awards emmy, london photography award, foam paul huf award

prager began her photography practice after viewing an exhibition of william eggleston's at the getty museum which was on view between 1999 & 2000. her staged color photographs are described by ken johnson as being influenced by cindy sherman, philip lorcadicorcia & dougl assirk. moma curator roxana marcoci has described prager's work as ‘intentionally loaded’, saying ‘it reminds me of silent movies— there is something pregnant, about to happen, a mix of desire & angst.’  michael govan the director of lacma has said that ‘prager's photographic & filmic compositions, like eggleston's photographs, alfred hitchcock's films, & edward hopper's paintings, reveal the extraordinary lurking within the ordinary. wreaking havoc with our involuntary voyeurism & our tendency to leap to conclusions about people's characters based on the merest details of their appearances, prager cues our own fantasies by representing her own.

in 2005, prager created a group of works, the book of disquiet, as an exhibition & joint publication with artist mercedes helnwein. she began to gain more attention after exhibiting polyester in 2007, which focused on what is now described as her signature cinematic styled portraits set in los angeles. her next series, the big valley, was shown in 2008 at michael hoppen gallery in london & in 2009 at yancey richardson gallery in new york. in 2010 prager exhibited week-end at m+bgallery in los angeles, yanceyrichardson gallery & michaelhoppen gallery where she debuted her first short film, despair alongside a group of photographs. despair was conceived in london during the big valley exhibition, where viewers were inquiring what happened before & after to the subjects in her photographic work. the film starring bryce dallas howard was a full-sensory version of prager's photographs in motion, showing the before, now and after of one of her images. her intention was to create pure, cinematic melodrama through the use of an array of artistic mediums – imagery, motion, color, sculpture, painting & sound. prager's despair was included in museum of modernart's exhibition ‘new photography 2010’ where she was recognized as a notable emerging talent

a pivotal moment for prager came in 2011 when kathy ryan, director of photography for the new york times magazine commissioned her to shoot 12, 1 minute films with some of 2011's stand-out film actors inspired by ‘cinematic villainy’. prager won an emmy for her touch of evil short film

in 2012, prager addressed themes of disaster & spatial turbulence with the series compulsion. exhibited at m+b gallery and yancey richardson gallery. prager's short film lapetitemort starring french actress judith godreche with narration from gary oldman was shown alongside the body of work. the film was a ‘contemplation on death’ & ‘a way for [her] to deal with the hopelessness [she] was feeling about the world. creating a parallel universe where tragedies happen but with a sense of lightness as well’

prager's series, face in the crowd, debuted at washington d.c.'s corcoran gallery of art in 2013 followed by a solo exhibition at lehmann maupin in new york

prager was commissioned by the paris opera in 2015 to create a film for 3 e scène. the film, la grande sortie, explores the tension between a performer's experience on stage and the audience watching

wreaking havoc with our involuntary voyeurism & our tendency to leap to conclusions about people's characters based on the merest details of their appearances, prager cues our own fantasies by representing her own.

For about ten years now, I have been creating paintographies. As its name suggests, a paintography is a mixture of painting and photography.

From photography, I keep the initial shot, an essential and unavoidable basis for the work to come. I also retain, despite all the successive manipulations carried out afterward on the computer, the precision, finesse and plastic quality that certainly distinguish it from painting other than hyper-realistic. However, a paintography is not a photograph, it is a plastic construction that raises doubts in the eyes, that raises the question of the nature of the image that is offered to the eyes of the spectators. What part of the work was captured by the objective, what part recreated by the software work, what part brought by the acrylic glazes?

Layers, layers, stacks: despite its extreme readability, a paintography is a complex construction, based on a succession of screens. The fabric or skin never appears naked, they are always covered by a material that is as much a screen as it is a body with them. This matter is itself obscured by squares that seem either to detach from it or to deepen within it; by evoking the pixels at the base of any digital image, these squares remind us that this matter is a decoy, that it is virtual. And yet, in the works in mixed technique, it is precisely these squares that appear in relief on the surface of the canvas, in a strange transparent materiality.

