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The magazine of the art-form of the photo-essay “A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine.  Fabulous!” Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film & documentary maker
May 2014 issue
Renee C Byer To commission Renee or to request prints of her work: reneephoto@sbcglobal.net Renée C. Byer is an American documentary photojournalist best known for her in-depth work on those who are disadvantaged or whose voices have not been heard. Her capacity to create photographs with profound emotional resonance and sensitivity earned the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography in 2007 and dozens of other national and international honors, including that of Pulitzer finalist in 2013. “I think of myself as a journalist who chooses the art of photography to bring awareness to issues throughout the world,'' Byer said. "As a documentary photojournalist, I adhere to a code of ethics. My pictures depict the unvarnished realities of life. Art is a powerful means of expression, but combined with journalism it has the ability to bring awareness to issues that can elevate public understanding and compassion. As a photojournalist, my hope is to give a voice to those who would otherwise never be heard.”
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Adrian Morillo To commission Adrian or to request prints of his work: www.adrianmorillo.com Born in Cádiz, Spain, in 1986. Currently living and working in London. Beside his personal projects, he is working in cinema productions, press and advertising. Graduated in audiovisual communication at Rey Juan Carlos University, has developed a Master in Fine Arts at the Complutense University and has won a scholarship to study in MadPhoto photography school. Traditionally works in audiovisual documentaries about social issues but progressively starts to prefer photography because it is a medium that offers more freedom for working. His last works are focused on the investigation about traditional cultural manifestations from the south of Andalusia.    
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 Printing where he studied for a post graduate degree in Photojournalism.  In 2011 he founded Life Force magazine with his business partner and wife of ten 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 (Aug 2013). 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.
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Per-Olof Stoltz To commission Per-Olof or to request prints of his work: postoltz@hotmail.com Freelance photographer based in Gothenburg, Sweden. Before turning freelance he worked as a newspaper photographer. In his projects he mainly focuses on subjects close to his own life and history, which is why he seldom works outside Sweden.
David Yarrow To commission David or to request prints of his work: davidyarrowphotography.com David Yarrow, 48, was born in Scotland. He was named Young Scottish Photographer of the Year at the age of 20 and in the same year covered the World Cup in Mexico for The Times. His photo of Maradona holding the trophy aloft was internationally syndicated and remains an iconic image of that tournament. He was an accredited photographer for Allsports, later part of Getty Images, and photographed the 1988 Winter Olympic Games, the US Masters and over 300 international football matches before turning his lens on the natural world to capture its harsh and endangered beauty. David’s photography has featured in numerous publications around the world, including The Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph and Hong Kong Tatler. His first book, Nowhere (2007), a collection of colour images of some of the world's remotest spots, raised money for the CLIC Sargent Children’s Charity and sold out its limited print run. David is the affiliated photographer for conservation charity Tusk, which receives 10% of sales of his prints and books to support its 53 projects in 18 African countries.
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James Brabazon To contact James: www.jamesbrabazon.com James Brabazon is a journalist and documentary filmmaker. Based in the UK, he has travelled to over 70 countries – investigating, filming and directing in the world’s most hostile environments. He is the author of the international bestseller My Friend the Mercenary, a memoir recounting his experiences of the Liberian civil war and the Equatorial Guinea coup plot, published by Canongate. James has recently finished producing the Academy Award shortlisted feature documentary Which Way Is The Frontline From Here? (Goldcrest Films for HBO, 2013), which tells the life story of his friend and colleague the photographer Tim Hetherington, who was killed while working in Libya in April 2011. James first gained international profile as the only journalist to film the Liberian LURD rebel group fighting to overthrow President Charles Taylor. He spent six months travelling with the rebels in Liberia on the multiple award-winning documentary projects Liberia: A Journey
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Andrew White To commission Andrew or to request prints of his work: andrewdwhitephoto.com Andrew D. White was born in Santa Monica, CA in 1986. He worked in the skateboard industry as a video editor and camera operator prior to moving to New York City to study photography. Andrew attended the documentary photography and photojournalism program at The International Center of Photography in 2012. In 2013, he received a fellowship from the New York Foundation of the Arts. Andrew's current projects are in part advocacy and in part personal investigation.
