Liam Sharp

So don’t think I can shoot on white

I put my book in to an agency to be considered for a ad campaign.  I was told that I wasn’t chosen because they didn’t see any shots on a white background.  So I thought I would show them that I could shoot on white by doing the most difficult shoot I could think of on white.  So I travelled to Ethiopia, driving for seven days to get to the remote Oma valley region where there were tribes living how they have always lived for thousands of years with the addition of guns.  There was no electricity, charging my batteries in the Toyota Land Cruiser .  I wanted the portraits to feel like I brought the warriors to a New York studio.

Is this our Canada?

When I was photographing a phd student for University of Toronto they told me they were heading up an organization fighting for equal government funding for healthcare and education for First Nations people of Canada.

Frank Rocco

It has been said that you can tell who the tourist are in New York City because they are the only ones who are looking up. New Yorkers never look up! There is at least one place that neither New Yorker nor tourist ever look up and that is in the subway. Frank decided to document what it was you could see looking straight up inside the subway stations of New York City. Some of the images illustrate the degradation and decay of the surroundings while others show some of the wonderful design details that we are all missing. Frank decided to limit himself to looking straight up with no angle and proceeded to start the project. Although it is legal to photograph in the subway, tripods are not permitted. Frank started the project with a DSLR, a tripod, cable release and a bubble level, and was chased by subway authorities. While thinking about ways to shoot without being chased or arrested, he acquired a new camera without a viewfinder (a Sony Cyber Shot DSC-QX10). Since this little camera that looks like nothing more than a lens can lay on the ground and be operated remotely via iPad, it was the ideal camera for this work. Soon Frank was shooting in stations across the city and looking up all the time. The series is called Straight Up and is shot entirely in the NYC subway system. Frank Showed the work as a digital show at Frank Meo’s series of photographer talks called Projections in 2016. Frank Meo said “The subway will never be the same.” Last June (2017) Frank had a solo show of “Straight Up” at the 51 Art Gallery in Martha’s Vineyard.

Frank Rocco is a New York City fashion photographer. He also shoots beauty, portraits and fine art.  He has been shooting professionally since the 90’s. His involvement in the photo community includes 15 years of service as a board member of the New York chapter of ASMP, serving for five years as president. He is currently a director on the national board of ASMP. Before his photography career, Frank studied studio art and communications. Frank teaches photography at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Frank donates his time to a few charities and serves on the executive board of the Young Professionals Committee of Big Brothers Big Sisters of NYC.

www.frankroccophotography.com/

Svetlana Jovanovic

Svetlana Jovanovic’s surreal photography portraits question existing cliches of femininity. Exploiting conventions of fashion photography, Jovanovic’s work organizes around issues of eroticism, taboos, and theatricality. In her endeavor of creating images that are at the same time aesthetically pleasing and discomforting, her portraits evoke dreamlike sequences of women masked, emanating loneliness, alienation or ecstasy. Using often monochromatic backgrounds and digital image manipulation, Jovanovic explores the ambiguities in the visual legacy of the female form, creating atmospheric narratives of psychological and uncanny nature.. The unease and ambiguity that surrounds Jovanovic’s photos encourage the viewer to recognize on their own objectifying practices and expectations of the female body in fashion and photography. 

Born in Belgrade, Serbia, Svetlana received an MA in Psychology from the University of Belgrade. In 1999, she moved to The Hague, The Netherlands, where she worked with the United Nations. She has also studied at the Royal Academy of Arts (KABK) in The Hague, Nouva Accademia di Belle Arti NABA in Milan, and the International Center of Photography in New York City. In 2015, she moved to NYC, where she is currently living and working on personal and commercial art projects, and also as a Teaching Assistant at the International Center of Photography.

www.svetlanajovanovic.com/

Michael Seto

In May 2017, I set out with five other professional photographers on a hike to Everest Base Camp (EBC) in Nepal. We traveled with William Vazquez, a NYC based photo expedition leader, under his company, Camera Voyages. Each of us sought to capture the trip through the lens of our own experience. A trip as daunting as the Lukla to EBC strips one of all but the most basic necessities and we were often out of internet and telecommunications. This immersive mode of travel can be the equivalent of hyperfocal length in bringing out the essence of each traveler and our imagery reflects the un.... interaction with the people, the culture, the weather, the land, and ourselves.

