo.(c) Conscientious.
Thursday, June 7, 2007
50 MASTERS OF PHOTOGRAPHY
The Photographers
Compiled by Mason Resnick
1 Ansel Adams
One of the most widely-known photographers, Adams was a conservationist and an artist with a camera. His photos of Yosemite, the Southwestern US and portraits are equalled only by the techniques that he pioneered.
2 Diane Arbus
Her controversial portraiture looked beyond the superficial and into her subjects often troubled souls. But her magazine work show she could have a split personality.
3 Richard Avedon
His up close, show-every-hair-follicle approach to portraiture can be jarring, but his ability to render both his and his sitters' personalities in each image he creates is uncanny.
4 Erwin Blumenfeld
An innovative, influential fashion photographer.
5 Phil Borges
Photographer of all things Tibetan, including the Dalai Lama.
6 Margaret Bourke-White
One of the original Life magazine staff photographers, Bourke-White was a pioneer in both photojournalism and womens' work roles. Her images of World War II--especially the liberation of concentration camps--were deceptively simple. Her images would often be the perfect combination of fact and beauty.
7 Brassai
His portraits and Paris street photos are touching and perceptive.
8 Henri Cartier-Bresson
The father of Photo Reportage and co-founder of the legendary Magnum photo agency, "HC-B" has influenced generations of photojournalists, documentary photographers and street photographers. Influenced and inspired by classical and impressionist art and freed by the portability of the Leica, HC-B changed the way we look at the world around us.
9 David Byrne
The founder of the Talking Heads points his camera at the kind of bizarre incongruities you could write a song about.
10 Imogen Cunningham
Cunningham's carreer spanned the first three quarters of the 20th century photographed many of her subjects draped in exotic clothes in images with moral themes and tableaux representing works of poets. Later nudes were shocking for their time, but rather tame now.
11 Edward Curtis
Curtis built an illustrius carreer documenting Native Americans in the 1900s. The images resonate 100 years later.
12 Robert Doisneau
A street photographer whose decisive moments are imbued with warmth, feeling and wit, Diosneau's work reveals the fragile moments of urban existance.
13 Harold Edgerton
A bullet through an apple. A droplet of milk that looks like a crown. A punctured balloon in mid-explosion. These are just a few of the famous images by "Doc" Edgerton, the pioneer of high-speed photography.
14 Elliott Erwitt
A perceptive street photographer with a sharp sense of humor, a sensitivity to the human condition, and an affinity for dogs. It is almost impossible to be depressed after looking at his work!
15 Robert Frank
Frank's The Americans is a seminal development in the history of photography. He cris-crossed the US in the mid-50's and produced a collection of subjective images that showed the dark side of the nation that was supposedly in the midst of a socio-economic boom. To quote Jack Kerouack speaking directly to Robert Frank in the intro: "You Got Eyes."
16 Walker Evans Quintisential American photography from the first half of the 20th century. Evans influenced a generation with his forceful images of a lonely country.
17 Anne Geddes
The ultimate children's photographer. Her colorful, whimsical images leave you wondering how she got those infants to pose like that.
18 Ralph Gibson
Gibson's high-contrast, minimalist black and white compositions have influenced a generation of photographers. By isolating the essential elements of a scene, his pictures show a style that is unique and immediately recognizable.
19 Lewis Hine
By championing the cause of poor immigrants, child laborers and other downtrodden folks through his powerfully straightforward photos, Lewis Hine showed us how the "Other Half" lived. His passionate photographs enlightened the world and brought about legislation that has protected millions since his work appeared in the early 20th century.
20 Allen Ginsberg
Some photographers have been described as poets with a camera. Ginsberg was the real thing.
21 George Hurrell
During Hollywood's Golden Era, publicity photos had the power to make or break stars. George Hurrell, who perfected the "glamour" portrait, was the most sought after glamour photographer by the big names and the wanna-be's.
22 Andre Kertesz
Kertesz used the camera to transform the chaos of the street into lyrical scenes. A brilliant, influential teacher and artist.
23 William Klein
His brief involvement with photography yielded an influential body of work that has been called confrontational and immediate. They seem to be a furious protest against the establishment. Uncompromising and bold, the images are mostly street photos that stare when others would avert their gaze. He almost dares you to look at them.
24 Josef Koudelka
A protege of Carter-Bresson, the first printing of Koudelka's book about Gypsies is a collector's item. Koudelka's documentary photos highlight the dignity of Eastern Europe's Gypsies, despite their often squalid living conditions.
25 David Lachapelle
A rising star on the celebrity portrait scene, Lachapelle's photos of Drew Barrymore, Jim Carrey, k.d. lang and the Beastie Boys has earned him accolades from American Photo magazine and others. His first book is a showcase of his impressive talents.
26 Dorothea Lange
Best known for her famous photos of the Depression, including Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, Lange was active from the 1920s to the early 1960s and was one of the most influential photographers in American history.
27 Annie Leibovitz
One of today's most influential and admired artists, renowned for her vivid and distinctive style, Annie Leibovitz is an American original and a master of self-promotion. Her portraits of Bruce Springsteen, Jody Foster, Michael Jackson, Miles Davis, Greg Louganis, Mikhail Baryshnikov, John Lennon and more combine a keen eye with a quick wit.
28 Robert Mapplethorpe
His sometimes graphic homo-erotic photos challenged the established morality of the times, but his flower photos were considerably less controversial works that showed a subtle genious unencumbered by the baggage of his more infamous work. His Flowers collection, photos taken as he was dying of AIDS, is a symbolic look at life, death and sensuality.
29 Joel Meyerowitz
Joel Meyerowitz is a master of the color image. His exquisitely printed collections include his lyrical landscapes and detailed portraiture that share an autobiographical feel, and a strong sense of place.
30 Richard Misrach
Misrach's technically perfect images portray American landscapes that have seen the heavy hand of developers, the military and polluters. The serene, understated approach Misrach often employs lies in stark contrast to the ecological damage his work depicts.
31 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
A member of the avante-garde Bauhaus movement, this artist/photographer/ theoretician's images anticipate the deconstructivist and post-modernist art movements of toady.
