The images are iconic, unmistakable. The photography of David Alexander is the backdrop of our lives. He shot the album cover for the Eagles’ “Hotel California”. He’s worked with Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner, Tom Petty, James Brown, Steve Miller, the Allman Brothers and so many more.
Family Connection of South Carolina to hold photography exhibit at Richland Library
Photo: Richland Library Main
COLUMBIA, S.C. (WOLO)– Family Connection of South Carolina is partnering with Richland Library for the LOOK! Photography Exhibit.
Visitors will have the chance to take a peek into the lives of children and youth who have a disability or chronic health condition through the art of photography.
The purpose of the exhibition is to highlight the abilities of the person being photographed and to help those viewing the photos to pause, reflect and see disabilities in a different way, says Family Connection.
Professional photographers from across the state volunteered their time to host photo sessions with more than 60 families who have been impacted by childhood disability or chronic illness.
To view the collection, attendees can go to Richland Library Main from June 2 through Friday, July 12.
A glimpse of the collection can be viewed online by visiting www.richlandlibrary.com/art.
If you’re not familiar with photographer Daniella Midenge—get familiar. The Swedish image maker, currently based in Los Angeles, was the genius behind the lens of one of our two recent GEN V covers with Tate McRae. However, McRae is only the most recent of a long slue of celebrities Midenge has made look better than ever, including Jennifer Lopez, Kourtney Kardashian, Pamala Anderson, and many (many) more.
Upon the release of her collaboration with GEN V, V magazine spoke with Midenge about other photographers you should know, how she turned a hobby into a career, and balancing paid gigs with more experimental work.
V: Can you remember the first photo you ever took?
Daniella Midenge: I was in the Swedish archipelago on a sailing trip with my family, [and] I was about 9 years old and it was with an analog camera of the sunset. My dad , who was a huge enthusiast, showed me all the settings. We even had a darkroom at home in the wardrobe. I do think there is a limit with what you can learn through school, and I would recommend assisting after a basic course, I think it is more efficient once you know what field of photography you are curious to explore and you don’t have to waste your time shooting vases if you are into long legs.
V: When did photography switch from a hobby to a career? And then to a full-time career?
DM: In about 24 hours when I had my ex-boyfriend’s 16 year old cousin hanging off the balcony, while on Torstrasse in Berlin, while I experimented with photos for my make-up and hair portfolio. I thought to myself, “Wow, this looks quite amazing,” and immediately felt a calling. I was determined to make it a career quite instantly, but it did take about a year of living on barely nothing but optimism before I got busy and started booking jobs.
V: What was your first paid gig as a photographer?
DM: A South African Marie-Claire cover with Candice Swanepoel in the staircase of a Thai restaurant in New York.
V: How do you balance “paid” gigs with doing photography just for yourself, or for art’s sake?
DM: I’ll admit that I’ve been caught up with advertising jobs for the past few years and I’m now getting back to more [experimenting]—the birth of how a passion turns into a job. I opened a daylight studio in Los Angeles recently since my dream was always to be in a natural light based environment so now there is no excuse not to use it as often as possible. It is also available to other photographers and creatives, it is a huge outdoor space all in stone, [and was] a former tennis court that I painted out, [it’s] also beautiful for events, filming, and exhibitions and completely private for nudes (*laughs*).
V: Who is a (perhaps lesser known) photographer that you think anyone who wants to be a photographer should study?
DM: Dan Beleiu, I adore! I do think the best study is your own creativity and exploration, trial and error, play and fearlessly trying out everything until you feel a high on what turns you on visually. Your eye will organically seek out the photographers that are compelling to you. For instance, I appreciate a lot of photographers whose styles are very different to mine.
V: What types of art or creativity do you take inspiration from outside of photography itself?
DM: Characters and moments in real life, it can be very random cinematic scenarios, or short moments of something that feels like a surreal dream or a scene from a movie, but in real life. Lots of comedy, [both] accidental and spontaneous. Movies and books are more obvious inspirations and someone else’s fantasy, [but] I am more inspired by where my own mind takes me, triggered by what I see and feel—I often times surprise myself.
V: Do you find any vast (or general) differences in how Swedes approach photography as opposed to Americans, or perhaps particularly Los Angelites?
DM: Scandinavians have a more melancholic and minimal approach, emphasizing depth while the Angelinos are more about showing something perfect and positive, and this goes for how people communicate also—it is more direct and frank at home, with lots of sarcasm, whilst here I am sometimes uncertain of the authenticity since everything is targeted towards positivity. On another note, it does feel good to get an “OMG!” from a client when they receive the images, instead of “That looks nice.”
