Susan Meiselas is an influential American documentary photographer known for her powerful, socially engaged work that often focuses on human rights, conflict, and marginalized communities. A longtime member of Magnum Photos, she rose to prominence in the late 1970s with her vivid, frontline coverage of the Nicaraguan Revolution, particularly her iconic image of a rebel throwing a Molotov cocktail.

Meiselas’s approach blends photojournalism with deep research and collaboration, often incorporating text, video, and archival materials. Notable projects include “Carnival Strippers” (1976), which documents the lives of women working in traveling strip shows, and “Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History” (1997), a layered exploration of Kurdish identity and memory.

Her work challenges traditional boundaries between observer and subject, raising questions about representation, power, and the ethics of storytelling.

Jan Yoors was a Belgian-American artist and photographer known for his multifaceted work spanning photography, tapestry, and writing. Born in Antwerp, Yoors had an extraordinary early life—at age 12, he left home to live with a Romani tribe, an experience that deeply shaped his worldview and later artistic work.

His photography often focused on marginalized communities, especially the Romani people, whom he portrayed with rare intimacy and respect. His 1967 book, “The Gypsies”, combines his striking black-and-white photographs with personal memoirs, offering a powerful and empathetic insight into a misunderstood culture.

Beyond photography, Yoors was also acclaimed for his monumental tapestries, created in collaboration with his wife and studio partners, blending modernist aesthetics with a humanist sensibility.

His life and work reflect a deep commitment to cross-cultural understanding, storytelling, and artistic exploration.

Alex Webb is an American photographer celebrated for his richly layered, color-drenched street photography, often capturing complex scenes full of light, shadow, and movement. A member of Magnum Photos since 1979, Webb is known for working in challenging, high-energy environments in Latin America, the Caribbean, and beyond.

His breakthrough came when he shifted from black-and-white to color in the late 1970s, realizing that the intense hues and chaotic beauty of places like Haiti and Mexico demanded a different approach. Books like “Under a Grudging Sun”, “Crossings”, and “The Suffering of Light” showcase his ability to find order in visual chaos.

Webb’s work is often described as cinematic and emotionally resonant, blending documentary observation with artistic composition.

Steve McCurry is an American photographer renowned for his vibrant, emotionally powerful images that capture the human experience, often in regions affected by conflict and cultural change. He rose to international fame with his iconic 1984 National Geographic cover photo “Afghan Girl”, portraying a young refugee with striking green eyes.

McCurry’s work spans countries like Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, and beyond, blending photojournalism with a strong sense of color, composition, and storytelling. He has a talent for revealing the dignity, resilience, and beauty of people in difficult circumstances.

While celebrated for his visual impact and global reach, McCurry’s work has also sparked discussions about ethics in photojournalism, particularly regarding image manipulation and staging.

Constantine Manos was an American photographer known for his vibrant, candid street photography and his insightful documentation of American life. A member of Magnum Photos since 1963, Manos was particularly recognized for his work in both black-and-white and color.

Early in his career, he gained attention with “Portrait of a Southern Town” and later with “A Greek Portfolio” (1972), a poetic visual record of rural life in Greece. His later projects, like “American Color” and “American Color 2”, showcase bold, saturated images of everyday life across the United States, blending humor, irony, and social commentary.

Manos’s work is noted for its sharp composition, keen eye for human behavior, and deep cultural observation.

Herbert List was a German photographer known for his strikingly composed black-and-white images that blend classical beauty with surreal and dreamlike elements. Initially influenced by modernist movements and surrealism, his work spans portraiture, still life, architecture, and travel photography.

List began his career in the 1930s, photographing in Europe and later working for magazines like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Life. He fled Nazi Germany due to his Jewish heritage and spent time in Greece, Italy, and other Mediterranean countries, where he developed his signature style—often described as “magic realism.”

Later in his career, he joined Magnum Photos in 1951 and mentored younger photographers, including Wolfgang Tillmans. While he also documented war-torn Germany and postwar Europe, List is best remembered for his poetic compositions, particularly his elegant male nudes and timeless still lifes.

Leonard Freed was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist best known for his work exploring social and political themes, particularly related to civil rights, Jewish identity, and law enforcement. He became a member of the renowned Magnum Photos agency in 1972.

