The magazine of the photo-essay
March 2017 back issue
Doug Menuez
To commission him or to request prints of his work: www.menuez.com
Documentary photographer & director Doug Menuez once stood at the North Pole,
crossed the Sahara, had tea with Stalin's daughter and held a chunk of Einstein's
brain. Quitting his blues band in 1981, he began his career at the Washington Post
then began freelancing for Time, LIFE, Newsweek, Fortune, USA Today, the New
York Times Magazine and many other publications. He’s done portraits of politicians,
movie stars and cultural figures such as Presidents Bush and Clinton, Mother Teresa,
Robert Redford, Cate Blanchett and Hugh Jackman. He's published four books, and
shot award-winning advertising campaigns for global brands such as Chevrolet,
Nikon, GE, FedEx, Charles Schwab, HP, Emirates Airlines, and Microsoft.
His extensive archive of over one million images was acquired by Stanford University
Libraries in 2004. His latest project, Fearless Genius: The Digital Revolution in Silicon
Valley 1985-2000 was published by Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books, gained worldwide
press coverage and is traveling as a fine art exhibition of rare images of Silicon
Valley’s greatest innovators, including Steve Jobs, as they changed our world. Doug
divides his time between the Hudson Valley and NYC.
“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!”
Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film & documentary maker
Vincent Cianni
To commission him or to request prints of his work: www.vincentcianni.com
Vincent Cianni is a documentary photographer exploring community, memory and
social justice issues through image, text and audio. Cianni holds an MFA in
Photography from SUNY New Paltz and teaches at Parsons, The New School for
Design in NYC. The Archive for Documentary Arts (Duke University) established a
study archive of his photographic work in 2007. We Skate Hardcore, published by NYU
Press and the Center for Documentary Studies in 2004, was awarded the American
Association of University Press Best Book Design and a major survey of this work was
exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York in 2006. Gays in the Military, an
investigation into the effects of the military’s ban on the lives and careers of LGBT
service members was published by Daylight Books in May 2014 and was featured in
the New York Times Sunday Review and The Katie Couric Show. He recently
presented at TEDxUniversityofNevada (2015) and has lectured on his work at the
Library of Congress, the American Psychiatric Association and OutServe/SLDN
Leadership Conference, and in many photographic, gallery, and museum venues.
Cianni’s photographs have appeared in The New Republic, Aperture, Double Take,
The New Yorker, Slate, ViceUK, Photography as Activism; New York 400: A Visual
Claude le Gall
To commission him or to request prints of his work: www.clgp.fr
Born in a little village on the north coast of Brittany. 1962. First photographs taken with
a bakelite camera ( 6x9 cm) 1970s. Becomes a teacher of English and, at the same
time, develops a deep interest in photography. Documents his environment, in
particular the life of local kelp-gatherers whose activity will come to an end a few years
later. 1981. Exhibition on Brittany at the Canon gallery in Paris. 1982. Starts work on
Ireland. The project will be concluded in 1994. Some of this work will be shown in
France and in Poland. 1986. Starts a project on Galicia, the so-called Celtic part of
Spain. This work is still in progress and part of it was exhibited at Museo do Pobo
Galego in Santiago de Compostela in 2012. 1993-2013. Work distributed by Agence
VU in Paris. Has become a free-lance again and is currently organizing the work he
has done over the past 46 years.
Michael O’Neill
To commission him or to request prints of his work: www.michaeloneill.com
From the very earliest days of photography, photographers have been ineluctably
drawn to the human face. Riding the crest of a twenty-five year career that saw several
lifetimes worth of industry awards and commissions, Michael O’Neill was feeling this
pull on an almost visceral level. So, abruptly calling it quits he underwent over the
course of the next five years, what could be called a radical ‘genre transplant’. As one
the most respected photographers of his time in the exacting art of commercial and
editorial still-life, he wanted a practice based on an empathy between subject and
photographer and began his career anew as portrait photographer.
Having come up in the late 60s in the orbit of Avedon, Hiro, Penn, and Karsch--through
a sort of ‘guild’ system, that is, where the collective memory of his mentors linked him
directly back to Steichen, Hoyninguen-Huene, Horst, Beaton and Brodovitch--O’Neill did
have an intuitive grasp of how to approach his sitters. Early subjects were Andy Warhol
and Richard Nixon, who left O’Neill stunned with a spontaneous humanity totally at
odds with his image as a total pariah of the American left. He has photographed every
American president since.
