Alexi Lubomirski has a natural ability to put the people he photographs at ease. “I have to find out who they are and who they need me to be for the day. Do I sense they want to be treated with the utmost respect… or that they like rude jokes?” he says with a smile. “When they feel like I’ve heard them and I understand them, trust is born.” His thoughtful approach, combined with deep camera skills and legendary charm (not to mention dashing good looks), has made Lubomirski the favourite photographer of the world’s most notable celebrities. He is drawn to images where his subjects appear at their happiest and, during his two-decade career, he has captured countless famous faces – including this month’s cover star Elle Fanning – in soft moments of reflection or peals of laughter.

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The son of a Peruvian-English mother and a Polish prince, Lubomirski only learnt of his aristocratic heritage at the age of 11, while living in Botswana – the same year his stepfather gave him his first camera, a discovery that enthralled him rather more. “I found the joy of taking pictures of friends, trying to show them in their best light,” he says. He returned to the UK to study for an art foundation degree at the University of Brighton, specialising in fashion, before moving to Paris in 1999, where he worked as Mario Testino’s assistant for four years. Subsequently, he began building his portfolio as a celebrity photographer, with early shoots featuring Renée Zellweger, Naomie Harris and Cate Blanchett.

Sienna Miller photographed by Lubomirski for Harper’s Bazaar’s April 2017 issue

In 2018, he was commissioned to take Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s official engagement and wedding photos, as well as portraits of King Charles and Camilla, the Queen Consort. In these, Lubomirski captures the more intimate side of a family usually portrayed in formal set-ups. One shot, for example, shows Charles mid-chortle, while Camilla’s hand rests on his knee. “What I noticed with the two of them is that, when nobody was looking, they would just be whispering to each other, smiling and laughing. It was like watching a new boyfriend and girlfriend,” he says.

An Olivia Colman portrait taken for Harper’s Bazaar in 2019

His long-standing relationship with Bazaar has seen him shoot many covers, including those featuring Olivia Colman, Lupita Nyong’o and Jennifer Aniston – all set to appear in his forthcoming book of 113 portraits, The Sittings (2003-2023). Julia Roberts, with whom he has built a particular rapport, has written the foreword. “Julia creates this familial vibe onset,” he reflects. “When I do the lightest, I’ll say something to make her laugh, take the frame and wait for two seconds while the image travels through the wires and comes onto the computer screen beside the clients. I will listen, and 100 per cent of the time, I hear this ‘Oh!’ – this collective joyous sigh– because of that smile.”

Lupita Nyong’o captured by Lubomirski for Harper’s Bazaar’s May 2015 issue

While he was working with Lupita Nyong’o, he learnt that she loves to dance – so he decided to blast Prince songs from the studio speaker system. “I started dancing behind the camera, like a dad at a wedding. She began to move, too, and the whole crew lit up,” he recalls. “Once that mood is set, you can carry it on for the rest of the day.”

To coincide with the release of The Sittings, Lubomirski is curating an exhibition of his works at Claridge’s Art Space with Bazaar’s creative director Tom Usher, so that visitors will have a chance to look at his portraits up close. “That’s the thing with being an artist,” he says. “It’s not just about creating the work. You want to share it with other people so that, hopefully, they will feel the same emotion from it as you do.”

Viola Davis photographed for Harper’s Bazaar in 2022

by Alexi Lubomirski is published on 24 April. All proceeds will be donated to Concern Worldwide. The exhibition will run at Claridge’s Art Space from 24 April to 15 May

Madison professional portrait photographer Shalicia Johnson was recently among the 15 portrait photographers selected to exhibit their artwork at The Pharmacy Gallery Art Space in Springfield, Illinois, during a one-night-only display.

“I was elated. I felt so valued and seen and accomplished to see my artwork up in the gallery with international works and national works of art and local works of art,” Johnson tells Madison365. “It felt really really good to have my work seen and chosen on its merits. So I’m super happy.”

Shalicia Johnson, owner of ArrowStar Photography, is a well-known photographer in Madison who is highly visible at many community celebrations and events. Her photography artwork was chosen from over 200 images submitted by photographers hailing from the United States and Canada. The images were selected by a panel of seasoned professional photographers based on the level of excellence they demonstrated.

“I was stunned by the quality of submissions for this prestigious event. That Shalicia’s was chosen among so many outstanding applicants is a true testament to the excellence she has achieved as a boutique portrait photographer,” said Sarah Petty, photography business coach and host of the event, in a statement.

The Pharmacy Gallery Art Space is a premier art space in the capital city of Illinois, featuring a wide range of contemporary artwork from local, national and international artists. Over 100 photographers attended the formal reception on April 12.