He gained wide recognition for his powerful photo essays, especially his seminal book “Black in White America”(1968), which documented African American life during the Civil Rights Movement. Another major project, “Police Work” (1980), provided an intimate look at the daily lives of New York City police officers.

 Freed’s photography is marked by empathy, strong storytelling, and a deep commitment to capturing the human condition.

Mark van den Brink studied photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam from which he graduated in 1996. He continued to develop himself as a free lance photographer but his autonomous projects are the most important part of his work. His projects arise on his journeys inland and to foreign countries. His pictures are characterized by the use of a small spy camera, which he occasionally combines with a spyglass.

Charlie De Keersmaecker is a Belgian photographer known for his striking, cinematic approach to portraiture and documentary photography. His work often blends stark realism with an emotional depth, capturing moments that evoke both intimacy and tension. De Keersmaecker’s subjects range from everyday individuals to figures in unique or personal settings, reflecting themes of vulnerability, isolation, and human connection. His work is characterized by strong compositions, natural lighting, and a quiet yet powerful narrative. De Keersmaecker has exhibited his work internationally and continues to explore human experiences through his evocative photographic storytelling.

Roger Ballen is a South African-born photographer known for his haunting, surreal images that explore the human psyche and social isolation. Born in 1950 in New York, Ballen moved to South Africa in the 1970s, where he began documenting life in the country, focusing on marginalized communities and the complexities of human existence.

His early work was documentary-based, but over time, Ballen’s style evolved into a darker, more psychological realm, blending fine art with photography. He is particularly known for his stark, black-and-white images that often feature distorted figures, animals, and unsettling settings, creating an atmosphere of tension and mystery.

Ballen’s series such as Outland (2001) and Asylum of the Birds (2014) showcase his unique vision, capturing bizarre, dreamlike scenes that blur the line between reality and fantasy. His work has gained international acclaim, with exhibitions in major galleries worldwide and his photographs held in prominent collections.

Walker Evans was an American photographer renowned for his work documenting American life, particularly during the Great Depression. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Evans studied at Williams College and later developed his photographic style while living in Paris in the 1920s. Upon returning to the U.S., he worked for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in the 1930s, where he produced some of his most iconic images, including his series of rural poverty in the South.

Evans’ photographs are known for their simplicity, precision, and quiet intensity. He often employed a detached, almost documentary approach, capturing the everyday lives of ordinary people, vernacular architecture, and signs of American culture. His style is characterized by clean lines, an emphasis on geometric composition, and a focus on the unseen, which has made his work timeless and evocative.

One of his most famous works is Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a collaboration with writer James Agee, which focused on sharecroppers in Alabama. Evans’ photography is often associated with the concept of “social realism,” though he always sought to create art through his depictions of the American landscape. His work has had a profound influence on modern photography, and his images are housed in major collections such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Rineke Dijkstra is a Dutch photographer renowned for her intimate and powerful portraiture. Her work primarily focuses on the human condition, capturing the vulnerability, transition, and emotional depth of her subjects. Dijkstra often explores themes of identity, adolescence, and the passage of time through striking, direct portraits.

One of her most famous series is The Bechers, where she photographed young people during significant life transitions, such as military service or coming-of-age moments, in a straightforward, almost clinical style. Another notable series, Beach Portraits, features adolescents at the beach in various postures, showing their inner awkwardness and the moment of self-awareness they experience during the transition from youth to adulthood.

Dijkstra’s work is characterized by its stark compositions, meticulous framing, and the emphasis on the momentary expressions and gestures of her subjects. Her subjects are often placed in neutral backgrounds, which intensifies their presence and highlights the personal narratives conveyed in the images.

Her work has been widely exhibited internationally and is included in major collections such as the Guggenheim Museum and the Tate Modern. Dijkstra’s exploration of identity and the human experience continues to resonate, making her one of the most influential contemporary photographers.

Louis Faurer (1916–2001) was an American photographer known for his intimate portraits and street scenes that capture the emotional atmosphere of urban life. Born in Philadelphia, he began his career in the 1940s, working for magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. Influenced by surrealism and expressionism, Faurer always aimed to create images that went beyond simple documentary representation, focusing on emotion and mood.

His work stands out for its ability to capture fleeting moments and moments of vulnerability, often in the streets of New York, where he spent much of his life. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Faurer did not seek to idealize his subjects. Instead, he aimed to show the reality of everyday life, with a style that combines intimacy and visual poetry. His photographs are often dark, full of contrasts, and mysterious atmospheres.

