Rich Burroughs is an Art photographer from Portland, Oregon. He shoots Polaroids, other film and digital images. 

Statement of the artist :

« I’ve been taking photographs for much of my life. I spent my teens in a small Iowa town where I was an outsider by definition, and that had a huge impact on how I see the world. Part of me participates and another part observes, whether I’m looking through a viewfinder or not.

As a child film cameras were toys for me. I spent time playing with our family’s Brownie Holiday Flash and our Polaroid SX-70. At age seventeen I began shooting film for my high school newspaper using a manual 35mm camera. On one assignment I met a photographer from the UPI wire service who gave me the best advice I’ve ever gotten about photography. “You can never have too much film,” he said. “If you think you’ve brought enough, bring more.” It was liberating for me to hear that even a professional shooting for one of the biggest news organizations in the country took bad photos. And lots of them — he shot with a motorized winder.

I continued to take pictures on and off over the years, but my real love of the art came back to life when I picked up a Holga in 2007. I was researching buying my first DSLR at the time and somehow while Googling I stumbled across an article describing the Holga, which was exactly the opposite of what I had been looking for: a medium format film camera with a lens made of plastic that cost about $30. The images in the article were moody and evocative in a way I hadn’t seen in photos from a digital camera. I ordered my first Holga soon after and made my entry into medium format film photography.

Since then I’ve come to love shooting on medium format film, especially black and white. I still use Holgas but I also shoot with other medium format cameras including a Hasselblad. I also shoot with Polaroids — one of my favorites is an SX-70 from the 1970s like the one I played with as a child.

I started shooting with models in 2009 and that’s been the focus of most of my recent work. I view that work as portraiture, even though many of the images are nudes. To me a good portrait reveals something honest about the subject, that’s what I strive for. I try to provide an environment where my subjects feel open and creative. I view it as a collaboration.

One thread that runs through a lot of my work is a love for natural beauty, whether I’m shooting with a model or shooting landscapes. I’m also a minimalist. I’m always happy when someone uses the word “timeless” to describe one of my images. » Rich Burroughs

http://richburroughs.com

Alexander Shahabalov is a russian photographer. The most part of his work is artistic nude photographies.

http://shahabalov.ru

« Born in Verona, in Italy in 1981. 

Attracted to the role and image in contemporary art as an expressive medium, from some years I work in photography, through the analogical and digital photo.

I have been working for really long time in the photo environment, I always carry out my projects with several national professionals » – Giulia Pesarin

Brett Weston (originally Theodore Brett Weston; December 16, 1911, Los Angeles–January 22, 1993, Hawaii) seemed destined from birth to become one of our greatest American photographic artists. Born in Los Angeles in 1911, the second son of photographer Edward Weston, he had perhaps the closest artistic relationship with his famous father of all four of the Weston sons. In 1925, Edward removed Brett from school and took him to Mexico, where the thirteen year old became his father’s apprentice. Surrounded by revolutionary artists of the day, such as Tina Modotti, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and influenced as well by the striking contrast of life in Mexico, it was there that Brett first began making photographs with a small Graflex 3 1/4″ x 4 1/4″ camera.

The introduction to modern art the younger Weston received, via the work of painters Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco. unquestionably influenced his sense of form and composition. A quality of design was evident in Brett’s early images of the organic and man-made. He appreciated how the camera transformed subjects close up and how the contrast of black and white further altered the recognition of an object. It is therefore not difficult to understand his tendency to abstraction, a characteristic by which he would be identified throughout his almost seventy year career.

Returning to California in 1926, Brett continued to assist his father in his Glendale portrait studio while exhibiting and selling his own photographs. At the age of seventeen, a group of his images were included in the German exhibition “Film und Foto”, considered one of the most important avant-garde exhibitions held between the two World Wars. This recognition brought the younger Weston international attention and inclusion in numerous photographic exhibitions in the following years. Although his art will forever be associated with his father’s, it is unfair to continue to suggest that Brett’s style was overly imitative of Edward’s beyond these early years given what we have discovered in an enormous body of work produced over seven decades.

In 1929, Brett and his father moved to Carmel, California where the Weston family, including Brett’s three brothers, would maintain homes for the rest of their lives. At various times, Brett Weston also lived in Los Angeles where he had his own studio and portrait business, and in New York where he was stationed in the army. He later traveled extensively on personal photographic trips to South America, Europe, Japan, Alaska, and Hawaii. Following a 1947 Guggenheim Fellowship which he used to photograph along the East Coast, he moved to Carmel to assist his ailing father, and pursue his fine art work, including wood sculpture that was influenced by his own photographs.

Throughout the decades of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Brett Weston’s style changed sharply and was characterized by high contrast, abstract imagery. The subjects he chose were, for the most part, not unlike what interested him early in his career: plant leaves, knotted roots, and tangled kelp. He concentrated mostly on close-ups and abstracted details, but his prints reflected a preference for high contrast that reduced his subjects to pure form. In the late 1970s and into the 1980s Weston spent much of his time in Hawaii where he owned two homes. He would travel back and forth between them, shooting along the way: “l have found in this environment, everything I could want to interpret about the world photographically.” Brett Weston died in Kona, Hawaii, January 22, 1993.

http://www.brettwestonarchive.com

Biography of Jeff Downer

“…in Las Vegas where the electric bills are staggering, the decor hog wild, and the entertainment saccharine. What a golden age, what a time of right and reason. The consumer’s king, and unhappiness is treason” (Strange Powers, The Magnetic Fields). 