This was my third trip to the Himalaya region, having been to Base Camp on the Tibetan side of Everest in 2006, as well as a three-week trek through the Annapurna region of Nepal two decades earlier. For me, I love capturing the day-to-day lives and the common thread of humanity in the local populace. Whether children, young adults, or a group of older women touring a local temple together. My work tends to focus on environmental portraits and reportage style street imagery to give viewers a ground level perspective of the local people and culture.

www.michaelseto.com

Zoe Wetherall

I've always been interested in the landscape, whether natural or man-made, and I'm curious about the histories, uses, and meanings we layer on top of it.  All the images in this series show land that humans have modified in some way to serve themselves. 

Meticulously constructed areas are viewed from above, with a focus on clean simple form and man made dividing lines. From the roads we travel on, to crops for food: everything serves a deliberate purpose.

www.zoewetherall.com/

Robert A. Ripps

The following are images from my hike to Everest Base Camp in Nepal in the spring of 2017, traveling with several fellow past and current APA board members (and some “civilians” as well).

While the hike was challenging- long days, thinning air, a respiratory ailment, and of course, limits on the weight of camera equipment that I could bring on the small plane to Lukla, our starting destination- as a photographer, not being able to spend more time in some situations waiting for the right light, or the decisive moment was hard. But, I tried to strike a balance between some quick, scenic shots along the trail, and the more in depth, smaller details or personal moments with local people that I like to capture.

Negativityness is a natural outgrowth from my Urban Trees series- in which I looked at how urban trees survive, how their environment shapes them and in return, how they shape their environment.

This work is my response to the political climate in our country right now- everything seems to be about negativity, about division, about what is truth (and what is inarguable false, yet touted as truth). It is about how the surface of things can be 180 degrees opposite from what is underneath, it is about falsehoods and unseen influences. It is about discordance, about disorientation, about a world turned upside down and inside out. What was familiar and perhaps mundane has now taken on a sense of surrealism and unfamiliarity, which leaves us feeling unsure, confused and helpless, powerless to get a handle on events affecting not only our daily lives, but our children’s lives and the future of our country.

https://www.raripps.com/

Ted Andreasian and Nune Karamyan

Ted Andreasian and Nune Karamyan, husband and wife. We have been working in architectural-based fine art photography since 2015. With generations of architects in their lives, the choice of subject came naturally.

Long exposure is our main tool for presenting a space and expressing the passage of time in one still frame. The exposure, anywhere from thirty seconds to twelve minutes, brings to the work a particular, ethereal light, in which shadows move and create a spiritual or surrealistic architectural scene.

In a sense, they say, long exposure photography is a return to the darkroom, where the outcome of the photograph is unknown until the exposure is finished.

https://www.tedandnune.com/

Mark Bennington

"Living the Dream: The Life of the 'Bollywood' Actor (HarperCollins) is a photography book by Mark Bennington, that explores the lives of those who dream for real against the odds of the world's largest film industry, otherwise known as Bollywood. From student to mega-star and everyone in between, the book contains 112 photographs and interviews of people from every branch of the Bollywood acting tree."

http://www.markbennington.com/

Michael Berman

Berman Pictures is Michael Berman's photography and documentary film studio based in Brooklyn, NY. The photography is documentary, lifestyle, and food. Clients include editorial publications, advertising agencies, commercial brands, and restaurants.

https://www.bermanpictures.com/

Jim Lafferty

Jim Lafferty is an editorial and commercial photographer with over a decade of industry experience living and working in NYC

http://www.jimlafferty.com/

Liam Alexander

Liam Alexander is a critically acclaimed internationally exhibited fine artist and creative director with the intention of catalyzing social change through artistic expression. Liam has created community focussed independent creative projects such as:  IThou at the NYU Kimmel Galleries, The Exchange at Rush Arts, and the forthcoming documentary series #StrokeofGenius (2019).  His work has been featured in gallery exhibitions through out the United States, internationally at the second annual Toolkit Festival in Venice, Italy and published in magazines like Nylon and Rolling Stone. He has created projects for major brands like Wix.com, The City of New York, Samsung and Renaissance Hotels. 

