Life Force online photography magazine

The magazine of the photo-essay

February 2020 issue

“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!” Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film maker

Damian Bird To commission him or to request prints of his work: damianbirdphotography.com Damian Bird (born London, 1972) is a photographer, photojournalist and lecturer with many years of experience, working in war zones and trouble spots around the globe. He was educated at Canford School and 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 18 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. His first book Seabird was released in November 2017 his latest book is due to be release at the end of 2019.

Dougie Wallace To commission him or to request prints of his work: www.dougiewallace.com Recognised as one of the UK’s leading photographers Dougie Wallace has successfully published five previous books. He has been the subject of a 30 minute BBC documentary as part of the series What Do Artists Do All Day and has exhibited widely in Europe, the United States and India.

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, Daily Mail, Dazed & Confused, The Face, Country Life, Coast and Geographical magazine. He lives in Devon, England with his wife, four children and his dachshunds, Jessie, Rosie and Ted.

Katy Gomez Catalina Katy Gomez Catalina, an amateur photographer and doctor of veterinary science from Spain, has become the first-ever Spanish overall winner of the international Travel Photographer of the Year awards (TPOTY).

Neil Martinson I first started taking photographs in 1970 around Hackney with a Zenith E while I was still at school. These were somewhat bumbling attempts with a clunky Russian made camera. The images have a quality to them that only time can burnish along with my varied attempts to develop the film and get the temperature and time right. Some of my earliest photographs were taken around Brick Lane, a desperately poor area. Down and outs would try and sell their own tatty, shredded clothes and, even early in the morning, were often drunk on meths. Stalls sold food well past its use by date to the sounds of a live animal market, long since banned, that sold birds, cats, snakes and dogs. Much of the market was in buildings still wrecked from the bombs of the blitz.

Isadora Kosofsky To commission her or to request prints of her work: www.isadorakosofsky.com Isadora Kosofsky (b. 1993, USA) is a documentary photographer, photojournalist, and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. She began photographing at the age of 14, documenting individuals in hospice care. At the age of 16, she worked on a photo reportage in a Romanian youth prison, becoming the youngest journalist to ever work in a penal setting. She takes an immersive approach to photojournalism, spending months and years imbedded in the lives of the people she shadows. For her, the relationships formed with the subjects are tantamount to the image-making. She has contributed to the NY Times, TIME, the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, The Washington Post, Stern, Le Monde, M le Magazine du Monde, GEO Germany, Paris Match, The London Sunday Times, The Guardian, Slate, Internazionale, and many others. She is the recipient of the 2012 Inge Morath Award from the Magnum Foundation for her multi-series work on the aged. She was nominated for a 2016 Lead Award (German Pulitzer) for her long-term documentary about a senior citizen love triangle. She was a participant in the 2014 Joop Swart Masterclass of World Press Photo. Her work has received distinctions from Flash Forward Magenta Foundation, Ian Parry Foundation, Social Documentary Network, International Academic Forum (IAFOR), Women in Photography International, Prix de la Photographie Paris, The New York Photo Festival and others. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and can be found in Family Photography Now (Thames and Hudson, 2016), a photographic anthology, and in Public Private Portraiture from Mossless. She had an exhibition of her work on youth facing incarceration and their families at the 2017 Visa Pour L’Image International Festival of Photojournalism in Perpignan, France. She is the recipient of a 2017 Getty Images Instagram Grant for elevating the stories of marginalized communities. Her storytelling has also been used for public policy, doubling the budget of a program to connect children with their incarcerated parent; her work has been used as evidence for the need for additional rights for women in prison through the Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act, a congressional bill. In addition, she is a teacher and has lectured at the National Geographic Photography Seminar, CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, Ohio University School of Visual Communication, Loyola Marymount University, Harold Washington College, the National Conference on Crime and Delinquency, and has instructed high school students on topics related to the language of empathy, working intimately with subjects, and trauma studies; she is an instructor in critical visual journalism with the Connected Academy, sponsored by the World Press Photo Foundation. She holds a B.A. in Gender Studies from University of California Los Angeles. She is a recipient of a 2018 Grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting for her ongoing work on girl survivors of complex trauma. The Royal Photo Society recently named her one of a hundred “heroines” in photography worldwide. Isadora is a TED Fellow, part of a network of 450 global change makers, and gave a talk at TED 2018 in Vancouver.

The Zenith E was everything a boy could want from a camera. It had lots of knobs and dials and they all had a satisfying clunk when operated. By some kind of fluke I went to Newport College of Art to do a Documentary Photography course led by David Hurn of Magnum. It didn't work for me and I came back to Hackney where I had been working with a local publishing project called Centerprise. I set up Hackney Flashers with Jo Spence and started to take more photographs in Hackney, especially around work. With a group of photographers and local historians we published a book called Working Lives Volume Two, a collection of personal accounts of work accompanied by documentary photographs. It has been very much inspired by A Fortunate Man by John Berger and Jean Mohr and, in a more subliminal way, the work of the Farm Security Administration photographers in the United States in the 1930's

Dara McGrath To commission him or to request prints of his work: www.daramcgrathphotography.com Dara McGrath(b. 1970) is an Irish photographic artist, living in Cork, Ireland. He is the recipient of many awards and has represented Ireland at the 11th Architecture Biennale Venice. Recently he presented Project Cleansweepat the United Nations (OPCW) in The Hague.

Norm Diamond To commission him or to request prints of his work: www.normdiamondphoto.com After a long career as an interventional radiologist, Norm Diamond is now a fine art photographer based in Dallas, Texas. He has studied with Jay Maisel, Debbie Fleming Caffery, Keith Carter, Arno Minkkinen, Aline Smithson, Sean Kernan, Susan Burnstine, and, from 2013 to the present, Cig Harvey has mentored him. He was a finalist in the Photolucida Critical Mass competitions of 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2019. In 2017, Daylight Books published his monograph What Is Left Behind – Stories from Estate Sales. Prints from this series have been shown in multiple museums and galleries, including the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Griffin Museum of Photography, and the Houston Center for Photography. The Afterimage Gallery in Dallas, TX, and the Cumberland Gallery in Nashville, TN, have hosted exhibitions of this work.

Mike Smith To commission him or to request prints of his work: www.mikesmithphotographs.com Mike Smith (b.1951 in Heidelberg) earned his BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and his MFA from Yale University. In 2001, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the Tennessee Governor’s Award in the Arts. In 2012, he received the United States Artists Lowe Fellowship. His work is in the collections of major museums across America and is represented by Lee Marks Fine Art, Tracey Morgan Gallery, Yancey Richardson Gallery, and Jackson Fine Art. He continues to produce new work in the studio provided to him by East Tennessee State University, where he taught photography for 37 years.

Tomeu Coll To commission him or to request prints of his work: www.tomeucollphoto.com Tomeu Coll, born 1981 in Mallorca, has been the recipient of several photojournalism and documentary photography awards, including the Illes Balears Photojournalism Award. He was featured as an Emerging Photographer by Smithsonian Magazine (USA) for his project Badlands, and has had solo shows at the Winter Festival of Sarajevo, curated by Ellen James, and at La Nacional Gallery in New York. Coll currently shoots for Stern, Der Spiegel, L'Illustre and other international publications.