Juergen Teller is internationally renowned for his candid portraits of celebrities, his bold and provocative fashion editorials, and his iconic campaigns for various renowned designers. His distinctive style, blending raw and unfiltered aesthetics with a often irreverent approach, has redefined visual norms in contemporary photography, leaving a lasting impact on the fashion and advertising industries.

Since his rapid rise to prominence in the 1990s after moving to London, Teller has continuously explored more intimate dimensions of his artistic practice. Alongside his commercial work, he has produced significant personal series, in which he reflects on himself, his heritage, his family ties, and his cultural roots. These autobiographical projects, often imbued with vulnerability and humor, reveal a deep contemplation on identity, memory, and the complexity of human relationships, giving his body of work an emotional and narrative richness that transcends the boundaries of traditional fashion photography.

Francesca Woodman (American, born April 13, 1958, in Denver – died January 19, 1981, in New York) was a photographer famous for her black-and-white photographs in which she posed alongside other models. Despite her short career, which ended with her suicide at the age of 22, Woodman created more than 800 prints. Influenced by conceptualism, many of her photographs feature recurring symbolic themes such as birds, mirrors, and skulls, and her work is often compared to that of surrealists like Hans Bellmer and Man Ray.

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From 1961 to 1980, Marcel De Baer (Belgium, 1922-2014) was a Forensic Expert (specialised in collisions) for the public prosecutor’s office of the district of Oudenaarde, Belgium. In this capacity, he came at the scene of every major traffic accident that took place in the area to report on what had happened based on photos, measurements and technical drawings.

His pictures, despite their macabre theme and the fact that they were made for strictly utilitarian purposes, possess a fascinating, accidental beauty. De Baer’s grandson, visual artist Erik Bulckens, recently started his mission to inventorize and promote this extraordinary archive.

Simon Chaput has had a passion for photography since his early childhood. He taught himself how to shoot and set up his own darkroom to print his gelatin silver prints at home. After owning an art gallery for seven years, Chaput left France in 1983 to live in New York. After this move, he started to focus more on his personal art photography.

Chaput’s body of work over the years varies from social and subject documentary to color panoramic and fine art black and white photography. In 1996, he started his first long-term personal series entitled ‘New York’; a suite of modernist views of Manhattan’s architecture. This series marks the beginning of Chaput’s distinct style of abstracting images by playing with negative space and paying special attention to geometrical compositions that force the viewer to look at these recognizable buildings in a new way. ‘New York’ can also be considered as documentary work, due to the city changing over the years. Chaput’s striking images of the World Trade Center have become iconic and revered, as much as the buildings themselves before they were destroyed.

In 2000, Chaput started to work on his black and white ‘Nudes’ series. Photographing a nude model in Death Valley, California, Chaput became inspired by the way the female body echoes the dunes. Later on, he came to realize that he could shoot the nude in the studio as the dunes themselves. In 2007, Chaput began his most recent work; a study on ‘Waterfalls’ in Ireland and later on in the surroundings of his home base of New York. Both series are characterized by the emphasis placed on the essential form and movement and the negative space that receives equal attention.

Through his work, Chaput shows a different way of looking at beauty found around us, and this all over the world. He has traveled extensively, photographing the nature and individuals he encountered along the way. While doing so, Chaput highlighted social and environmental issues that affect the world. He produced many narrative stories on Tibet and ancient cultures that require quiet appreciation and visual perception of mood and timing. Other (photographic) travels include among others the Australian Outback and the American Southwest, or a trip to India in 1995, where he followed in the footsteps of the Buddha. This was also the start for Chaput’s series ‘Jantar Mantar’, in which he studies the Stone Observatories in Jaipur and Delhi, built in the 18th Century. Their dynamic compositions exude the energy and awe of these timeless structures and are representative for Chaput’s interest in abstraction and negative space.

Chaput also did documentary work on commission and participated in documentary films. Examples are his co-operation for 3 films with the American director Nina Rosenblum, all focusing on social conscientious subject matter. Later on, he also worked with filmmaker Gaetano Maida on two films about the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, whose primary photographer he would later become.

Born in Munich, Michael Wolf grew up in Canada, Europe, and the United States, studying at UC Berkeley and under Otto Steinert at the Folkwang School in Essen, Germany. He moved to Hong Kong in 1994, where he worked for eight years as a contract photographer for Stern magazine, before moving on from photojournalism in 2003 to focus on his personal work. Over time he created a rich body of work exploring the complex reality of urban life around the world.

Michael Wolf first came to international recognition for his work on Hong Kong, one of the world’s densest cities. Through his two long-running series Architecture of Density (2003–14) and Informal Solutions (2003–2019), he developed a multi-layered approach in order to better understand the dynamics of this megacity, stepping back in order to better picture its overwhelming architecture, while also continuously exploring the inner workings of the city, particularly through the extraordinary vernacular culture present in its back alleys.

