Artist Biographies
Daniel Beltrá
Born in Madrid, Spain, Daniel Beltrá is a photographer based in Seattle, Washington. His passion for conservation is evident in images of our environment that are evocatively poignant. In 2011, he received the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award and the Lucie Award for the International Photographer of the Year – Deeper Perspective for his photography of the Deepwater Horizon Gulf Oil Spill. In 2009, he received the prestigious Prince’s Rainforest Project award granted by Prince Charles and won the BBVA Foundation award in 2013. Beltrá’s work has been published in many international publications including The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, Le Monde, and El Pais. He is a fellow of the prestigious International League of Conservation Photographers.
David Breashears
David Breashears is an accomplished mountaineer, photographer, and filmmaker. He is also the founder and Executive Director of GlacierWorks, a non-profit organization that uses art, science, and adventure to raise public awareness about the consequences of climate change in the Greater Himalayan Region. Since 1978, he has combined his skills in climbing and filmmaking to complete more than forty film projects. 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.
Jimmy Chin
Jimmy Chin is a photographer, filmmaker, and mountain sports athlete known for his ability to capture extraordinary imagery while climbing and skiing in extremely high-risk environments. Jimmy has garnered numerous photography awards from Photo District News (PDN), Communication Arts, the American Society of Magazine Editors, and others. His 2015 film Meru won the coveted Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and was on the 2016 Oscar shortlist for Best Documentary. Jimmy’s photos have appeared on the cover of National Geographic and The New York Times Magazine, among others,
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.” In 1963, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented his early work in a solo show. His work witnessing the dire social conditions on one block 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 that was 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.
John Davies
John Davies was born in County Durham, England and studied photography in Nottingham. After graduating in 1974 he became fascinated by the rural landscape during his visits to the west coast of Ireland. His images of Ireland, Scotland and England, made between 1976-1981, were published in the monograph Mist Mountain Water Wind in 1985. In 1981, he won a Research Fellowship at Sheffield School of Art and in 1995-1996 he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Art School at the University of Wales Cardiff. Davies was the first photographer to be commissioned by the Museum of London in 2001. His work has been shown at many international venues including the Museum of Modern Art New York and the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
Anna Filipova
Anna Filipova is a photojournalist and a researcher based in Paris. She has been working for the International New York Times, International Herald Tribune and Reuters News Agency and has been published in CNN, Washington Post, The Telegraph, Dazed & Confused and The Guardian, amongst others. For the past few years, she has been focusing on the Arctic region, where she explores environmental and social topics based in remote and inaccessible areas. She has a MA from the Royal College of Art in London. Most recently, the mayor of Paris and President of C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, selected Anna as one of the climate heroins to represent the city of Paris.
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-known 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 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. Declaring that he “wanted to show things that had to be corrected,” he was one of the earliest photographers to use the photograph as a documentary tool. In 1936 Hine was appointed head photographer for the National Research Project of the Works Projects Administration, and died in 1940.
David Hurn
Born in the UK 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.
Nico Jesse
Nico Jesse is a Dutch photographer born in 1911. For many years, Nico Jesse combined his work as a doctor with his passion for photography. In 1956, he decided to end his practice and devote himself exclusively to photography. Six years later, he resumed his former profession, but went on taking photos in his free time. Jesse died in 1976.
Dolf Kruger
Swiss-born photographer Dolf Kruger, started his career as a freelance photographer before working for the paper De Waarheid. In 1959, he was invited to become a member of the GKf (professional association of photographers) and in 1961 he won the Silver Camera Award for a photo that he had taken of the miners’ strike in the Borinage region. After leaving De Waarheid in 1960, he worked as a freelance photographer for government agencies, publishers, corporations and environmental organizations. In 1983, he settled permanently in Sweden. A monograph of his work was was published for a retrospective exhibition in the Amsterdam Historical Museum.
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. Mallory’s body was found on Mount Everest in 1999.
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.
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.
Daniel Shea
Daniel Shea was born in 1985. Following a BFA at Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD (2007), he gained an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, in 2013. Daniel now lives in New York. In 2018, Daniel was chosen as the winner of the twelfth Foam Paul Huf Award, an annual prize given to a photography talent under 35 years.