32 Nicholas Nixon
His early work showed a remarkable mastery of large format photography in situations where one would expect to see 35mm cameras; his portrait work includes a series on four sisters taken over a 15-year period and images of people with AIDS.
33 Alexander Rodchenko
A Russian photographer whose strong graphic work was rarely seen outside the Soviet Union until after the Iron Curtain was torn down.
34 Pedro Meyer David Muench
This landscape photographer's images of American national parks and the southwest celebrate the country's primal beauty through magical patterns of light and form.
35 Helmut Newton
From big nudes to portraits of Elizabeth Taylor and Salvador Dali, Newton has been on the cutting edge of fashion and glamour.
36 Herb Ritts
From Madonna to Jack Nicholson to William Burroughs, Herb Ritts has photographed the most famours--and notorious--faces of our time. His Notorious collection showcases his best celebrity shots, while Africa offers a bold departure: photos of the people and landscape of the African continent that will be a revalation to his fans.
37 Galen Rowell
Master nature photographer and teacher Galen Rowell's work presents the splendor of the world's natural beauty. As a columnist for Outdoor Photographer, Rowell has produced a prolific output of writing and images that will help a new generation of photographers to create the kind of interperative, adventure-filled images that Rowell is famous for.
38 Sebastiao Salgado
A photojournalist in the best sense of the word, Sebasiao Salgado is fascinated with people who work hard in all parts of the world. From landless workers trying to claim property for themselves in Brazil to Oil workers putting out fires in Kuwait, Salgado's lens captures the beauty in his subjects' gritty reality.
39 John Sexton
A consumate craftsman and teacher, John Sexton offers tactile fine black and white nature imagery that utilizes the Zone System and large format for crisp, beautiful work. Sexton focuses the Desert Southwest US, using creative printing techniques to create uniquely expressive results. Sexton runs numerous workshops to share his knowledge with up-and-coming photographers.
40 Cindy Sherman
Sherman uses photography as a tool to manipulate images of women that have been spawned by popular culture, with herself as the leading character in most of the images she creates.
41 W. Eugene Smith
A premier master of photojournalism, Smith passionately believed in the integrity of his subjects and the photographs that portrayed them. From his staged "Walk to Paradise Garden" to his graphic images of World War II and damning photos of the human tragedy brought on by industrial pollution at Minamata, Smith produced some of the most memorable images of his day.
42 Edward Steichen
As the curator of the photo collection for the New York Museum of Modern Art, Steichen was the man behind The Family Of Man, a late 1950's photo exhibition and recently-republished book that was a watershed in the history of photography because it gave photography mass appeal as an expressive, fine art. His curatorship brought about a grand era for "Concerned" photography.
43 Alfred Stieglitz
One of the great art-world arbiters of the 20th century, Stieglitz gained recognition for photography as a fine art and introduced the European avant-garde to America. A leader in the controversial Pictorialist movement, he offered a mix of literal and interperative images. He moved in a brilliant circle of artists and intellectuals and was the husband of Georgia O'Keeffe.
44 Paul Strand
A white picket fence. A poor Adirondac family. Paul Strand's pure vision and uncompromising technique gained him international accolades as a master of American photography, especially in the 1950s. His black and white photos are exquisite and memorable.
45 Jerry Uelsmann
Before there was Photoshop, there was Uelsmann. His enigmatic, surrealist collection darkroom combinations defy categorization. It is their mystery that has stumped critics and kept his fans coming back for more.
46 Weegee
A crime news photographer in the 30s and 40s in New York, Weegee is possibly the most well known street photographer. Crude and direct, his photos have an immediacy and impact that affect the viewer to this day. His later work, distorted portraits that he called "photo charicatures", have a similar in-your-face quality.
47 William Wegman
A man and his dogs: Wegman, who started out as a painter, is best known for photographs of his dogs. Man Ray, then Fay Ray and her pups have posed for Wegman in a variety of often humorous and very human-like settings. His photographs are a tribute to the ultimate partnership between a man and his dogs.
48 Edward Weston
Weston's immaculately constructed images imbue forms of common objects with a sensuality that transcends the subject. Sharp, detailed and rich in tonality, his closeups, nudes and nature photographs brought the power of photography as an objective tool of observation to new heights. You'll never look at a pepper quite the same way again.
49 Minor White
A teacher as well as a photographer, Minor White crafted works of beauty that were also explorations of his inner self. His best known work was made of the natural wonders in the American West. He experimented with alternative processes, non-narrative sequences and techniques that would stretch the bounds of photography.
50 Joel-Peter Witkin
Few living photographers are as consistently controversial and provocative as Joel-Peter Witkin, whose work elicits hostility and admiration in equal measure. Shocking and compelling, the photographs in this retrospective collection reach to the outer limits of human nature. Voted least likely to be invited to photograph childrens' birthday parties by Modern Photography in 1989.
Compiled by Mason Resnick
1 Ansel Adams
One of the most widely-known photographers, Adams was a conservationist and an artist with a camera. His photos of Yosemite, the Southwestern US and portraits are equalled only by the techniques that he pioneered.
2 Diane Arbus
Her controversial portraiture looked beyond the superficial and into her subjects often troubled souls. But her magazine work show she could have a split personality.
3 Richard Avedon
His up close, show-every-hair-follicle approach to portraiture can be jarring, but his ability to render both his and his sitters' personalities in each image he creates is uncanny.
4 Erwin Blumenfeld
An innovative, influential fashion photographer.
5 Phil Borges
Photographer of all things Tibetan, including the Dalai Lama.
6 Margaret Bourke-White
One of the original Life magazine staff photographers, Bourke-White was a pioneer in both photojournalism and womens' work roles. Her images of World War II--especially the liberation of concentration camps--were deceptively simple. Her images would often be the perfect combination of fact and beauty.
7 Brassai
His portraits and Paris street photos are touching and perceptive.
8 Henri Cartier-Bresson
The father of Photo Reportage and co-founder of the legendary Magnum photo agency, "HC-B" has influenced generations of photojournalists, documentary photographers and street photographers. Influenced and inspired by classical and impressionist art and freed by the portability of the Leica, HC-B changed the way we look at the world around us.
9 David Byrne
The founder of the Talking Heads points his camera at the kind of bizarre incongruities you could write a song about.