Although Faurer did not achieve the same level of fame as some of his peers, his work has gained increasing recognition posthumously. His photographs are part of significant collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Araki Nobuyoshi is a Japanese photographer born in 1940 in Tokyo, famous for his provocative and controversial images that explore themes such as sex, death, and human relationships. After studying photography at university, he began his career in the 1960s as a commercial photographer before gaining recognition in the 1970s with his personal series. His photography is known for its raw and intimate approach, often filled with sensuality and transgression.

Araki is particularly known for his portraits of women, including erotic photographs that question the boundaries between beauty and objectification. He is also famous for his photos of Tokyo, capturing the city in all its diversity and energy. One of his most famous series is Sentimental Journey, where he documents his marriage and the early moments of his life with his wife, Yoko, whose premature death deeply affected him.

Over the decades, Araki has published numerous books and exhibited his work internationally. His distinctive style blends traditional Japanese aesthetics with modern, often disturbing elements. Despite facing criticism, his work has influenced contemporary photography, and he remains an iconic figure in Japanese visual art.

Lillian Bassman was an influential American fashion photographer, widely recognized for her contributions to Harper’s Bazaar magazine. Known for her striking high-contrast black-and-white photographs, Bassman captured the elegance of society women, actresses, and models from the 1950s and 1960s, with her muse being the renowned model Barbara Mullen. Born on June 15, 1917, in Brooklyn, NY, Bassman studied at Textiles High School in Manhattan, where she met photographer Alexey Brodovitch. She later attended night classes at Pratt Institute, focusing on fashion illustration. In the 1940s, she began working for Harper’s Bazaar, where she also served as photo editor, helping to elevate the careers of notable photographers like Richard Avedon, Robert Frank, and her husband, Paul Himmel. By the 1970s, as her style fell out of favor in the fashion world, she shifted away from commercial photography but continued to pursue her art. Her works are now housed in collections such as the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Bassman passed away on February 13, 2012, in New York.

Norbert Ghisoland came from the coal-mining region of “Le Borinage”, in Belgium where he opened his shop and studio. He was able to attract a whole crowd of people wanting to be photographed either as individuals or in groups. Not only local miners came by but also middle-class people, military men, clergymen, sportsmen, young and old. Norbert Ghisoland chose the setting and poses of his models, either in a specific decor or in front of a white backdrop, always capturing them in a most positive way.

Ghisoland showed a lot of emotion towards all his models. They either sit or stand with their hands folded or with one hand simply resting on the shoulder of a friend or relative posing next to them, all of them without a trace of a smile on their faces as they come from Le Pays Noir, the local coal-mining area.

Tormented by the pre-war times and worried at the thought of his son being called up in the army, Norbert Ghisoland passed away in 1939 at the age of 61, leaving behind a unique testimony about his fellow people of the coal mining era.

Katy Grannan, originally from Arlington, MA, discovered a passion for photography early in life, after her grandmother gave her a Kodak Instamatic 124. She never aspired to be an artist until she discovered Robert Frank and his indelible photographs in The Americans. This work changed her life.

Grannan was first recognized for an intimate series of portraits depicting strangers she met through newspaper advertisements. Since moving to California in 2006, Grannan has explored the relationship between aspiration and delusion—where our shared desire to be of worth confronts the uneasy prospect of anonymity. Together, Boulevard and The Ninety Nine unfold as a danse macabre of society’s liminal and ignored—the “anonymous”.

THE NINE, Grannan’s first feature film, is an intimate, at times disturbing, view into an America most would rather ignore. Raw, poetic, direct, and unnerving, the film is less a window into a foreign world than a distorted mirror reflecting our own, shared existence.

Grannan’s photographs are included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among many others. She’s also a long time contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and many other important publications. Grannan received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania and her MFA from the Yale School of Art. There are five monographs of her work: Model American, The Westerns, Boulevard, The Nine, and The Ninety Nine.

(www.katygrannan.com)

Judith Joy Ross, born in 1946 in Hazleton, is an iconic portrait photographer, known for her ability to capture human intensity with rare sensitivity. Since the 1970s, she has used large-format cameras and contact printing techniques to create portraits, primarily of working-class individuals from northeastern Pennsylvania, the region where she was born and raised. Her approach is characterized by a deep attention to the complexity of the faces she captures, avoiding preconceived judgments, and maintaining an egalitarian relationship with her subjects.