https://www.liam-alexander.com/

Linda Kuo

My interest lies in the impact humankind has upon the environment, centering on the benevolence and vulnerability of the animal kingdom. It is the animal that solicits my projects, and most strongly connects me to the underlying sensibilities of my work. Animals and nature are endowed with resilient mechanisms for survival, and possess the ability to continually adapt and yield to changing circumstances. However, their innate and intelligent systems of proficiency, are continually being stressed under the actions of humankind. With simplicity and openness, I hope to create imagery that provokes deep consideration and reverence, towards the preservation and responsible stewardship of our environment, and the sentient beings that inhabit our world.

http://www.kuophoto.com/

Jon Michael Anzalone

Jon Michael Anzalone is a photographer in Queens, NYC, shooting explorative and introspective images in analog format since 2005. He shoots long-form photoessays meditating on places through these lenses:

- Moments of Place and Moments of Self, and their overlap 
- Emotional distance between subjects and their environment
- Alienation within quiet, intimate moments
- Inacessible memory of a person or place, just beyond recollection

http://www.defeats.us/

Barry Rosenthal

Barry Rosenthal is an environmentally concerned photographer. Since the fall of 2010, Rosenthal has been a resident artist at Chashama in the Brooklyn Army Terminal where he continues to refine his vision of the project ‘Found in Nature’ as it evolves from found object collections to statements about modern packaging and marine pollution.

He studied photography at the Dayton Art Institute in Dayton, Ohio and at the Apeiron Workshops in Millerton, New York with notable photographers Emmet Gowin and George Tice. Barry‘s fine art images can be found in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the D'Amour Museum of Fine Arts in Springfield, Massachusetts.

His project “Found in Nature” has gathered a worldwide following which created opportunities for Barry to communicate to a larger audience through gallery exhibitions and artist talks. His photographs have been published in arts and culture magazines and online as well as general interest news publications around the world.

Rosenthal partners with NGO’s and corporations to create awareness about the growth of packaging and to ​consider a product's entire lifecycle and its impact on the environment and the oceans.

http://www.barryrosenthal.com/

Tom Brownold

I am a commercial photographer presently based in Flagstaff, Arizona. I shoot with Canon 5 D Mark 2 and Mark 4 using primarily Canon 16-35 f2.8 and Canon 70-200 f2.8. One of my clients is the Babbitt Ranches (established in 1886). Every year on the second Saturday of July, rain or shine, this company holds an auction to sell the new crop of foals bred specifically as working quarter horses to interested parties from around the country. The new colts are auctioned then raised on the Babbitt ranches for their first year, weened and saddle broke then delivered to their new owner(s). Over the years I have been making images for their catalog as well as documenting the branding process and auction.

https://www.tombrownold.com

Harry Giglio

Harry Giglio has the natural ability to bring out and reveal  the inner being of people and other living creatures with dramatic style and reverence. His subjects, great or small, powerful or timid, feel instanly at ease and open with him.
Harry is at home where his subjects are because his ability has no boundary, his experience is vast, his subjects are countless,  his drive is bountiful and his talent always growing. All his assignments are personal images and all his subjects become friends.

http://www.harrygigliophotography.com/

Jorge Parra

"My creative vision has evolved with a blend of elegance and sensuality, combined with my love for bold design, to create unique images that range from the seemingly mundane to the abstract and conceptual, for the Advertising and Travel, Leisure and Luxury markets. My blend of Fashion, Beauty and Fine Art Photography diffuses the line between personal and commercial work to create compelling still and motion visual stories, and I have fun doing it!"

Even though I usually photograph relevant men in the arts, sports, celebrity/entertainment and business, executive/corporate environments, I spend most of my time working with women.

I photograph women for fashion & beauty editorial advertising projects, plus women in the leisure & luxury industries for different brands, marketing their products and services. I shoot portraits of women, trying to capture their essence as well as trying to unfold their personal enigmas! I photograph women for my personal work. 

I live surrounded by women, even in my personal time, as life and the universe have granted me 3 fantastic daughters and a wonderful wife, so my daily life is a constant browsing of the female spirit!! 

