Jonathan Higbee: This is What NYC Street Photographers Sometimes Experience

All words and images by Jonathan Higbee. Used with permission.

Let me tell you about my day. It was odd and saturated with adrenaline thanks to an ambitious group of security personnel who are now schooled in civil rights!

A gang of security guards outside the Time Warner Center decided it was a good use of their time and mine to harass, intimidate and threaten me. I was photo-waiting (like I do) at a beautiful scene with filtered afternoon light combined with gorgeous bounced light that Midtown and its skyscrapers so generously afford sometimes. I was on the sidewalk, photographing urban geometry-type work. The first guard to approach me came up and told me I had to leave, that I was a threat to national security. You know how Manhattan has pretty much become an open air psychiatric hospital in recent years? Well, yeah, I thought he was insane and ignored him.

He persevered (bless his heart), so I realized he was serious and removed my ear buds one by one (modern day equivalent of taking off earrings) to play ball.

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Thor Vermijlen: Photographic Serenity in Urban Geometry

All images and words by Thor Vermijlen. Used with permission.

I’m Thor Vermijlen, a student from Belgium who loves photography. I recently went on a trip to Berlin. The one thing I noticed the most about the beautiful city is its diversity. This photo series is an unusual way of showing that diversity and how it can be beautiful. I photographed different beautiful windows from modern to ancient and clean to broken in different perspectives. e-mail me if you have more questions about me or the series.

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Salad Days: The Australian Skater Scene in Black and White

All images and words by James Grundy. Used with permission.

My name is James Grundy, I’m a 28 year old photographer from Australia.

I guess I became a photographer at around the age of 11, when I used to steal my mum and dad’s digital camera and sneak off to document what was happening around me, little social events and misadventures. I was finally gifted my own camera at around 16 which was one of the first Olympus digital waterproof cameras. I think I took around 20,000 photos on that thing before it seized up. From there I moved onto DSLRs starting with a Nikon D200, then a Nikon D3000, Nikon D3100, then a Nikon D7100.

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Vagabonds: Following the Final Moments of the NYC Punk Scene

All images and text by Olivia Pasquarelli.

The Vagabonds project happened naturally, starting in 2012 and spanning all the way until 2015. Prior to starting this project, I had already been going to concerts and shooting, but I began becoming more interested in the subcultures of the people attending the shows and the spaces they occupied than the actual performers. I had just moved to a new place, and the passion and dedication some subcultures I discovered in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan fascinated me. I went to more and more shows, having my camera on me at all times ready to shoot anyone who would let me. The people in the photographs became my friends, and the more I took their photos and learned about their lives, the more obsessed I became with shooting more and capturing their unique point of view.

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The Urban Movement: Keith Reid’s Wonderful Photos of Dancers in the Streets

All images and text by Keith Reid. Used with permission.

I have always been fascinated by photography and how it connects people with moments in time. I don’t just see a photograph, I see an emotion or an idea that compels the viewer to truly feel connected with the subject by telling a story. My photography has served many purposes for me: it has saved me from my own darkness; forced my hand at a confidence I didn’t know I had; connected me with amazing people I would have never met otherwise. Now I want to use photography as a platform to showcase the sacrifice, skill, dedication, and inspirational talent I get to see in my subjects every day. I shoot primarily in Micro Four Thirds with the Panasonic G85 and use 12-60mm f3.5-5.6 OIS, 25mm f1.7 G ASPH, and a 14mm f2.5 G.

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David J Fulde: Mixing Colors, Lighting and Portraiture

All images and words by David J Fulde. Used with permission.

My name is David J. Fulde, I am a photographer currently based in Toronto, ON.

I work a colorist and online editor in the film industry at night, leaving my days free to work as a portrait photographer. Being a part-time worker as a photographer allows me to really pick and choose commissions as I don’t need to worry about putting food on the table. I am really not an event photographer, nor someone that wants to shoot white-wall catalogue sort of photos. I enjoy creating images that are quintessentially mine, and try to avoid trends as much as possible.

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Dave Harrell: On Starting Out in Portrait Photography

All images and words by Dave Harrell. Used with permission.

My name is Dave Harrell. I am a portrait photographer just beginning to make a regional name for myself. I shoot in Northern Michigan and, while focusing on portraits, I am now also booking weddings (I have 5 this year).

I learned photography in the early 90s while serving in the US Air Force. I was stationed in Washington DC and fell in love with the museums, art, and architecture. I purchased a Minolta 7000i and several prime lenses and enrolled in photography classes offered on base. By 1993 I was transferred to Oxford, UK and my landscape/architecture photography love ignited.

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Neal Auch’s Dark Food Photography Is a Slap in the Face to Factory Farming (NSFW)

All images and words by Neal Auch. Used with permission.

