Photographers
Jonas Bendikson
Jonas Bendiksen was born in Norway in 1977. At the age of 19 he interned at Magnum’s London office, before leaving for Russia to pursue work as a photojournalist. In Russia, Bendiksen photographed stories from the fringes of the former Soviet Union, a project that was published as the book Satellites (2006). His documentary of life in a Nairobi slum, Kibera, published in the Paris Review, won a National Magazine Award in 2007. His editorial clients include National Geographic, Geo, Newsweek, the Independent on Sunday Review, the Sunday Times Magazine, the Telegraph Magazine, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
David Breashears
David Breashears is a mountaineer, photographer and filmmaker. He co-directed and produced the first IMAX film shot on Mount Everest, and reached the summit of Everest for the fifth time in 2004 when shooting his film Storm Over Everest. Breashears is Executive Director of GlacierWorks.
Robert Capa
Born Andre Friedmann to Jewish parents in Budapest in 1913, he settled in Paris in 1933. He invented the ‘famous’ American photographer Robert Capa and began to sell his prints under that name. Capa’s coverage of the Spanish Civil War appeared regularly and his picture of a Loyalist soldier who had just been fatally wounded earned him his international reputation and became a powerful symbol of war. In 1947 Capa co-founded Magnum Photos. In May 1954 he died while photographing for Life in Thai-Binh, Indochina, when he stepped on a landmine.
Jimmy Chin
In the past decade, Jimmy has worked with some of the greatest adventurers, climbers and skiers in the world, documenting everything from first ascents of unclimbed towers in the Karakoram to ski descents of high peaks in the Himalayas. Jimmy was recently awarded the Rowell Award for his excellence and breadth in adventure photography and recognized by National Geographic as one of their Emerging Explorers.
China Features/China Photo Archive
China Features, inaugurated in 1950, is the solo features service in China, and its stories have carried by more than 1,000 publications in over 100 countries and regions. China Photographic Archive is the governmental largest center for collecting photographs in the People’s Republic of China.
Alfredo D’amato
Alfredo D’amato is a graduate of the Documentary Photography degree course at UWN, Newport. He is now based in Palermo, Sicily. Alfredo has won the prestigious Observer Hodge Photographic Award (first prize student award) and was also the recipient of the One Media first prize award for photojournalism.
Bruce Davidson
Bruce Davidson began taking photographs at the age of ten in Oak Park, Illinois. He became a full member of Magnum in 1958 and created such seminal bodies of work as “The Dwarf,” Brooklyn Gang,” and “Freedom Rides.” His work witnessing the dire social conditions in East Harlem was published in 1970 under the title East 100th Street. In 1980, he captured the vitality of the New York Metro’s underworld, later published in a book, Subway. His awards include the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Documentary Photography in 2004 and a Gold Medal Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Arts Club in 2007.
Cameron Davidson
Aerial and people photographer Cameron Davidson calls Northern Virginia home. He creates images from the skies around the globe for advertising campaigns, annual reports and editorial features. Clients include Vanity Fair, American Express Departures, National Geographic, Audubon, Smithsonian, American Express, Dominion and Virginia Tourism. An avid volunteer and board member for the Community Coalition for Haiti, Cameron has documented CCH aid projects in central and southern Haiti since 1999.
Stuart Franklin
Stuart Franklin was born in Britain in 1956. During the 1980s, he worked as a correspondent for Sygma Agence Presse in Paris before joining Magnum Photos in 1985. His documentary photography has taken him to Central and South America, China, Southeast Asia and Europe. Since 2004 he has focused on long-term projects concerned primarily with man and the environment. Franklin is currently working on a long-term project on Europe’s changing landscape, focusing in particular on the climate and on patterns of transformation.
Geng Yunsheng
Born in Kunming, Yunnan Province in 1954, Geng Yunsheng started to learn photography in 1990. Geng has been invited to many international photo festivals in Pingyao, Lianzhou, Shenyang and Taiwan. His well-know project “Wumeng Miners” has won him several national photographic awards, and has been widely exhibited in Germany, France and the U.S. The book with the same title has been published in 2010.