10 Imogen Cunningham
Cunningham's carreer spanned the first three quarters of the 20th century photographed many of her subjects draped in exotic clothes in images with moral themes and tableaux representing works of poets. Later nudes were shocking for their time, but rather tame now.
11 Edward Curtis
Curtis built an illustrius carreer documenting Native Americans in the 1900s. The images resonate 100 years later.
12 Robert Doisneau
A street photographer whose decisive moments are imbued with warmth, feeling and wit, Diosneau's work reveals the fragile moments of urban existance.
13 Harold Edgerton
A bullet through an apple. A droplet of milk that looks like a crown. A punctured balloon in mid-explosion. These are just a few of the famous images by "Doc" Edgerton, the pioneer of high-speed photography.
14 Elliott Erwitt
A perceptive street photographer with a sharp sense of humor, a sensitivity to the human condition, and an affinity for dogs. It is almost impossible to be depressed after looking at his work!
15 Robert Frank
Frank's The Americans is a seminal development in the history of photography. He cris-crossed the US in the mid-50's and produced a collection of subjective images that showed the dark side of the nation that was supposedly in the midst of a socio-economic boom. To quote Jack Kerouack speaking directly to Robert Frank in the intro: "You Got Eyes."
16 Walker Evans Quintisential American photography from the first half of the 20th century. Evans influenced a generation with his forceful images of a lonely country.
17 Anne Geddes
The ultimate children's photographer. Her colorful, whimsical images leave you wondering how she got those infants to pose like that.
18 Ralph Gibson
Gibson's high-contrast, minimalist black and white compositions have influenced a generation of photographers. By isolating the essential elements of a scene, his pictures show a style that is unique and immediately recognizable.
19 Lewis Hine
By championing the cause of poor immigrants, child laborers and other downtrodden folks through his powerfully straightforward photos, Lewis Hine showed us how the "Other Half" lived. His passionate photographs enlightened the world and brought about legislation that has protected millions since his work appeared in the early 20th century.
20 Allen Ginsberg
Some photographers have been described as poets with a camera. Ginsberg was the real thing.
21 George Hurrell
During Hollywood's Golden Era, publicity photos had the power to make or break stars. George Hurrell, who perfected the "glamour" portrait, was the most sought after glamour photographer by the big names and the wanna-be's.
22 Andre Kertesz
Kertesz used the camera to transform the chaos of the street into lyrical scenes. A brilliant, influential teacher and artist.
23 William Klein
His brief involvement with photography yielded an influential body of work that has been called confrontational and immediate. They seem to be a furious protest against the establishment. Uncompromising and bold, the images are mostly street photos that stare when others would avert their gaze. He almost dares you to look at them.
24 Josef Koudelka
A protege of Carter-Bresson, the first printing of Koudelka's book about Gypsies is a collector's item. Koudelka's documentary photos highlight the dignity of Eastern Europe's Gypsies, despite their often squalid living conditions.
25 David Lachapelle
A rising star on the celebrity portrait scene, Lachapelle's photos of Drew Barrymore, Jim Carrey, k.d. lang and the Beastie Boys has earned him accolades from American Photo magazine and others. His first book is a showcase of his impressive talents.
26 Dorothea Lange
Best known for her famous photos of the Depression, including Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, Lange was active from the 1920s to the early 1960s and was one of the most influential photographers in American history.
27 Annie Leibovitz
One of today's most influential and admired artists, renowned for her vivid and distinctive style, Annie Leibovitz is an American original and a master of self-promotion. Her portraits of Bruce Springsteen, Jody Foster, Michael Jackson, Miles Davis, Greg Louganis, Mikhail Baryshnikov, John Lennon and more combine a keen eye with a quick wit.
28 Robert Mapplethorpe
His sometimes graphic homo-erotic photos challenged the established morality of the times, but his flower photos were considerably less controversial works that showed a subtle genious unencumbered by the baggage of his more infamous work. His Flowers collection, photos taken as he was dying of AIDS, is a symbolic look at life, death and sensuality.
29 Joel Meyerowitz
Joel Meyerowitz is a master of the color image. His exquisitely printed collections include his lyrical landscapes and detailed portraiture that share an autobiographical feel, and a strong sense of place.
30 Richard Misrach
Misrach's technically perfect images portray American landscapes that have seen the heavy hand of developers, the military and polluters. The serene, understated approach Misrach often employs lies in stark contrast to the ecological damage his work depicts.
31 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
A member of the avante-garde Bauhaus movement, this artist/photographer/ theoretician's images anticipate the deconstructivist and post-modernist art movements of toady.
32 Nicholas Nixon
His early work showed a remarkable mastery of large format photography in situations where one would expect to see 35mm cameras; his portrait work includes a series on four sisters taken over a 15-year period and images of people with AIDS.
33 Alexander Rodchenko
A Russian photographer whose strong graphic work was rarely seen outside the Soviet Union until after the Iron Curtain was torn down.
34 Pedro Meyer David Muench
This landscape photographer's images of American national parks and the southwest celebrate the country's primal beauty through magical patterns of light and form.
35 Helmut Newton
From big nudes to portraits of Elizabeth Taylor and Salvador Dali, Newton has been on the cutting edge of fashion and glamour.
36 Herb Ritts
From Madonna to Jack Nicholson to William Burroughs, Herb Ritts has photographed the most famours--and notorious--faces of our time. His Notorious collection showcases his best celebrity shots, while Africa offers a bold departure: photos of the people and landscape of the African continent that will be a revalation to his fans.
37 Galen Rowell
Master nature photographer and teacher Galen Rowell's work presents the splendor of the world's natural beauty. As a columnist for Outdoor Photographer, Rowell has produced a prolific output of writing and images that will help a new generation of photographers to create the kind of interperative, adventure-filled images that Rowell is famous for.
38 Sebastiao Salgado
A photojournalist in the best sense of the word, Sebasiao Salgado is fascinated with people who work hard in all parts of the world. From landless workers trying to claim property for themselves in Brazil to Oil workers putting out fires in Kuwait, Salgado's lens captures the beauty in his subjects' gritty reality.