The portrait series she creates address existential and social themes such as suffering, innocence, resilience, and beauty. Judith Joy Ross is particularly drawn to people who are often overlooked by society, including adolescents, immigrants, and those affected by conflict. She has notably created powerful portraits of visitors to the Vietnam War Memorial and military reservists.

Rejecting the commercialization of her art, she prefers to capture the world through her own perspective. For her, the camera becomes a tool for deep connection and personal transcendence, allowing her to overcome her judgments and find meaning in her observations.

Jean Depara began photographing in 1950. He opened his studio, Jean Whisky Depara, in Kinshasa and worked there until 1956 making portraits, family photographs and pictures of celebrations. In that time Kinshasa was a centre for music where rumba and cha-cha were played the whole night.
Many people from West Africa went there to spend the night in the clubs and cafes. Depara mixed with the public as a photographer. He was famous for his love for women, whom he tried to seduce camera in hand.

In addition he was a follower of the singer Franco, the maestro of the Zairean rumba, who had discovered his work and invited him to come along during a performance. In 1954 he became Franco’s official photographer until the singer’s death in 1989.

Jane Evelyn Atwood engages with closed communities, formed through trauma and adaptation.  Through immersive long-term exploration, often spanning multiple continents, Atwood offers complex and intimate perspectives on the lives of prostitutes, incarcerated women, landmine victims, blind children and others similarly excluded by social or physical conditions. Her photographic engagement with those who have been affected directly by these situations is at a visceral level.

While Atwood was born in New York, she has lived in France since 1971. She was the first recipient of a W. Eugene Smith Fund Grant in 1980 and a year later the International Center of Photography hosted a solo exhibition of her work. Since then, her series have been exhibited extensively throughout Europe, the US and North Africa including two major retrospectives; at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris in 2011 and at La Filature, Mulhouse in 2020.

Thirteen monographs and a play have been produced based on Atwood’s œuvres and her photographs are found in numerous public collections in France, the United States, and in Scotland.

Stig De Block (b°1990) is a (fine-art) photographer who’s cultural referenced practice is inspired by heritage values. Especially when working in a contemporary fashion landscape which comes and goes, intention, passion and realness are his building blocks. His story driven approach is a constant interaction between the everyday real and layers of his own imagination. With a strong interest in subcultures, his images reflect a contemporary realm of authentic and explicit beauty. In 2022 he premiered his debut project Back to Back From Backyard to Boulevard. An intimate portrait on the low rider community in Los Angeles uniting different walks of life through a shared passion and love for low rider cars. In December 2023 Stig De Block exhibited Back to Back during Art Basel Miami at Scope Miami x Photo Basel.

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Ingar Krauss was born in 1965 in East Berlin, in what was then the GDR. He now splits his time between Berlin and Zechin, a village near the Polish border. After completing his military service and working for many years as a psychiatric caregiver, he turned to photography in the mid-1990s, gaining recognition for his poignant, meditative portraits of children and teenagers.

Krauss lives on an old farm where he grows his own vegetables and raises animals. Since 2010, he has focused on creating still-life portraits that reflect his close connection to the land. While nature is highly regarded today, it is often idealized. The rural world, however, still embodies a more practical, and sometimes harsh, relationship between the farmer, the hunter, and the land. Through his images, Krauss captures this raw reality, offering a personal and poetic perspective that resonates universally, almost as a tribute to a vanishing way of life.

Krauss develops his own black-and-white silver gelatin prints and then hand-paints them in oils using a limited color palette. This unique approach evokes the painted photography of the 19th century, lending a timeless quality to his depictions of rural East Germany at the turn of the 21st century.

Diane Arbus was an influential American photographer, renowned for her striking black-and-white portraits that captured intimate moments. She frequently focused on individuals marginalized by society, such as those with mental health issues, transgender people, and circus performers. Arbus’s work often explored themes of identity, as seen in her famous photograph Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey (1967), which highlighted both the similarities and subtle differences between twin sisters. She once remarked, “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know,” reflecting her belief in the complexity of her art.