Lewis Hine
Born in Oshkosh, WI, Lewis Hine took up photography in 1904 to document immigrants arriving at Ellis Island. Hine attended the Columbia University School of Social Work in 1904 and in 1907 Hine began photographing for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC). He traveled from Maine to Texas documenting children working in factories, mines, mills, farms, and in street trades. His photographs did not embellish the child laborers’ destitution, and instead showed accurate and poignant depictions of their circumstances.
Thomas Hoepker
Thomas Hoepker studied art history and archeology, then worked as a photographer for Münchner Illustrierte and Kristall between 1960 and 1963, reporting from all over the world. He joined Stern magazine as a photo-reporter in 1964. Specializing in reportage and stylish color features, he received the prestigious Kulturpreis of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie in 1968. Today Hoepker lives in New York. A retrospective exhibition, showing 230 images from fifty years of work, toured Germany and other parts of Europe in 2007.
David Hurn
Born in the UK but of Welsh descent, David Hurn is a self-taught photographer. He gained his reputation with his reportage of the 1956 Hungarian revolution. Hurn became a full member of Magnum in 1967. In 1973 he set up the famous School of Documentary Photography in Newport, Wales. He recently collaborated on a very successful textbook with Professor Bill Jay, On Being a Photographer. However, it is his book Wales: Land of My Father, that truly reflects Hurn’s style and creative impetus.
Nadav Kander
Nadav Kander is a London based artist renowned for his portraiture and large-format landscape photographs. Kander was born in Israel in 1961. He began photographing at an early age and moved to London in 1982 where he still lives. In 2009, The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to Obama’s People, his 52 portraits of President Obama’s inaugural administration. His books include, Beauty’s Nothing (2001), Night (2003), Obama’s People (2009), Yangtze – The Long River (2010).
Gleb Kosorukov
Born in Chelyabinsk 70, a secret city and nuclear research center in Urals, Russia. He studied at the Moscow Engineering-Physics Institute where he graduated in 1990 with a diploma in experimental nuclear physics. Starting in 1992 he worked as a freelance photographer for publications like New York Times, Guardian, Observer, NYT magazine, Time, News-Week and Stern in Russia. Kosorukov began working on art and documentary projects in 1998 and has regularly shown at exhibitions in Russia and abroad in cities like Reykjavik, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Paris.
Builder Levy
Intertwining social documentary, art and street photography, Builder Levy has been making photographs for almost fifty years. In 2008 Levy was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. His two books are Images of Appalachian Coalfields, and Builder Levy Photographer. Levy is currently completing a book, Appalachia USA, spanning 40 years in that American mining region.
George Mallory
Born in 1886, George Mallory was an English mountaineer who took part in the first three British expeditions to Mount Everest in the early 1920s. Mallory and his climbing partner Andrew Irvine disappeared high on Everest during their attempt to make the first ascent.
Niu Guozheng
Born in 1955 in Henan Province’s Baofeng County, Niu has been working for the Pingdingshan City Bureau of Public Security since 1980. Niu started in 1987 as a freelance photographer. His major works include, “Career Behind Bars,” “Martial Arts,” “In Dreams,” “Garden of Hundred Flowers,” “Small Coal Mines,” and “Exercises.” His work has been collected by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and published in Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Clifford Ross
Clifford Ross began his career as a painter and sculptor after graduating from Yale in 1974 with a degree in both Art and Art History. In 1995, he turned his attention toward photography and other media. Frustrated by the lack of detail available with existing cameras, Clifford invented and patented the “R1″ camera in 2002 and made some of the highest resolution large-scale landscapes in the world. His current work includes a stained glass wall for the new federal courthouse in Austin, Texas and he recently completed “Harmonium Mountain”, an animated, computer generated landscape video, with an original score by Philip Glass.
Vittorio Sella
Vittorio Sella was born in the foothills of the Alps in Biella, Italy in 1859. During his long and productive career as a photographer and mountaineer, Sella took part in many expeditions to the world’s greatest and least explored mountain ranges.
David Seymour
David Szymin was born in 1911 in Warsaw. After studying at the Sorbonne in the 1930s, Szymin stayed on in Paris. From 1936 to 1938 he photographed the Spanish Civil War. On the outbreak of the Second World War he moved to New York, where he adopted the name David Seymour. In 1947, along with Cartier-Bresson, Capa, George Rodger, and William Vandivert, he founded Magnum Photos. In 1956, when traveling near the Suez Canal to cover a prisoner exchange, he was killed by Egyptian machine-gun fire.