39 John Sexton
A consumate craftsman and teacher, John Sexton offers tactile fine black and white nature imagery that utilizes the Zone System and large format for crisp, beautiful work. Sexton focuses the Desert Southwest US, using creative printing techniques to create uniquely expressive results. Sexton runs numerous workshops to share his knowledge with up-and-coming photographers.
40 Cindy Sherman
Sherman uses photography as a tool to manipulate images of women that have been spawned by popular culture, with herself as the leading character in most of the images she creates.
41 W. Eugene Smith
A premier master of photojournalism, Smith passionately believed in the integrity of his subjects and the photographs that portrayed them. From his staged "Walk to Paradise Garden" to his graphic images of World War II and damning photos of the human tragedy brought on by industrial pollution at Minamata, Smith produced some of the most memorable images of his day.
42 Edward Steichen
As the curator of the photo collection for the New York Museum of Modern Art, Steichen was the man behind The Family Of Man, a late 1950's photo exhibition and recently-republished book that was a watershed in the history of photography because it gave photography mass appeal as an expressive, fine art. His curatorship brought about a grand era for "Concerned" photography.
43 Alfred Stieglitz
One of the great art-world arbiters of the 20th century, Stieglitz gained recognition for photography as a fine art and introduced the European avant-garde to America. A leader in the controversial Pictorialist movement, he offered a mix of literal and interperative images. He moved in a brilliant circle of artists and intellectuals and was the husband of Georgia O'Keeffe.
44 Paul Strand
A white picket fence. A poor Adirondac family. Paul Strand's pure vision and uncompromising technique gained him international accolades as a master of American photography, especially in the 1950s. His black and white photos are exquisite and memorable.
45 Jerry Uelsmann
Before there was Photoshop, there was Uelsmann. His enigmatic, surrealist collection darkroom combinations defy categorization. It is their mystery that has stumped critics and kept his fans coming back for more.
46 Weegee
A crime news photographer in the 30s and 40s in New York, Weegee is possibly the most well known street photographer. Crude and direct, his photos have an immediacy and impact that affect the viewer to this day. His later work, distorted portraits that he called "photo charicatures", have a similar in-your-face quality.
47 William Wegman
A man and his dogs: Wegman, who started out as a painter, is best known for photographs of his dogs. Man Ray, then Fay Ray and her pups have posed for Wegman in a variety of often humorous and very human-like settings. His photographs are a tribute to the ultimate partnership between a man and his dogs.
48 Edward Weston
Weston's immaculately constructed images imbue forms of common objects with a sensuality that transcends the subject. Sharp, detailed and rich in tonality, his closeups, nudes and nature photographs brought the power of photography as an objective tool of observation to new heights. You'll never look at a pepper quite the same way again.
49 Minor White
A teacher as well as a photographer, Minor White crafted works of beauty that were also explorations of his inner self. His best known work was made of the natural wonders in the American West. He experimented with alternative processes, non-narrative sequences and techniques that would stretch the bounds of photography.
50 Joel-Peter Witkin
Few living photographers are as consistently controversial and provocative as Joel-Peter Witkin, whose work elicits hostility and admiration in equal measure. Shocking and compelling, the photographs in this retrospective collection reach to the outer limits of human nature. Voted least likely to be invited to photograph childrens' birthday parties by Modern Photography in 1989.
Monday, June 4, 2007
Thursday, May 31, 2007
personalities
legendary Shehnai maestro late Ustad Bismillah Khan.
(The shehnai is an aerophonic instrument which is thought to bring good luck, and as a result, is widely used in North India for marriages and processions.This tube-like instrument gradually widens towards the lower end. It usually has between six and nine holes. It employs two sets of double reeds, making it a quadruple reed woodwind. By controlling the breath, various tunes can be played on it)
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Stock Tips: News From Photo Agencies
By Daryl Lang (PDN)
The latest on the stock photo business:
Getty's Future: Consumers, Music, And (Surprise) Acquisitions
In the next four months Getty Images plans to launch new a new consumer business and a music licensing service.
Some rare hints about upcoming products came during a presentation last Wednesday by Getty CEO Jonathan Klein at an Internet conference organized by Goldman Sachs.
"We plan to launch a consumer business in the next 90 to 120 days," Klein said, without revealing what the business is. He mentioned this in connection with Getty's new strategy of operating multiple Web sites for different customers – including gettyimages.com, iStockphoto.com and new acquisition PunchStock.
Klein also expressed hope that the text-only search ads sold through Google will eventually incorporate multimedia content, like photos and video, both of which Getty provides. On that note, he added, "We will be providing music to our customers within 90 days."
Klein declined to predict how big the music business could become. Getty competitor Jupitermedia runs a stock music service at RoyaltyFreeMusic.com, which is a relatively small part of Jupiterimages.
Klein was asked about the failed talks to acquire Jupitermedia and declined to say anything new. Later, Klein took a shot at archrival Corbis, saying, "I respect Corbis," but "It is worth pointing out that iStockPhoto made more profit yesterday than Corbis did in its entire history, and I think that matters in business."
Asked about Getty's financial priorities, Klein said, "The past is a really great guide for the future for us, and that's acquisitions, acquisitions, acquisitions. We're very good at doing acquisitions. I think we've done about 90. One of them was a complete disaster, and that was in 1999, the rest have worked out extremely well."
The 1999 failure he was referring to was Art.com – a consumer service that Getty gave up on in 2001.
Klein's presentation is available here.
More Getty News
- Getty Images has re-upped its deal with the National Hockey League and will remain the league's exclusive commercial imagery licensor for the next four years. Getty and the NHL have been in partnership since 2002.
- Newscom is now distributing 500,000 royalty-free photos from Getty Images. Collections represented include Digital Vision, Photodisc, Photographer's Choice, Retrofile, Stockbyte and National Geographic (a Getty partner).
- Pixsy, a company that provides search services for image collections, has teamed up with Getty-owned iStockphoto. All of iStock's images will be searchable through the Pixsy.com portal. Separately, Pixsy will power three new portals for specific kinds of stock photography for SuperStock, which is owned by a21.
Launches and deals
- Drive Images is a new right-managed stock library of 25,000 automotive images. The wholly owned collection was developed by eVox Productions, which also licenses images through third-party sites via its Automotive Image Library.
