Photographers to know / Link 18 : Alex Prager

Wendy – Week-End 2010, photographed by Alex Prager.

Alex Prager, a 29-year old photographer grew up between Los Angeles and Switzerland, her work reflecting the unreal reality of the influence of a cinematic childhood. After experiencing an exhibition by William Eggleston, this self-taught photographer never looked back.

Inspired by the high drama of classic movies—which, despite their theatricality, touch upon genuine emotions of alienation, fear, anger, longing, and lust—Prager's images seem at first to be all exquisite surface. However the girls of this series—named “Barbara,” “Jane,” “Lois” and other such conventional and slightly old-fashioned monikers—conceal pain beneath their lipstick-lined smiles and dead eyes. Informed largely by Los Angeles, with its perpetual blue skies and birds singing from imported palm trees, Prager’s work exudes an underlying sense of the eerie monotony and unease that can permeate beneath the surface of beauty and the promise of happiness.

Annie – The Big Valley 2008, photographed by Alex Prager

In the artist's own words, she is “documenting a world that exists and doesn’t exist at the same time.” The trilogy began with girls playing archetypal roles in Polyester. Then in The Big Valley, the roles took on lives of their own, and the separation between make-believe and real life began to dissolve. With Week-end, which signifies the peak as well as the extent of the period, the façade becomes so thick that the illusion is now more real than the world they actually live in.

After the release of her first book The Book Of Disquiet (2005) Prager was given her first solo show at Robert Berman Gallery in Santa Monica, CA entitled "Polyester", which was covered by the Los Angeles Times. Along with her 2008 exhibition at The Michael Hoppen Gallery, London, Prager is slated to exhibit in New York in 2009.

"Her photographs reveal a keen eye for the shining and the bizarre, a bit Annie Leibovitz, a bit Diane Arbus."- The Los Angeles Times

Alex Prager continues to live and work in the Los Angeles area.

Eve – The Big Valley 2008, photographed by Alex Prager

Photographers to know / Link 17 : Michael Wolf

© Michael Wolf / The Transparant City, 2008.

In a diverse array of photographic projects Michael Wolf explores the complex cultural identities of China and Hong Kong, where he has lived since 1995. Wolf delves into subjects such as the formal and improvisational aesthetics of Hong Kong's architectural forms, the often-overlooked human presence at the heart of international industry, and the idiosyncratic ways city-dwellers shape their surroundings in an "organic metropolis." Throughout these interrelated series Wolf draws into question notions of public and private space, anonymity and individuality, history and modern development. Attuned to the cultural and economic undercurrents of his adopted home, Wolf remains humanely attentive to the personal details as well. Kenneth Baker, critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, has written of the "formal intelligence and acuity of observation" evident in Wolf's photographs, and while Wolf is meticulously and consistently observant, his photographs reflect a manner of working that is intuitive and fluid: from series to series Wolf assumes a range of viewpoints, intimate in some cases and removed in others, and alternates between approaches that are rigorously formal and playfully lyrical.

Michael Wolf was born in Munich (1954), Germany. He grew up in the USA and studied at UC Berkley and at the University of Essen in Germany. He has been living and working as a photographer and author in China for ten years.

© Michael Wolf / Tokyo Subway Dream, 2009.

Photographers to know / Link 16 : Thomas Wrede

Thomas Wrede’s work is about our relation to nature. Our longing for nature and the medialized description thereof. With his camera he observes how artificial nature is received in the same way as real nature. This subject matter is well known in German philosophy. Philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Hegel studied the dialectic relation to nature. Wrede thereby continues this German tradition as a photographer, questioning our perception of nature. His last series “Real landscapes” are manipulations of landscapes. By adding artificial details into real nature he creates a staged scene that looks authentic at first. For the observer it becomes difficult to see what is actually real and what is unreal. The resemblance to model construction kits is striking. In effect he creates dreamlike scenes of nature or perhaps even nightmares.


