Hannah Shaw, a kitten educator and advocate, and Andrew Marttila, a feline photographer, are a “meow” made in heaven.

My name is Cham Phan. I got into photography when I took a film photography class in high school in 2006. Have been in love ever since. I lost my vision shooting fashion, and when I recovered, this was the only way I could continue to use a camera safely.I have been shooting for 15 years. In my first ten years, I was focused on fashion photography, but after going blind during a shoot when my blood vessels ruptured due to undiagnosed diabetes, I had to make a change.

Editor’s Note: This interview has been slightly edited for clarity when reading.

I switched to infrared landscapes after hanging up the camera for a couple years. The fact that IR works when the sun is directly overhead was the one key difference in the process that made it so I could safely shoot again. Shooting golden hour is incredibly difficult with how damaged my eyes are.

My identity has changed dramatically during my journey. I used to rely on a team and models, talent, and designers to create an image. In the fashion world, you are expected to move a million miles a minute, and that was not sustainable. Since switching gears to landscape, Photography has become a meditative slow-paced form of therapy. I would lean towards being a creator than a documenter due to the nature of my landscapes being surreal.

I always look for intersections of nature and man-made. My end frame guides every decision. I look for lines that tell a story. I like to frame my subjects almost uncomfortably and always shot as low as possible for a larger feel. The most peaceful aspect of the process is lining up the frame then waiting for the clouds to land exactly where they need to be. It’s a waiting game and requires patience and focus. If I can shoot next to a body of water, even better.

It’s therapy for me. Photography is my way to get in touch with nature and exist outside of time in a tranquil state.

Since my photos are all digital, I do false color processing to push the colors to fit the mood that I am in. This is my set of photos from my recent trip to Cozumel. I hope to do more shoots for Tourism boards and hotel/resort groups.

Annie Leibovitz was one of my biggest influences. Listening to her talk about her 1 on 1 process to get people to open up for portraits really helped me evolve as a director. Photography allows me to show the world how I would like to see it. 

For Infrared photography, I use a Fujifilm XT3 with 3 lenses: 23mm f2, 50mm f2 and 35mm f1.4
I also shoot with the GFX 100 system using the GF 45mm and GF 63mm.

For my street photography work, I shoot with a Leica M240 and a TTartisans 35mm f1.4. Both natural light and artificial light are used by me, because all light can be beautiful.

Check out more from Cham at his website. Want to be featured too? Here’s how to get on our site.

Six decades of traveling the continents, covering crises, portraying cities… From his native Germany to his adoptive America, Magnum’s photoreporter has witnessed the societal changes of the last century that have turned our contemporary world upside down.

With the one and only instruction to “take a look”, Thomas Hoepker was commissioned in 1963 to produce a series of reports across the Atlantic for the magazine Kristall. The young photographer, accompanied by the German journalist Rolf Winter, traveled for three months, from New York to San Francisco, the country revealed itself under his lens as the road trip progressed. It took several weeks and a few thousand shots, contrasting with the idea of ​​prosperity conveyed by American culture and which captivated so much in a Germany weakened by the war. The duo bore witness to another face of the United States in the sixties, the other side of the coin waltzing between dream and disappointment, wealth and poverty, piety and morality.

Far from the American Dream, Hoepker’s images highlighted significant disparities between social castes and between territories. This Korean War veteran, with both legs amputated, begging in the streets of Quincy in Illinois, or this man slumped at the foot of a garbage can on a sidewalk in New York in manifest indifference… The clichés of distress and injustice sit side by side with those of a religious and bourgeois class for whom reality hovers above that of the masses. A contrast that Hoepker’s photographs underline with a fine irony embodied by this sad clown who stood out among the uniformed customers in a fast food restaurant in Reno, Nevada, with, above his head, the simple words to the tunes of sentence: “Turkey Dinner”. Equally distant from urban appeal, Hoepker captured a hinterland where time seemed, on the contrary, to have stood still: the hermit in his cabin in the depths of Montana or the Fleetwood car in the almost desert countryside around the city of Waelder in Texas, that thwarted an American image on glossy paper.