- London-based Photolibrary Group has launched a new collection called Fresh Food Images (FFI). FFI incorporates 200,000 images from 100 photographers, including the Anthony Blake Food Library.
- AP Images, the photo licensing arm of the Associated Press, is distributing content from the archives of EBONY and JET magazines, which are part of the Johnson Publishing Company.
- Software developer CogniSign recently launched a beta version of xcavator.net, a visual search engine. For now, the site is searching 300,000 images from Photovault.com, but the company expects to add more collections in the coming months.
- Alamy is distributing GoGo Images, a multicultural, royalty-free lifestyle collection.
- Imaginechina is now distributing the features and archive of Agence VU in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Imageinechina already represents photo agencies Magnum and Anzenberger for Chinese markets.
- Digital Railroad has expanded its service for photographers by adding business tools powered by ADBASE Inc. and HindSight Ltd.
Send suggestions for stock photo news to news editor Daryl Lang (dlang@pdnonline.com).
The latest on the stock photo business:
Getty's Future: Consumers, Music, And (Surprise) Acquisitions
In the next four months Getty Images plans to launch new a new consumer business and a music licensing service.
Some rare hints about upcoming products came during a presentation last Wednesday by Getty CEO Jonathan Klein at an Internet conference organized by Goldman Sachs.
"We plan to launch a consumer business in the next 90 to 120 days," Klein said, without revealing what the business is. He mentioned this in connection with Getty's new strategy of operating multiple Web sites for different customers – including gettyimages.com, iStockphoto.com and new acquisition PunchStock.
Klein also expressed hope that the text-only search ads sold through Google will eventually incorporate multimedia content, like photos and video, both of which Getty provides. On that note, he added, "We will be providing music to our customers within 90 days."
Klein declined to predict how big the music business could become. Getty competitor Jupitermedia runs a stock music service at RoyaltyFreeMusic.com, which is a relatively small part of Jupiterimages.
Klein was asked about the failed talks to acquire Jupitermedia and declined to say anything new. Later, Klein took a shot at archrival Corbis, saying, "I respect Corbis," but "It is worth pointing out that iStockPhoto made more profit yesterday than Corbis did in its entire history, and I think that matters in business."
Asked about Getty's financial priorities, Klein said, "The past is a really great guide for the future for us, and that's acquisitions, acquisitions, acquisitions. We're very good at doing acquisitions. I think we've done about 90. One of them was a complete disaster, and that was in 1999, the rest have worked out extremely well."
The 1999 failure he was referring to was Art.com – a consumer service that Getty gave up on in 2001.
Klein's presentation is available here.
More Getty News
- Getty Images has re-upped its deal with the National Hockey League and will remain the league's exclusive commercial imagery licensor for the next four years. Getty and the NHL have been in partnership since 2002.
- Newscom is now distributing 500,000 royalty-free photos from Getty Images. Collections represented include Digital Vision, Photodisc, Photographer's Choice, Retrofile, Stockbyte and National Geographic (a Getty partner).
- Pixsy, a company that provides search services for image collections, has teamed up with Getty-owned iStockphoto. All of iStock's images will be searchable through the Pixsy.com portal. Separately, Pixsy will power three new portals for specific kinds of stock photography for SuperStock, which is owned by a21.
Launches and deals
- Drive Images is a new right-managed stock library of 25,000 automotive images. The wholly owned collection was developed by eVox Productions, which also licenses images through third-party sites via its Automotive Image Library.
- London-based Photolibrary Group has launched a new collection called Fresh Food Images (FFI). FFI incorporates 200,000 images from 100 photographers, including the Anthony Blake Food Library.
- AP Images, the photo licensing arm of the Associated Press, is distributing content from the archives of EBONY and JET magazines, which are part of the Johnson Publishing Company.
- Software developer CogniSign recently launched a beta version of xcavator.net, a visual search engine. For now, the site is searching 300,000 images from Photovault.com, but the company expects to add more collections in the coming months.
- Alamy is distributing GoGo Images, a multicultural, royalty-free lifestyle collection.
- Imaginechina is now distributing the features and archive of Agence VU in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Imageinechina already represents photo agencies Magnum and Anzenberger for Chinese markets.
- Digital Railroad has expanded its service for photographers by adding business tools powered by ADBASE Inc. and HindSight Ltd.
Send suggestions for stock photo news to news editor Daryl Lang (dlang@pdnonline.com).
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Oded Balilty Credits Teamwork For Pulitzer-Winning Photo
May 23, 2007 © AP Photo/Oded Balilty
By Daryl Lang (PDN)
A day after accepting the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News photography, Oded Balilty credited two fellow Associated Press photographers with helping him get his winning photograph.
Balilty was working as a team of three – along with staffer Emilio Morenatti and stringer Baz Ratner – to cover a confrontation between settlers and Israeli soldiers on a hillside in the West Bank in February 2006. With Morenatti covering one side of the scene, Balilty said he was free to move to the other side for a different angle. Then, once they had the pictures, Ratner rushed to Jerusalem on his motorcycle to transmit them.
"It's a great example of teamwork," Balilty said. "Sometimes to take the picture is the least thing you can do."
Balilty spoke as part of a panel discussion on conflict photojournalism at the AP office in New York. He was joined by photojournalists Horst Faas, Hal Buell, Anja Niedringhaus and Santiago Lyon.
Lyon, the director of photography for the AP, said photo editors considered cleaning up the dark specks in the upper right corner of Balilty's photo, believing they were caused by a dirty lens or camera sensor. But then they realized the specks were rocks flying through the air.
Lyon asked the panel about the importance of local staff in conflict areas. He mentioned Balilty, who is based in his home city of Jerusalem, and Bilal Hussein, the AP photographer who has been imprisoned in Iraq for more than a year.
"In Baghdad, we tried from very early on to get local photographers," said Niedringhaus, who was part of the team that won a 2005 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of Iraq. After seeing the staffers work for a while, "You know who's really good, and Bilal was one of them."
Niedringhaus and Faas, who was the AP's chief photographer covering the Vietnam War, discussed the differences between photo coverage then and now.