« I was raised in a suburb that probes for history through the natural environment. It cultivates notions of “culture” in its infrastructure that simultaneously depletes the natural and brings forth unnatural and homogenous foundations; where model homes of a 1970’s catalogue are repeated every fourth or fifth driveway. It is a culture that can be found in strip-malls and shopping centers, parking-lots after sundown, or under the guise of the woods where smoke dissipates faster than the gaze of jurisdiction. It houses a new high school packed with students in portables that are shlepped under the fame: undulating slogans, quotes, and the pride of one man’s attempts at running across Canada with one leg. A place where the current events include mass serial killings that involve the pork industry, where you find out half of your neighborhood is built upon a grave. Where words like grow-op, green-house, drug-bust, Po-compton become the vernacular. 

However, being cognizant of my surroundings enabled me to remove my own involvement from this culture in attempts to examine how and why this culture has been consumed. I have since been interested in this culture, and others that are located on the periphery, outside of major influences, but that exist as products of major social, economic or ideological movements and instances. 

In the past, I have explored boomtowns: areas struck with a rapid population explosion and economic growth due to precious resources, construction projects, attractive climates, or a popular attraction that have since been abandoned and entered a state of touristic entropy. This is overt in my work Gol Nu Get Mote through which I am looking at the history of British Columbia, its ties to the Fraser River and how it functioned as a vehicle for early commerce and industry. 
The Fraser’s demographics swayed during the fur trades and the gold rush upsetting the population balances of the First Nations people, one of the first communities to settle in the area. Through photography I am looking at how time, tourism, commerce, and its current residents have made its mark on this area, while also searching for a trace of British Columbia’s heritage. 

I also investigate the disregarded and peripheral visual culture to see how such objects, concepts and their locations come to affect our overall being and identity. Through this investigation, I am attempting to understand and interpret our environment. This can be seen in my work “Veils” where I saw a visual culture prior to it being disregarded, as being upheld as a disguise or a veil to project a certain reading of how people want to appear to others. For instance, objects like Old Glory, Elvis, or Chinese terra-cotta warriors that are mechanically reproduced icons that once successfully represented certain ideologies, from independence, freedom, rock and roll, and power. They become one with the overlooked waste or disregarded, the strength of what they used to signify is now in question, if not fully dissolved. I am interested in the breakdown, or slippage of these fabricated aesthetic choices that are used to reaffirm ideologies, both historical, cultural, and idealized, and the attempts therein to subvert the intended meaning to one that condones critical thinking and criticism through a sardonic and at time humorous lens. 

By highlighting the peripheral and disregarded I am ruminating on the banal, everyday, and often overlooked aspects of our society. I try to find the humor, tragedy and the beauty that is embedded in these places, objects and concepts. » Jeff Downer.

outer.cosmos@gmail.com

www.jeff-downer.ca

Beth Hoeckel is a multidisciplinary artist from Baltimore USA. She received a bachelor of fine arts degree from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she focused primarily on painting, photography, and printmaking. A whirlwind decade was subsequently spent abroad including two years living in New York City followed by four years in Los Angeles. Beth is currently a full-time artist creating mixed media paintings and collages in Baltimore city.

https://www.facebook.com/bethhoeckel

http://www.bethhoeckel.com

TOBI ( TOMOHISA TOBITSUKA )
Japanese photographer
Born in Japan in 1972
Travel foreign countries since 1993 acrossed the Australian continent and North America on a motorcycle.

http://www.tomohisatobitsuka.net/

«Sandrine Zondervan, visual artist born in Mexico City and based in Italy. I express my personal universe through some mediums such as painting, photography, writing, and soft sculpture. I’m inspired by those themes that have influenced me since I was a child , being part of a strong culture filled with myths, legends and magic. As I grew up, I’ve started to study art, but also my culture and my country, travelling, exploring and showing interest and love for Anthropology and folklor to enrich my work and make a fusion of my feelings and my roots. My art talks about spirituality, Occult Sciences,, darkness and nostalgie but is also full of colors and a particular view of life and death. My eclectic style let me express with freedom, and without any particular tendency, making my art as primitive as modern just listening to myself and the things I have to talk about. I work as a full time artist in the north of Italy.» Sandrine Zondervan

http://sandrinezondervan.weebly.com

Van Robinson photographs his friends and their antics from a very interesting point of view. Van has a way of showing the hectic activities he observes in a refreshing way that pulls you into the action, then spits you back out to look at what you have just witnessed.

Article : http://nocultureicons.com/the-blog/interview-with-van-robinson.html

Blog: http://vangr.tumblr.com/

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vanorits/

Site : http://vanrobinson.net