If Hoepker’s photographs sound like a disillusion, this stay inaugurated his “je-ne-sais-quoi” for this equivocal country whose cultural and political life l became his future favorite subjects. He returned there with Winter in 1970, this time for the magazine Stern, and in 1976, Hoepker became a correspondent in New York where he still lives today, at the age of 86. Driven by this desire to understand the American people who fascinate him, he started a new tour of the country in 2020 from which are born color images presented in response to his black and white archives in his latest book with a social documentary content: The Way It Was – Road Trips USA.

“Travelling is seeing and discovering images”

Famine and leprosy in Ethiopia, repression in Santo Domingo, the smallpox epidemic in India… At the same time, Hoepker traveled the planet to talk about the striking crises with rigorous images, away from any sensationalism. Thoughtful compositions that appear as the testimony of the passage from one world to another, some of which, several decades later, still mark the consciences. Many of Hoepker’s images have become mythical, such as the Love-birds in Rome produced in 1956, resulting from his first monochrome works. Hoepker makes a point of photographing his subjects without compromising who they are: to get to know them. You have to understand a lot of things, and that’s when you see differently.”

In 1974, the photoreporter accompanied his wife, the journalist Eva Windmöller – also working for Stern, and then became one of the rare photographers in the West to obtain accreditation to go “to the other side”. Together, they documented daily life from their East Berlin neighborhood, located in the diplomatic square. Hoepker captured in color this “grey” Germany where only communist red came through: a crowd of soldiers in forest green uniforms contrasting with the red flags during a military rally in Treptower, the scarlet Skoda matching the socks under the leather sandals of this vacationer in Rügen, all resonating with the red facade, again, of the Plattenbauten building in Halle-Neustadt… Hoepker creates images whose suggestive value takes on symbolic power. A way of telling the great historical cases of another spectrum, with an ability to grasp their intimacy: these young people who take a break together during a military air show in Magdeburg fix History forever.

Noémie de Bellaigue

“Thomas Hoepker: Intimate History”, until May 7, 2023.

f³ – freiraum für fotografie
Waldemarstraße 17,
10179 Berlin
https://fhochdrei.org/

From April 15th to June 3rd, 2023, Galerie XII Paris presents the first personal exhibition in a while in Paris of the Milanese artist Paolo Ventura. Inspired by the story Le Passe-Muraille (The Man Who Could Walk Through Walls) by Marcel Aymé, this new exhibition combining painting, models and photography, immerses us in the Paris of the 1940s.

Paolo Ventura is a multidisciplinary artist who has used different techniques (photography, collages, painting, sculpture, drawing, scenography) to create two- and three-dimensional works for more than twenty years. Built around images of “invented worlds” or “unrealities” in which the story unfolds like a dream, between imagination and memory, his deeply original work is shot through with a disturbing feeling of timelessness.

If War Souvenir (USA, 2005) evoked the atmosphere of the Second World War in the form of clay puppets and painted cardboard decorations, here he embodies himself, with a few members of his family in costumes and made up, the characters from his Short Stories, posing in front of decorations painted by his hands. All his work remains inhabited by the notions of double, mise-en-scène and illusion.

For his first exhibition at the Gallery, Paolo Ventura has imagined an original project combining various mediums and freely inspired by Marcel Aymé’s short story, The Man Who Could Walk Through Walls, which is the story of a completely ordinary man, but endowed with the extraordinary gift of being able to pass through walls, takes place in Montmartre in the Paris of the 1940s. This “Passe-Muraille” then embarks on many adventures until the day he loses his gift, thus finding himself forever prisoner of a wall . Paolo Ventura uses this tale as a pretext to reconstruct scenes of Parisian life, a romantic and violent story that spans the ages, in the form of transversal works including drawings, photographs, paintings, models and paper sculptures.

About Paolo Ventura
Son of an illustrator, the childhood of Paolo Ventura (born in 1968 in Milan) was rocked by the sketches and stories of his father. The wonder and the childlike passion still permeate his work of narrative staging where we regularly find images of street artists, theaters and cinemas, which are not without evoking certain compositions of paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec. Paolo Ventura’s scenes are tinged with nostalgia, but have an element from the realm of the strange or the fantastic that echoes his childhood: an overflowing imagination for those who think that the real world always seems a little too grey.

