Brian Oldham was born in Orange, CA in 1993. He grew up as the only child, who was looking for creative and artistic ways to express himself. He was playing fictional and fairy tales games, that helped him to develop imagination. At the age of 16, Brian’s love for art and fantasy finally got an actual form when he discovered a potential that gives conceptual photography. As a self-taught photographer, Brian used different resources to develop photography skills. Today, Brian is recognized as a queer interdisciplinary artist, currently based in Los Angeles. He specialized in portrait photography and conceptual photography and found a distinctive way to express his imagination and talent.
In October of 2017, the photographer Jeff Mermelstein, who has been taking pictures of New York City street life since the early nineteen-eighties, was walking in midtown, on one of his near-daily shooting expeditions, when he encountered something he had never thought to capture before. “It was somewhere around Eighth Avenue and the mid-Forties,” Mermelstein told me from his home in Brooklyn, when I called him the other day. “I noticed that a woman was sitting there, tapping something out on her phone.” Operating on half-conscious instinct, as he often does when photographing, Mermelstein raised his own phone, went up to the woman, and took a picture, focussing not on her, as he might usually have done, but on the screen of her device. “She was doing a Google search, and it was something about wills, and a line came up about finding six thousand dollars in an attic. It was just a couple of lines there, but I suddenly felt, This could be the germ of a short story. It was a galvanizing moment.”
Jacobus Snyman is a South African born Photographer, Videographer and Creative Director.
Inspired by the ability to create art through photography, Jacobus' passion for story telling through visual imagery, remains core to his creative process.
It is this passion for narrative building that has seen him collaborate with clients such as Vanity Fair, Dr Martens, Primark, Woolworths and Country Road amongst others.
Hervé Lassïnce est un photographe et comédien français vivant à Paris.
Sa photographie est constituée pour beaucoup de portraits intimes. Familles, ami.e.s, amants et amoureux constituent l'essentiel de ses modèles, photographiés le plus souvent sur le vif, dans le flux du quotidien, en France ou à l’étranger (Russie, Mexique, Inde, Tunisie, États-Unis, Canada…).
Il est l'auteur du livre Mes frères (éditions Granon), et a fait l'objet de plusieurs expositions : à Paris (galeries P38 et galerie Agathe Gaillard, Philharmonie de Paris), à Marseille ainsi qu'à la Villa Noailles de Hyères (Festival international de la Mode et de la Photographie), à Los Angeles (galerie Paris-Berlin) et à Milan (galerie Offarch).
Il est régulièrement sollicité par la presse pour réaliser des portraits : Les Inrocks, Le Monde, AD magazine, Butt, Trax, Boycott, I-D magazine, Psychologies magazine, Athletica, La Parisienne, Têtu, Milk magazine, Egg… Il a ainsi réalisé les portraits de Jean-Michel Jarre, Benjamin Biolay, Christophe Honoré, Olivier Assayas, Arnaud Desplechin, Perez, Yannick Haenel, Mathieu Lindon, Nabil Ayouch, Nils Schneider, Stéphane Giusti, Antoine-Olivier Pilon, Sara Martins, etc.
The world has caught up to Gregory Crewdson. In his large-scale photographs, which are produced with a movie crew in bravura Hollywood style, the people stare off into space, cloaked in solipsistic misery. The lighting is so portentous and the isolation and hopelessness so exaggerated that these scenes have always reminded me of Technicolor film stills from a 1950s melodrama — a kitschy imitation of life.
Until now. In the current locked-down world, which is hollowed out by economic collapse and fragmented by fear of contagion, Mr. Crewdson’s overwrought images seem like faithful representations of our frazzled psychological state. “It’s weird how all my pictures have taken on a new meaning,” he said.
I'm a habitual self-interlocutor. One evening while taking photographs at the American Museum of Natural History, I had a near-hallucinatory vision. My internal question-and-answer session leading up to this vision went something like this: "Suppose you shoot a whole movie in a single frame? " The answer: "You get a shining screen. " Immediately I began experimenting in order to realize this vision. One afternoon I walked into a cheap cinema in the East Village with a large-format camera. As soon as the movie started, I fixed the shutter at a wide-open aperture. When the movie finished two hours later, I clicked the shutter closed. That evening I developed the film, and my vision exploded behind my eyes.
Hiroshi Sugimoto left his native Japan in 1970 to study art in Los Angeles in 1971 at a time when Minimalism and Conceptual art—both of which informed his work—dominated art practice. Inspired by the systemic aspects of Minimalist painting and sculpture, he has consistently explored several themes with rigorous seriality throughout his career.
The white screen that reappears in his Theaters series (begun in 1978) is itself the result of shooting the projection of a feature film. Photographing drive-ins, golden-age cinema palaces, and modern movie houses, he uses an exposure determined by the length of the screening. As each frame of film flickers by, the shifting action and light both cancels and accumulates until the film, shown in its entirety, is recorded as a bright, blank screen, appearing empty of imagery while actually filled to overflowing. Sugimoto calls this “time exposed”—the collecting, in one still image, of moments passed.
A photographic journey into the contradictions of Siberia—its pristine wilderness and despoiled landscapes, its pockets of wealth and abandoned cultural centers.
Growing up near Washington DC at the end of the Cold War, New York–based photographer Michael Turek (born 1982) has always been drawn to Russia as a taboo, forbidden place. This project began in the winter of 2016 when he joined award-winning British writer Sophy Roberts as she pursued a three-year search for a historic piano in Siberia; he traveled to the region another five times, exploring the vast territory east of the Ural Mountains all the way to the Pacific.
Turek’s images record a constant tension—sometimes bizarre, often unsettling—between desecrated landscapes alongside pristine wildernesses; between the lives of indigenous people and modern Russians; between worn-out infrastructure and abandoned towns juxtaposed with gleaming new cities pumping gas and oil. The journey takes him deeper and deeper into small towns and villages, into the arsenic-green corridors of Khrushchev apartment blocks. The photographs have a slowness and a stillness to them. Each one is a fragment of a conversation, a moment of genuine intimacy between subject and photographer.
From Vulture: Photographs by Ruth Ossai Styling by Ola Ebiti Hair by Charlotte Mensah using Manketti oil products at Premier Hair and Makeup Makeup by Bernicia Boateng Photography assistance by Ryan Connolly Styling assistance by Leonor Carvalho