Niedringhaus said as part of the ground rules for embedding, photojournalists are supposed to secure advance permission from the troops to take their photos if they are injured. It makes it difficult to make a friendly connection, she said.
"How do you want to make friends when you're asking, 'In case something happens in the next 10 minutes, can I take your picture?'" she said. New rules that let police keep journalists away from bombing scenes have also made photography more difficult in Iraq, she said.
By contrast, Faas said journalists were welcomed by the troops in Vietnam. One reason for this was that soldiers had less access to news – no Internet or TV, and little radio.
"They were so grateful if a reporter hung around and talked to them and explained the situation," Faas said. "We were welcomed for what we were, messengers. The Army didn't provide any of that."
The photographers also talked about how they cope with seeing terrible things in war.
Faas said he and other journalists enjoyed collecting pottery in Vietnam. "That was a wonderful relief from the ugly work you're doing," he said. He also said it helps when you're convinced your work serves a purpose.
Balilty says he paints and works on features to take a break from conflict photography.
"I think I'm too young to realize what I'm seeing, what I'm in to," said Balilty, who is in his 20s. "After seeing a bus blow up, when you see people on fire, how can you forget it? And you have nightmares sometimes."
But having been off for three weeks, he said he was feeling "itchy" to get back to work. "I don't know how to deal with that, I just do what I'm doing."
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Monday, May 21, 2007
Sunday, May 20, 2007
One man and his Leica: An audience with enigmatic Magnum photographer Elliott Erwitt.
One man and his Leica: An audience with enigmatic Magnum photographer Elliott Erwitt.
Elliott Erwitt is on PR duty at the Frankfurt Book Fair. He stands, somewhat awkwardly, as a phalanx of German photographers with large lenses take his picture. They probably think they're taking a decent portrait. But they don't see that under the sober tweed jacket, there is a pair of Stars and Stripes braces. Nor will they guess that Elliott Erwitt, veteran of worldfamous Magnum photo agency, almost certainly finds their whirring and flashing ridiculous. He looks over to where I am skulking by the book-piles, and grins.
Erwitt has a reputation for quietness. A journalist once wanted to write 12,000 words on the man, and a fellow photographer said, "In all the years I've spoken to him, Elliott hasn't spoken 12,000 words." Actually, he speaks easily. He smiles and twinkles. He is one of the few people who can treat an interview as a conversation. Which is how I know about the braces – "my small patriotic gesture". And how I know, though his gentlemanly courtesy prevents him from speaking ill of most things, that he has an antipathy to paraphernalia. "Photography is very simple," he says. "People make it so technical, so complicated, to disguise the fact. They overcompensate."
This would surprise the Nikon-carriers: Erwitt's forty-year career has included plenty of commercial work – for the French tourist board, for Italian fashion houses, for airlines and big business – where he has happily used the assistant, the filters, the whole ostentatious, complicated baggage of the modern photographer.
But it is another Elliot whose work he is promoting here in the 500-picture collection Snaps. The anti-Elliott – his work was once called "anti-photos" – shoots only in black and white, usually takes one shot only, is never without a Leica in his pocket, and will wait hours for one snap. This Erwitt says, "I observe, I try to entertain, but above all, I want pictures that are emotional." This Erwitt finds people who ask what film he uses hilarious – he uses what's in his bag ?– and people who ask how hard it is to use colour ("you just put a colour film in the camera") funnier still. And for apparently simple snaps that can contain fathoms of emotional input, the anti-Elliott is peerless.
Yet his name is probably unknown to most. If anything, he's a taker of funny pictures with easy charm, or a photographic dog-lover: His Dog Dogs book has sold 250,000 copies. A professional photographer will know him as a master of inimitably perfect composition and deceptive casualness. To the true fan, he has an eye for a shot like no other, and his work has the pathos and insight of Cartier-Bresson and the charm of Doisneau, though he has the name-droppability of neither. Hence Snaps. "Books aren't very rumunerative," he muses over bad German food. "But you get jobs out of it and that leads to work." His face – soulful and doleful, like Matthau without the jowls – creases into irony. "Besides, I have to do it – I've been around so long, most editors think I'm dead."
He was born in Paris in 1928, to a Russian Jew called Boris, and a Russian Greek Orthodox mother called Evgenia. It was textbook romantic: Evgenia had been one of the richest girls in Moscow, but lost everything in the Revolution. Boris was a dilettante from Odessa. Almost immediately, they moved to Italy, and Elio Romano Erwitz – his middle name a homage to the Holy City – grew up speaking Italian in public, Russian at home. But Mussolini forced the family out, and in 1939 they took the last peacetime ship from France, landing in New York to a world five days into war. Later, Boris took his child to the West Coast, and the marriage broke down. By then Elio Erwitz had become Elliott Erwitt, easier for American mouths to pronounce, and he had begun to live in a fourth language.
The instability chased him into adulthood: Four wives – "none beheaded" – six children, five grandchildren. He met his current wife, German zweedheart Pia, when she came to interview him. He doesn't say much about the others, except that they were beautiful and smart, and that his love of America's southern states dimmed after his marriage – number three – to a Southerner. When I say his private life could be called chaotic, he replies, "Well, what do you mean? Changing countries I suppose was chaotic. Changing cities. Living on your own at an early age. I've married a few times." He pauses. "Is that chaos? Perhaps it's just activity."
He began being properly active aged 16, after his father left for New Orleans, fleeing alimony payments. Elliott, left alone in Southern California, took up photography as "a way to buy biscuits". He worked first as a darkroom assistant, printing movie stars' pictures other people had taken. Soon, he bought a Rolleiflex and started taking his own, beginning with pictures of his dentist. Then, "Henri Cartier Bresson's picture of a train depot jumped out at me. I had never reacted to a photo like that before – the mood, the tight rectangular composition, the casualness of it. It was a scene available to anyone. You didn't need anything special except your own personal equipment for noticing things. It was a revelation." As was the black and white. He still refuses to use colour in his non-commercial work. "Colour film is more about narrative and storytelling. Photographs are a synthesis. My photographs are more of a drawing than a painting." (Sometimes he uses the byline Snaps Pikazo.)