Daniel Shea
Daniel Shea is an artist and educator based in Chicago. His long-term photographic work about the coal industry, Plume and Removing Mountains, have been shown extensively, and are scheduled to show as a solo show in Switzerland in July 2011. Daniel shoots for publications such as Bloomberg BusinessWeek, TIME, Dwell, Monocle, W Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal.
W. Eugene Smith
William Eugene Smith was born in 1918 in Wichita, Kansas. Smith worked as a war correspondent for Flying magazine (1943-44), and a year later for Life. He followed the island-hopping American offensive against Japan, and suffered severe injuries. Smith worked for Life again between 1947 and 1955, before resigning in order to join Magnum. Smith was fanatically dedicated to his mission as a photographer. His legacy lives on through the W. Eugene Smith Fund to promote ‘humanistic photography’, founded in 1980, which awards photographers for exceptional accomplishments in the field.
Song Chao
Born in Dongming County, Shandong Province in 1979, Song Chao began working as a miner in Shandong’s Yankuang Group in 1997. He began to take photographs of his co-workers in 2001. In 2002 he received the Chinese National Photography Award. In 2009, Song graduated from the Beijing Film Academy, and has worked with Times magazine to photograph workers in China. He now works and lives in Beijing.
Ian Teh
Born in Malaysia of Chinese descent in 1971, Ian Teh is presently based in Beijing and London. He joined the prestigious photo agency VU in 2001. Self-trained and independent, he has worked for a variety of international publications such as Time, Newsweek and The New Yorker. His artistic creativity stems from his interest in social, environmental and political issues. He was recently awarded the 2011 EF grant from the Magnum Foundation and also received a high commendation for the 2009 and 2010 Prix Pictet award.
Robert Wallis
London based photographer Robert Wallis has specialized in photographing countries undergoing rapid economic and social change. Recent work in India includes stories on the destruction of ancient tribal communities in N.E. India due to the spread of coal mining and other heavy industry- the dark side of “Shining India’s” economic boom. This project was a major exhibition entitled “A Disappearing World” at the University of London’s Brunei Gallery in 2011.
Wang Mianli
Born in Jining, Shandong Province, in 1968, Wang Mianli has worked for Shandong Pictorial magazine for more than 15 years and has been recognized as one of the Top Ten photographers in the province. He is a member of the China Photographers’ Association, as well as the Shandong Youth Photographers’ Association. He has been awarded prizes in several dozen national photographic competitions and has had his work published in numerous print media outlets.
Major E.O. Wheeler
Born in 1890, Major E.O. Wheele, was a Canadian member of the Survey of India and participated in the first British expedition to Mount Everest as a member of the survey team. Wheeler was trained in the Canadian method of photogrammetric mapping.
Wu Qi
Born in Kaifeng, Henan Province in 1966, Wu Qi graduated from the Art Department of Suzhou University in 1990. Wu currently does photography and works in commercial design. His project “The Day Does Not Know the Darkness of the Night” has been exhibited at the Pingyao International Photography Festival in Shanxi Province and the Paris Photography Biennial. He is the founder of the Golden Apple Design Company.
Yang Junpo
Born in Pingdingshan, Henan Province in 1963, Yang Junpo has been photographing since 1978. His project “Small Coal Mines” was started in 1996. He has been a commercial photographer in the Shenzhen Authentic Vision Company since 1998 and his work has been shown in major photo festivals in China. He works and lives in Shenzhen.
Yang Shaobin
Born in Tangshan, Hebei Province, Yang Shaobin came to prominence in the late 1990s with his “Red Violence” series of oil paintings featured in the 1999 Venice Biennale. His work has been included in numerous local and international exhibitions including The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China at Tate Liverpool and his recent solo exhibition at the Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Yu Haibo
Born in Yongcheng County, Henan Province in 1962. Yu Haibo graduated from Wuhan University as a photography major. Yu has won many national and provincial photographic awards. Since 2006, his project “Dafen Oil Painting Village” has been widely exhibited in China, Amsterdam, Paris, Zurich and Lodz, Poland, and collected by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He is now the chief news photographer of the Shenzhen Economic Daily. He is also the Director of the Shenzhen Professional Photography Association.
This post is also available in: Chinese (Simplified)