While Hong Kong remained one of his primary sources of inspiration, over the last decade Michael Wolf had split his time between Asia and Europe. During this period, he regularly undertook bodies of work on other major cities around the world, providing a global perspective on the increasingly fraught experience of urban life today. From Chicago where he shot Transparent City (2006) to Tokyo, where he captured the claustrophobia of the subway commuters in Tokyo Compression, to Paris where he began an extensive body of work using Google Street View and shot the series Paris Rooftops, Michael Wolf was fascinated by city life in all its forms.

In recent years Michael Wolf had increasingly experimented with installation in his practice. The immersive installation The Real Toy Story integrates portraits of workers in China’s toy factories into a wall display covered entirely in tens of thousands of plastic toys of all kinds. In exhibitions of his Informal Solutions work, he presented his photographs of Hong Kong’s back alleys alongside the objects he found and collected in these spaces.

The photobook also played an important part in Michael Wolf’s work. Since his first monograph Sitting in China in 2002, Wolf had worked with a number of leading publishers including Steidl and Thames & Hudson. Over the past ten years he had developed a close working relationship with the Berlin-based publisher Hannes Wanderer (1958–2018) of Peperoni Books. Together, they produced seventeen books between 2009 and 2018 including the critically acclaimed titles Tokyo Compression and Architecture of Density.

Michael Wolf won first prize in the World Press Photo competition in 2005 and 2010, and received an honourable mention in 2011. In 2010 and 2016 he was nominated for the Prix Pictet photography award.

His work features in many permanent collections, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Museum Folkwang in Essen, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and Gemeentemuseum Den Haag.

Michael Wolf’s first major retrospective, Michael Wolf – Life in Cities, was held in 2017, premiering at the prestigious Rencontres de la Photographie festival in Arles, then moving on to The Hague Museum of Photography (20 January – 22 April 2018), the Fondazione Stelline in Milan (10 May – 22 July 2018) and Deichtorhallen Hamburg (17 November 2018 – 3 March 2019).

Michael Wolf’s work on life in cities was always driven by a profound concern for the people living in these environments and for the consequences of massive urbanization on contemporary civilization. This commitment and engagement remained central throughout his career, first as a photojournalist and then as an artist.

Arpaïs Du Bois (Belgium, 1973) approaches man’s being-in-the-world in a very personal and intimate way. Her drawings and texts are at the same time sharp and ambiguous; playful and poetic observations of the world that surrounds her. Out of an intense involvement, she reflects on societal issues, big and small, and the often unnoticed moments and events that shape our lives. Amidst the abundance of impressions that come to us every day, Du Bois’s drawings create a moment of stillness and reflection. They are often syntheses of images, expressing as much as possible with a minimum of resources. They offer the viewer a resting point, a way to frame the chaotic reality.
The content of Du Bois’s exhibitions is generally provided in the form of pages torn from her drawing books arranged in novel constellations, combined with mid-scale and large-scale drawings and paintings on paper.

© Photo Roger Szmulewicz

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Born in Dublin in 1969, Eamonn studied photography and painting in the late 1980s. He spent much of the next twenty years producing music and working in the independent music business, founding Dublin Electronic Arts Festival (DEAF) alongside the record labels D1 Recordings and Dead Elvis. Music continues to feature as a fundamental aspect of his work.

Eamonn returned to photography in 2010. His debut photobook i was self-published in March 2014. ON (2015) and End. (2016) completed the Dublin trilogy, and was followed with K (2018), which he photographed in the west of Ireland and southern Spain. He recently published O (2020), a series of photographs shot in the Dublin neighbourhood of his youth, and ONE (2021), a large format publication featuring a selection from a series of silver gelatin prints. Eamonn has been continually exhibiting internationally, in Europe and America, throughout his photographic career. His Dublin trilogy formed a large-scale centre-piece installation at Rencontres d’Arles 2016. Fundación Mapfre Madrid staged the first fully comprehensive exhibition of Eamonn’s work at the time in 2019, which then moved to Gijón in 2020, and is accompanied by a substantial catalogue.

Made In Dublin (2019), a collaborative project that is both an award-winning publication and a nine-screen film-work, has been exhibited in Dublin, London, Madrid, Gijón, Barcelona, and Antwerp. EX (2020), a collaborative short film has been screened in Ireland and at the Berlin Short Film Festival and the Austin Arthouse Film Festival, with installation works and publication currently in progress.

Drawing forms the core of Zoete’s oeuvre. He always starts from observation drawings of things that cross his path, like a cactus, a landscape or the human form. Influenced by the theatre sets and costumes of the German Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism of the 1920s, Zoete organizes happenings in his studio in which actors in imaginative costumes pose in front of his camera. Their masks are based on self-portraits from the artist. His drawings are the two-dimensional reports of those events.

From these observations on paper, Zoete lets his imagination run free. He remodels them over and over, until they have evolved into drawings that are far removed from the reality they were originally based on. The artist refuses to determine an absolute, finished form. On the contrary: he is constantly searching for ways of improvement and shows all stadia of his learning process to the viewer. Along the way, Zoete lets himself be guided by chance and coincidence. Although the simplicity of pencil on paper gives him the freedom required for his improvisational method, Zoete also appeals to other media. His drawings can give rise to performances, sculptures, photographs and vice versa.

