Photographer #449: Miti Ruangkritya

Miti Ruangkritya, 1981, Thailand, studied Photojournalism at the University of Westminster. His work is mainly documentary based yet he tries not to restrict himself in any way. He is currently working on an ongoing project that consists of a polaroid installation placed on the beach of Nongkhai in Thailand. A dining table displays the polaroids without placeholders, inviting the viewers to pick up the images and be involved. By adding mattresses and swimming rings he wants to create a relaxed atmosphere for the audience to enjoy the work outside of a typical gallery exhibition. In his series On the Edge he took a closer look at Siem Reap, a city he had visited in 1991 when there was only one hotel and one bar. Today the city has massively exploded in size consisting of 5 star hotels, restaurants and bars. Miti viewed the city from a distance "from the vantage point of someone approaching (or perhaps momentarily escaping) the city." His work has been exhibited in London, Paris and Thailand and his portfolio will be featured in the May 2012 edition of the British Journal of Photography. The following images come from the series Imagining Flood, Northern Route and On the Edge.

Website: www.mi-ti.com

Photographer #439: Colin Delfosse

Colin Delfosse, 1981, Belgium, is a documentary photographer who studied Journalism. Together with three other photographers he founded the Out of Focus collective in 2005. As a collective (5 photographers) they focus on social issues. One of his latest projects focuses on Kazakhstan where he concentrates on the Soviet legacy in the country, still visually present. In 2010 he portrayed a large number of Congolese wrestlers and the culture around it. This series won the PDN photo annual award in 2011. Colin has traveled extensively for his strong and intimate projects. He has been to countries as China, Mali and Iraqi Kurdistan where he documented the movement of the Free Women of Kurdistan movement. Colin's work has been featured in The New York Times, Le Monde and The International Herald Tribune to name a few. The following images come from the series Polygon - Soviet Legacy in Kazakhstan, part I, Congolese Wrestlers and The PKK Amazons.

Website: www.outoffocus.be

Photographer #411: Adam Amengual

Adam Amengual, 1981, USA, is a portrait photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. He studied at Massachusetts College of Art and Parsons School of Design. After graduating he started assisting commercial photographers as Ruven Afanador and Art Streiber. Even though he was photographing for himself and commercially he felt the urge to create his own series. While researching gangs, cults and hardcore religious factions he came accross Homeboy Industries, a non-profit organization assisting former gang members to become positive and contributing members of society. He portrayed the former gang members at Homeboy Industries which resulted in a series named Homies. The images are stylized and aesthetically composed mug shots. He hopes that the viewer connects to the portrayed on a more human level. It is important to Adam that his subjects are always shown in a respectful manner. The following images come from the series Homies: Portraits of Former LA Gang Members, Day Laborers and People, Places, and Things...

Website: www.adamamengual.com

Photographer #402: Stefan Milev

Stefan Milev, 1981, Bulgaria, is a very productive fashion and fine-art photographer based in Paris, France. He spend seven years assisting major photographers around the globe and worked as a photographer in New York for a period of three years. He wants his images to resemble paintings and includes a sense of mystery and beauty, trying to capture emotion, mystic and soul. He wants the photographs to be simple and unique. He is heavily inspired by the great photographers of the 19th and 20th century as Alvin Langdon Coburn, George Seeley, Peter Lindbergh, Irving Penn and Helmut Newton. His images have appeared in magazines and publications as Tranoï Magazine, DERZEIT Magazine and Qvest. The following images come from various different shoots.

Website: www.stefanmilev.com

Photographer #379: Zhang Xiao

Zhang Xiao, 1981, China, studied Architecture at Yantai University. Between 2005 and 2009 he worked for the Chongqing Morning Post and has since been active as a freelance photographer. His project Coastline focuses, as the title describes, on the Chinese coastline which is 18000 kilometres long. For Xiao the sea is a place of strong emotions and rich imagery. He states that "the sea is the beginning of lives and dreams." The project also clearly shows how China is changing and has been changing in the last 30 years since it began opening up. This change is also visible in his project They. The project documents the Chinese culture while undergoing a societal change. It shows culture and tradition, but also the youth and their newly acquired culture. Amongst his other projects we find a series called Three Gorges. The Three Gorges Dam was completed in 2006 and presents many economic benifits, however, as the images of Zhang show us, it has also led to a vast amount of deconstruction and demolition. Zhang has exhibited his work in China, Japan, Germany, England and France. The following images come from the series Coastline, They and Three Gorges.