Born Diane Nemerov in New York City on March 24, 1923, she grew up in a privileged family, which supported her artistic aspirations from an early age. Her first encounter with photography came in 1941 when she visited Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery with her husband, Allan Arbus, where she saw the works of photographers like Mathew Brady, Paul Strand, and Eugène Atget. In the mid-1940s, the couple ventured into commercial photography, contributing to magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. By the 1950s, disillusioned with commercial work, Arbus turned to street photography, capturing the diversity of New York’s inhabitants. These photographs were featured in The Museum of Modern Art’s 1967 exhibition, New Documents, alongside those of Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander.

Struggling with depression throughout her life, Arbus tragically took her own life on July 26, 1971, at the age of 48. A year after her passing, the Museum of Modern Art held her first major retrospective. Today, her work is part of permanent collections at prestigious institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Arnold Newman (1918-2006) is acknowledged as one of the great masters of the 20th and 21st century and his work has changed portraiture. He is recognized as the “Father of Environmental Portraiture.” His work is collected and exhibited in the major museums around the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Chicago Art Institute; The Los Angeles Museum of Art; The Philadelphia Museum; The Tate and the National Portrait gallery, London; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and many other prominent museums in Europe, Japan, South America, Australia, etc.

Newman was an important contributor to publications such as New York, Vanity Fair, LIFE, Look, Holiday, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, Town and Country, Scientific American, New York Times Magazine, and many others. There are numerous books published of Newman’s work in addition to countless histories of photography, catalogues, articles and television programs. He received many major awards by the leading professional organizations in the U.S. and abroad including the American Society of Media Photographers, The International Center of Photography, The Lucie Award, The Royal Photographic Society Centenary Award as well as France’s “Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters.” In 2005, Photo District News named Newman as one of the 25 most influential living photographers. In 2006, Newman was awarded The Gold Medal for Photography by The National Arts Club. He is the recipient of nine honorary doctorates and has lectured and conducted workshops throughout the country and the world.

Arnold Newman died on June 6, 2006 in New York City. He was 88 years old.

(www.arnoldnewman.com)

Antanas Sutkus is one of the co-founders and the president of the Lithuanian Photographic Art Society. His black-and-white photographs represent the Lithuanian school of photography, with a focus on human beings at the heart of his work. These photos are now housed in some of the world’s greatest museums.

In 1940, when he was just one year old, his father chose to take his own life rather than collaborate with the Soviet invaders. During his childhood, Sutkus contracted tuberculosis and miraculously survived, spending two years in a sanatorium where he devoured works of world literature.

From 1950 to 1989, Sutkus captured numerous images that were disturbing to the Soviet censorship and regime, which he kept as precious testimonies of that era.

He famously photographed Jean-Paul Sartre in the Lithuanian dunes at Nida along the Baltic coast, as well as Simone de Beauvoir during their visit to Lithuania in the summer of 1965.

He currently lives in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.

(www.antanassutkus.com)

An international jury at Photokina 1963 voted William Klein one of the 30 most important photographers in the medium’s history. He became famous in Europe immediately upon publication of his strikingly intense book of photographs, Life Is Good for You in New York – William Klein Trance Witness Revels, for which he won the Prix Nadar in 1956. Klein’s visual language made an asset out of accidents, graininess, blurriness, and distortion. He has described his work as “a crash course in what was not to be done in photography.” Klein employed a wide-angle lens, fast film, and novel framing and printing procedures to make images in a fragmented, anarchic mode that emphasized raw immediacy and highlighted the photographer’s presence in the scene.

Born and raised in New York, William Klein graduated from high school at age 14 and subsequently studied sociology at City College of the City of New York. After two years in the United States Army, where he worked as an army newspaper cartoonist, he attended the Sorbonne, Paris, on the G. I. Bill. He studied painting briefly with Fernand Léger and has lived in Paris since 1948, working as a painter, graphic designer, photographer and filmmaker.

Born on August 6, 1928, in Pittsburgh, Andy Warhol, born Andrew Warhola, became an iconic figure in Pop Art. After studying at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, he began his career in advertising, gaining recognition as an illustrator for prestigious magazines. Warhol revolutionized 1960s art by exploring the image of consumer society, notably through screenprints of mass-produced products like Campbell’s soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles. His celebrity portraits, including Marilyn Monroe, became iconic. In 1963, he founded “The Factory,” his New York workshop, where he hired assistants to mass-produce his artwork, while also creating experimental films. Warhol became a central figure in New York’s underground scene, producing the band The Velvet Underground. In 1967, he survived an assassination attempt. During the 1970s, he continued to create notable works, including portraits of figures like Mao and Mick Jagger. Warhol passed away in 1987, but his legacy endures as he represents the impact of Pop Art on contemporary art and popular culture. Warhol famously said, “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings.”

