Jonas Bendiksen, Photographer

Born in Norway in 1977, Jonas Bendiksen began his photography career as a 19-year-old intern in the London office of Magnum Photos. After a time, he decided to leave office life and travel through Russia to pursue his own work as a photojournalist. In the years he spent there, Bendiksen photographed stories from the fringes of the former Soviet Union, culminating in his 2006 book Satellites. Since leaving Russia, Bendiksen has worked on numerous articles throughout the world, including his ongoing project about the world's slums. His coverage on "Dharavi: Mumbai's Shadow City," is featured in the May 2007 issue of National Geographic. Bendiksen has received numerous awards, including a National Magazine Award for his story "Kibera,'' which was featured in the Paris Review. Other distinctions include a Freedom of Expression Foundation fellowship, second place in the Daily Life Stories category for World Press Photo, the 2003 Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and first prize in the Pictures of the Year International competition. In addition to National Geographic and Paris Review, Bendiksen's editorial clients include GEO, Newsweek, Telegraph Magazine, the Sunday Times magazine, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He lives in New York with his wife and son.

Anna Shteynshleyger, Photographer

Anna Shteynshleyger is a photography teacher at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Originally from Moscow and of Ukranian descent, she left to come to the United States. Her photographs of Siberia examine the sites of Russian labor camps under the former Communist regime. The juxtaposition of the beautiful landscapes with their history of containment and oppression draws an interesting paradox about the character of modern Russia. Making three different trips to different regions of Russia, Shteynshleyger manipulated already existing scenes rather than creating new situations. Born in Russia in 1977 and educated at the Maryland Institute College of Art (BFA, 1999) and Yale University (MFA, 2001), Shteynshleyger’s most recent exhibitions include Solo Exhibition (12×12 project) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and Art Basel Miami Beach at the Jacob Karpio gallery in Miami, FL.

"… be it a metaphysical or cultural concern, whether it’s a critique or a celebration, art remains a practice rooted deeply in the material world. We make likenesses of what we see and transform our world in a very tangible way. Any situation can reveal a reality not apparent at first examination."

Dith Pran, Photojournalist

Dith Pran (born September 27th, 1942 -- March 30th, 2008) was a photojournalist best known as a refugee and Cambodian Genocide survivor and was the subject of the Academy Award-winning film The Killing Fields. He was portrayed in the movie by first-time actor Haing S. Ngor, who won an Academy Award Oscar for his performance. In 1975, Pran and New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg stayed behind in Cambodia to cover the fall of the capital Phnom Penh to the communist Khmer Rouge forces. Schanberg and other foreign reporters were allowed to leave, but Pran was not permitted to leave the country. When Cambodians were forced to work in forced labor camps, Pran had to endure four years of starvation and torture before finally escaping to Thailand in 1979. He coined the phrase "killing fields" to refer to the clusters of corpses and skeletal remains of victims he encountered during his 40-mile escape. His three brothers were killed back in Cambodia. From 1980, Pran worked as a photojournalist with The New York Times in the United States. He also campaigned for recognition of the Cambodian Genocide victims, especially as founder and president of The Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project. He was a recipient of an Ellis Island Medal of Honor in 1998 and of The International Center in New York's Award of Excellence. Pran died on March 30th, 2008, having been diagnosed with stage 4 Pancreatic Cancer just three months earlier.

Kenneth Jospehson, Photographer

Kenneth Josephson (American, b.1932) was among the first generation of photographers to graduate with a degree in photography from the Illinois Institute of Design, where he studied with Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan. He studied photography with Minor White at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Before retirement in 1997 as a teacher at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago for over 35 years, Josephson trained two generations of photographic artists.

"I think Louis Pasteur said, 'Accident and chance favors the prepared mind.' If you are kinda open and somewhat prepared, I think you recognize all things that are going on and produce work in your favor."