Nichole Sobecki
Nichole Sobecki, born 1986, is an award-winning photographer and filmmaker based in Nairobi, Kenya. From 2012-2015 Nichole led Agence France-Presse’s East Africa video bureau, and was a Rory Peck Awards News Finalist for her coverage of the Westgate mall attacks in Kenya. In 2018 won the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights prize in new media. She has been recognized by Pictures of the Year, the One World Media Awards, the Alexandra Boulat Award for Photojournalism, The Magenta Foundation, and The Jacob Burns Film Center, among others. Her work has been featured in National Geographic, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, Foreign Policy, The Financial Times Magazine, The Guardian, and Le Monde.
Henri Storck
Henri Storck was born in Ostend in 1907. He was a filmmaker best know for his social documentaries, most notably Misery in Borinage, which he made together with Joris Ivens. During WWII he filmed the sociological documentary Farmers’ Symphony. Storck made nearly 100 films. He passed away in 1999.
Peter van Agtmael
Peter van Agtmael was born in Washington DC in 1981. His work concentrates on America, looking at issues of conflict, identity, power, race and class. He won the W. Eugene Smith Grant, the ICP Infinity Award for Young Photographer, the Lumix Freelens Award, the Aaron Siskind Grant, a Magnum Foundation Grant as well as awards from World Press Photo, American Photography Annual, POYi, The Pulitzer Center, The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, FOAM and Photo District News. His book, Disco Night Sept 11, on America at war in the post-9/11 era was named a “Book of the Year” by The New York Times Magazine, Time Magazine, Mother Jones, Vogue, American Photo and Photo Eye. Peter joined Magnum Photos in 2008 and became a member in 2013.
Robert Wallis
RobertWallis started his career in San Francisco photographing subjects ranging from Mexican-American gang culture to the gay clubbing scene at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. Now London-based. Wallis has specialized in photographing countries undergoing rapid economic and social change. He is particularly concerned with the environmental impact of the global race to achieve Western standards of living in stories such as “The Dark Side of the Boom” in India where “development” means one thing for a growing urban middle class and quite another for those living on top of minerals needed to fuel the boom. This work culminated in a major multimedia exhibition at London’s School of Oriental and African studies in 2011.
Major Edward O. Wheeler
Born in 1890, Major E.O. Wheeler, 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.
Yu Haibo
Born in Yongcheng, 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.
Matt Black
Matt Black’s work explores the connections between migration, poverty, agriculture, and the environment in his native rural California and in southern Mexico. He has photographed over one hundred communities across 44 U.S. states for his project “The Geography of Poverty.” Black is a contributor to the @everydayusa photographers’ collective. He has produced video pieces for msnbc.com, Orion Magazine, and The New Yorker. He is an Associate Member of Magnum Photos. He received the W. Eugene Smith Award in 2015 and the the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in 2016. His work has also been honored by the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Center for Cultural Innovation, and others.
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.
Alfredo D’Amato
Alfredo D’Amato studied Art, Media and Design at the London College of Printing. He later graduated with a degree in Documentary Photography from the University of Wales, Newport, UK. 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.
Cameron Davidson
Aerial and location 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.
Willem Diepraam
Willem Diepraam was born in Amsterdam in 1944 and began his career in the 1960s as a self-taught photojournalist working for the Dutch newspaper, Vrij Nederland. Diepraam’s work demonstrates a sincere concern for the plight of the world’s underprivileged, while his eye never sacrifices elegant form and composition. He has published several books of his own work including, Dutch Caribbean (1975), Sahel (1982), Lima (1991), and Foto’s and Photographs (2000). Diepraam donated part of a 400-print collection of original prints by some of the greatest names in the field to the Rijksmuseum.
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.
Josh Haner
Josh Haner is a Staff Photographer and the Senior Editor for Photo Technology at The New York Times. In 2014, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for a photo essay documenting the recovery of a Boston Marathon bombing victim. His video on Jeff Bauman’s recovery after the Boston Marathon bombing won first place in the National Press Photographers Association’s Best of Photojournalism and second place in the Pictures of the Year International contest. He was recently selected as “One to Watch” in the September 2012 issue of American Photo magazine. His photography has appeared in numerous publications including Newsweek, Time, Fortune and Rolling Stone.
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.