I’m a fine art photographer living in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Most of my recent work concerns the commodification of suffering, and the ethics of eating animals. My work explores these themes by presenting animal organ meats that are intended for human consumption in an unfamiliar context where I hope that the underlying ugliness of our food system is exposed.

I took a somewhat chaotic trajectory to get to where I am now. My background is in pure mathematics, and I spent the better part of a decade in academia, doing rather esoteric research. Those kinds of jobs are almost all short-term contracts, so I moved around a lot. The frequent moves took a toll on my personal life, and my passion for the work I was doing waned. I hit a breaking point a few years ago, while I was living in the UK, and I rather abruptly abandoned my post there to come back home to Canada and settle into a more stable life with my spouse. To make ends meet I did contract work for a while and, in my spare time, I made a lot of art and I did a lot of introspection about what I wanted to do with my life. I stumbled into photography at this point and fell in love with the process. Since then I’ve devoted pretty much all of my creative energy to taking pictures.

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Debmalya Sinha: A Black and White Personal Documentary Photographer

All images and text by Debmalya Sinha. Used with permission.

My name is Debmalya Sinha and I’m a personal documentary photographer. As Martin Parr once said, “Unless there’s some vulnerability there, I don’t think you’re going to get good photographs”; I started looking for my vulnerabilities inside my otherwise easy and mostly satisfying life and quickly found out one can find pain even in the intense orgasms inside the most loving embraces of life if one is looking for it. Emptiness and fear became central to my photographs and my life during this period. A downward spiral of self inflicted sufferings later, I slowly realised that crisis is not only about pain and suffering. Simultaneous joy of an ephemeral moment and the sadness as it floats away is a projection of vulnerability too and can be expressed together. This helped me start my current project “Mono No Aware” where I’ve explored emptiness and togetherness concurrently in a dreamlike fictional sequence. Here is a very short video of a subset of the pictures from the project.

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Dan Grove: Photographic Perfection in the Reimagination of the Mundane

All images and text from Dan Grove. Used with permission.

Hi! I’m Dan – I’m 19 and from Gloucester in the UK. I’ve just finished my Photography A2 course and I’ll be setting up my exhibition for it at school soon! I shoot with a Canon 60D and 18-135mm STM or occasionally my iPhone for quick snaps.

My photography is all about reimagining the mundane – the bit of England I live in is reaaalllly dull so taking decent photos can be quite a challenge at times. I love to notice the things that other people might miss and I’m always looking to get the shot that makes people look twice or wonder how/where I’ve taken it. I tend to switch across a few different styles in my work – I either shoot bold and clean architectural stuff or gritty, documentary-style street work when I’m out and about. I’ve also spent some time in the studio at school as part of my A Level course.

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Brandon Pittser: On Artistic Geometry, Symmetry and Shapes in Photography

All words and images by Brandon Pittser. Used with permission.

As a photographer, I would describe myself as a permanent learner, because I think the most enriching work happens at the intersection of my vision and something I’ve never done before. I try to adopt a growth mindset, because I deeply believe progress only happens outside of your comfort zone, but I balance that self-applied pressure with a sincere love of the craft. Robert Frost once wrote that a poem “begins in delight and ends in wisdom,” and that describes my creative process. Many times, I’ll have an epiphany in the development phase that elevates or entirely re-interprets the material from the shooting phase, and those are the most exciting moments for me.

For gear, I use a humble Canon T3i (with 50mm and 55-250mm lenses) and my favorite object, the Ricoh GR II – I take all of this gear with me everywhere. I use Photoshop and Lightroom for development, but not necessarily in that order. For subjects I favor architecture, street photography, and landscapes. Because I try my hand at lots of styles, it’s tough for me to encapsulate my work in a single genre, but I think of my work broadly as dream-like, candid, surreal, minimal, abstract, and contemplative. That’s a lot of adjectives, which is probably cheating.

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Purple Mangrove: Exploring the Rougher Side of Miami in Documentary Photos

All images and words by Daniel Valledor. Used with permission.

Miami is probably America’s most multicultural city (perhaps with the exception of NYC). In fact, you’d think you’re in a different country if it wasn’t for the red, white and blue flags in front yards and massive deep beats coming from black SUVs.

I hadn’t been to Miami for over 20 years, so when I arrived I was (once again) very impressed by how the most evident sociocultural contrasts blended in with the tasty pinkish colors and palm trees. A guy in a Bentley here, a homeless who’s just passed out in the middle of the sidewalk there… And I felt very lucky to see each and every scene with an unbiased eye, something that usually helps photographers capture cultural shock in an honest way.

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100 Days of Protests: A Kickstarter Book Campaign Highlighting Trump Protests

All images and words by Stefan Immler. Used with permission.