V: Can you describe your day shooting the GEN V cover with Tate McRae?
DM: Tate was phenomenal, we were at my studio in the Hollywood Hills and she was open to all ideas and had a beautiful fearless presence about her. Very confident in-front of the camera and great body control—a natural!
“In love with love” is the signature statement of Daniela Gutierrez, a Guadalajara, Mexico-based destination wedding photographer and one of Rangefinder’s 30 Rising Stars of Wedding Photography of 2024. For Gutierrez, wedding photography is “about capturing love stories through my lens and giving my clients memories that they will always cherish.” Her style is elegant, documentarian, and editorial with an emphasis on storytelling narratives that resonate with her subjects’ personalities. Rangefinder recently asked Gutierrez to share an image that she is most excited about right now along with tips for how other photographers can achieve such a shot. The image she sent is striking and emotional, telling a personal love story for the couple depicted, using architectural wedding photography
The bride and groom were married in a private home with modern architecture that perfectly suits their artistic aesthetic. The bride is a painter, so she wanted creative artistic scenery in her portraits. She and the groom share a love for architecture, so this house was a perfect fit.
As soon as Gutierrez saw the staircase, she knew she wanted to photograph the couple on them. In fact, she reflected that during this part of the shoot, it felt as if they were playing a game. They went up, down, and around many times so that she could explore angles and focus on different parts of the scene.
Here are her tips for photographers looking to capture something in the same spirit.
She also notes that it is important before starting a sequence like this to scan the scene to make sure nothing distracting is in the shot like bottles, cellphones, or anything else that you’d rather not have to remove later in Photoshop.
Also, time is always a big challenge in every wedding. Gutierrez notes that just moments after they completed this sequence of images, the family arrived, and of course, she shifted gears to get precious photos of them, too. So, it’s important to always take advantage of the moments you have and make the most of them.
Follow Daniella Gutierrez on Instagram. View the full 30 Rising Star Winners Gallery.
Fashion photography wields the profound ability to not only capture the beauty and glamour of silhouettes, but also speak to the essence of struggle, resilience, joy, and cultural heritage. The art form also serves as a testament to visual storytelling’s enduring power to shape narratives about identity and social change. British-Nigerian photographer Gabriel Moses is part of the contemporary vanguard using fashion imagery to speak to global issues like representation within the African diaspora, colorism, Black women’s maternal mortality rates, and more.
Known for working with brands like Chanel, Nike, and Louis Vuitton, and collaborating with cultural figures including Pharrell, A$AP Rocky, and supermodels like Imaan Hammam, the highly in-demand Moses is carving out a space within the fashion, beauty, and entertainment sectors through his commanding photos. His work demands your attention. It conveys a cinematic undertone, with vivid use of color, dramatic lighting, and intentional composition. And now, he has set his sights on the world of publishing with a striking new monograph, Gabriel Moses: Regina (Prestel). Taking its title and inspiration from the Latin word for queen, the book is an ode to the women in Moses’s life and a comprehensive collection of his photography, presented alongside conversations with friends and industry peers like British rapper Skepta, photographer Ciesay, and designers Samuel Ross and Matthew Williams.
“It was important to create one body of work that represented my journey and what I’ve been trying to say over the years with the art,” Moses tells Harper’s Bazaar. We caught up with him to talk about the inspiration behind Regina, his distinct style and creative process, and how he uses image-making to, as he puts it, “create the world that I want my kids to grow up seeing.”
It was important to almost create a time capsule across my career, something that I can pass down to my kids—to have something physical that represented my career and my work so far.
These are all people who have been really influential within my career, all people that were an inspiration for me growing up. It was super important to have them involved and to have an honest conversation with Skepta and Nick Knight, and to almost have two sides: one where we are speaking more about life, and the other about the discipline of photography. I think that was the best way to speak within this book, through honest conversations. To have close friends and collaborators sharing their overview on myself. It was important to have their perspective featured within the book.
Motherhood is important to me. I was raised by a single mother of five. For me, I’ve always seen the strength and the beauty within that, and there was no better time to centralize it and celebrate it than having it as a cover of this book.
These are the things I’ve always seen beauty within. And my work is very honest; I create work from my perspective. With all of my subjects, these are all people that I’ve wanted to represent, whether it’s me thinking about what I want my daughters to grow up seeing as beautiful, and seeing and knowing that their dad celebrated with all different types of Blackness. I feel like I have a responsibility to create the world that I want my kids to grow up seeing. I wanted to represent that within my work.