Daniel Alexander
To commission him or to request prints of his work: danielalexanderphotography
Daniel Alexander is a London based photographer and designer. Combining design
and photography his work has been exhibited at the Wellcome Collection, The Imperial
War Museum, The Science Museum and the Charité. He is currently Course director of
Photography at London South Bank University.
Vidhyaa
To commission him or to request prints of his work: www.vidhyaa.pic
Currently live in Abu Dhabi, passionate photographer, I specialise in portraits & News
paper photography. I always try to capture a uniqueness in each photograph. My love
for photography began in 2012; which relaxes and excites me a lot, I love
photographing people, faces, documenting the events culture, colors, texture and
liveliness of life. My vision is to explore globally, I love walking long way with music and
my camera in the streets of a large city.I have won, published, sold,exhibited several
photographs in many international magazines and in local media and exhibiting and
finalist in the 8th Edition of the Pollux Awards in people and exhibiting in Berlin
Germany by 6 October 2016.
Nicholas Gervin
To commission him or to request prints of his work: www.nicholasgervin.com
I am a documentary and fine art photographer from Portland, Maine. I first picked up a
camera in 1992, at the age of twelve, when I began to explore my urban surroundings
and document the graffiti art scene with disposable cameras. I have battled alcoholism
as well as several head traumas in my lifetime. I am currently six years sober and
dealing with Post-Concussion Syndrome on a daily basis. Photography has been very
therapeutic for me in my ongoing recovery process. I have had work published in local
and international magazines, such as Popular Photography Magazine, Portland Press
Herald, Portland Phoenix, The Forecaster, Dig Portland and Dispatch.
On April 20th, 2015, I self published my first zine titled BrickWork, a perfect bound,
hand made, limited edition zine (50 copies), featuring one year’s black and white
photography documentation of Portland, Maine’s grittier side. The publication was sold
internationally, to such places as: France, Germany, Spain, Luxembourg, Turkey, Japan
and the United States. I am currently working on several long term projects and will be
featured in Colin Westerbeck’s new book, Street Photography 2015, currently in design
by Acuity Press.
George Webber
To commission him or to request prints of his work: www.georgewebber.ca
George Webber has been photographing the people and social landscape of the
Canadian prairies for nearly 40 years.
In 2010 he was the recipient of the National Magazine Gold Award for Photojournalism.
His books include Requiem, A World Within, People of The Blood, Last Call, In This
Place, Prairie Gothic and Badlands. Webber’s work can be found in museums and
archives in Canada, France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and Australia.
Arkadiusz Gola
To commission him or to request prints of his work: www.arekgola.com
Arkadiusz Gola (b. 1972) / based In Zabrze (Poland) / graduate of the Opava School
of Photography (the Czech Republic) / engaged in documentary photography, mainly
focused on the changes occurring in Silesian society after 1989 / particularly interested
in the places connected with heavy industry, that got shrunken significantly in Poland
at the end of the 20TH century / has been a photojournalist since 1991 and has been
working for Dziennik Zachodni in Katowice for 21 years / winner of numerous contest,
including Polish Press Photo, Grand Press Photo, BZ WBK Press Foto and Silesian
PressPhoto / scholar of Silesia Province Marshal in the field of culture / his
photographs are in collections of Silesian Museum, Katowice Historical Museum,
Zabrze Municipal Museum, Coal Mining Museum in Zabrze, Museum of History of
Photography in Cracow and Olomouc Museum of Art / member of the Association of
Polish Artists Photographers / author of the book Horizontal for Two Columns. History
of Press Photography in Dziennik Zachodni and Trybuna Robotnicza 1960-1989 and
albums People from Coal, Garden 1, I Don’t Have to Come Back… and Boundary
States / has exhibited in Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Poland and Slovakia.
Olaf Unverzart
To commission him or to request prints of his work: www.unverzart.de
Olaf Unverzart was born in 1972 in Germany. He is a graduate of 'Hochschule für Grafik
und Buchkunst' in Leipzig and finished with a diploma for Fine Art Photography. In 2002
he received a DAAD fellowship for Cuba and in 2011 a fellowship by Goethe Institut for
Lithuania. Furthermore in 2010 he was selected for the 'la brea matrix' fellowship in Los
Angeles. He has won several awards and prizes like 2005 'Kunstfonds Book
Scholarship', 2009 'Deutscher Fotobuchpreis', 2009 'Förderpreis der Stadt München'
as well as the Lead Award in Gold in 2010 and 2016. From 2006 to 2009 he lectured
photography at the 'Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg', Germany. Currently he
teaches at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria.