In the last decade, Byer has focused on intimate portraits of families facing gut-wrenching decisions, from terminal illnesses to financial struggles to intra-family custody battles. She has traveled the world to document efforts to increase food production and has focused on some of the ethical and scientific debates those efforts have fueled.  She has captured the unique struggles faced by women preparing for war and, later, recovering from it. Her photography and multimedia work has garnered awards from Pictures of the Year International, Sigma Delta Chi, the Casey Foundation, Days Japan International, UNICEF, World Hunger, DART and the National Press Photographers Association. She received the World Understanding Award from Pictures of the Year International and the McClatchy President's Award, the highest honor offered by that chain. Byer is generous in sharing her passion. She has lectured and taught workshops worldwide, including a TEDx Tokyo talk, “The Story Telling Power of Photography,” that received a standing ovation. Both that and her Iris lecture for the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles can be viewed online.  She served as a James H. Ottaway Sr. Endowed Professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz in 2010. She was a Hearst visiting Professional in 2008 at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University and has lectured at the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada-Reno and at Bradley University. After the death of the Phillips Jones Griffiths, head of the Magnum photo agency, photojournalist Ryuichi Hirokawa, founder of Days Japan, asked Byer to take Griffiths’ place in judging that organization's prestigious international photo contest. She has judged award competitions also for the Alexia Foundation for World Peace, Pictures of the Year International and the National Press Photographers Best of Photojournalism. Collections of Byer's work appear in two traveling exhibits -- "The American Soldier'' and "Capture the Moment: The Pulitzer Prize Photographs'' -- curated by Cyma Rubin, a Tony- and Emmy Award-winning producer, director, and writer. Her Pulitzer- prize winning photos are in a permanent Kiosk exhibit at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. Byer has had solo exhibits at the Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville, Va., the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art in New Paltz, N.Y., The Hartmann Center Art Gallery in Peoria, Ill., the Muroff Kotler Visual Arts Gallery in Stone Ridge, N.Y., the Photographic Center in Palm Beach, Fla., and the Exposure Gallery in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in group exhibitions in Washington, D.C., Germany, Japan, Spain and Cambodia. Her photography is featured in several books. Her most recent book project, "Living on a Dollar a Day,'' with a forward by the Dalai Lama published by W.W. Norton in April 2014. She traveled to four continents for the San Francisco-based nonprofit, The Forgotten International, to bring awareness to the plight of the poor who struggle daily to stay alive. Byer, a native of New York, works as a Senior Photojournalist at the Sacramento Bee in California since 2003 and covers local, national and international news. Before joining the Bee she earned numerous awards for picture editing, design and photography. Her Sacramento Bee work is also represented at ZUMA Press, where her work has been profiled in newspapers, magazines and online worldwide including Paris Match, People, El Pais, Newsweek Asia, People, Days Japan, Photo District News, Rangefinder, View in Germany and BHMAGAZINO in Greece. She graduated cum laude from Bradley University in Peoria, Ill., where she was inducted into the elite Centurion Society in 2008.
He lives with his wife and three children in Devon, England.
Andrew Newey To commission Andrew or to request prints of his work: www.andrewnewey.com Andrew is an award-winning documentary travel photographer based in the southwest of England. Born in 1978, he started travelling the world in his early 20′s which sparked a passion for photography. After returning to college to study the craft he embarked on a year long round the world trip to put the theory work into practise. He began his photographic career supplying landscape & travel imagery to the stock photography industry and now focuses on commissions, photo expeditions and personal projects documenting traditional cultures around the world. His work has been exhibited at the prestigious Royal Geographical Society in London and published worldwide by National Geographic, GEO, Microsoft, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, The Telegraph, Geographical, NBC News, BBC, Lonely Planet andYahoo to name but a few. He was awarded in the 2012 International Photography Awards (IPA) with 9 Honorable Mentions, won ‘Best Single Image in a Portfolio’ in the 2012 Travel Photographer of the
Year (TPOTY) awards and was a finalist on the 2013 TPOTY awards.
Without Maps (2002: BBC2, SABC, CNN) and Liberia: An Uncivil War (2003: Discovery, BBC4). James read history at the University of Cambridge (1991–94) and subsequently developed his career in photojournalism as a contributing reportage photographer for Katz Pictures in London and Gamma Press Images in Paris. From 1999 to 2002 he worked as a television news producer with Nairobi-based television agency Camerapix in Eritrea, Kenya and Zimbabwe, producing long and short form packages (BBC, SKY, TVNZ, ABC, CNN, SABC). Since 2002 he has worked on independent commissions with Discovery (The World’s Most Dangerous Places, Gabriel Films 2002–04); BBC2, for whom he made the BAFTA- and Grierson-nominated four-part current affairs series The Violent Coast in West Africa (2003–04); Channel 4, where he made twenty-one films in the critically acclaimed Unreported World series (2004–13) and was appointed the strand’s Deputy Series Editor (2008–09); and Dispatches (2005–11), where he has made six films. At Unreported World, James has made films in locations including Somalia (featuring an exclusive interview with a senior al-Qaeda commander); India (covering the fight between Maoist guerrillas, indigenous people and mining companies over land rights); Ivory Coast (documenting the violent struggle to control the international cocoa harvest); Colombia (exploring the mechanics of the trade in cocaine to the USA); Angola (considering American foreign policy in the light of Africa’s oil industry); Cameroon (examining the connections between the illegal trade in bushmeat and zoonotic viruses); Papua New Guinea (investigating violence fuelled by the narcotics trade with Australia); and Syria, filming the work of a volunteer doctor in the frontline town of Salma, in Latakia. For Channel 4’s Dispatches series, James has filmed and directed unique material with US troops in Baghdad (Iraq: The Reckoning, Juniper 2005) for which he gained a second BAFTA nomination; reported the inside story of the planned coup in Equatorial Guinea (My Friend the Mercenary, Hardcash 2005); investigated social and political turmoil in Paris and Birmingham during the Paris riots (Paris in Flames, Mentorn 2005); told the inside story of BP’s controversial operations in Alaska and Azerbaijan and political connections in Britain (In Deep Water, Fresh One 2010–11); investigated the finances of former Prime Minister Tony Blair in Britain, Kuwait and Palestine (The Wonderful World of Tony Blair, Blast Films 2011); and exposed the relationship between British aid money and human rights abuses in Rwanda (Where Has Your Aid Money Gone? October Films 2012). James’s work has often involved filming close-quarter combat, for which he was awarded the IDA Courage Under Fire Award 2004 and the Rory Peck Trust Sony International Impact Award 2003. His work in Liberia won many international accolades including the Rory Peck Trust Freelancer’s Choice Award 2003; the Special Jury Award IDFA 2004 and two Emmy nominations. James’s films have provoked major international political investigations in Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Jamaica. He has been called as an expert witness in two war-crimes trials. His written work has recently appeared in Newsweek, The Guardian Weekend Magazine, Monocle and The Independent. James lectures on the ethics and practicalities of journalism in hostile environments at universities across Britain, speaks frequently at the Frontline Club Forum and appears as a commentator on international current affairs. His company, Brabazon Media Limited, has an ongoing contract to provide Camera and Risk Assessment and Security Protocol Awareness Training for Channel 4’s Dispatches Investigative Journalism Trainee Scheme.