After studying painting in Milan, Ventura devoted himself to photography and settled in New York where he collaborates with fashion magazines, bringing from this time a very personal look to this formatted medium. At the same time, he began to work on personal projects which led to a first commission from the War Museum in Washington. War Souvenir marks the launch of Paolo Ventura’s artistic career with exhibitions in the main capitals, from Moscow to Milan, from Paris to New York. Since then, he has benefited from about thirty personal exhibitions in institutions and galleries, and participated in as many collective exhibitions.

In 2020, on the occasion of a major retrospective at the Centro Italiano per la Fotografia in Turin, the Silvana editions published a catalog raisonné of his work.

About Gallery XII Paris
Galerie XII Paris, formerly Galerie Photo12 founded in 2007 by Valérie-Anne Giscard d’Estaing specializes in contemporary figurative photography.

Member of the Professional Committee of Art Galleries, the Gallery strives to promote artists with a strong pictorialist sensibility, working on new forms of media with a multidisciplinary approach, particularly at the borders with painting, sculpture and collages.

Galerie XII Paris organizes exhibitions within its walls, contributes to the distribution of works through the organization of exhibitions with partner institutions and galleries through its “Hors Les Murs” program and participates in international fairs such as Paris Photo, Photo London, Photo Basel, Art Paris Art Fair, Photo Shanghai, Photo L.A and Modern Art Fair. The Gallery has also expanded internationally with the opening of a new space in the United States in 2018.

Paolo Ventura : Le Passe-Muraille
Exhibition from April 15 to June 3, 2023
Opening on Saturday April 15, in the presence of the artist from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Galerie XII Paris
14 rue des Jardins Saint-Paul 75004 Paris
Hours of operation :
Tuesday-Friday: 2 p.m.-7 p.m. Saturday: 12 p.m.-7 p.m & by appointment outside these hours
www.galeriexii.com

In a long-term series that combines different photographic formats, Benjamin Rullier delicately highlights an all-women’s football club in a rural town of 800 inhabitants.

The starting point is simple: Benjamin Rullier wants to understand what is going on here, in Les Verchers-sur-Layon, in this rural, agricultural area, where a women’s football club has been established twenty years ago. So, what makes players from the other end of the department come to play here, drive two hours to train here twice a week? What does it mean to be a country club? What does the word commitment mean in a club where players, managers and volunteers are involved in keeping an atypical model alive and well?

“At the time we played in D2, we were considered to be the country girls and that was the truth. The image counts a lot. We all had to come in jogging suits, dressed in the same way, we had to conform to codes that didn’t suit us. But it was complicated, there were girls opposite who were semi-professionals, who trained all day. We tried to do three training sessions a week, as we were working or studying on the side. Today, it has become even more important. Amandine, AS Verchers football defender

The photographer chose to take a long time to get to know the club, the staff, the players, and to try to understand, without words, what makes the DNA of AS Verchers Foot. To carry out this project, he wanted to show fragments of what constitutes these Sunday afternoons of football, real moments of sport but also of encounters, of reunions for those who are attached to this club.

At one point, the season was very difficult and it was complicated for me. There were games where I wanted to leave the pitch, it was unbearable, I was ashamed of what we could produce, fed up with the number of goals we were getting. And yet I was running for every ball. I was torn between the realism of our level and my fighting spirit, which always took over. I thought: maybe we could do something. And anyway, even if we lose, I’ll just give it all  until the 90th minute.

Sport and football photography is not the main subject. Benjamin Rullier is more interested in the scenes, the objects, the faces, the emotions, what is transmitted before, during and after the match. We observe in turn legs feverishly waiting to enter the field, arms waving on the bench, a forgotten ball across the wasteland, bodies going into contact, into battle, faces marked after the match, and we understand the commitment of the players and supporters gathered along the barriers or on the small earthen mound.

The question of the gaze is essential. By working with different cameras, different formats, he offers different points of view, different axes on this project: portraits with a Pentax 6×7 (medium format film) taken at the end of the match, scenes around the field, among the spectators, captured with a Canon QL17 GIII (compact rangefinder), and what happens on the field, with a Fujifilm XH-1 (digital hybrid).