Website: www.zhangxiaophoto.com

Photographer #349: Antonio Bolfo

Antonio Bolfo, 1981, USA, is a photojournalist based in New York City. His career started working as an animator for video games before he decided to persue photography fulltime. For his series NYPD: Operation IMPACT he followed the youngest, most untested officers on their operation IMPACT. The police men and women are send to the most violent and dangerous neighbourhoods of NYC for a plunge into "The Job". The 30 rookies in the South Bronx are confronted with some of the most vicious criminals. Bolfo also visited Haiti on several occasions resulting in series on the aftermath of the devastating earthquake of 2010. In Haiti he also followed local fishermen who had to dig mass graves to bury the dead and he visited the mass garbage dumps in Port au Prince where a vast community tries to survive by searching food and scrap metal at the dumping site. Antonio was recently selected for the World Press Joop Swart masterclass. The following works come from the series NYPD: Operation IMPACT, Mass Garbage Dumps of Cite Soleil and Grave Diggers of Ti Tanyen.

Website: www.antoniobolfo.com

Photographer #316: Kathryn Parker Almanas

Kathryn Parker Almanas, 1981, USA, is a conceptual fine art photographer who also focuses on making collages. She received a BFA at the Massachusetts College of Art and an MFA at Yale University School of Art. Inspired by a personal experience with bodily illness, her work deals with the universal themes of corporeal existence, anxieties and phobias connected to the world of medicine. In her series Pre-Existing Condition she uses food as a stand-in for the body and its organs. Pastry, jellies and fruit juices become flesh and blood, creating abstract images of "the parts of ourselves both essential to our survival and responsible for our death." In her earlier series Pastry Anatomy she "treated" various pastries as a surgeon or lab would. Her work has been exhibited throughout the USA. The following images come from the series Pre-Existing Condition, Spellato and Medical Interior.

Website: www.kathrynparkeralmanas.com

Photographer #304: Federico Cabrera

Federico Cabrera, 1981, Argentina, is a fashion photographer and designer who works and lives in Helsinki. He left Argentina at age 18 and is based in Finland since 2005 and has been doing various projects ever since. In the last two years he has focused mainly on his own works amongst which is a project called Sect et Sept, building a conceptual fashion house, collaborating with other creatives and using fabrics and trash. The clothes featured in the shoots are build from scratch and they cannot be bought. Gilles et Dada is one of his other projects including photography and graphic design aswell as Who Said We Can't, an online art gallery for young upcoming photographers. He "cut and pastes" within his pictures creating bizarre and fantastical effects. The following images come from The Emperors Black Rose, We Will All Burn / Sect et Sept and The Infamous Infant Prodigy / GD.

Website: www.federicocabrera.com

Photographer #265: Mikhael Subotzky

Mikhael Subotzky, 1981, South Africa, works and lives in Johannesburg and is an associate member of Magnum Photos. Mikhael has concentrated on prison life in various projects. In 2008 he released the book Beaufort West, about a small town with a prison in the middle. The prison is situated at the center of a traffic circle. Due to the prison he started to explore this transit town and its margins. Beaufort West was shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His latest project Ponte City, together with Patrick Waterhouse, is a work of art. He photographed each window, door and TV set of the fifty-four storey building in Johannesburg that has had an eventful history. All of these images have been put together in three massive light-boxes of nearly four meters tall, having similar proportions to the Ponte City buildings. The following images come from the series Umjiegwana, Beaufort West and Die Vier Hoeke.

Website: www.subotzkystudio.com

Photographer #257: Karen Mirzoyan

Armenian photographer Karen Mirzoyan, 1981, born in Georgia is a documentary photographer and a photojournalist. He has done several series and is currently working on various long-term projects. His photostory called The Unrecognized Islands of Caucasus is divided in four parts. These different parts of his story are also edited into different chapters. Karen's multi-layered chapters create a very profound insight into stories that deal with war. He shows us an enormous diversity of the effects of war. Karen's work is strong, personal, full of respect and frightening at the same time. The following images come from the storyparts Nagorno-Karabakh Republic / Artsakh, Republic of Abkhazia / Apsny and Republic of South Ossetia.