[Color is] massive within my image-making process. It’s something I’m really calculated about, and I consider a lot when image-making. The way in which we play around with tones, light, and creating an overall atmosphere—it all contributes to the feeling you feel when you look at these images, and that’s always been my aim, to make people feel something. If there’s anything anyone takes away, it’s a feeling. That’s always my mission, and that’s why I like the first page of the book to start with “Who Can’t Hear Must Feel.” That’s always been the number one priority.
Gabriel Moses: Regina will be available for purchase from U.S. retailers on June 4.
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Sixteen year old Elizabeth Hatton, from Harrogate, England, is an aspiring photographer with a rare and aggressive form of cancer, but that isn’t going to stop her from getting her beautiful photographs seen.
In January of this year, Liz received the life-changing diagnosis of desmoplastic small round cell tumors in both her ovaries, her omentum tissue, and liver.
Only 12 cases of desmoplastic small round cell tumor are diagnosed each year in England, according to the bone and soft tissue cancer charity Sarcoma UK. Doctors have told Liz she likely has between six months to three years to live, depending on the effectiveness of the chemotherapy.
Liz got her first camera when she was 10 years old after saving up her money, and chose her school because it offered a course in photography.
“There’s just been a bit of a shift in what’s normal,” Liz told Digital Camera World, “I used to be very focused on school work, but I’ve stopped that completely now. If I only have around three years left to live, what’s the point in A-levels?”
Vicky, Liz’s mum, told us that her daughter has always loved photography. “I don’t think I overtly encouraged it,” said Vicky, “I’ve always enjoyed taking photos, although I’m not as good as Liz, so she was used to seeing me with a camera wherever we went.”
Liz uses a Canon EOS R6 and favors portrait photography, “because I like capturing people’s emotions,” she said.
“I was gifted my current camera by a very kind photographer who is a Canon ambassador and works for Getty Images,” said Liz, “He drove all the way from the south of England to spend a day at my house, and taught me how to use it when I first got diagnosed. I’m very grateful to him for giving me something that has given me so much pleasure ever since.”
Liz’s parents had hoped to send her on a trip to Los Angeles to meet her favorite photographer David Suh, but the medical insurance proved a barrier.
Instead, Vicky went viral on X, formerly Twitter, for her post sharing Liz’s photography bucket list:
“So far I have just achieved one,” said Liz, “I went to watch ‘Would I Lie To You’ being filmed, it was phenomenal.
“I’ve been invited to watch the rehearsals of Six, Cabaret, and Wicked [West End musicals] – we’re just waiting for dates for those. I’m also getting to photograph a show at London Fashion Week this weekend.
“So many people have offered me lots of opportunities that weren’t on the list though and I’m excited to do those as well.”
Liz started her seventh round of chemotherapy this week, and photography has been a useful distraction during this difficult time.
“Photography has given me something to do,” she said, “It has become my focus in life.”
If you can help Liz with any of the opportunities on her photography bucket list, her mother’s X handle is @2ndtimeMama (PumpkinsandPost-Its). Give Liz a follow on Instagram as well at @lizhatton_photography.
Follow in Liz’s footsteps and take a look at the best Canon cameras. We’ve also put together the best cameras for beginners, and the best cameras for portraits.
The scenario is simple. Two different photographers. The same year: 1955. The same grant: a Guggenheim. The same idea: travel across the country taking photographs.
How will it end?
If you know the name Robert Frank, you know already. It ends with a sequence of 83 photographs, published in a book called “The Americans,” that is to photography what “Kind of Blue” is to jazz or “Sgt. Pepper’s” is to popular music: a body of work that is not just distinctive and original but, in artistic terms, almost theological: that than which nothing greater can be imagined. It has transcended its subject and medium to achieve the status of the very best art.
So what about the other guy?
Well, do you know the name Todd Webb? Because if you don’t, that’s also how it ends.
In 1955, Webb was a highly regarded figure in American photography. A protégé of Edward Steichen and a friend of Dorothea Lange, he was part of an inner circle of favored photographers, a fixture in some of the most important exhibitions of the era.
But after selling off his archive to a dealer who kept his work out of circulation, Webb fell into obscurity. During the 1970s and ’80s when curators and tastemakers were establishing the canon of 20th-century photography, he was barely considered. So while Frank’s “The Americans” is everywhere, Webb’s photographs from his 1955 travels have never previously been exhibited.
A superb exhibition at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Mass., corrects this. Organized by Lisa Volpe, the show opened late last year at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and will travel to the Brandywine Museum of Art in Pennsylvania in February.