Finding the right distance, isolating the bodies, freezing the scenes delicately, this is the recipe that Benjamin Rullier tries to put in place to bring the spectators to look at this club, hidden in the back of a forest, at the exit of a village through which few people pass.

I often leave at 6.30 pm and come back at 10.30 pm. Because Les Verchers is the club of my heart, the family club. There is a competition, of course, but it has always had a good atmosphere. I don’t know if I could find that anywhere else but here

Benjamin Rullier’s digital photographs were all taken with a Fujifilm XH-1 and the Viltrox 90mm f/2, Fujifilm XF 56mm f/1.2 and XF 200mm f/2 lenses, whose luminosity and depth of field allow the subject to be isolated, to freeze the movement. They were purchased on MPB.com, a company that buys and resells second-hand photographic equipment that has been tested and verified by specialists.

The female form is beautiful, but best captured in motion. Like on a wave. Photo: Ella Boyd

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It’s 2023. Women get barreled at Pipeline, charge at The Eddie, perform on the Championship Tour, and do airs. But for whatever reason, it seems like the desire to objectify, and therefore reduce women to their looks as opposed to what they can do in the water, has persisted. 

Specifically, the desire to photograph, portray, and sell images of women in demeaning and sexual lights, especially on social media, has spiked as of late. Yes, male photographers have historically risen to fame by capitalizing on gender cliches, but surf photography isn’t commercial or fashion photography, so this wouldn’t happen, right? 

Unfortunately, surf photography is not immune to certain photographers attempting to up their earnings by photographing women in scantily-clad outfits in sexual positions, sometimes on the beach, sometimes nowhere even close. 

I won’t draw attention to specific names, because I’m not interested in pointing fingers. This is a theme across the industry. And if you follow enough surf photogs, you’ve definitely noticed it. Artists who post beautiful photos of noseriding and empty waves will also post photos of female models seductively gazing at the camera, fingers pulling off their bra strap, lying near the shorebreak. 

Then, to make matters worse, these accounts ask viewers to pay more money to see the real, 18-plus content (often on Patreon or similar platforms). If this sounds like porn, that’s because it is. Asking people to pay money for adult content is not something that should be considered surf or water photography (or even adjacent). 

An important disclaimer here is that I’m not claiming it is wrong for women to want to be portrayed in sexual or promiscuous ways. In fact, women should be free to dress and act however they want without stigma attached to it. But, when male photographers are profiting off selling women’s images in ways that appeal to the male gaze, this becomes an issue for other women in surf culture who do not wish for women to be subjected to objectification or judged solely on their appearances. 

Women have worked hard to get sponsorships in the industry (something that was historically always more difficult than their male counterparts). Take Linda Davoli, for example: her Encyclopedia of Surfing entry reads: “Davoli moved to Hawaii in 1975, and two years later competed in the debut women’s world circuit, finishing fifth for the season. Over the next three years, she placed, in order, 4th, 4th, and 3rd, and in 1981 she won the Bells Beach Rip Curl Pro. Even so, as Davoli later said, ‘I was sleeping on people’s couches, living on peanut butter and jelly. I was poor all the time and that’s kinda the reason why I gave it up.’” 

Her experience was not uncommon among professional female surfers, and that’s what makes the modern-day exploitation of women’s bodies in surf media so upsetting. There are plenty of women in the surf industry who are phenomenal subjects: Carissa Moore, Stephanie Gilmore, Soleil Errico… not only because they’re fit and beautiful and everything else that comes with the aesthetic ideals of surfing, but because they rip! Why photograph women who don’t surf, and then use these sexual images to promote “surf” content? It’s a cheap way to get views, it’s tacky, and it’s unethical. 

Stephanie Gilmore, as photogenic as ever. Photo: Courtesy Apple TV

To be clear: I am critiquing one small aspect of surf media here, not surfing itself. Because surfing, as a culture, is not more sexist than Western culture at large. In fact, surf culture is pretty inclusive, as groups of people go. No matter if you believe surfing began in Hawaii or Peru, women were at the forefront of wave riding activities. Tracing all the way back to ancient Polynesia, women surfed gracefully and were praised for their wave-riding abilities. Surfing was a religious practice, and it was for everyone. 