The drawings that ensue from this practice, have a naive and schematic character. The panoramic landscapes and village scenes are made up of a few simple, clear lines. The views on fields and acres – Zoete comes from a farmers family, hence the recurrence of these themes – have a total lack of depth and perspective. The architectural settings never outgrow the schematic design phase. Furthermore, Zoete’s human figures are far-reaching geometrical abstractions, deprived from any individual features. Their faces are mere masks, with triangular- and rectangular shaped mouths and noses. Both humans and their environment are exclusively shown in frontal view; they stay façades, that never truly come to life. This two-dimensionality is reflected in Zoete’s sculptures, with their unfinished back sides. These constructions, often existing of metal frames, concrete and removable colour areas, also present themselves frontally to the viewer.

The almost childish drawing style and abstraction add to the enigmatic, sometimes morbid nature of Zoete’s universe, filled with surrealistic scenes depicting an absurd company of characters, primitive animals and their attributes.

Belgian artist Dirk Zoete (°1969, lives and works in Ghent) made successful passages at Be-Part in Waregem (2016) and the SMAK in Ghent (2017). Zoete’s first solo exhibition at Gallery FIFTY ONE took place in the spring of 2018.

The collages of Katrien De Blauwer (°1969, Ronse, Belgium) flirt with fashion, dance, cinema, and photography. Some call her a “photographer without a camera”. Others would define her work as “post-photography”. Using magazine images from the 1920s until the 1960s, her work is all about recollection. Like a photographer, De Blauwer cuts/reframes images, pasting them together with others, or with monochrome strips from those same magazines. This process is a spontaneous one, kindred to the methods of a painter as well. While creating, De Blauwer uses different palettes with limbs, still lives, dark tones, colours… She applies her old and worn materials very sparingly, thus producing precious and fragile pieces of art, that are, moreover, of an exceptional openness and appeal.

The artist is a master of composition, contrast and atmosphere. The spectator enters into a sensual, ambiguous, but nonetheless clean-cut atmosphere that reminds us strongly of film noir or nouvelle vague cinema. The artist’s indebtedness to photography and cinema is indisputable. Recurring titles, such as ‘Jump Cuts’ or ‘Dark Scenes’, clearly hint at cinematic language. De Blauwer’s subjects are arrested in their movement, performing an unseen action, watching or desiring something that has been literally cut away from them. De Blauwer, scissors and glue in hand, keeps us wondering about what is going on exactly.

Originally dreaming of becoming a film director, Gruyaert studied at the School of Film and Photography in Brussels from 1959 to 1962. After his studies he left Belgium at the age of 21, fleeing the strict catholic environment in which he was brought up. The world was his oyster, traveling extensively across Europe, North Africa, Asia and the United States and living in cities with a vibrant movie and photography scene like Paris and London. During his first trip to New York in 1968 Gruyaert discovered Pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg. This encounter made him appreciate the creative potential of colour and encouraged him to search for beauty in everyday elements for the rest of his career. At this time Gruyaert also became friends with the American artists Richard Nonas and Gordon Matta-Clark and photographed their work.

Further inspired by the visual impulses he received during his first trip to Morocco in 1969, Gruyaert decided in the second half of the 1970s as one of the first photographers in Europe to commit himself entirely to colour photography. After visiting the William Eggleston’s exhibition in the MoMA in 1976, he realised that he was on the same tracks.

Gruyaert’s passion for movies and his devotion to colour were at the basis of his unique visual language. His cinematographic background inflicted on him an aesthetic conception of photography. Gruyaert’s images are simply snapshots of magical moments in which different visual elements, primarily colour, form, light and movement, spontaneously come together in front of his lens. His bold, saturated tonalities are autonomous elements that grant structure and depth to the composition. This becomes clear looking at the brightly coloured automobiles in the pictures on show that often form monotone areas occupying a part of the image. After using the cibachrome technique for many years, Gruyaert decided to switch to digital printing to exploit the maximum of image potential, thanks to its ability of control.

In his search for strong graphical compositions Gruyaert focuses his camera on objects as much as on people. These are often reduced to silhouettes or rendered to plain colour fields. Gruyaert is neither interested in psychology, nor in telling stories or documenting the world. Unsurprisingly the countries he photographs are mostly revealed by means of the subtle differences in colour palette and light, inherent to the atmosphere, culture and climate of each place, more than by the depicted subjects or scenes.

Gruyaerts’ work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions at, among others, the Botanique in Brussels, the FOMU in Antwerp, the Carlos de Amberes Foundation in Madrid, the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles in France and the Moscow Photobiennale of 2012.

Gruyaerts’ work is included in the collections of museums like the Musée de la Photographie in Charleroi, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the David Roberts Foundation in London, the Howard Stein collection in New York and the Metropolitan Museum in Tokyo.

In 1976 Gruyaert received the Kodak price for photo critique. In 1981 he joined the legendary photographic cooperative Magnum Photos.