For Webb’s reputation, it has to be said that “Robert Frank and Todd Webb: Across America, 1955” is not ideal. Just as it isn’t fair to Antonio Salieri always to be putting him on concert programs with Mozart, it’s not quite fair to Webb to put his 1955 project alongside Frank’s. He can only suffer by comparison.
Still, fairness be damned. As a sense-sharpening exercise, it’s irresistible, and highly instructive. Something about it recalls the mechanics of the scientific method.
You start with a question — let’s say, about America (“What sort of place is it?”) or aesthetics (“Can photographs rise to the level of the greatest art?”). You conduct a little research and concoct a hypothesis, e.g., “America is sad” or “Photographs are documentary, not artistic.” For a good experiment, you need a control. So: Two photographers. One gets the drug, the other a placebo.
A cursory analysis of the results leaves little doubt: Frank got the drug. And whatever it was, its efficacy cannot be questioned.
But the beauty of this exhibition is that it invites us to take another look, and to entertain less binary conclusions. It will make you see America and photography with freshly rinsed eyes.
The two photographers had similar kinds of curiosity but very different ways of seeing. Both were more attracted to people than to landscapes or things. They photographed roads and roadside businesses, billboards and signs, bars, parades, rallies, and public transport. They were alive to big themes like class and race relations, but also to the accidental, strangely poetic shapes made by bodies lying on picnic rugs or getting off chairlifts.
Frank, who traveled the country in a used 1950 Ford Business Coupe, whittled down the 83 photographs that made it into “The Americans” from 28,000. He was in his early 30s.
Webb, who traveled by foot, by raft and by bike, made his selections from a total of 10,000. So it’s fair to say that Webb took more trouble with his photographs. They are more calculated and deliberate. They’re also more static.
Frank’s photographs, by contrast, are mobile and responsive. “The places that interest me are on the way,” he said. There’s something clandestine and erotic about them, like a rueful exchange of looks between thwarted lovers across a loud restaurant table. Tilted and cropped, his pictures twitch with an animal alertness. Many envelop pockets of poignant focus in seas of blur, so that they feel targeted, ardent, but snatched on the run.
As indeed they often were. Frank showed silver-shining strips of road stretching miles ahead. The car itself was often his tripod. In the mid-1950s, many of the roads he traveled on were new. They made new parts of the country available to Frank’s camera. And they generated new kinds of phenomena: roadside diners, signs, billboards, gas stations.
Frank would place his camera low for some subjects, so that they loomed overhead like mysterious adults dimly perceived from a child’s cot. Alternatively, he’d photograph from an elevated vantage point: The resulting picture would express levels of power, degrees of separation, atomic loneliness.
In 1955, Webb was 49 years old. Like Frank, he had a natural sympathy for people who were marginalized, overlooked, factored out. His decision to avoid car travel was obviously consequential, but he didn’t want walking and cycling to become the point of the exercise. “The trip itself as it stretches out assumes the dimensions of a saga,” he wrote to his wife, Lucille. “There was one stretch between Lovelock and Fernley — 40 miles without a tree or blade of grass and an inferno of heat.”
His portraits pulse with human sympathy. But they’re also relatively conventional — the result of calculated, very intentional encounters. Compare them to Frank’s photographs of people, and you realize you are dealing with two different ideas of portraiture. Frank’s was intrinsically photographic. It was rooted, that’s to say, in a deeper feeling for the ramifications of the camera’s intrusiveness. “Once someone is aware of the camera, it becomes a different picture,” he said. He chose not to suppress or sidestep this fact, but to make hay with it.
His own favorite photo from “The Americans” was taken in a sloping park in San Francisco. “I was sitting down — sitting on the grass — behind these people, then [the man] looked back. It’s the look you often get as a photographer when you intrude.” (You understand something about intimacy when you break it.)
A lot of the sadness that comes off both bodies of work can be read as the sadness of what Volpe, in the show’s excellent catalogue, calls “the forms of destruction, injustice, and rabid consumption perpetuated in the name of American freedom.”
But then again, it’s also just human sadness. And sometimes it’s not even sadness: It’s solitude, absorption, oblivion. “The world moves very rapidly and not necessarily in perfect images,” said Frank. This is not a sad statement in itself, just a true one.
If Frank was responding intuitively to the world around him, he was also reacting against the artifice he detected in earlier styles of photography. Instead of determinedly hunting for life’s “decisive moments,” in the manner of Henri Cartier-Bresson, he seemed more curious about the moments before and after. His vision was almost syncopated in this sense. It was also achingly unresolved, like life. There was no clear beginning, no pivotal transformation, no resplendent culmination. Just degrees of shuffling along, each moment potentially momentous — or not.