Alan Cohen Photography Lecture

"You need to find the boundary lines you are crossing... We have less and less to say about the value we think we hold... Your work doesn't have to be narrative, but you are going to be impacted by whatever you grew up in and whatever you are going towards... It's crucial to find that line. It's shaping you in terms of what's possible and what's not...You need to understand your transitional points. It's not just global and political but it may be personal. It might be transitional from Suburban to Urban, or it might be a type of thinking. It's ambition, it's drives, it's fantasies. Work is based on the awarenesses that come from transitions. The more you know who you are, the more you can speak... If you don't want to talk about things, choose to look at things. If you're not thinking about what someone will swallow, you're not thinking about them. Or you'll never get people to open up to you. Questions should be neutral, directed, focused thought-out. This isn't about what you like, it's about what you perceive, If you are interviewing someone, make that perception larger. Then you may be the bearer of the question, to inform whoever else is around you. If you get informed, they'll get informed. Think about the so what aspect of every question. So you're asking a question, so what? You also can't ask a quesiotn like a tv interviewer. A question should come out of things that are there and being addressed and that are evident and make sense and can be backed up. If they aren't, work it in, build it in. Where do you place yourself in this dream of contemporary history? The thing about Josephson is that his ideas are technical, personal, historical; there is an analysis that is acceptible. There is no look-at-me-doing-this sensibility. He's very drole, he's very calm... You should never write an essay just to write the essay. You need to edit yourself and then edit yourself and then edit yourself."

Erica Langley, Photographer

Erika Langley is an internationally recognized photographer. A native of Arlington, Virginia, she attended the Rhode Island School of Design, cross-registering for writing courses at Brown University, and graduated with honors in 1989. She worked for newspapers in Virginia and was the recipient of three Virginia Press Awards before moving to Seattle, Washington in 1992.

Sebastian Salgado, Photographer

Sebastião Salgado changed careers from economist to photographer in 1973. After a few years of covering news events he began working on the first of the major photographic projects that would begin to define his vision of the majority world. "Other Americas" depicted those Latin Americans who clung to traditional rural ways; "Famine in the Sahel" documented people attempting to survive in the worst of circumstances; and "Workers" explored the eroded status of the manual worker in the age of computers and high technology. Being a photographer has allowed Sebastião Salgado extended contact with people throughout the world, and it is around this contact that he believes his work revolves. “The picture is not made by the photographer,” he remarked in a somewhat rare public explanation of his approach, “the picture is more good or less good in function of the relationship that you have with the people you photograph.” In the Sahel, for example, he preferred to take a bus rather than rent a car, because when one arrives by car “it’s a disaster--you are a guy with a car,” a rich guy, and not “with the people.” Or, as he put it more broadly, “You need to be accepted by reality.” The philosophy also jibes with his sense of personal economy--by traveling third class, rolling his own film, working sixteen-hour days making thousands of small proof prints himself, he was able to accomplish his various extended reportages in the Sahel--in Chad, Ethiopia (including the disputed Tigre province), Mali, and the Sudan--for the very minimal sum of $20,000, with printing being the major expense. “You photograph with all your ideology.”

Charles Burnett, Filmmaker

Charles Burnett is the epitome of a cult hero—almost famous for not being famous. On the rare occasion his work attracts any notice in the mainstream press, the article will be sure to mention how little attention his work receives in the mainstream press. Despite the public acclaim of critics and fellow filmmakers, the festival awards and retrospectives, the MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, the Library of Congress' selection of Killer of Sheep for its National Film Registry—despite his legendary status among a small cohort of cinephiles, Burnett goes unrecognized by the larger culture, the pop marketplace. His films are known to few. But among those few they're loved by many. The best qualities of Burnett's films are the very things that make them a tough sell in the mass-media world. The people in Killer of Sheep (1977) and To Sleep with Anger (1990) don't conform to the usual commercial-film typology of hero, villain, supporting player, love interest and comic relief. Like Renoir, Ozu, Altman, Leigh—like Chekhov—Burnett presents his characters in the round, justifying themselves to themselves. (In industry terms, that means there's no one to root for.) He does not direct us to feel a certain way as the narratives unfold. At its best, his work is not easily digestible at one sitting: morally and emotionally complex, subtly layered with cultural references and mythic overtones, these films ask us not to judge them too quickly. (In industry terms, that means they're slow and boring.) Finally, he's black, and he rejects sensationalism, stereotype, and genre convention in favor of human-scaled, richly observed tales of African-American life. Burnett was born in Mississippi in 1944 and moved as a child to Los Angeles, where he has lived ever since. During the 1960s, after receiving a degree in electronics at Los Angeles Community College, he planned to pursue a career in engineering but instead enrolled in UCLA to study film.