Layers, layers, stacks: despite its extreme readability, a paintography is a complex construction, based on a succession of screens. The fabric or skin never appears naked, they are always covered by a material that is as much a screen as it is a body with them. This matter is itself obscured by squares that seem either to detach from it or to deepen within it; by evoking the pixels at the base of any digital image, these squares remind us that this matter is a decoy, that it is virtual.

The photographs for which Dafydd Jones made his name seem a long way from Doncaster where he was born during the 1950s. After a stint in Wales his family moved to Oxford when he was ten. It was there where he took photographs of Oxford University’s dining clubs in the 1980s and these went on to win a Sunday Times Magazine photography competition. This led to an invitation by Tina Brown to take photographs of society weddings, parties and hunt balls for Tatler magazine. No one had quite taken pictures of these parties quite like this before.

‘It was like an invitation to a secret society’ he told the Times in 2018, ‘the “last hurrah” of the upper classes’.

"I was studying fine art in England and we went to Florence on an art school trip. We were looking round the Uffizi gallery when I saw these image-museum attendants worried about something on the painting. But I liked the way you can read the men crouching beneath the Titian as something ambiguous. It looks like an act of worship. 

A few years later in 1981, I was a prizewinner in a photography competition run by the Sunday Times magazine with a set of pictures of the 'Bright Young Things'. I was then hired by Tina Brown to photograph Balls, debutante dances and weddings for the Tatler magazine.

I moved to New York in 1989. My move there helped by generous editors. While there I worked as a  photographer for the New York Observer producing feature and news-related pictures. I covered celebrity and society events for Vanity Fair. Also for my own enjoyment, I did all the pictures for one issue about New York for Paper magazine.  I moved back to London in 1996. In America, everything was spread out over vast distances.  I'd come to realise how England had everything I wanted to photograph nearby. Art, fashion the literary world, beautiful countryside and all in a soft light. London had started to become the centre of the cultural world and was the place I wanted to be. Since returning back to London I've had slots in most of the broadsheet papers. 

For twenty years I did all my own darkroom printing in black and white. Typically at the time I would do one or two small prints of each picture. I closed my darkroom in the mid-nineties as I experimented with digital photography.

In 2015 after a disastrous magazine launch I found myself with an empty diary for the first time since 1980. I joined a community darkroom and printed a collection of silver gelatin prints in a boxed set called 'Exhibition in a Box'. I gave 3 boxes as gifts to my family. Then 2 boxes sold. I went on to print 2 more smaller boxed sets on 'Teenage Balls' and 'Sleepers'. Another smaller-sized box is the Dangerous Sports Club called Surreal Ski Race. In 2019, I made the Burning Boat box in an edition of 6. Very pleased with this one. I also made one Oxford box for the Bodleian Library with one A/P. I like to think of each Box either sitting on a shelf or as a kind of portable exhibition. Some of the collections shown here are ones I'm thinking of but have not yet printed. The Vanity Fair Years' from the nineties is another one in the pipeline. When I actually go through the films again I'll probably find quite a few more pictures. But I'm finding it hard to move on from the eighties as I keep finding more material.

It was Thatcher’s Britain, a period of celebration for those that had money.

Dafydd Jones › Last Hurrah of the Upper Classes

Slavica Ziener was born in Belgrade, Serbia. In the nineteen nineties, she moved to Germany & studied photography at the Academy of Photo Design in Munich. Portraiture has become central to her work, other focuses are travel & music photography. Ziener gets her inspiration from meeting people, celebrities as well as creative or edgy individuals, & discovering new places.