Website: www.karenmirzoyan.com
Video on his previous project My Roads: Armenia-Turkey Border

Photographer #253: Matthieu Gafsou

Swiss/French photographer Matthieu Gafsou, 1981, is a landscape or urban landscape photographer. In his impressive body of work we find the series Surfaces, a collection of photographs taken in Tunisia. The places he encountered in Tunisia varied in strange ways. He felt that the land was devided by tradition and aspiration and that the structures failed to create any coherence. He photographed the buildings that merely create a surface or make-believe. He feels that "these new cities are in fact a mere reflection of a modernity the country has not really found out for itself." The hotels, a mix of modernity and false authenticity. and the modern houses are for a large part a created reality which can be seen on the surface, but it cannot be felt or experienced as something real. In 2009 he released Surfaces as a monograph. Matthieu has exhibited his work on numerous occasions in Europe and the USA. The following images come from the series Terres Compromises, Alpes and Surfaces.

Website: www.ph0.ch

Photographer #212: Newsha Tavakolian

Newsha Tavakolian, 1981, Iran, is a self-taught photographer. Her work has been published in magazines as Time Magazine, Newsweek and Stern. Her main focus lies on women's issues. She started out as a photojournalist, covering stories in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon amongst others. Slowly her work has shifted towards a more documentary and creative approach. In her series "listen", she photographed six female singers who are not allowed to sing solo, perform in public or produce CD's due to the Islamic tenets. She then created six images and turned them into CD covers for these singers. As a statement she left the CD cases empty. Newsha's portfolio is filled with interesting stories. The following images come from "listen" and Mother of Martyrs.

Website: www.newshatavakolian.com

Photographer #185: Nicolas Dhervillers

Nicolas Dhervillers, 1981, France, is a photographer that keeps fooling it's viewers. What appears as reality is actually a fabricated reality. In his series Tourist he has taken night pictures of remote places in which he relights certain parts creating "non-places". He then went on the internet searching for the most banal holiday snap possible. He combines the two images letting the people be tourists in his images. In the series Préfiguration, Nicolas photographed visitors in the Pompidou Centre in Paris and put them into spaces of the building site of the future Pompidou Centre in Metz. The following images come from the series Tourist #2, Préfiguration and Landscape Painting.

Website: www.nicolasdhervillers.com
Video in French

Photographer #183: Nico Krijno

Nico Krijno, 1981, South-Africa, works between Cape Town and London. His photography often contains nudity and has an element of spontaneity and rebelliousness. Nico primarily uses analogue cameras to create his works that capture the raw hedonistic essence of youth and sexuality. He has worked for clients as Nike and Dazed and Confused and is currently working on a monograph that should be titled; On how to fill those gaps. The following images come from various portfolio's.

Website: www.nicokrijno.com

Photographer #163: Andreas Laszlo Konrath

Andreas Laszlo Konrath, 1981, UK, currently lives in Brooklyn and is a portrait photographer. His main focus lies on identity and youth. He studied Fine Art at the London Guilghall University. Andreas has released several books with Pau Wau Publications. The latest one So Alone I Keep the Wolves at Bay contains images from the series Come Friendly Bombs about the band Gallows. The following images come from My Generation, Come Friendly Bombs and The Faces You Know (Part I).

Website: www.andreaslaszlokonrath.com

Photographer #133: Yann Gross

Yann Gross, 1981, Switzerland, went to Uganda in 2008 and 2009 to document the only Skatepark in East Africa. The skatepark was build by the youngsters themselves from Kitintale, a suburb of Kampala, without support from the government or NGO's. The series Kitintale is released as a book. Earlier he released the book Horizonville. He went on a motorcycle through the Rhône valley in Switzerland to find a community that wants to live and look like citizens of the USA. Although most of them have never been there, "they feel a sense of belonging to another culture that they don't really know." The following images come from the series Kitintale, Horizonville and Agreste.

Website: www.yanngross.com

Photographer #130: Nelli Palomäki

Nelli Palomäki, 1981, Finland, released her book Elsa and Viola in 2009 in an edition of 300 copies. Nelli focuses in her black and white portraits on the gestures and the diversity of glances of her subjects. Her series I, Daughter is build in three stages. First she took close-up photographs, in the second stage she dressed her models in "historical looking" clothing and in the third stage the models have control when the shutter is released. For the full explanation see her website. Nelli's work has been exhibited throughout Europe. The following images come from Elsa and Viola, I, Daughter and Selected works 2004-2009.

Website: www.nellipalomaki.com