Robert Larson

Robert Larson is a young Los Angeles-based documentary photographer and photojournalist. His work has been featured by the New York Times LENS Blog, the Los Angeles Times, PDN, and others.

Following the 2010 Haitian earthquake, Larson packed up and went to Haiti to document the tragedy and help the world understand the magnitude of what had happened to the people there. In one interview, Larson mentioned that prior to his trip to Haiti, he had never enjoyed photographing much during his travels. Having worked as a travel photographer's assistant prior to the earthquake, he had never felt an emotional connection to his work.

In 2007, he photographed the death of his beloved dog and also began to photograph his grandparents. It was during these projects that he began to form a sense of purpose and develop a personal voice within his work. When the earthquake struck Haiti in 2010, he knew he had to photograph it.

Beyond Waiting for Haiti and Grandma and Grandpa, other projects Larson has gained national attention for over the past several years include his series The Food Runner, documenting his real-life experience working in the Los Angeles restaurant industry, as well as The Summer of Our Lives, documenting youth culture and experiences in Southern California.

Sebastiao Salgado: Genesis

This Brazilian photographer, led a life photographing harsh realities and wars. He became ill and in order to heal himself, set out on an 10 year journey to capture the last humanities of the world. I feel that Salgado’s collection is strong and beautiful. Just knowing that these are the last images he plans on taking before he retires is powerful in the sense that he wants to see good and beauty in the world so he went on an elaborate trip just to find it.

Watch him explain Genesis here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHJWgQxTous

Watch his TEDx video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH4GAXXH29s 

       

 Marcela Paniak

Entering Marcela Paniak's visual universe is something of an extraordinary journey. This young Polish photographer skillfully uses “intermediality” and plays with photography as an artifact or a materialized souvenir. Memory and its process are at the center of her work, suitable for introspection. What is drawn out of it is a moving innocence, an overwhelming and almost unreal feeling of nostalgia.(http://www.photography-magazine.net/interviews/sensorial-experiment-memory-marcela-paniaks-sound-and-photomontages)
This is how the artist describe her work: " Discovered objects have their own memory. Although in their degraded and deprived form, they may have lost their original individuality, they still store in themselves a part of history. In my photographs, I am attempt to stop time—if only for an instant—to allow these old elements to gain new form." (https://www.lensculture.com/articles/marcela-paniak-rediscovered-objects-giving-new-life-to-the-past#slide-8)

These photos look pretty simple. Just some objects on a flat background. But the artist  made some decisions that  gave a specific  quality to these photos, such as textures in the background, black and white photos, and  putting different parts of different objects together to make a new object. Every piece of each object  has come from a different place and has its own story, and we can see all these different stories coming together and fixed in the photographs. With this view, she successfully played with the concept of time and history. It seems that time is fixed, and the objects  frozen in these  photos.

Link to artist's website:
http://marcepani.art.pl/index.php?i=przedmioty&lang=en

Evan Baden

Evan Baden is a American Photographer who in 2014 received his MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago. Baden's work has been featured in many publications such as Time, The Guardian, and New York Magazine. I came across Baden's work in File Magazine on his photo series The Illuminati 

This series highlights the consumption of technology by the youth in America. Baden poses the question with this series do we consume technology or has technology consumed us? 

Claudine Doury

http://www.claudinedoury.com/en/portfolio_artek.htm
Claudine Doury is living in Paris, and she has received a few awards for her work and has published a few books. Though these photos aren't the most current (the dates range from 1999-2011), I will continue to go back to them for inspiration now that I've found them.
I came across her while reading an interview on a photography blog called Mull it Over, where Claudine's "cinematic-like" work was mentioned. I can see how that description fits; she photographs in a way that make her photos look like small moments in a scene. I appreciate her approach, where some images feel pre-planned and set up while others do not. I think it's that combination that makes each of her projects strong.






 


 

Housing Developments of the American West By: William Rugen

     Originally raised in Northern Michigan, William Rugen is a Seattle-based photographer.  After working as a biologist for 20 years, he quit his job to pursue photography. Inspired by Manifest Destiny and his love for the west Western Dioramas, he explores the conflict between man and nature specifically, the abundance of open space versus the inhabited. 

 Rows of houses in the desert, North Las Vegas, Nevada

End of a street with opening to the desert in Henderson, Nevada 

Housing development on the edge of the desert, Maricopa, Nevada

Sara Rahbar

Sarah Rahbar is a Iranian artist who works both in Tehran and New York.  Rahbar has said that she doesn't identify as a Muslim, but her Iranian background and the events that occure in her homeland influence her as an artist.

She frequently addresses subjects that deal with political issues and current events: themes of identity, nationalism and borders feature prominently in her work. 

One of the materials Rahbar uses most frequently in her work is flags. She dislikes the way flags divide and separate people, creating artificial borders and isolation and making people feel they are different from others in distant countries. In herOppression Series, Rahbar is “exploring ideas of national belonging, as well as the conflicting role of flags as symbols of ideological and nationalistic violence.” Countries, cultures, and diversity are major forces in the world today. According to the artist, “we have made our personal identities so important and supreme above all. We believe that it is our countries, our nationalism, our religions, our cultures, our beliefs and so on, that make us who and what we are.” The result that Rahbar sees is the dividing, separating, and labeling of individuals.

-Women Arab-American Artist