Charles Bukowski, Poet

Alone with Everybody

the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much

and nobody finds the
one
but keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.

there's no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.

nobody ever finds
the one.

the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill

nothing else

Henry Charles Bukowski (August 16th, 1920-- March 9th, 1994) was an influential Los Angeles poet and novelist. Bukowski's writing was heavily influenced by the geography and atmosphere of his home city of Los Angeles. He is often mentioned as an influence by contemporary authors, and his style is frequently imitated. A prolific author, Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories, and six novels, eventually having more than fifty books in

print.

Daniil Kharms, Author

Born in St. Petersburg in 1905, Daniil Kharms was one of the founders, in 1928, of OBERIU, or Association of Real Art, an avant-garde group of writers and artists who embraced the ideas of the Futurists and believed that art should operate outside the rules of logic. In his lifetime, Kharms produced several works for children, but his writing for adults was not published. In 1931, Kharms was charged with anti-Soviet activities and briefly exiled from Leningrad. In 1941, he was arrested by the N.K.V.D. for making “defeatist statements”; sentenced to incarceration in the psychiatric ward of a prison hospital, he died of starvation the following year, during the siege of Leningrad. It wasn’t until the late nineteen-seventies that Kharms’s playful and poetic work began to appear in mainstream publications in Russia.

"How strange, how indescribably strange, that behind the wall, this very wall, there’s a man with an angry face sitting on the floor with his legs stretched out, wearing red boots. If one could only punch a hole in the wall and look through it, one would see right away that this angry man is sitting there. But it’s better not to think about him. What is he? Is he not a particle of a dead life that has drifted in from the imaginary void? Whoever he may be, God be with him." (1931)

Mira Schendel, Artist

Like thousands of Jewish refugees seeking a fresh start after World War II, Swiss artist Mira Schendel immigrated to Brazil. She worked prolifically in São Paulo until her final days in 1988. An important contributor to the Brazilian Constructivist movement, Schendel was inspired by both Eastern mysticism and Jungian psychoanalysis. Born in 1919 in Zurich, Schendel was in her late teens when her family moved to Milan, where she attended art school and studied philosophy at Catholic University. Because of Nazi persecution, Schendel joined a group of refugees fleeing to Sarajevo in 1941. She married a Croatian friend, Josip Hargesheimer, to facilitate her exit visa, and they left for Rome to work for the International Organization of Refugees. In 1949, Schendel arrived in Brazil. In 1951, she exhibited a series of spare still lifes in the first São Paulo Bienal. Schendel then relocated from Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo, where she met Brazilian Concrete artists. (She also met the bookseller Knut Schendel and married him in 1960.) Her tendency toward abstraction grew along with her misgivings about the Concrete movement’s quest for scientific rationality in art. Schendel did feel an affinity with the movement’s poets; she experimented extensively with letters and graphic symbols in purposefully imprecise configurations on rice paper. The modesty and translucency of that medium and the repetitive nature of her process revealed the artist’s growing interest in Asian philosophy. Schendel joined a Zen meditation group in 1978.Her use of paper led to an intimate understanding of the medium. She twisted and tied it into sculptural Droguinhas (Little Nothings) and suspended numerous sheets face-to-face from transparent fishing line to make Trenzinhos (Little Trains). Schendel died in 1988.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Photographer