Johnson’s exhibit photo was of an adorable dog named JoJo whose picture came from a competition that Johnson hosts every year where she raises money for a charitable cause. It’s called the Pooch Playoffs 2023, a March Madness-style tournament fundraiser for dogs and dog lovers.

“Very few pet portraits are chosen for this particular gallery exhibit. But, yes, she was one of the 44 dogs that I photographed for Pooch Playoffs 2023,” Johnson says. “I raised $4,400 for my charity, which was Not One More Vet, Inc., a nationwide organization for mental health support and suicide prevention for the veterinarian community because the suicide rate among veterinarians is very, very high.

“I love the photo of JoJo because she just has this really wistful look on her face. And I actually did an oil painting effect in Photoshop on that particular image and so you can see it when it’s up close,” Johnson continues. “I randomly chose JoJo just because she had this gorgeous longing look on her face.” 

The opportunity to be featured at Pharmacy Gallery Art Space arose out of a coaching community that Johnson has been a member of for quite some time.

“We have an in-person training with our coach …we call it immersion. So there’s a spring immersion and a fall immersion,” Johnson says. “And for the last night of our spring immersion this year, our coach said, ‘Hey, guess what? We have this idea and we are going to have your artwork exhibited at this gallery. And so they’re going to be a few people selected. And so if you’re interested, submit up to three images.’”

Three people from the coaching program assessed each piece of artwork on its technical merits without knowing who submitted the image.

“Out of 200 submissions, they chose 15 works of art. And the gallery was going to allow space for 15 pieces of artwork to go up for a one-night-only showing,” Johnson says. 

Each image featured at least one person or pet and exemplified the skill and creativity of the artists selected. The show was sponsored by White House Custom Color (WHCC), a leading provider of photographic printing and professional photography products.

“We were able to tell White House Custom Color, which is a professional lab we use who actually sponsored the event, the size we wanted, the material we wanted, the kind of paper we wanted … that kind of thing,” Johnson says. “So I chose a bamboo panel with fine art photo rag metallic paper. It’s something I haven’t had before. And then White House [Custom Color] took care of it.

“And so this was a really cool experience for our class. We’ve never gotten to see everybody dressed up and all fancy because we see each other on Zoom every day of the week,” Johnson adds. “Because with our coaching program, everything is virtual, so we only get to see each other twice a year in person and this time we all had heels on and the guys had ties on … and so this ended up being an amazing experience. The president of the gallery was there and she said that we were the most fun group that they’d ever had at the gallery.”

Johnson’s incredible experience being featured in an international art gallery exhibition came just a few days after she officially launched herself as a fully self-employed, full-time photographer. It was a little scary because that meant quitting her day job. So while ArrowStar Photography began as a side business back in 2017; now she is delving into photography full-time. It’s a tribute to how far she has come in just six years.

“It makes me really proud of myself for making this leap. I never really thought of myself as an entrepreneur, even in the last almost six years I’ve been running my business, but I am now embracing the fact that I am a full-time entrepreneur and that I can live out my dreams and live my life the way I want to,” Johnson says. “I’m so excited about it.

“I’m very excited for my future and what I’ll be able to do through my portraiture because I do a lot of philanthropy through my portraiture, so I’m really excited to see how I can help the next organization through my work and I’m excited about being able to travel and do the things I love with the people that I love,” Johnson continues. “So I couldn’t be happier for where I am in my life right now and I appreciate all of the people who have supported me on this journey.”

Born in the US to Ukrainian parents, Katherine Turczan grew up on a farm near the town of Paterson in New Jersey. “It only took three ballerina-like leaps to cross the lawn and reach my grandfather’s screen door,” she writes in her new photo book, From Where They Came, which features evocative monochrome portraits made in Ukraine between 1991 and 2008.

As a child, Turczan had listened intently to her grandfather’s stories of the country he had fled in the wake of the second world war. “My whole family were storytellers,” says Turczan, “and they created vivid descriptions of the life they had left behind. But my grandfather’s were the most vivid.” He told her how he had been wounded fighting the Bolsheviks, how his brother had died of typhoid during the conflict, and how he had made his way to the US, leaving behind his parents and siblings. As he talked, he would often sketch the remembered likenesses of his lost family members on scraps of paper torn from Svoboda, or Freedom, a newspaper for Ukrainian exiles.

Throughout her childhood, Turczan’s cultural links with her family’s homeland were strong: she attended Saturday school to learn Ukrainian and was part of a Ukrainian-American girls’ scout troupe – but it was her grandfather who was her most important influence. With hindsight, she sees a deep connection between the drawing lessons her grandfather gave her as a child – “his careful direction to observe things closely” – and her quiet, but penetrating, photographic gaze. “He was a folk artist, who worked on the railroads,” she says. “He collected roadkill, birds and squirrels, which he would hang on our barn door with old toys, wire and driftwood to make interesting compositions. Occasionally I would draw these still lifes. I had a long childhood of looking.”