Slavica Ziener has long standing relationships with magazines such as Der Spiegel, SZ Magazin, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Zeit, Zeit Leben, GQ, Neon, Musikexpress, Rolling Stone, Art Magazine, Vanity Fair, Geo Wissen, Glamour, Axel Springer Brand Studio, Cosmopolitan, Manager Magazine. The photographer lives & works in Munich. BMG, Universal Music, Four Music, Die Toten Hosen, Gigolo Records, Serviceplan, Castrol, Engelhorn, Strellson, Piper Verlag, BMW, Roland Berger, Thüga Ag, Amundi Germany & more are amongst her clients.

Slavica gets her inspiration from meeting people, celebrities as well as creative or edgy individuals, and discovering new places.

Slavica Ziener › Black & White Portraiture

Henrik Purienne (born as Benninghoff H. Puren; 1977), is a South African photographer, film director, and founder of fashion publication, Mirage, living in Los Angeles. Purienne began his career making documentary films influenced by the realist aesthetic of filmmakers such as Eric Rohmer and John Cassavetes. His subjects are predominantly natural looking girls often set against beach- or poolside situations. He has created advertising campaigns and editorials for the brands Louis Vuitton, Maison Kitsuné, American Apparel, Maison Margiela, Interview Magazine, Playboy, Vogue, Lui, and Purple often featuring contemporary 'it girls' such as Sky Ferreira, Emily Ratajkowski, Camille Rowe, and Aymeline Valade.

In 2009 he launched the fashion and culture publication Mirage. Henrik Purienne’s photography has the unmistakable mixture of ethereal natural and physical beauty, with a warm and often exotic ambience. All this is interwoven with domestic and voyueristic sexual imagery, which converge at a point between provocation and profundity. With Holiday, his second volume of photography, Purienne presents a series of trips with friends and girlfriends captured between his native South Africa, the Mediterranean, and his new home, Los Angeles. Shot exclusively in his signature 35mm format, Purienne's images often include imperfections that belie the sophistication of his technique, resulting in images at once reminiscent of the past and the future. Mirage Magazine was founded independently by Henrik Purienne and Frank Rocholl as a 400 page independent fashion and culture magazine, inspired by the photographic aesthetic and hedonistic culture of the 1960s and 1970s.

Subject matter relates to timeless aesthetic in the fields of architecture, art and design interwoven with visions of forgotten utopias, unsung heroes and cinematic stagings. Editorial content has a documentary feel and often reflects the personal relationship of photographer and muse, with key themes being summer, sun, youth, freedom and rebellion. Henrik Purienne has curated his first book, the self-titled 'Purienne', fronted by friend and model Sonja van den Heever. Purienne's images afford us immeasurable scope for desire. It is where imagination and reality merge; art and eroticism are companions and self-expression reigns ultimate.

While sexualized content and nudity in photography is no new concept, Henrik Purienne shoots only health looking women, willing women, with unmade faces, hair unruly and clothing, if any, unfussy. All this amalgamates to encapsulate the beauty of his subject in her truest form. Most often, the backdrop is a sunny, domestic situation, engendering tender and nostalgic connotations; we can see and feel the heat through his images.

While sexualized content and nudity in photography is no new concept, Henrik Purienne shoots only health looking women, willing women, with unmade faces, hair unruly and clothing, if any, unfussy.

Henrik Purienne › Unmistakable Mixture of Ethereal Natural and Physical Beauty

From fashion photography to photo reporting, from fugitive moments to photographic set up, Françoise Huguier keeps the same pronounced graphic look and the same humour. Passionate with trips and the meeting of territories and their inhabitants, she brings us in Africa with her first book : “Sur les traces de l’Afrique fantôme”, followed by “Secrètes” in which she succeeded to share the privacy of African women. Then she heads into Europe, in 1993, she kept a log of a lonesome trip to Siberia. She won a World Press prize for this work. “En route pour Behring” was published by Editions Maeght. In 2001, she worked several years in Saint-Petersburg about communal apartments. This work resulted in a book, "Kommounalki " (Actes Sud, 2008) and a documentary film "Kommunalka", screened in Cannes. Asia is also one of her favourite destinations. After discovering Japan in the 80s, she returned on her childhood’s footsteps, when she was a Viêt Minh prisoner in Cambodia.