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.

Born 1969 in Huntington Beach, California, Deanna Templeton grew up in the suburban sprawl of Orange County and spent her early years going to all punk shows she could in Los Angeles. After returning home from a one-night runaway, her mother bought her a camera as a coming home present. This was 1985 and the start of her photographic career.

Largely self-taught, she started in 2002 making a series of self published ‘zines called “Blue Kitten Photos, one, two, and three.” She has shown her photographs in galleries and museums worldwide including solo shows at the Museum Het Domein, Netherlands, NRW Forum, Dusseldorf, and the Schucnk Museum, Netherlands. And group shows at the Australian Center for Photography, Sydney, The Preus Museum, Norway, The Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, and New Image Art gallery in Los Angeles. Her photographs regularly appear in magazines including Preen, Museum Paper, Hobo, Juxtapoz, Foam, The Journal, Anthem, Kinki, and Huck. Her first book of photographs, “Your Logo Here” (PAM Books, Australia) was published in 2007, and in 2008 she self-published a 106 page photographic travelogue called “17 Days” based on her travels in Europe and Russia. Deanna Templeton’s traveling exhibition “Scratch My Name on your Arm” documenting the recent phenomenon of body autographs is a piercing look at today’s youth culture.

Templeton currently lives and works in Huntington Beach with her husband Ed Templeton.

Jacques Henri Lartigue was unknown as a photographer until 1963, when, at 69 years old, his work was shown for the first time in a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. That same year, a picture spread published in Life magazine in an issue on John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s death also introduced Lartigue’s work to a wide public. Much to his surprise, he rapidly became one of the twentieth century’s most famous photographers.

Jacques Lartigue was introduced to photography as early as the year 1900 by his father, Henri Lartigue, who gave him his first camera in 1902, when Jacques was eight years old. From then on, Jacques recorded incessantly the world of his childhood, from automobile outings and family holidays to inventions by his older brother Maurice (nicknamed Zissou). Born into a prosperous family, the two brothers were fascinated by cars, aviation and sports currently in vogue; Jacques used his camera to document them all. As he grew up, he continued to frequent sporting events, participating in and recording such elite leisure activities as skiing, skating, tennis or golf.

But young Jacques, acutely aware of the evanescence of life, worried that photographs were not enough to resist the passing of time. How could images taken in just a few seconds convey and retain all the beauty and wonder around him? In parallel to his photography, he therefore began keeping a diary, and continued to do so throughout his life.

He also took up drawing and painting in 1915. After briefly attending the Julian Academy in Paris, he became a professional painter, exhibiting his work from 1922 on in Paris and the south of France. In 1919, Jacques married Madeleine Messager, the daughter of composer André Messager; their son Dany was born in 1921. Jacques and Madeleine divorced in 1931.

Jacques circulated in high society until the early 1930s, when the decline of the Lartigue fortune forced him to look for other sources of income. But he refused to give up his freedom by taking on a steady job, and lived meagerly off his painting throughout the 1930s and 1940s. In the early 1950s, while pursuing his painting career, he also began to receive some recognition as a photographer.

In 1962, with Florette, his third wife, he sailed by cargo ship to Los Angeles. During their travels, they stopped in New York, where they met with Charles Rado, founder of the photo agency Rapho. After seeing Lartigue’s photographs, Rado introduced him to John Szarkowski, the newly appointed director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art. Szarkowski was so impressed that the following year, he organized the first-ever exhibition of Lartigue’s work.

A retrospective of Lartigue’s photographs was held in Paris’ decorative arts museum, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, in 1975 – the year after the French president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, asked him to take his official portrait. In 1979, Lartigue signed an act donating his entire photographic output to the French government, the first living French photographer to do so; and mandated the Association des Amis de Jacques Henri Lartigue to conserve and promote his work. In 1980, his exhibition “Bonjour Monsieur Lartigue” was shown at the Grand Palais in Paris. He continued taking photographs, painting and writing until his death in Nice on September 12, 1986, at the age of 92, and left behind more than 100.000 photographs, 7.000 diary pages and 1.500 paintings.