In the summer of 1991, Turczan travelled to Ukraine for the first time, supported by a grant from Yale University. Her grandfather had died and both her parents had just been diagnosed with early stage dementia. “Looking back, I really did not know how to grapple with it all,” she says, quietly. “But I had always imagined what my life would have been like had my family stayed there.”

Her first, uncertain trip to her family’s homeland coincided with an attempt by hardline Soviet communists to oust Mikhail Gorbachev, the Russian reformist leader, in what became known as the August Coup. The attempted coup failed and, four months later, the USSR began to fragment. The Ukraine that Turczan held in her imagination from so many family stories, many of them marked by war and tragedy, was suddenly, almost unbelievably, an independent country with a palpable sense, as she puts it, “of things loosening up”.

From Where They Came, her collection of images, is the end result of her many subsequent visits to Ukraine over the following two decades. It is a deeply personal undertaking: portraits of the extended family she met there – the uncles, aunts, cousins she had heard so much about as a child. “I began in Lviv by contacting family I had there who are musicians and quite well known,” she says. “They completely understood what I was doing, and I began living with them.”

From there, she made contact with two other branches of her extended family, but also made portraits of other people she encountered and was instinctively drawn to. They included Orthodox nuns, whose convents were supported by donations from exiled Ukrainians, and the children of Chornobyl who attended secular summer camps far away from the zones of contamination caused by the 1986 nuclear disaster. “I was interested in women and children,” she says. “Women held the households together and the children were often the innocent victims of one tragedy after another.”

Her images are not tragic. But with their poised, quiet presence, they inevitably exude a melancholy sadness given the destruction wreaked by Russia’s invasion. They evoke a place that seems almost pre-modern, the sense of bucolic calmness now loaded with the weight of history. “It did feel to me then that the world I encountered on those early trips had not advanced in 30 or 40 years. Which in a way was true. The view is gentle and one of the main reasons to show the pictures now is to balance the dreadful images of horror and suffering coming out of Ukraine.”

Nevertheless, you cannot look at these images without wondering what has happened to the people in them. When I mention this, Turczan draws my attention to a portrait of a young girl in a car who, it turns out, is her cousin. Since the invasion, she has lived in Poland. They were reunited in Berlin last Christmas.

Turczan has made the aesthetic choice to present her images uncaptioned and her subjects unnamed. “What I like about it,” she says, “is that you are not distracted by all that information.” She uses a large format, 8×10 camera that is “a labour of love requiring patience and time” as well as “talking and negotiation” between her and her subjects.” Formally, her portraits have a similar aura to those of the great Judith Joy Ross, who, it turns out, encountered Turczan’s work at Yale and encouraged her with the project. “She is one of my heroes,” says Turczan, who also counts Andrea Modica and Lois Conner among her influences. “I like fearless women travelling alone with big cameras,” she says, laughing.

When she first arrived in Ukraine, she recalls that one of her relatives, on seeing her camera, said: “I wish you were a writer.” The inference was that a photograph could not go as deep into history, memory and human experience as a story. “I think there are different things that photography can do,” she counters. “My images are essentially a reflection of my own complex family history as well as my relationship to a country that, before I went there, was based on received information – so much so that, when I did go there for the first time, I felt like I was returning.”

• From Where They Came is available from Stanley/Barker

When invited to select a photograph for the forthcoming show Avedon 100, at Gagosian’s New York gallery on West 21st Street, I chose an image of Richard Avedon and writer James Baldwin, together in one frame. The unassuming and lesser-known image is essentially a 20th-century “mirror selfie”. The two young men are looking at themselves in a looking glass framed by a decorative fireplace. Avedon holds a medium-format film camera at chest level. The fireplace is cluttered with a range of domestic objects – photographs, newspapers, ceramics, even a box of fabrics that appear to be bedsheets. 

It was captured in the very intimate environment of Baldwin’s mother’s house in Harlem; Baldwin was 22 at the time, Avedon was 23 – the age at which I made history by photographing Beyoncé for Vogue, the first black photographer to shoot a cover. Avedon’s photograph was taken in 1946 – the year my father was born in Chicago. I can’t help but feel an auspicious connection to the work.

I look at this photograph of Avedon and Baldwin and see the many intimacies of a deeply collaborative friendship between two artists, one that was forged in high school and grew into such triumphs as the 1964 publication of Nothing Personal, a collection of photos and essays exploring American identity. Often, we are presented with images of these two figures in staged scenarios that position them as titans. And while they are titans, I love how pure and unguarded this moment is. Baldwin’s face is bursting with a rare teeth-revealing grin. It’s a moment of closeness and reflection. It reminds me of the significance of intimate friendships throughout the process of making and growing, creating and evolving.