I am obsessed with grace, elegance and sensuality, specially when women allow me to expose their inner strengths and feelings. Which is why I love so much when I am hired to use my personal work as a guideline to shoot commercial projects!

http://jorgeparraphotography.com/

David Arky

David Arky is not just an artist for art’s sake. To David, photography is a calling, but also a business, in which the final image is designed to achieve an end. So he’s well known not only for how striking and innovative his still life, conceptual and x-ray photography is, but also for his understanding of how the images will be used. It’s what makes him an ideal fit for advertising and editorial clients as varied as AT&T and AARP, Fresca and Forbes. 

(See our full list of clients here.) Since his start, he’s seen photography as a kind of visual language, crafted in specific ways to solve specific challenges. His process, too, combines instinctive artistry with rigorous methodology: visualizing a solution, then physically applying ink to paper—in as many forms and as many times as it takes—to spark the solution. 

Having studied photography at the Art Center College of Design and Rochester Institute of Technology, he now shares his passion with students at the International Center for Photography, where he has taught since 2001. When not working, he finds other inspiration in Brooklyn, from his wife and two kids.

http://www.arky.com/

Walter Smith

From a conversation with an art buyer:

Natural, appealing portraits of real people in simple, emblematic settings. Your pictures always make the subject the hero of the shot supported by a background or complimentary setting that helps to tell the story without becoming the story. Your unique talent is that you create these portraits with ease and without fanfare and the net result is that they always hit the spot - they are effective, believable and usually joyful. They never appear staged yet they appear to be a very special reality - that is one of happy acceptance - happy to be young or happy to old, white, black, yellow, brown, happy to be. And happy to be wherever they may be - on the streets of Cairo, New York City, suburban USA, in the corporate office, the hospital, etc., etc. Driving it all is that sense of truth within yourself that steers you away from what is false and toward that which is true.

https://www.wspf.com/

William Vazquez

Going to places I have never been, figuratively or literally, is one of my favorite things. And I feel lucky that the range of clients and projects I have worked with for the past two decades has allowed me to shoot in five continents and meet all kinds of people: scientists, farmers, businesspeople, orphans, doctors, community activists, families, monks.

I am also adaptable in my approach to work. Can I shoot video? Yes. Can I direct a shoot remotely from 13 time zones away? Yes. Can I carry all my own equipment across multiple sites for weeks on end? Yes. Being married to one kind of equipment or to one visual approach is not for me. What matters most is telling visual stories and finding the essence of people in the simplest way possible.

Growing up in multicultural New York City gave me the foundation to feel comfortable in any setting, whether or not I speak the language of my subjects. At 18, I ditched electrical engineering when I discovered photography and spent a summer in Paris, followed by some study in Parsons School of Design. But what shaped me the most as a photographer was old-fashioned apprenticeship, as assistant to photographers who showed me how to make photos that look effortless even when working in the toughest situations.

https://www.williamvazquez.com/

Rick Schatzberg

Rick Schatzberg is a Brooklyn, NY and Norfolk, CT-based photographer. After completing a one-year certificate program from the International Center of Photography in in 2015, he earned his MFA in photography from the Hartford Art School in August, 2018.

Rick’s photographs have been shown in solo and group exhibitions in New York City; Cincinnati; Atlanta; Lenox, MA; Nacogdoches, TX; Norfolk, CT; and Berlin, Germany. Prints of his work are in a number of private collections. His first monograph, Twenty Two North (2015) won first prize in the “One for the Books” award at the Ballarat Foto International Bienniele (Australia, 2015)

Rick has had a varied career. He holds a degree from Columbia University in Anthropology (1978), played French horn with Cecil Taylor’s jazz orchestra in 1970s, and spent more than thirty years as a business executive and entrepreneur in the New York metropolitan area.

Rick is married with two grown children. He is engaged in his photography practice on a full-time basis and is currently completing his second photobook, The Boys. /

http://rickschatzberg.com/

Sharlene Morris

When I visit new people and places, the details I notice most and try to capture are those things that I recognize, that are similar to my own experience and to the human condition on the whole. And in the current political climate of the United States, where there is substantial political fear mongering fueled by statements focused on our differences, this imagery is more vital than ever as a reminder that, actually, we are all very much the same.

https://www.sharlenemorris.com/