Darcy Padilla

Darcy Padilla, 1965, USA, is a photojournalist and documentary photographer. Her career as a freelance photographer started after completing 12 internships at daily newspapers as The New York Times and The Washington Post. Since then she covered stories in Cuba and Haiti, on Aids in Prison and the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, just to name a few. Her most acclaimed body of work is The Julie Project. This long-term project is the story of a woman called Julie Baird. Eighteen years Darcy followed and photographed the story of AIDS, drug abuse, abusive relationships, poverty and death. Julie died on September 27th, 2010 at the age of 36, after having lived a turbulant life in which she gave birth to six children of whom the first five were taken away from her. It is an impressive, heartbreaking project with a dramatic, yet expected ending. The series rightfully received the W. Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography in 2010. Amongst other awards for her work is the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for the work she did photographing residents of transient hotels in one of the poorest neighborhoods in San Francisco. All of the following images are from The Julie Project.

Laurence Demaison

Laurence Demaison, 1965, France, studied at the School of Architecture of Strasbourg before she started making self-portraits in 1993. Her vast body of work is almost exclusively constituted of photographs of herself. She does not digitally manipulate the images nor does she manipulate the photographs after they have been shot with the exception of chemical inversion for some series. All the techniques she uses are analog and done by herself. The various series have a large array of emotions. They can be poetic, fragile and classical, yet sometimes they are quirky, haunting or even freaky. She is a photographer who seeks the bounderies of what can be done within analog photography and successfully crosses them with grace. Laurence has exhibited her work on numerous occasions, mainly in Western Europe and New York. The photographs have also been released in several monographs.

Brent stirton

Brent Stirton, 1969, South-Africa, is a photojournalist and documentary photographer who focuses on issues related to conflict, health and the environment. He has traveled extensively to places as Timbuktu, Yemen, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh and India. He is the official photographer for the Global Business Coalition against Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Twice he visited the Ukraine, a country with the highest concentration of HIV+ people in Europe, to document the victims of Aids and the social workers and doctors who improve the lives of the infected. His goal was to humanize the disease through his photography and to lessen fear and prejudice against those who live with the disease. His work has received numerous awards amongst which are five awards from the World Press Photo Foundation and six from the Lucie Foundation. His images have been shown in a vast amount of exhibits including one at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and has been published in leading magazines as the National Geographic Magazine, Time, Newsweek and Stern. The following images come from the stories Tuareg Rebels Niger, Aids, Drugs & Uncertainty: Ukraine and Narco-wars in Afghanistan.

Roger Ballen

Roger Ballen was born in New York City, New York, USA in 1950. He has lived in Johannesburg since the 1970s. Beginning by documenting the small dorps or villages of rural South Africa, Ballen starting photographing the inhabitants of these places in the late 1980s and early 1990s. His fifth book 'Outland' produced by Phaidon Press in 2001 was the result.
In the fall of 2005, Phaidon press produced its second book by the artist, entitled 'Shadow Chamber'. The book focuses on interactions between people, animals, and/or objects. Ballen’s recent work enters into a new realm of photography — the images are painterly and sculptural in ways not immediately associated with photographs.

'I have been shooting black and white film for nearly fifty years now. I believe I am part of the last generation that will grow up with this media. Black and White is a very minimalist art form and unlike color photographs does not pretend to mimic the world in a manner similar to the way the human eye might perceive. Black and White is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality.

My purpose in taking photographs over the past forty years has ultimately been about defining myself. It has been fundamentally a psychological and existential journey.

If an artist is one who spends his life trying to define his being, I guess I would have to call myself an artist.'

 

Through collaboration on some of Die Antwoord's music videos, which have received more than 30 million hits on YouTube, Ballen's paintings and sculpture have gained broader exposure globally. Yolandi Visser said about him: "Mr. Ballen is like, the weirdest person I've ever met in my life."
Ballen's work was recently selected for a solo exhibition in the Smithsonian Institute's Museum of African Art titled Lines, Marks, and Drawings: Through the Lens of Roger Ballen