This is not to say there weren’t certain… less than stellar moments in surf history concerning women’s involvement. But all of history has its black spots: women couldn’t even vote until 1920, and Title IX, or the law concerning women’s right to receive a fair and equal education, wasn’t signed by Nixon until 1972! Women were surfing long before being allowed to pursue the same academic and athletic opportunities as men. 

Oftentimes, male photographers excuse this harmful behavior by claiming that they are making women feel beautiful, or raising women’s self esteem up by showing them their own good looks. But at the end of the day, even if the goal is to “make women feel better,” it’s to make them feel better about their looks. Are looks really the only important thing? Are looks a way to build lasting confidence and self-esteem? Do looks really have anything to do with surfing? 

Also, note who these photographers are choosing to “lift up.” If you want to raise people’s self-esteem, why choose the most conventionally attractive women to highlight? It’s because you’re not interested in doing charity work for the greater good of society. Photographing attractive young women who fit the beauty standards is something you are doing for your own personal pleasure and financial gain. And it is harming all the people who aren’t benefitting, while only benefitting the male photographer. One, singular person. By any ethical standards, this is a pretty poor trade-off. 

Surfing doesn’t need more corruption and violence, and sexism promotes both of those themes. And if you think, “well, it’s just a few pictures. How bad could it be?” In a psychology journal-published research article by Manuela Barreto and David Matthew Doyle titled “Benevolent and hostile sexism in a shifting global context,” the authors explain that “sexism takes different forms, some of which can be disguised as protection and flattery.” 

In this case, let’s be clear: by photographing women in sexual, objectified, and vulnerable positions, you are not flattering anyone. And it’s definitely not impressing your audience who followed you to see surf photography. 

Surfing, and many of the values it represents (open-mindedness, exploration, appreciation for nature) can change the world. Let’s keep it that way: we don’t need more affiliation with sexism. 

Hugh Kinsella Cunningham was named the winner of the documentary projects for his series “The Women’s Peace Movement in Congo”

Peace activist Liberata Buratwa poses for a portrait in her garden. Rutshuru, Rutshuru Territory, North Kivu Province, DRC, May 31st 2022.

“I have been working for peace since I was very young, she says. In 2008, at the height of a spate of massacres, Liberata led a delegation of women to meet Laurent Nkunda, the leader of CNDP. We told him, my son, rebellion will lead you nowhere, the bush is for the animals, not for the people.”

Edgar Martins was named Photographer of the Year 2023 for his series “Our War,” a collection of portraits featuring Libyan subjects who resembled (or reminded him of) the late Anton Hammerl, a photojournalist shot while covering the conflict.

In a statement, Martins said receiving the $25,000 prize was “very humbling.” He described it as “quite an emotional experience because I get to honor my friend on a world stage and bring attention to the family’s plight to find his remains.”

“Our War” came about after the Portuguese photographer’s attempts to recover his friend’s body led him to Libya with the help of a smuggler. Instability in the country made his search unfeasible, so Martins instead decided to capture portraits of people who had been involved in the war.

A portrait from Edgar Martins’ winning series “Our War.” Credit: Edgar Martins

The resulting images span former fighters and civilians from both sides of the eight-month conflict that saw Gadhafi overthrown by anti-government rebels.

In a statement, prize chair Mike Trow described the project as a “powerful, personal set of portraits,” adding: “(Martins’) work highlights the lengths photographers will go to tell a story and create meaning; each image giving a sense of the journey Anton took without ever being explicit about how his life ended.”

Martins was selected from the winners of the annual awards’ 10 professional categories, which span topics from sport and landscape to the environment. Now in its 16th year, the awards attracted more than 415,000 entries in 2023, with over 180,000 of them eligible for professional categories. Organizers said this year’s competition had seen the highest number of entries in its history.

Winners of other professional categories included Chinese photographer Fan Li, recognized for his images of an abandoned cement factory; the UK’s Hugh Kinsella Cunningham, who documented the work of women’s rights activists in the Democratic Republic of Congo; and US photographer Al Bello, for his series on the first female baseball player to play in an all-male professional league.

Organizers also announced the winners of several other prizes Thursday, with photographers in the student and youth competitions among those honored. An inaugural Sustainability Prize, meanwhile, recognized the work of environmental photographer Alessandro Cinque.