Thomas Wrede searches for sanctuary within an environment increasingly subjugated to man’s intrusion upon nature. His desire for asylum amidst chaos sends him seeking refuge in the infinite spaces that seem to hover at the remote edges of the world. A drift upon endless expanses of beach, snow, and sea, he renders beautiful the quietude of landscape in large-scale images that lure the viewer into their vastness.


All of these photographs share the feeling that the viewer could be anywhere. Nowhere does this anonymity of place more secure the viewer’s ability to lose him or herself within the landscape than in Wrede’s images of snow. Although they are completely devoid of human presence, they are not free from the author’s trace. Wrede playfully places fake plastic fir trees amongst an icy windswept landscape seemingly littered with sharp mountainous peaks. What seems at first to be an incredible vantage point reveals itself to be an otherworldly scene of his own construction.

Thomas Wrede is based in Muenster, Germany.

Photographers to know / Link 15 : Mona Breede

© Mona Breede / Look-Out, 2007.

I was seduced by the light play in her so called 'choreographic' approach of the city and industrial sites. She shows various series of photographs which examine the interaction between people and their man-made environment. Individuals or groups of people are set against the neutral shapes of modernist functional architecture. The artist does not ask people to pose for her, but she frequently manages to catch the decisive moment when their actions or gestures are particulary striking. In fact, when looking at these vivid pictures, the viewer is often reminded of choreographies or dancers on a stage. Mona Breede´s series usually comprise three or four pictures taken in rapid succession and invite us to explore the subtile changes occurring from one moment to the next. On the one hand, we may establish narritive links between the different situations captured in these images; on the other hand, Mona Breede´s poetic photographs also sharpen our perception of variations in form. Have a look at her website. Mona Breede was born in 1968, studied photography with Thomas Struth, and now lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany.

© Mona Breede / Splendid Isolation I, 2007.

© Mona Breede / Splendid Isolation II, 2007.

Photographers to know / Link 14 : Noah Kalina

© Noah Kalina / From the series 'California'.

I was seduced by the strangeness of his work, the ambivalence between reality and fantasy and the new approach on portrait and landscape. Have a look at Noah Kalina's website.

© Noah Kalina / From the series 'Road Trip'.

© Noah Kalina / From the series 'Portraits and Landscapes'.

© Noah Kalina / From the series 'Lost and Found'.

Photographers to know / Link 13 : Bieke Depoorter

© Bieke Depoorter. From the series Oe Menia - With Me, Russia 2008-2009.

Bieke Depoorter is a young female Belgian photographer who just finished Academie of Art and won the Photo Academy Award for GUP Magazine. She did one big travel project so far and about that project she writes:
' For three periods of one month, I have let the Trans-Siberian train guide me alongside forgotten villages, from living room to living room. Some Russian words, scribbled on a little piece of paper, allowed me to be welcomed and absorbed in the warm chaos of a family. Accidental encounters led me to the places where I could sleep. The living room, the epicentre of their life, establishes an intimate contact between the Russian inhabitants. In this room, they sleep, eat and drink as well as cry. For a brief moment, I was part of this. Their couch became my bed for one night. This way, I experienced transient, but very powerful, shared moments. We communicated without words, we understood eachother somehow. '

" I am looking for a place to spend the night.
Do you know people who would have a
bed, or a couch? I don’t need anything
in particular, and I have a sleeping-bag.
I prefer not to stay in a hotel, because I
don’t have a lot of money and because I
want to see the way people live in Russia.
Could I stay at your place, perhaps?
Thank you very much for your help! "

© Bieke Depoorter. From the series Oe Menia - With Me, Russia 2008-2009.

Photographers to know / Link 12 : Reiner Riedler

From the series Fake Holidays / Horizon 01, Tropical Islands, Germany 2007. © Reiner Riedler

Born in Gmunden, Austria in 1968 and living in Vienna. He first encountered photography at the age of 12. Two years later he had his own B/W darkroom. He moved to Vienna to study ethnology. Then he decided to study photography at the College for Photography. In 1993, he began working for the Anzenberger Agency.
In recent years, he has travelled mainly to countries in Eastern Europe.