"In a good photograph, the essentials are there and you don't need all the other stuff." Certainly none of those computer things: Photography should be observation, not manipulation, he says – he loathes Photoshop, and prefers not to crop, because a good photograph is perfectly framed in the first place. Even so, writes Charles Flowers, a writer and ghostwriter who provides the text in Snaps, "for all of his devotion to chance, he meets each snap at least halfway." Elliott thinks waiting for pictures is a kind of manipulation, but he's also not above tweaking: For a museum picture of men looking at a female nude, next to a woman looking at a female clothed, he "moved them around a bit." And those famous jumping dogs? He barks, they jump. Snap.
He moved to New York in 1946, and introduced himself to three photographic greats: Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art, Rod Stryker and Robert Capa, "who was running this little agency I'd never heard of." All thought the work of the man who "just takes pictures" exceptional. He signed up for the Army in 1951 and for Magnum - Capa's agency - two years later. Since then, the commercial and the "hobby" – as he refers to the award-winning body of work – have co-existed harmoniously, taking it in turns to fund each other, and doing it well: the Erwitts live between New York and the Hamptons, each home bearing two life-size plaster Japanese policemen at the entrance.
Erwitt sees comedy in most things, and then some more, because he's watching and waiting for it: A gull and aeroplane with parallel lines, each one's form mirroring the other, a woman's jutting bosom aping her dog's pedigree snout. As a wedding present, he often gives a scene from a Siberian registry office, where two newlyweds gaze at a smirking James Dean figure lounging in the chair next to them. Elliott thinks it's funny, but also that it says much about the uncertainties of marriage. "Some people think my pictures are sad, some think they're funny," he wrote in the 1998 collection Personal Exposures. "Funny and sad, aren't they really the same thing? They add up to normality." If there is comedy in his work, it's also the human, divine kind.
Not that he won't supply the funny anecdotes of a 50-year veteran: The Shah of Iran wore platform heels ("You could tell from the pant creases"). Che Guevara was good-looking but not charming, Marilyn Monroe the opposite. One notorious image – the "kitchen debate" of Richard Nixon and Nikita Kruschev arguing at a Westinghouse exhibit – almost didn't happen because he was laughing too hard: Kruschev told Nixon to "Go screw my grandmother" in Russian, which the child of Boris and Evgenia understood perfectly.
There are no captions in Snaps, beyond place and date, because a good photograph shouldn't need one. There are chapter headings, supposed to reflect life's natural compartments – Look, Tell, Stand, Move, Rest – but they were the designer's idea. The reason he is most proud of the opening photograph – a black man drinking at a fountain marked "colored" – is because "it tells you the whole business. It's very economical, very obvious, very sharp." But because Elliott doesn't bother trying to explain his pictures (he thinks curators write in "museumese"), he can be surprised by what they tell people. He describes the water fountain shot as "a very violent image," but Flowers found it funny. "Elliott was horrified. But I had been there, a boy in the South who was surprised and disappointed when the Colored fountain in the downtown dry-goods store shot up water that was perfectly clear rather than hued like a rainbow."
"I guess if you take a picture and you want to have a certain meaning," Erwitt now reflects, "and people get that meaning, that's nice. Otherwise people can like my photos on any level and I'm happy."
Some don't, of course. He has been accused of whimsy, old-fashioned sweetness, irrelevance. In 1998, a reviewer wrote, "there is a price to be paid for this popular charm, so light on the eye, so hard to achieve. All those years with Magnum, and Elliott Erwitt is better known for a single shot of a bug-eyed Chihuahua than for any reportage from the great plains of human history." No longer. "Treasure this collection," writes Elliot's friend Murray Sayle in the introduction to Snaps. "It's destined to become a classic, because the times and technologies that made it possible will never come again." The sharp-eyed man has finally delivered a panoramic of those great plains of history. And the dot on the horizon, Leica in hand? That'll be Elliott.
Published in the Independent on Sunday Review
21/10/2001
Elliott Erwitt is on PR duty at the Frankfurt Book Fair. He stands, somewhat awkwardly, as a phalanx of German photographers with large lenses take his picture. They probably think they're taking a decent portrait. But they don't see that under the sober tweed jacket, there is a pair of Stars and Stripes braces. Nor will they guess that Elliott Erwitt, veteran of worldfamous Magnum photo agency, almost certainly finds their whirring and flashing ridiculous. He looks over to where I am skulking by the book-piles, and grins.
Erwitt has a reputation for quietness. A journalist once wanted to write 12,000 words on the man, and a fellow photographer said, "In all the years I've spoken to him, Elliott hasn't spoken 12,000 words." Actually, he speaks easily. He smiles and twinkles. He is one of the few people who can treat an interview as a conversation. Which is how I know about the braces – "my small patriotic gesture". And how I know, though his gentlemanly courtesy prevents him from speaking ill of most things, that he has an antipathy to paraphernalia. "Photography is very simple," he says. "People make it so technical, so complicated, to disguise the fact. They overcompensate."
This would surprise the Nikon-carriers: Erwitt's forty-year career has included plenty of commercial work – for the French tourist board, for Italian fashion houses, for airlines and big business – where he has happily used the assistant, the filters, the whole ostentatious, complicated baggage of the modern photographer.
But it is another Elliot whose work he is promoting here in the 500-picture collection Snaps. The anti-Elliott – his work was once called "anti-photos" – shoots only in black and white, usually takes one shot only, is never without a Leica in his pocket, and will wait hours for one snap. This Erwitt says, "I observe, I try to entertain, but above all, I want pictures that are emotional." This Erwitt finds people who ask what film he uses hilarious – he uses what's in his bag ?– and people who ask how hard it is to use colour ("you just put a colour film in the camera") funnier still. And for apparently simple snaps that can contain fathoms of emotional input, the anti-Elliott is peerless.
Yet his name is probably unknown to most. If anything, he's a taker of funny pictures with easy charm, or a photographic dog-lover: His Dog Dogs book has sold 250,000 copies. A professional photographer will know him as a master of inimitably perfect composition and deceptive casualness. To the true fan, he has an eye for a shot like no other, and his work has the pathos and insight of Cartier-Bresson and the charm of Doisneau, though he has the name-droppability of neither. Hence Snaps. "Books aren't very rumunerative," he muses over bad German food. "But you get jobs out of it and that leads to work." His face – soulful and doleful, like Matthau without the jowls – creases into irony. "Besides, I have to do it – I've been around so long, most editors think I'm dead."