His work is shown and publicated since the mid 1990.
He lives in Munich and Oberpfalz.
Kanishka Mukherji
To commission him or to request prints of his work: facebook
I am Kanishka Mukherji. I am currently working as a banker in SBI. Photography
happened to me three and a half years back when I started taking pictures with a point
& shoot camera.Gradually i started realizing the difference between a picture and a
photograph,and what started as a hobby eventually metamorphosed into an
indispensable part of my life.
Being an introvert, I use my photography as a medium to express myself,my thoughts,
my emotions. I believe that " Every photograph I create, creates me " and hence I click
to create myself.According to me, a photograph is a bridge between the subject and
the viewer. A photograph should compel the viewers to think and be one with the
subject. Despite my busy work schedule I manage to take some time out to sneak into
the world and bring out the untold stories from the life of people.Life is a quintessential
element of my photography because they say, "it is more important to click with people
than to click the shutter".
Szymon Barylski
To commission him or to request prints of his work: www.szymonbarylski.com
Szymon Barylski Polish photographer born in 1984, based in Ireland.
Szymon is involved in documentary photography and photo essays. Photographing is
a tool for exploring and learning about the world. He try to tell a story and show it
directly. In his opinion, people are an inexhaustible topic and a source of inspiration.
Szymon said: “When travelling, I meet people; as a result I create the image of my
relation with them. The exploration of the environment where I take photos allows me
to create emotional and convincing scenes.“ He thinks you cannot photograph the
things you do not know well. That is why he prepare himself for each project
individually, accurately, going into detail in the newspapers and on the Internet. Next
he looks for an inspiration in other photographer’s photos and conversations, as a
result he can create real pictures. His own narrative presented in his photos is at the
same time very personal and common. Szymon thinks that a lot of people can identify
themselves with his works.
Photographer wish his photos could increase individual and collective awareness about the social, political and economic
need and urge people to act, be part of positive changes.
Paolo Patruno
To commission him or to request prints of his work: www.paolopatrunophoto.org
Paolo Patruno (Italy) is a freelance documentary photographer and filmmaker. He has
traveled throughout Africa over the past ten years, documenting global topics, including
health care, human rights, gender equality, and women's empowerment. Since 2011
he has been working on his long-term project, Birth is a Dream which aims to
document and raise awareness of maternal health in Africa.
Paolo’s work has been published in the The Huffington Post, Vanity Fair, Daily Mail,
REFINERY29, and other reputable publications. His work has been awarded on an
international level, having received first place in the Social Documentary and Narrative
Documentary categories; a gold medal at Px3 Paris Photography Prize; and
"Photographer of the Year" in the Humanitarian and Documentary category at 4th
Pollux Awards, among others.
Damian Bird
To commission him or to request prints of his work: www.damianbirdphotography.com
Damian Bird, is a photographer and photojournalist with many years of experience,
working in war zones and trouble spots around the globe. He was educated in
Photography at the Surrey College of Art and Design and at the London College of
Communication where he studied for a post graduate degree in Photojournalism.
In 2011 he founded Life Force magazine with his business partner and wife of 14 years,
Alice. As well as Editing Life Force magazine, he is currently engaged in photographing
a series of photo-essays on English culture and has recently returned to Afghanistan.
He continues to have his work published in national and international newspapers and
magazines including The Times, the Telegraph, the Express, the Observer, GQ, Esquire,
Dazed & Confused,The Face, Country Life and Geographical magazine.
He lives with his wife and four children in Devon, England.
Jonathan Mehring
To commission him or to request prints of his work: www.mehringphoto.com
Jonathan Mehring is an award-winning photographer based in Brooklyn, NY. In 2015 he
released his first book, Skate the World – Photographing One World of Skateboarding,
published by National Geographic. His unique style of adventure travel coupled with
action and lifestyle photography has taken him to over 30 countries around the globe.
Some of these epic journeys include riding motorbikes through Vietnam, taking a
riverboat up the Amazon, riding the Trans Siberian Railway, and road tripping through
India, all with a skateboard by his side.