http://www.sugimotohiroshi.com

Hiroshi Sugimoto, born on February 23rd, 1948 is a Japanese photographer currently dividing his time between Tokyo and New York. His catalog is made up of a number of series, each having a distinct theme and similar attributes. His use of an 8×10 large format camera and extremely long exposures have garnered Sugimoto a reputation as a photographer of the highest technical ability. He is equally acclaimed for the conceptual and philosophical aspects of his work. Sugimoto began his work with "Dioramas" in 1976, a series in which he photographed displays in natural history museums. The cultural assumption that cameras always show us reality tricks many viewers into assuming the animals in the photos are real until they examine the pictures carefully. His series "Portraits", begun in 1999, is based on a similar idea. In that series, Sugimoto photographs wax figures of Henry VIII and his wives. These wax figures are based on portraits from the 1500s and when taking the picture Sugimoto attempts to recreate the lighting that would have been used by the painter. Begun in 1978, Sugimoto's Theatres series involved photographing old American movie palaces and drive-ins, exposing the film for the duration of the entire film, the film projector providing the sole lightning. The luminescent screen in the centre of the composition, the architectural details and the seats of the theatre are the only subjects in the photographs, and the unique lighting gives the works a surreal look, as a part of Sugimoto's attempt to reveal time in photography.

Sandro, Photographer

http://www.sandrofilm.com



Internationally known photographer Sandro D. Miller has been photographing people from around the world for over 25 years. Born in 1958 in the Chicago suburb of Elgin, Sandro was raised in an Italian/American family. Illinois. He became interested in photography at the age of 16 upon seeing the works of Irving Penn, and since then has devoted his time and passion to making expressive images. Sandro’s work has been featured in The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Forbes, Details, stern, and ESPN Magazine. He has exhibited in Munich, Germany; Daytona Beach, Florida; and at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Illinois.

Alan Cohen, Photographer

http://www.alan-cohen.com



Alan Cohen grew up in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. After earning a degree in nuclear engineering at North Carolina State University and beginning a doctoral program in thermodynamics at Northwestern University, he began photographing and eventually left the sciences to study photography. As a graduate student at the Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design, he studied with Aaron Siskind, Arthur Siegel, Garry Winogrand, Charles Swedlund, Ken Josephson, and Joe Jachna. He was awarded a M.Sc. Photography degree in 1972. Married to Susan Walsh, Cohen lives in Chicago and is an Adjunct Professor in the Art History, Theory, Criticism Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a member of the visiting faculty at DePaul University's School for New Learning and at Columbia College Chicago's Department Of Photography.

"It's irrelevant whether you like most artists' work or not. It's how you use their work; it's whether it's instructive or not."

Robert Adams, Photographer

Robert Adams (born May 8th, 1937) is an American photographer who came to prominence as part of the photographic movement known as New Topographics. Adams was born in the industrial town of Orange, New Jersey relocating to Colorado as a teenager with his family. Adams became interested in documenting how the western landscapes of North America, once captured by the likes of Timothy O'Sullivan and William Henry Jackson, had been shaped by human influence. As part of the New Topographics in the 1970s, Adams approach to photographing these landscapes was to take a stance of apparent neutrality, refraining from any obvious judgements of the subject matter.

"The goal is not making art, it's living a life."

William S. Burroughs, Author

William Seward Burroughs II (February 5th, 1914(1914-02-05) -- August 2nd, 1997) was an American novelist, philosopher, essayist, social critic, painter, and spoken word performer. Much of Burroughs' work is semi-autobiographical, drawn from his experiences as an opiate addict, a condition that marked the last fifty years of his life. A primary member of the Beat Generation, he was an avant-garde author who affected popular culture as well as literature.

Burroughs Soundbites: http://www.netherworld.com/~mgabrys/william/

A Short Film on William S. Burroughs, by Gus Van Sant:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7_MYrVzU-Y