Leni Riefenstahl

Leni Riefenstahl, Nuba

Leni Riefenstahl's remarkable Africa oeuvre

When Leni Riefenstahl was in her early sixties, she began voyaging frequently to the African continent, where she has worked on various film and photography projects over the last half century. Her favorite destination was in Sudan, where she lived with and photographed the Nuba tribes people, learning their language and becoming their friend.

The Nuba were a loving and peaceful people who welcomed Riefenstahl as one of their own. Riefenstahl remembers her experiences in Africa as the happiest moments in her life. Her beautiful, skilled photographs of the Nuba, as well as of the Dinka, Shilluk, Masai, and other tribes represent a landmark in the extraordinary career of the 20th century's most unforgettable artistic pioneer.

David LaChapelle

David LaChapelle

LaChapelle’s images—of the most famous faces on the planet, and marginalized figures like transsexual Amanda Lepore or the cast of his critically acclaimed social documentary Rize—call into question our relationship with gender, glamour, and status. Using his trademark baroque excess, LaChapelle inverts the consumption he appears to celebrate, pointing instead to apocalyptic consequences for humanity itself. While referencing and acknowledging diverse sources such as the Renaissance, art history, cinema, The Bible, pornography, and the new globalized pop culture, LaChapelle has fashioned a deeply personal and epoch-defining visual language that holds up a mirror to our times.

David LaChapelle was offered his first professional job by Andy Warhol to shoot for Interview magazine. Since then his work has been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, including Tony Shafrazi Gallery and Deitch Projects in New York, and London's Barbican. His images have appeared in countless magazines including Vogue Italia, French Vogue, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone and i-D. In recent years he has expanded into music videos, live theatrical events and documentary film-making.

Erwin Olaf

Erwin Olaf

Erwin Olaf, born in 1959 in Hilversum, The Netherlands, has a passionate love affair with life, and fully enjoys everything that it has to offer. An ever-rising photographer, his work constantly garners new attention, and maintains the respect of his loyal fans. His ‘oeuvre’ is a manifestation of his incredible passion and genuine engagement with subjects. Olaf has been professionally active for over twenty-five years, and in this period he has succeeded in evolving from a participating photographer to a director who creates his own reality. Olaf’s pictures are filled with humor, imagination and exuberance, but they go much further than simple visual intrigue. His work broach ideas and visions of freedom, beauty, loneliness, and being different. He convinces his public in a shameless and versatile manner, questioning established norms. Olaf consistently expresses his own standpoints, fulminating against narrow-mindedness, smugness, and rigid norms, but not without humor, bravura and bite. An authentic Olaf is a blow to the head, ruthlessly direct, but simultaneously wrong footing the viewer and poking fun. One reviewer remarked that in Erwin Olaf’s photographs everyone stares unwaveringly into the lens–thus looking straight into the photographer’s big blue eyes, as it were. Olaf approaches the world openly and enthusiastically and this is also the way in which, in his work, he dares to enter the public debate. Olaf is a master in generating his own world, whether this be in autonomous photographic series or film projects. He is also hypercritical, nothing escapes him, so that pictures are created with a placement composed so meticulously that it is almost painful to examine. With these, Olaf manages to produce fictitious yet convincing images of bygone days, fairytales and dreams, populated by historical figures, elves, dwarves, lunatics, and god knows who.

G. M. B. Akash

G. M. B. Akash

" Today, I count myself blessed, having become a photographer. To be able to articulate the experiences of the voiceless, to bring their identity to the forefront, gives meaning and purpose to my own life "

G. M. B. Akash

Oliviero Toscani

Oliviero Toscani Official

Oliviero Toscani at MADEinPHOTO.fr

"Globalism is a blessing. Proclaiming that McDonalds is bad and should be banned is like saying you're against photography because you've seen an ugly picture somewhere. You know what you should do? Take a better picture. That is revolution-not screaming on the street." - Oliviero Toscani

"Some people look at a picture for thirty seconds, some for years. It doesn't really matter because a picture is like life. You take out of life as much as you are able to take out of life, just as you take out of a picture as much as you can take out of a picture... "- Oliver Toscani

"We become very impressed when we get to look inside ourselves, into pictures. That's the relationship we have with pictures. Every picture is a piece of the inside of ourselves." - Oliviero Toscani

"A man can watch half an hour of television and think that he's seen a civil war in Africa, the disappearing rain forests in the Amazon and genocide in Bosnia. In truth, he hasn't seen a thing. In truth, he was seated in his armchair and saw images that were presented, accelerated, slowed down and mediated by someone else. You can't learn anything passively. (...) What about still images? Can't they be just as manipulative? No, because they work at a subjective rhythm. You react to a photograph according to your own tempo. A photograph permits a first viewing, and then an individual reflection. It solicits participation, and encourages individuality in interpretation. Television is an autarchy, a dictatorship." - Oliviero Toscani - interview with Benetton pr-manager Oliviero Toscani; Newsweek, June 13, 1994

Frans Lanting,

Frans Lanting

Life Through Time

"What my eyes seek in these encounters is not just the beauty traditionally revered by wildlife photographers. The perfection I seek in my photographic composition is a means to show the strength and dignity of animals in nature." - Frans Lanting - Vision - Lowepro

A fantastic account of the thrilling wildness

Eye to Eye, the first personal portfolio by master photographer Frans Lanting, presents an extraordinary collection of animal images by an award-winning photographer and naturalist who "has set the standards for a whole generation of wildlife photographers," according to the BBC.

More than 140 photographs, made over a period of twenty years, reveal the unique personal aesthetic Frans Lanting brings to wildlife photography, as well as the startling new perspective on animals his images provoke.
In a review of his work The New York Times states, "Mr. Lanting's photographs take creatures that have become ordinary and familiar and transform them into haunting new visions."

His exquisite images are accompanied by personal stories and observations from a lifetime of working with wild animals around the world, ranging from orangutans in the rain forests of Borneo to emperor penguins in Antarctica.

Frans Lanting does not seek in these encounters the beauty traditionally revered by wildlife photographers: "The perfection I seek in my photographic compositions is a means to show the strength and dignity of animals in nature." Frans Lanting's work has been lauded by designers as art, by biologists as science, and by others as a new vision of the relationship between animals and people - one that challenges us to look animals in the eye and see ourselves.