Joris Ivens
Joris Ivens (Georg Henri Anton Ivens), born 1898 in the Netherlands, was a Dutch director who explored leftist social and political concerns. Ivens left working for his family after receiving acclaim for two of his films, The Bridge (1928) and Rain (1929). His successes resulted in an invitation to lecture in the Soviet Union, where he made Song of Heroes (1932). In Spain with the writer Ernest Hemingway he made The Spanish Earth (1937), an anti-Franco report on the Spanish Civil War. His film “The Power and the Land” (1940) documents the New Deal’s rural electrification program. He passed away in Paris in 1989.
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 The New York Times, The Guardian, The Observer, The New York Times Magazine, Time, Newsweek, 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 three books are Images of Appalachian Coalfields, Builder Levy Photographer, and Appalachia USA, spanning 40 years in the American mining region.
Gideon Mendel
Gideon Mendel is a London-based photographer born in Johannesburg in 1959. He began photographing in
the 1980s during the final years of apartheid. His first book, A Broken Landscape: HIV & AIDS in Africa was published in 2001. Since then he has produced a number of photographic advocacy projects, working with charities and campaigning organizations. His work has been published in many leading magazines including National Geographic, Fortune Magazine, The Guardian Weekend Magazine, The Condé Nast Traveler, and Rolling Stone. Since 2007, Mendel has been occupied with “Drowning World,” an art and advocacy project about flooding that is his personal response to climate change.
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. He began his career as a painter and sculptor, and in 1994 became deeply involved with photography and other media. In 2002, Ross invented and patented his revolutionary R1 camera to photograph Mount Sopris in Colorado, which allowed him to produce some of the highest resolution large-scale landscape photographs in the world – his Mountain series. More recently, he has developed new techniques for generating computer-based videos, including Harmonium Mountain I, with an original score by Philip Glass, and his Digital Waves. MASS MoCA presented Landscape: Seen & Imagined, a major mid-career retrospective in 2015. In conjunction with the exhibition, MIT Press published two companion books, Hurricane Waves and Seen & Imagined: The World of Clifford Ross.
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 World War II 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 gunfire.
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 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 Beijing Film Academy. He now works and lives in Beijing
Ian Teh
Ian Teh has published three monographs, Undercurrents (2008), Traces (2011) and Confluence (2014). Teh has received several honours, in 2018 he was awarded a travel grant from the Pulitzer Centre for Crisis Reporting and presented his work on climate change at the prestigious 2018 National Geographic Photography Seminar. He is also the recipient of the International Photoreporter Grant (2016), the Abigail Cohen Fellowship in Documentary Photography (2014), and the Emergency Fund (2011) from the Magnum Foundation. In 2013, he was elected by the Open Society Foundations to exhibit in New York at the Moving Walls Exhibition.
Kadir van Lohuizen
Kadir van Lohuizen is known for his work on the seven rivers of the world, the rising of sea levels, the diamond industry and migration in the Americas. He started to work as a freelance photojournalist in 1988. In 2000 and 2002 Kadir was a jury member of the World Press Photo contest and is currently on the supervisory board of the World Press Photo foundation. The photo book Diamond Matters, the diamond industry was awarded the prestigious Dutch Dick Scherpenzeel Prize for best reporting on the developing world and was recognized with a World Press Photo Award. He made several trips to the USA to document the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. His project “Where Will We Go” looks at the global consequences of climate change and highlights the plight of displaced island communities.
Wang Mianli
Born in Jining, Shandong Province, in 1968, Wang now is the Business Director of Shandong Pictorial magazine. He 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 Deputy Secretary of Shandong Youth Photographers’ Association. He has been awarded prizes in several dozen national and provincial photographic competitions and has had his work published in numerous print media outlets. He once organized and curated some national-level photography projects, for example, Photographer’s Vision on Prision, Photojournalists’ Focus on Yunkuang, etc.
Witho Worms
Witho Worms is a Dutch artist-photographer. He has a Master’s degree in Anthropology (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam) and studied Audiovisual design and Photography (Homeschool voor de Kinston, Utrecht). His background in visual anthropology has led him into an ongoing investigation of the photographic medium and its claim to natural representation and factuality. After photographing the Dutch polders he shifted his attention to the slagheaps from the coal mining industries in Western Europe in 2006. In 2013 he started to work on forests in Finland, Sweden, France and Belgium. His publication La montagne c’est moi was named “The Best Dutch Book Design, 2012” and was short-listed for the Paris Photo- Aperture first Photo Book Award. He won the Gold Medal in 2013 for “The most beautiful book of the world” awarded by the Stiftung Buchkunst in Germany.
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.