Mehring earned a BFA in Photography from Virginia Commonwealth University, and
was the first of his class to be published, completing stories for Thrasher and Slap
magazines before graduating. He has since been published in national and
international editorials including Rolling Stone, Details, Le Monde, The Wall St.
Journal, Huck, Skateboarder, Transworld, Thrasher, and Monster Children. He has
exhibited his photographs at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Sydney,
Rotterdam, Köln, Honolulu, and Richmond, Virginia. Commercial clients include Nike,
Converse, Vans, Adidas, Levis, Burton, RVCA, Quiksilver, and Red Bull.
In addition to NYC, he often travels to LA or internationally for work.
History of America’s Greatest City; The Polaroid Book and numerous anthologies and online magazines. His photographs
have been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Stephen Daiter Gallery (Chicago), Verve Gallery (Santa Fe), the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the George Eastman House, and in international
photo festivals at Houston Fotofest, KOLGA Tbilisi Photo Festival, and the 7th Internaltionale Fototage Mannheim. His
photographs reside in numerous public and private collections including Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro; The
Library of Congress; The Kinsey Institute for Sexual Research; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; George Eastman House;
Philadelphia Museum of Art; Museum of the City of New York, Brooklyn Museum of Art, and Los Angeles County Museum
of Art.
“As a documentary photographer working in traditional media, I am interested in exploring community and memory, the
human condition, as well as the use of image and text stemming from personal experience. This anthropological/
ethnographic approach has brought me to investigate topics ranging from homeless men in a small city ravaged by urban
blight, the socio-political effects of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the lives of Puerto Rican skaters in Brooklyn and a small
former coal-mining town in Pennsylvania.
I began my documentary work questioning how photographs exist within the context of contemporary practice by
recording wedding rituals and combining them with text taken from sources as varied as Milan Kundera’s The Book of
Laughter and Forgetting, anthropological studies on marriage rituals and obscure plays that look at the wedding
ceremony as an archaic institution.
My background in community development and my interest in history and literature have played a major role in my work
allowing me to question the viability and practicality of documentary photography as a social change tool. Most recently,
this has led me to interviewing subjects and recording their oral histories in my present project on gay and lesbian service
members in the U.S. military.”
Through the next decades O’Neill was a contributing photographer for the New York Times Magazine for eighteen years,
Rolling Stone, Life, the New Yorker, Esquire, Vanity Fair, Time and numerous other publications, producing iconic photos of
the famous personalities of the late twentieth century. In time the work he produced in his adopted genre of portraiture
received acclaim equal to that in his previous life as an advertising and commercial artist.
O’Neill’s portraits keep artifice to a bare minimum. They have the restrained classicism of formal portraiture yet succeed in
keeping even the most well-known faces rooted in a factual and psychological here and now. In this way O’Neill subdues
their sheer familiarity, lest their fame overflow the images themselves. Making no concessions to formula, and remaining
open enough to let the strength of a sitter’s personality have its effect on the appearance of image, he captures those at the
highest pinnacles of fame simply enacting the role of themselves.
Ironically, in one of his most popular projects, O’Neill turned his lens not on people but on young animals. Inspired by
natural histories and drawings in the Columbia Encyclopedias he read as a kid, he started the Zoobabies project in 1991
(with a book published by Villard the same year). Translating his fascination with human physiognomy into an exploration
of the oh-so-human tendency to anthropomorphize the faces of animals, O’Neill produced images that have been delighting
viewers for over twenty years.
The project closest to O’Neill’s heart, though, and one that will continue to occupy him far into the future, is an exploration
in word and image of the origins and the essence of yoga and Eastern spiritual practice through an ongoing series of
portraits. On the heels of a photographic career that was occupied first with the physiognomy of objects as a still-life
photographer; then of many guises of fame and celebrity, O’Neill is now searching for the physiognomy of wisdom and of
compassion in the faces and in the comportment of the great gurus and teachers in these ancient traditions.
This project has in part manifested in the publication of his book “On Yoga The Architecture of Peace”. Ten years in the
making Taschen released the book in the fall of 2015.
O’Neill continues working on two new books and a film. He is certified as a Kundalini Yoga teacher and will continue to
immerse himself in yoga as a way of life.