Avedon’s photographs have seeped so deeply into the cultural consciousness that they have become impossible to ignore. A great artist leaves an indelible mark on their medium, and Avedon achieved this. During my university days, I was a film and TV student, but my love for photography drove me to enrol in a class about making magazines. The class was taught by the great art director Yolanda Cuomo, who worked with Avedon from the early ’80s up until the end of his life in 2004. Among other things, they worked on campaigns for Christian Dior, Chanel and Calvin Klein. She shared many stories about him and his childlike curiosity for each and every little part of image-making. She said he was constantly excited by each opportunity, and every detail and process – whether the work was being published in the pages of Vogue and The New Yorker or exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery. I remember her telling us how he would examine the prints of his images in the back of a taxi with his keen eye. I imagined him grinning in the back seat, unable to wait until he got back to his studio to look at them. 

This rigour and zest for life is evident in the work itself. If a photographer doesn’t have these things, then what do they have? I imagine that Avedon’s wide range of subjects – whether the model Donyale Luna, James Baldwin or non-violent civil rights protestors in Atlanta – felt this teeming, magic energy.

Avedon’s pictures captured all walks of life, and many of his subjects were very different from his own. In looking at his work, I am reminded that to be a truly great photographer of people is to maintain a constant and genuine curiosity in others. Sometimes, in the hustle and bustle of life, this is much easier said than done.

But for all the vibrance he brought to portrait sessions, he is also quoted as saying: “My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.” Avedon was acutely aware of how the formal and technical decisions a photographer makes when taking someone’s portrait brings the viewer further from the “truth” and into a more slippery realm where the photographer and the sitter become one – if only for one moment. To make photographs is to make human spirits converge, shutter click after shutter click. This is precisely why I chose that image of Avedon and Baldwin for the exhibition.

Whether capturing an off moment or taking a highly staged portrait, Avedon understood the significance of crafting another person’s image in his own truest mind’s eye. He understood how doing so creates a truly unforgettable and human body of work. 

Avedon 100 is showing at Gagosian, New York, from 4 May to 24 June, gagosian.com. Avedon 100 is published by Gagosian and distributed by Rizzoli, $100

Christian Coigny is a Swiss photographer with an career in traditional black-and-white and fashion photography. Petra Gut Contemporary AG presents A Storm in Black and White is his first Solo exhibition in Zurich. It presents a comprehensive retrospective ranging over his entire career.

Christian left Switzerland for San Francisco in 1968. He landed an advertising contract with Levi‘s that helped launch his career there.

The artist mainly works with analog materials. His art is grounded in classical training and significantly motivated by prominent American painters like Edward Hopper, Georgia O‘Keefe, and Andrew Wyeth – whom he encountered during his 5-year stay in San Francisco. Companies swiftly requested him to project his signature onto their promotional activities.

The advertising poster for the department store Bon Genie Grieder between 1975 and 1985 marked the beginning of his arrival in Switzerland. These posters were delicately silkscreened by Duo d‘Art, making them matchless within Swiss graphic design history. After returning to Switzerland, Christian Coigny earned several accolades at the Swiss Posters Awards. For ten years, from 1987 to 1997,

Christian Coigny photographed more than 130 personalities from the cultural world sitting on Vitra‘s legendary chairs. His pictures have given life to an advertising campaign launched by “Mister Vitra”, alias Rolf Fehlbaum, for his company.

The celebrated campaign is the subject of several exhibitions around the world. The incredible snaps collected capture the relationships between style and status through iconic figures from art and performance. Coigny managed to take pictures of Charles Bukowski, Audrey Hepburn, Allen Ginsberg, David Hockney, Dizzy Gillespie, Ben Kingsley, Billy Wilder, Franco Moschino, Frank Stella, John Irving,

John Malkovich, Keith Haring, Lou Reed, Louise Bourgeois, Martin Scorsese, Miles Davis plus over one hundred other renowned people. His book of photos of well-known artists got him the Vitra “Celebrities” Campaign.

He also worked for clients such as Hermès, Krug Champagnes, Ferretti yachts, and Hublot watches, and for many years he has participated in creating catalogs and publicity campaigns for Chopard.

Currently, Coigny dedicates the majority of his time to being a photographer specializing in nude, landscape, and still-life photography. Christian‘s work is highly sought after by private and public collectors.

Christian Coigny : A Storm in Black and White
April 14 – May 27, 2023
Petra Gut Contemporary AG
Nüschelerstrasse 31
8001 Zurich
T +41 44 422 40 69

[email protected]
www.petragut.com