Katherine Jack To commission Katherine or to request prints of her work: www.katherinejack.com Katherine Jack is a British photographer whose work explores the balance between people and the natural environment. For the past ten years she has been living and working on the island of Palawan, in the Philippines. Katherine graduated in 2002 with a BA in European Studies from Trinity College, Dublin, including a year studying at the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow. She then worked as assistant and staff writer for Geographical magazine and was an intern at Magnum Photos, London. Her features on travel, culture and the natural world are published in a range of international magazines, including Discovery Channel Magazine, Travel + Leisure Southeast Asia and Geographical.
Chris Leslie To commission Chris or to request prints of his work: www.chrisleslie.com Chris is a documentary photographer and filmmaker from Glasgow.  He graduated in Psychology and Politics in 1996 and after writing his thesis on Nationalism and Ethnic Cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, he then spent 6 months working on a social reconstruction project in war torn Croatia. With a passion for all things Balkan and surrounded by the scarred landscapes of Croatia, he started using an old 35mm camera in order to try to document his experience. He started a photography project in 1997 as a volunteer when he set up and managed a photographic project for children in Sarajevo orphanage.  The project taught children the basic principles of BW photography and print making in a specially constructed darkroom  and ran for 4 years. Chris then joined a UK based International charity as a Visual Communications Manager
in 2000, with responsibility for photography, short documentary films, print and web design.   In 2005 Chris set up business as a freelance film-maker, photographer and visual communications specialist. He continues to work for several international charities and NGO’s travelling throughout Eastern Europe and Africa photographing and filming to documenting their work. In 2010 Chris gained a distinction award for a Masters in Documentary Photography course for his project – Hope, memories, loss and community – telling hidden stories of regeneration throughout Glasgow. He continues to document Glasgow through his long term project - The Glasgow Renaissance as well as working and filming for CNN, BBC, and photojournalism assignments for national newspapers. His short films have been shown throughout Europe at various film festivals and in 2014 he will release his first feature length documentary, Finding Family.
Damien Schumann To commission Damien or to request prints of his work: www.dspgallery.com A fascination in the human condition has driven Schumann’s career since first picking up a camera in 2001. As a photographer and installation artist he specializes in making strategic exhibitions for advocacy and social mobilization purposes. After hitchhiking across Africa to create his first exhibition in 2003, Schumann received a scholarship to study photography at the Ruth Prowse School of Art which he completed with distinction. His work won much praise with Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Joseph Amon (Director of Human Rights Watch) opening his exhibitions, and Bill Gates requesting to visit participants in his series Dialogues. Working with RESULTS he achieved his most successful campaign, having US$37.5m being placed into public health care in Indonesia. After working extensively on the USA/Mexico border Schumann presented a series of lectures at Princeton, Duke and Johns Hopkins Universities looking at the visual anthropological values of his work relating to TB/HIV and stigma.
In 2011 Mail & Guardian recognized Schumann as one of the most influential youths in South Africa. He has also been an artist in residence in Brazil, awarded a National Arts Grant (for Borderline), and was nominated for Ikusasa’s Artist of the Year 2012. In 2013 he completed a Masters in Documentary Arts at the University of Cape Town, with his thesis focusing on the crisis of masculinity in South Africa.
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Markus Renner To commission Markus or to request prints of his work: www.markusrenner.com Markus Renner was born in 1972 in St. Georgen / Austria. His artistic path guided him already early from photo realistic painting to a unique style of photography which has a lot in common with building art at first sight. Being an autodidact, Marcus Renner found his own  highly emotional connection to photography. His internationally rewarded pictures and series of photos are created from the moment and awake from their inner engagement to life. He stages mainly spacious landscapes from around the world with great passion. His  photograhic journeys brought him to Argentinia, Bolivia, Chile, Iceland, Namibia, Peru, Kamtshatka, Nicaragua and the USA.
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