His photo essays on social topics reflect his critical attitude concerning photography itself. He regards the "ethics of seeing" as an indispensable element of serious photography. His photographs have been published internationally in magazines like Stern, Le Monde 2, Spiegel, Focus, New York Times, Ojodepez, National Geographic Germany, and ADAC Reisemagazin.

From the series Fake Holidays / Wild River, Florida 2005. © Reiner Riedler

He participated in photofestivals like Visa pour l´Image, Rencontres de la Photographie Voies Off Arles, Fotosommer Stuttgart, and Freo Foto Freemantle, Australia. His photographs have also been exhibited internationally and two books have been published on Albania, Life at the Periphery“ (2001) and Ukraine: Fotografien (2003). His upcoming project, Fake Holidays, is a cynical statement on holiday culture in industrial countries.

He has been represented by the Regina Maria Anzenberger Agency since 1993, and a 16-page printed portfolio of his work about the Ukraine was published by the agency in 2000.

Have a careful look at Reiner Riedler's website!

From the series Eastern Europe / Picnic, Carpathian Mountains, Ukraine 2000 © Reiner Riedler

Photographers to know / Link 11 : Stefan Bladh

A hundred lands ends, Odessa, Ukraine © Stefan Bladh

After working as a graphic designer Stefan Bladh moves to Stockholm in 2000 to study photojournalism at Nordens Fotoskola for three years. He has been working as a professional photographer since 2003. He works mainly on his own projects and travels constantly in eastern Europe and middle Asia. He has been following and documenting a nomadic family around Anatolia for seven years and now releasing his first photographic book about their life. Beside that he has been working with a project from the Black Sea region called "Eclipse", a project still in progress. In january 2009 he was invited to participate in an artist residence by Atelier de visu in Marseille. More complete work you will find here.

A hundred lands ends, Odessa, Ukraine © Stefan Bladh

' We set out into the unknown. Because of desires difficult to appoint.
To escape something or to discover something.
Nostalgia is present: in search of something we have sensed or
experienced far earlier, preserved like flies in resin, in other places where time has moved indifferent circles. '

Per Wästberg

Photographers to know / Link 10 : Andrej Balco

Suburbs © Andrej Balco

Born in 1973, living in Slowakia. His website is here.

Photographers to know / Link 9 : Hin Chua

Road Trip Blues © Hin Chua

Hin Chua was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, educated in Australia and now lives the United Kingdom. Hin has used his nomadic life as inspiration for his photography, capturing subjects ranging from office workers in his series, "They Called me a Corporate Whore", to urban and rural landscapes in "After the Fall".
Hin's photography has evolved into a distinctive style that mixes a compositional aesthetic with the comedy of the absurd that is apparent in much of his work and while he appears to work on disparate subjects, it is this wit that holds the images together in a coherent whole.

' The relationship between man and nature is a precarious balance, as Hin Chua investigates in his series, ‘After the Fall’. His images are ones of careful observation, retaining a somewhat anonymous distance from his subjects.
Hin tells me that his approach is, ‘to pick a spot on a map that could be considered 'the middle of nowhere', get there and walk around for several hours, photographing what I find’. This has lead him to shoot the project in locations throughout the world (USA, Australia, UK, China & Japan, a lot of Europe), yet he has found the most of the sites ‘completely interchangeable.’ His work points out that regardless of culture or landscape, the dialogue between man and nature is fairly ubiquitous. Glaring industrial structures impose on pastoral scenes, yet there appears to be a reciprocal reaction taking place, in which the man made imitates the natural and the natural imitates the man made. The two elements surprisingly seem to have a seamless bond as Hin examines the complexity of this ever-transforming relationship. '

Emily Graham on Contact.

You can follow his work on flickr.

Photographers to know / Link 8 : Jeff Brouws

Jeff Brouws, born in San Francisco in 1955, is a self-taught artist. Pursuing photography since age 13, where he roamed the railroad and industrial corridors of the South Bay Peninsula, Brouws has compiled a visual survey of America's evolving rural, urban and suburban cultural landscapes. Using single photographs as subtle narrative and compiling typologies to index the nation's character, he revels in the "readymades" found in many of these environments. Influenced by the New Topographic Movement, the artist books of Ed Ruscha (to whom Brouws paid homage with his Twentysix Abandoned Gasoline Stations project in 1992) as well as the writings of cultural geographers like J.B. Jackson, Dolores Hayden and John Stilgoe, Brouws has combined anthropological inquiry and a bleak aesthetic beauty mining the overlooked, the obsolete, the mundane.