Born in 1935, in the small village of Soloba, Sidibé stood out quickly because of his talent for drawing. His tutors encouraged him to enlist in the School for Sudanese Arts in Bamako. He graduated in Jewellery and Design but started his career in a totally different field: he became an apprenticeship at the Photo Service Boutique, owned by the Frenchman Gérard Guillat-Guignard. Three years later, he opened his own “Studio Malick”, which he ran until the end of his life. Where Seydou Keïta photographed people in his small studio, Sidibé became the father of the streets of Mali. He is also one of the only reporters to have covered all of the news of that time.

In the sixties and seventies he focussed solely on the local youth. Caught in surprise snapshots, or posing leisurely, these youngsters drag him along on their numerous wanderings. To sports events, relaxing on the beach, a fight in the nightclub Happy Boys or the Surf Club, out to a concert or seducing girls.

If Malick Sidibé’s images emanate so much power, it is because beyond the convivial and careless atmosphere, he also illustrates the difficulty of having to adapt to life in the city. The confrontation with unemployment and alcohol, the irresistible desire to be like young whites. The pictures reflect the artist: convivial, intimate and yet not voyeuristic. They tell of a great complicity between the artist and his subjects. Like that other photographer, Keïta, Sidibé too has had to wait until the nineties to get recognition outside of his own country.
Malick Sidibe got the Hasselblad Award, the golden Lion at the Venice Biennale and lately the ICP award for lifetime achievement.

Frank Horvat was born in 1928 in what was then Italy and is now Croatia. He initially studied art history in Milan. A meeting in 1951 with Henri Cartier-Bresson at Magnum, decided his fate as a photojournalist. In the early 50s he travelled all over the world and sent his images to magazines like Paris Match, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and Elle in Paris. In 1956 he settled in Paris and began to photograph fashion with a reportage style: real life situations, ambient lighting and 35 mm cameras.

Frank Horvat excels in reportage, fashion and nature photography. In his fashion photographs he already was a trendsetter for fashionshoots on location, as we know them today. He created fashion images in a journalistic way and journalistic series that resemble fashion shoots.

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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.

Piecing together Vivian Maier’s life can easily evoke Churchill’s famous quote about the vast land of Tsars and commissars that lay to the east. A person who fit the stereotypical European sensibilities of an independent liberated woman, accent and all, yet born in New York City. Someone who was intensely guarded and private, Maier could be counted on to feistily preach her own very liberal worldview to anyone who cared to listen, or didn’t. Decidedly unmaterialistic, Vivian would come to amass a group of storage lockers stuffed to the brim with found items, art books, newspaper clippings, home films, as well as political tchotchkes and knick-knacks. The story of this nanny who has now wowed the world with her photography, and who incidentally recorded some of the most interesting marvels and peculiarities of Urban America in the second half of the twentieth century is seemingly beyond belief.

An American of French and Austro-Hungarian extraction, Vivian bounced between Europe and the United States before coming back to New York City in 1951. Having picked up photography just two years earlier, she would comb the streets of the Big Apple refining her artistic craft. By 1956 Maier left the East Coast for Chicago, where she’d spend most of the rest of her life working as a caregiver. In her leisure Vivian would shoot photos that she zealously hid from the eyes of others. Taking snapshots into the late 1990′s, Maier would leave behind a body of work comprising over 100.000 negatives. Additionally Maier’s passion for documenting extended to a series of homemade documentary films and audio recordings.

Interesting bits of Americana, the demolition of historic landmarks for new development, the unseen lives of various groups of people and the destitute, as well as some of Chicago’s most cherished sites were all meticulously catalogued by Vivian Maier.

A free spirit but also a proud soul, Maier became poor and was ultimately saved by three of the children she had nannied earlier in her life. Fondly remembering Maier as a second mother, they pooled together to pay for an apartment and took the best of care for her. Unbeknownst to them, one of Maier’s storage lockers was auctioned off due to delinquent payments. In those storage lockers lay the massive hoard of negatives Maier secretly stashed throughout her lifetime.

Maier’s massive body of work would come to light when in 2007 her work was discovered at a local thrift auction house on Chicago’s Northwest Side. From there, it would eventually impact the world over and change the life of the man who championed her work and brought it to the public eye, John Maloof.