He was born in Paris in 1928, to a Russian Jew called Boris, and a Russian Greek Orthodox mother called Evgenia. It was textbook romantic: Evgenia had been one of the richest girls in Moscow, but lost everything in the Revolution. Boris was a dilettante from Odessa. Almost immediately, they moved to Italy, and Elio Romano Erwitz – his middle name a homage to the Holy City – grew up speaking Italian in public, Russian at home. But Mussolini forced the family out, and in 1939 they took the last peacetime ship from France, landing in New York to a world five days into war. Later, Boris took his child to the West Coast, and the marriage broke down. By then Elio Erwitz had become Elliott Erwitt, easier for American mouths to pronounce, and he had begun to live in a fourth language.
The instability chased him into adulthood: Four wives – "none beheaded" – six children, five grandchildren. He met his current wife, German zweedheart Pia, when she came to interview him. He doesn't say much about the others, except that they were beautiful and smart, and that his love of America's southern states dimmed after his marriage – number three – to a Southerner. When I say his private life could be called chaotic, he replies, "Well, what do you mean? Changing countries I suppose was chaotic. Changing cities. Living on your own at an early age. I've married a few times." He pauses. "Is that chaos? Perhaps it's just activity."
He began being properly active aged 16, after his father left for New Orleans, fleeing alimony payments. Elliott, left alone in Southern California, took up photography as "a way to buy biscuits". He worked first as a darkroom assistant, printing movie stars' pictures other people had taken. Soon, he bought a Rolleiflex and started taking his own, beginning with pictures of his dentist. Then, "Henri Cartier Bresson's picture of a train depot jumped out at me. I had never reacted to a photo like that before – the mood, the tight rectangular composition, the casualness of it. It was a scene available to anyone. You didn't need anything special except your own personal equipment for noticing things. It was a revelation." As was the black and white. He still refuses to use colour in his non-commercial work. "Colour film is more about narrative and storytelling. Photographs are a synthesis. My photographs are more of a drawing than a painting." (Sometimes he uses the byline Snaps Pikazo.)
"In a good photograph, the essentials are there and you don't need all the other stuff." Certainly none of those computer things: Photography should be observation, not manipulation, he says – he loathes Photoshop, and prefers not to crop, because a good photograph is perfectly framed in the first place. Even so, writes Charles Flowers, a writer and ghostwriter who provides the text in Snaps, "for all of his devotion to chance, he meets each snap at least halfway." Elliott thinks waiting for pictures is a kind of manipulation, but he's also not above tweaking: For a museum picture of men looking at a female nude, next to a woman looking at a female clothed, he "moved them around a bit." And those famous jumping dogs? He barks, they jump. Snap.
He moved to New York in 1946, and introduced himself to three photographic greats: Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art, Rod Stryker and Robert Capa, "who was running this little agency I'd never heard of." All thought the work of the man who "just takes pictures" exceptional. He signed up for the Army in 1951 and for Magnum - Capa's agency - two years later. Since then, the commercial and the "hobby" – as he refers to the award-winning body of work – have co-existed harmoniously, taking it in turns to fund each other, and doing it well: the Erwitts live between New York and the Hamptons, each home bearing two life-size plaster Japanese policemen at the entrance.
Erwitt sees comedy in most things, and then some more, because he's watching and waiting for it: A gull and aeroplane with parallel lines, each one's form mirroring the other, a woman's jutting bosom aping her dog's pedigree snout. As a wedding present, he often gives a scene from a Siberian registry office, where two newlyweds gaze at a smirking James Dean figure lounging in the chair next to them. Elliott thinks it's funny, but also that it says much about the uncertainties of marriage. "Some people think my pictures are sad, some think they're funny," he wrote in the 1998 collection Personal Exposures. "Funny and sad, aren't they really the same thing? They add up to normality." If there is comedy in his work, it's also the human, divine kind.
Not that he won't supply the funny anecdotes of a 50-year veteran: The Shah of Iran wore platform heels ("You could tell from the pant creases"). Che Guevara was good-looking but not charming, Marilyn Monroe the opposite. One notorious image – the "kitchen debate" of Richard Nixon and Nikita Kruschev arguing at a Westinghouse exhibit – almost didn't happen because he was laughing too hard: Kruschev told Nixon to "Go screw my grandmother" in Russian, which the child of Boris and Evgenia understood perfectly.
There are no captions in Snaps, beyond place and date, because a good photograph shouldn't need one. There are chapter headings, supposed to reflect life's natural compartments – Look, Tell, Stand, Move, Rest – but they were the designer's idea. The reason he is most proud of the opening photograph – a black man drinking at a fountain marked "colored" – is because "it tells you the whole business. It's very economical, very obvious, very sharp." But because Elliott doesn't bother trying to explain his pictures (he thinks curators write in "museumese"), he can be surprised by what they tell people. He describes the water fountain shot as "a very violent image," but Flowers found it funny. "Elliott was horrified. But I had been there, a boy in the South who was surprised and disappointed when the Colored fountain in the downtown dry-goods store shot up water that was perfectly clear rather than hued like a rainbow."
"I guess if you take a picture and you want to have a certain meaning," Erwitt now reflects, "and people get that meaning, that's nice. Otherwise people can like my photos on any level and I'm happy."
Some don't, of course. He has been accused of whimsy, old-fashioned sweetness, irrelevance. In 1998, a reviewer wrote, "there is a price to be paid for this popular charm, so light on the eye, so hard to achieve. All those years with Magnum, and Elliott Erwitt is better known for a single shot of a bug-eyed Chihuahua than for any reportage from the great plains of human history." No longer. "Treasure this collection," writes Elliot's friend Murray Sayle in the introduction to Snaps. "It's destined to become a classic, because the times and technologies that made it possible will never come again." The sharp-eyed man has finally delivered a panoramic of those great plains of history. And the dot on the horizon, Leica in hand? That'll be Elliott.
Published in the Independent on Sunday Review
21/10/2001
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