David W Lynch
To commission him or to request prints of his work: www.davidlynchphotography.com
David W. Lynch began photographing seriously in the late 1980s, concentrating on
landscape and portraiture in his native New England. In 1991 his life was forever
changed by a defining one-year stay in Guatemala where he began to document daily
life—focusing on laborers—in the largely intact indigenous society there. His emotional
and heartfelt connection to the people of Guatemala has led him to a lifelong work in
Central America, and has furthered his passion for social documentary focus in other
parts of the world.
While continuing his international work, David turned his eye closer to home, and
began documenting industrial workers at the Port of Seattle in the late 1990’s, where he
found similar dynamics to those at work in the “developing world”: poverty, substance
abuse, and disempowerment of the worker as a third class citizen in a society of
privilege.
2015 saw the publication of David's first book of photographs, Strangers in the
Landscape, featuring two of his conceptual projects: "The Firesuit Series" (2003–2009), an exploration of the human
condition through metaphors of isolation and anticipation, and "The Bubble Wrap Dress" (2010–2011), a parallel body of
work examining the fragility of femininity in contemporary America.
David has exhibited in Northampton, MA; Seattle, Vashon, and Bellingham, WA; and Los Angeles, CA. He divides his time
between the west coast of the United States and Mexico, where he is at work on a series on bullfighting.
Christopher Thomas
To commission him or to request prints of his work: www.christopher-thomas.de
Christopher Thomas, born in 1961 in Munich and a graduate from the Bayerische
Staatslehranstalt für Fotografie, has received a number of international awards as a
commercial photographer. His photo reportages have appeared in magazines such as
Geo, Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, Stern and Merian.
As an artist, Christopher Thomas has established a reputation above all through his
city portraits. The first of his cityscapes was Munich Elegies which was exhibited at the
Museum of Photography in Munich in 2005 (published by Schirmer/Mosel, 2005). This
was followed by the series New York Sleeps that he worked on between 2001 and
2009. The companion publication, New York Sleeps. Photographs by Christopher
Thomas, was published by Prestel in 2009 (6th edition 2012) and was awarded the
Deutscher Fotobuchpreis (German Photobook Prize).
In 2010 Christopher Thomas photographed amateur actors during rehearsals for the
Passion Play in Oberammergau. The result was a cycle of 56 portraits that are
reminiscent of paintings by Old Masters that exude the spirit of the Play. The volume
Christopher Thomas. Passion. Photographs of the Passion Play, Oberammergau was published by Prestel at the same
time. Christopher Thomas received several awards for this cycle such as the Silver Medal of the Art Directors Club of
Germany (2011) and the German Design Award (2013). The Bavarian National Museum in Munich exhibited a wide
selection of photos from this cycle from October 2011 to April 2012 in its magnificent Gothic Hall.
The following two volumes of photographs were also published by Prestel Verlag: Venice in Solitude (2012) and most
recently Paris. City of Light (2014).
Works by Christopher Thomas can be seen around the world in well-known photography galleries and at trade fairs, as
well as in major private and institutional collections such as the Francois Pinault Collection, the Sir Elton John
Photography Collection and the German Bundestag Art Collection.
Stan Raucher
To commission him or to request prints of his work: www.stanraucher.com
Stan Raucher is an award-winning photographer who has been documenting aspects
of the human condition around the globe for over a decade. He was born and raised in
Minnesota during the age of black and white television, Life magazine photo
documentaries, and the publication of The Family of Man. His photographs have been
featured in many solo exhibitions and included in numerous juried group shows. His
prints are in the permanent collections at the Lishui Museum of Photography and the
University of Washington Hall Health Center, and held by private collectors.
His photos have been published in LensWork (#97 and #117), Black & White
Magazine, Slate, The Daily Mail, The Independent, Lenscratch, F-Stop Magazine,
Shots, The Havana Times, and several other publications. He was a 2012, 2013 and
2015 Critical Mass finalist, a 2012 CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography
finalist, a 2014 PhotoWorld finalist, a 2015 PX3 Bronze Award winner, and a 2016
Social Documentary Network Fine Art of Documentary Competition Honorable Mention.
His first monograph, Metro: Scenes from an Urban Stage, features 50 duotone
photographs by Stan Raucher, a foreword by Ed Kashi and an essay by Marlaine Glicksman was published by Daylight
Books in May 2016 (hardcover, 8 by 10 inches, 88 pages ISBN: 9781942084150). This book has received extensive press
coverage and numerous accolades, including being named one of the Best Photography Books of Summer 2016 by
American Photo Magazine.
His complete resume may be found at http://stanraucher.com/resume.pdf