Currently, Vivian Maier’s body of work is being archived and cataloged for the enjoyment of others and for future generations. John Maloof is at the core of this project after reconstructing most of the archive, having been previously dispersed to the various buyers attending that auction. Now, with roughly 90% of her archive reconstructed, Maier’s work is part of a renaissance in interest in the art of Street Photography.

J.D. Okhai Ojeikere was born in 1930 in the western part of Nigeria. One of his cousins advises him to buy a camera and teaches him what he needs to know. In his young days Ojeikere incessantly writes the Ministry Of Information, asking them to hire him as an “assistant in the dark room”. His tenacity is rewarded when in 1961 the first television station is founded.

At the eve of the decolonisation he is contacted by the West African Publicity agency where he pays his dues; soon after that he opens his own studio “Foto Ojeikere”. In 1967 he becomes an active member of the Nigeria Art Council, an organisation in charge of organising a festival of visual and living arts. This is an opportunity for Ojeikere to devote himself to Nigerian culture, to which he is deeply attached.

“Hairstyles” will be his most known collection, involving almost 1000 different hairstyles that give an image of the African woman. He finds these “sculptures for a day” on the street, at a marriage or at work.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Jacques Sonck shoots classical analogue black-and-white portraits with an eye for the extraordinary. His oeuvre is a celebration of the diversity of humankind. Sonck is attracted by people who stand out from the crowd, either by an anomaly in their appearance or by their extravert attitude. His eccentric models are unique individuals who walk the border of ‘normality’. Although his work is often compared with that of Diane Arbus, who photographed humans on the margins of society, Sonck is more interested in the physical appearance than in the social position of his subjects.

Sonck finds his exceptional models on the streets of Belgian cities like Antwerp, Ghent and Brussels, and photographs them on the spot, often in front of a neutral background. Regardless the volatile and anonymous nature of these encounters, Sonck’s subjects pose with full surrender, pride and self-confidence. Often these portraits have a humorous undertone, stealing a grin from the viewer. In other cases Sonck confronts his audience with deformed individuals, evoking feelings of shame and discomfort. Notwithstanding the confrontational nature of these portraits, Sonck is never guilty of voyeurism or ridicule as he approaches his subjects with distance, without judgment but with a certain softness and respect.From the 1990s onwards Sonck started inviting his models into his studio, where he photographs them in front of a simple dark background with artificial light. In these purified photographs he focuses more on faces and or even body parts. These are more classical, timeless images, in comparison with his street photographs in which clothing and background often give away the timing.

Sonck worked as the photographer of the cultural department of the Province of Antwerp until 2009. He currently lives and works in Ghent.

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Friederike von Rauch (b. 1967, Freiburg, Germany; lives in Berlin) is a visual artist who works with photography. She was trained as a silversmith and studied industrial design at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. After working as a location scout for international film productions, which had a strong impact on her curiosity for spaces, she began to focus on her own work in the early 2000s.
Based on a precise knowledge of material and form, Friederike von Rauch deals photographically with architecture, space and atmosphere, which she observes and captures with precision. Her works are characterised by restraint, strong reduction  and a concentration on light as a pictorial element. With a superb eye for the beauty and inconsistencies of inconspicuous details, the artist presents astounding views of interior spaces. Her compositions of light and shadow, devoid of people, disclose a subtle artistic aesthetic and are at times evocative of abstract painting. Seen from von Rauch’s point of view, dark alcoves, bare walls, individual objects, and traces of the human hand develop a life of their own while at the same time allowing space for interpretation.

Von Rauch has had numerous solo exhibitions at venues including Haus am Kleistpark, Berlin (2019); Goethe-Institute Paris (2017); Kunstverein KunstHaus Potsdam (2015); Deutsche Oper Berlin (2015); i8 Gallery Reykjavík (2014); Forum für Fotografie, Cologne (2013); and Hafnarborg Centre of Culture and Fine Art, Iceland (2010). She has participated in group exhibitions at institutions such as Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2019); Berlinische Galerie (2015); MARTa Herford (2012); Kunstverein Heidelberg (2011); and Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2011). In 2008 von Rauch was invited by the architect David Chipperfield to interpret his museum project in Berlin, and the resulting book, Neues Museum, won the DAM Architecture Book Award. In 2010 she was nominated for the Gabriele Münter Prize. Von Rauch’s works are part of many private collections as well as the public collections of the Bundestag, Deutsche Bank Collection, the Hess Art Collection, and the Royal Dutch Collection.

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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.

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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.

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