© Jeff Brouws

Initially engaged with what Walker Evans termed the "historical contemporary" along America's secondary highways beginning in the late 1980s, over the following twenty years Brouws has extended this inquiry into the everyday places occupied by most Americans – the franchised landscapes of strip malls, homogenized housing tracts and fast food chains. More recently, he has also instigated an all-encompassing photographic investigation of decimated inner cities: abandoned manufacturing sites, low-income housing, and other commercial ruins – residual public spaces left behind by the effects of de-industrialization, white flight, disinvestment, failed urban policy and overall societal neglect. Throughout these various series, Brouws seeks the nexus points behind the movement of capital and the cycles of construction, decline and renewal within the built environment. For him roads, highways and city streets – vital components of a national infrastructure – are both engines of economic development and symbols of human freedom. By subtle implication, his photographs also evoke the restlessness of an uncertain nation and communicate a low-lying foreboding. They also challenge the mythos of the American Dream and suggest an underlying disparity throughout a country that purports economic equality and social justice for all.

© Jeff Brouws

Brouws is the author of seven books including his most recent Approaching Nowhere published by W. W. Norton in 2006. His photographs can be found in major private and public collections including the Whitney Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Art, Harvard's Fogg Museum, Princeton University Art Museum, and the Henry Art Museum.

Photographers to know / Link 7 : David Solomons

© David Solomons


Born in London, David Solomons became fascinated by reportage photography after visiting the Magnum 'In Our Time' exhibition. A period in Barcelona teaching English cemented his ambition to be a photographer and he moved back to England in order to enrol on a Photography course which he managed to secure at Newport studying Documentary Photography in 1993.
Whilst there he soon became interested in the work of Garry Winogrand, Tony Ray-Jones and Elliott Erwitt among others and decided he wanted work along similar lines of personal expression rather than adhere to the socially conscious type of photojournalism that was popular amongst many photographers on the course.
Like many of the photographers he has admired over the years he initially did all of his street photography in black and white. Solomons soon realised however that in order to differentiate himself from his predecessors, it would be better if he worked in colour. There were a few notable colour photographers such as Joel Meyerowitz, Alex Webb and Martin Parr whom he admired but he felt his style of work was more akin to the previously mentioned people.

Photographers to know / Link 6 : Thomas E. Gardiner

© T. E. Gardiner

For the last three summers Gardiner has been documenting small towns and communities in the hinterland regions of Western Canada. These photography are in some ways biographical in the sense that they represent the places where he lived as a child and a teenager. Moving to New York in 2004 has enabled him to view these small communities differently as he began to consider their social, economic, and geographic relationships to major metropolitan centers.

Photographers to know / Link 5 : Lars Tunbjörk

© Lars Tunbjörk

Look at the amazing stories of Stockholm based documentary photographer Lars Tunbjörk, represented by Agence VU.

Photographers to know / Link 4 : Ying Tang

Invite you to have a intensive look at the work of Shangai based photographer Ying Tang on her flickr weblog and her website.

Photographers to know / Link 3 : Juan Buhler

© Juan Buhler

More about San Francisco based street photographer Juan Buhler? Have a great pleasure looking at his daily fresh b&w images on his weblog. For his website, look at www.jbuhler.com.

Photographers to know / Link 2 : Walter Neiger

© Walter Neiger


Have a look at Walter Neiger's photoweblog. You 'll find amazing street stills and surprising street photographs, all in black and white. Go to the archive and take your time.

Photographers to know / Link 1 : Markus Hartel

© Marcus Hartel

New label. One preference link a month.

First is New York based photographer Markus Hartel. For daily fresh work, interviews about his work on the street and amazing galleries go to
http://www.markushartel.com/blog.