The book “J’avais huit ans”, which tells this story, was published by Actes Sud in 2005. The journey goes on in South East Asia with "Vertical/Horizontal" in 2012 from Singapore to Bangkok via Kuala Lumpur. She illustrates the evolution of postmodern societies in Indonesia (with the hijabistas), in Malaysia (with the KPOP movement) and in South Korea (Virtual Seoul). Curator of the Mois de la Photo in 2008, Françoise Huguier is then artistic director for the 2nd Luang Prabang International Image Biennial in Laos (2010), and for Photoquai Biennial 2011– organized by the Quai Branly Museum. In 2014, a retrospective of her work is presented at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie. Françoise Huguier regularly exhibits her work all over the world : New York, Moscow, Seoul, Sao Paulo, Johannesburg, Lausanne, Berlin, London, Madrid, Bogota, Valencia, etc. In 2018, Reporters Without Borders celebrates her whole career in the album "100 photos for press freedom".

In 2001, she worked several years in Saint-Petersburg about communal apartments. This work resulted in a book, "Kommounalki " (Actes Sud, 2008) and a documentary film "Kommunalka", screened in Cannes.

James de Leon is a self-taught photographer who grew up in California’s San Fernando Valley. He received his B.A. in American History from the University of San Francisco, and currently works as a paralegal in New York City.

Alex Prager was born on 1 November 1979 in Los Angeles, California. Her parents were hippies. At the age of 14, the future artist dropped out of school and left for Europe. Prager became interested in photography at the age of 19 after attending a William Eggleston exhibition at the Eggy Museum. The photographer had her first solo exhibition at 21 when she returned to the United States. Alex Prager has never received any education and in her interviews has referred to herself as a self-taught photographer. A number of art critics have noted the influence of Philip Lorca diCorcia on Prager's work. She is the author of two books: The Book of Disquiet: An Immoral Drama, 2005 and Polyester, 2007.

In 2008, Alex Prager published her photographic series The Big Valley. The works in this series have made her a household name. Many American publications wrote about the work of the young artist noting how she combined the aesthetics of America of the 70's - costumes of that period, eyelashes, hairstyles, external entourage, etc. - with the spirit of Los Angeles. However, interpretations have differed: A number of publications have noted the rich, bright color palette, creating an atmosphere of nostalgia - The New York Times called Prager's photos coldly romantic. The term retro is often applied to the works in this cycle - as it is to many of Prager's later works. 2010 saw the release of Prager's first short film Despair and a related series of photographs. The lead role in the film was played by Bryce Dallas Howard.

In 2011, Alex Prager's Touch of Evil - a short film for The New York Times Magazine - was published online. In this film, several high-profile actors of 2011 portrayed American cinema villains. In 2014, the Lehmann Maupin Gallery in New York hosted Alex Prager's exhibition Face in the Crowd. The eponymous series were filmed in the pavilion of the Los Angeles studio. Specifically for this project, the sets imitating a cinema, the street, the beach, the airport were built. A total of 150 people took part in the shooting. The artist personally selected characters, clothes, the poses of people and thus tried to give the viewer an impression that something was amiss. There was something strange in a commonplace, everyday scene, taken from life. Prager's crowd is not a faceless multitude of people but individual characters with their own thoughts and aspirations gathered in one place.

In 2015, Alex Prager produced La Grande Sortie, a short film that tells the story of the prima ballerina Émilie Cozette. The film got support from the Opéra de la Bastille and was shot within the walls of this iconic theatre. The viewer is shown the night of Émilie Cozette's return after a long break.

With Covid still rife, the artist reexamines the concept of the work holiday party – exposing playful truths about contemporary American life in the process.

Alex Prager › Subverts the Classic Office Christmas Party

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