In 1955, Frank was also shuffling along, albeit at high speed, sometimes with his wife and young children in tow, sometimes solo. “It seems nothing is really behind you,” he said, “girls you have known, or your children, or the town you came from. It’s all still with you in some way.”
“The Americans,” which I first discovered as a teenager, will always be with me in some way. Webb, meanwhile, is a welcome new discovery. He may suffer by comparison with Frank, but not too badly. He took more than enough wonderful photographs to earn our admiration (not least “Diner, Ouray, CO”). His 1955 project, uncovered at last, deserves to be examined on its own terms. But I see nothing wrong with acknowledging that studying Webb also serves to sharpen our appreciation of Frank.
I’ve been taking photographs in Quinamayó in west Colombia for around six years now, for a project about the town’s Black Baby Jesus celebrations. Quinamayó is what is known in Colombia as a palenque, a community founded by enslaved people who fled the country’s haciendas before slavery was abolished in the 1850s. These people had not been allowed to preserve their African cultural beliefs – nor to participate in the most important Catholic events, even though they had been forced to convert to Catholicism. So in Quinamayó they decided to perform their own version of Christmas, 45 days after the traditional date – the same number of days the Virgin Mary is said to have rested after the birth. The celebration still takes place every year in mid-February.
It lasts four days, with the second day devoted to a procession centring on a wooden figure of Black Baby Jesus, which is paraded around the town. Children dress up as biblical characters and people dance to a local variation of the juga rhythm, which in Quinamayó is performed by a brass band. Dancers shuffle their feet as a reference to their forebears, with chains around their ankles.
Three days after I’d photographed this year’s celebration, the director of Quinamayó’s juga band messaged me to say a child had died in the town and a bunde was going to take place that night. That’s a ritual in which a child up to the age of 10 is both mourned and celebrated – the tradition dates back to a time when the passing of children was seen as a release from the suffering of slavery. It was something I hadn’t witnessed before. Quinamayó is an hour and a half from my home by car, so I set out immediately.
Everyone in the neighbourhood is invited to a bunde. There’s a rule you have to respect if you are going to take part, even as a singer or dancer or a member of the band – and that rule is that you cannot go home before the child is buried at midnight. If you try to leave before the end, their spirit will chase you, forcing you to return. According to what I was told, the ghost will take the form of an animal, an insect, a butterfly, a sound, or an invisible hand that will come to fetch you.
For the people of Quinamayó, life begins at the moment of conception, and the baby being celebrated in this bunde had been lost due to miscarriage four months before her due date. Her mother Jessica wasn’t well enough to be present – she stayed inside her house, the building in the photograph. Other members of her family took part. Some of the children you can see filming on their phones in the background are Jessica’s cousins and nephews, and the two women – Mónica Carabalí and Nazly Paola Ramos – are friends of the family. The baby, referred to by many as angelito (little angel), was named Zoe Fernanda Camacho Aranda, and it is her tiny burial casket they’re dancing in front of.
According to the Afro-Colombian communities who practise these celebrations, children who die before the age of 10 are completely free of sin, as opposed to the usual Catholic belief that we inherit original sin at birth. The little angel on the banner behind the casket represents Zoe and was drawn by family members. She looks happy. If you look very closely you’ll also see that the only photographic materials relating to the life of Zoe have been stuck underneath: her antenatal scans.
Having gained the trust of the community, I was allowed generous access and witnessed the whole event – the singing and dancing at the start, and the coffin being carried to the cemetery where children surrounded it with candles, before people said their last words and Zoe was buried.
Racism is a structural problem throughout the country and Afro-Colombian customs are sometimes exoticised, but celebrations such as Black Baby Jesus and this bunde should be recognised as being part of Colombia’s national cultural heritage. I have come to admire Quinamayó as an example of Afro resilience, and want people who see my photographs to feel that same sense of admiration.
Born: Cali, Colombia, 1997
Trained: Universidad Autónoma de Occidente, Colombia
Influences: “Luisa Dörr, Richard Rinaldi, Johis Alarcón, Juanita Escobar”
High point: “The two and a half years I’ve been working as a freelance photographer for the New York Times, Bloomberg, Reuters and the UN”
Low point: “Not having enough courage to quit an earlier job that wasn’t meant for storytelling”
Top tip: “Find a personal project and a mentor. The first is vital for building your vision as an author. The second, to challenge the ways you portray the world”