I’m a photographer from Washington DC and I am excited to tell you about “100 Days of Protests”, a photo book about the protests during the first 100 days of the Trump inauguration.

From day 1 to day 100 after the inauguration of President Trump, I have documented all protests in my home town Washington, D.C., by taking thousands of photos on black & white film. The 100 best photos are included in the upcoming photo book “100 Days of Protests”, representing 100 days of protest. “100 Days of Protests” is very timely and will find very broad public interest, has a massive built-in audience, and has the potential to become a “classic” and important historic document similar to the photojournalism books of the Civil Rights and Vietnam ears.

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January Turla’s Rorschach Inspired Photos Help Her Combat Mental Illness

All images and words by January Turla. Used with permission.

​​​​I am Ja Turla and I’ve been shooting since my sophomore year in my secondary education here in the Philippines. University came and I met my late Photojournalism professor, Amer Amor, who taught me to keep on shooting and be great at what I do despite the fact that I didn’t have my own gear that time. He was a great influence and still is even though he left the material world so early.

Now at 23 with Bipolar I disorder and with rapidly fluctuating state at freelancing (equal to my mood), I have been engaging myself in tweaking photos of trees to create mirrored images. I was inspired by Rorschach from the graphic novel Watchmen by Alan Moore. Rorschach inkblot test got my attention and I merged my love for nature and this psychological test. I call it Mirrored Trees. It then progressed to kaleidoscopes and mandalas that I guess are very new to my audience’s eyes.

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How I Learned to Connect the Technical and Artistic Parts of My Photographic Mind

All images by Tracie Maglosky. Used with permission.

When I was 25 years old, I was pregnant with my first child. I was the most excited I’d ever been in my lifetime because all I’d ever dreamed of being was a mother. The love I felt for this invisible being was more than my heart could hold and it would spill out all over anyone and everyone with whom I came into contact. I’d never felt more creative or inspired. At 26 weeks I was headed to my ultrasound appointment to have the results of our gender identification. It was then I learned that our sweet little dream had no heartbeat. I delivered our little baby with the most broken heart you could ever imagine and I have not one image to remember it by.

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One Photographer’s Perspective from the 2017 Women’s March

Photo Essays is a series on the Phoblographer where photographers get to candidly speak their mind about a specific subject or project of theirs. Want to submit? Send them to editors@thephoblographer.com.

All Images By Spencer Bentley. Be sure to follow him and his business on Instagram. Used with Permission. 

 

Every now and then an event occurs where disparate points of tension and interests in your life converge. Whether or not that event is something you want to celebrate or just hurry to forget is usually a matter of chance and circumstance. Luckily for me one such an event occurred in the best way possible with the Women’s March on Washington.

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Tomasz Cuncvir Created a Pinhole Camera with a Matchbox

Photo Essays is a series on the Phoblographer where photographers get to candidly speak their mind about a specific subject or project of theirs. Want to submit? Send them to editors@thephoblographer.com.

All Images By Tomasz Cuncvir. Used with Permission. 

I wanted to present you some of my work I did back in 2010/2011 with a similar design. I have updated it since to make it a SLIT SCAN MATCHBOX PINHOLE CAMERA! (world’s first, perhaps) 🙂 I am attaching those photos as well at the end of this email, should you be interested. Films were Agfa APX 100 New, And Kodak Portra 160. Those photographs come from my first exhibition in Nowa Ruda, June 2011.

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Greg Turner’s Candid Street Portraits Use Light in a Gorgeous Way

Photo Essays is a series on the Phoblographer where photographers get to candidly speak their mind about a specific subject or project of theirs. Want to submit? Send them to editors@thephoblographer.com.

All images and text by Greg Turner.

My interest has always been to explore identity, emotions and experiences, in particular those influenced by existentialism and angst. It is almost certainly a little self-indulgent but it is entirely the product of my own experiences and difficulties as a child; of having to figure out who you are and how you’re going to ‘be’ when those around you don’t want you to ‘be’ with them. Exclusion at a young age has a lasting impact but thankfully my conclusions as an adult are entirely positive. I’m happy to be who I am even if the process of self-understanding is by no means finished.

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I Used to Say, “I’ll Never Do Weddings.” Then I Shot One.

All images and guest blog post from Nathan Hostetter. Be sure to also check out his instagram.

The phone call was great; the groom and I had a lot in common and he sounded really excited to have me photograph the wedding. I made sure he understood I had never shot a wedding before and that,  based on the budget, I would not be bringing a second shooter. The groom (also named Nathan) told me they weren’t looking for traditional wedding photos. He explained this would be a small wedding, no wedding party, and no expectation of a shot list.

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