Best known for his exploration photography, George Steinmetz sets out to discover the few remaining secrets in our world today: remote deserts, obscure cultures, the mysteries of science and technology. A regular contributor to National Geographic and GEO Magazines, he has explored subjects ranging from the remotest stretches of Arabia’s Empty Quarter to the unknown tree people of Irian Jaya.

Since 1986, George has completed 18 major photo essays for National Geographic and 25 stories for GEO magazine in Germany. His expeditions to the Sahara and Gobi deserts have been featured in separate National Geographic Explorer programs. In 2006 he was awarded a grant by the National Science Foundation to document the work of scientists in the Dry Valleys and volcanos of Antarctica.

George has won numerous awards for photography during his 25-year career,including two first prizes in science and technology from World Press Photo. He has also won awards and citations from Pictures of the Year, Overseas Press Club and Life Magazine’s Alfred Eisenstadt Awards.

Born in Beverly Hills in 1957, George graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Geophysics. He began his career in photography after hitchhiking through Africa for 28 months. His current passion is photographing the world’s
deserts while piloting a motorized paraglider. This experimental aircraft enables him to capture unique images of the world, inaccessible by traditional aircraft and most other modes of transportation. George lives in Glen Ridge, New
Jersey, with his wife, Wall Street Journal editor Lisa Bannon, their daughter, Nell, and twin sons John and Nicholas.

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LIFE Cover

Fillopian tube

baby life

baby feet

sperm meet egg

Cerebro embrionario 

pollen

skin sample taken from subway

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the Lennart Nilsson Awards +

The world’s leading scientific photographer creates the greatest photographic
document of human life ever made

A photographic study of human life in two parts

= Part I The journey of DNA and the sperm to the ambryo, foetus and birth
= Part II The growth of the organs and the tissues. The bacteria, atmospheric particles and viruses that threaten the body

The book called “Life” by Lennart NilssonAuthor of probably the most successful illustrated book in history - A Child is Born

Photographer of the first image of a living human embryo, Lennart Nilsson crossed a frontier and entered the interior world of human life

NASA sent Nilsson’s photographs of the human foetus into space with the Voyager space programme, as the greatest illustrations of human life

Life includes never before published photographs on the birth of viruses and particles of pollution in the atmosphere, both of which threaten the future of the planet.

Lennart Nilsson, born in Strängnäs in 1922, is a pioneer in medical photography. In association with researchers and with the help of advanced, specially designed equipment, he has documented the inside of man down to the level of a cell. Throughout the years, ha has devoted special attention to capturing the creation of a human being, from conception to birth.

He began his career as a photojournalist in the middle of the 1940s and published a number of photo-essays in Swedish magazines, including “Polar Bear Hunting in Spitzbergen” (1947). On his first assignment for Life to photograph Dag Hammarskjöld’s arrival in New York as UN Secretary General in 1953, he took with him his first photographs of the human embryo. The photographs were published, and he was encouraged to continue photographing the origins of man.
In order to show the foetal development from the earliest stage he used macro-lenses and instruments with special wide-angled lenses. The publication in 1965 of Nilsson’s cover story for Life, ‘The Drama of Life before Birth’, was a landmark. His famous book A Child is Born was published that same year and has since been published in four editions in over twenty countries. (more…)

Witness the shot of a stick-thin, malnourished toddler who stopped to rest on her way to a feeding station in war-torn Sudan. The picture, taken by South African photojournalist Kevin Carter, shows the girl on her knees, bent at the waist with her forehead resting on the dry, dusty dirt.

She is alone except for a vulture behind her, waiting for her to die.

This picture captivated the world in 1993 and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994. A few months later, Carter taped a garden hose to the exhaust of his pick-up truck and fed the other end into the passenger side window.

Broke and depressed over the loss of a friend, his suicide note read, in part, “I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain . . . of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners . . . “

The professional identity of photojournalists like Carter force them to repress artistic impulses at their peril and “to the detriment of the people whom they serve,” according to Clemson University Assistant Professor Peggy Bowers speech at the Northside Recital Hall.

Bowers teaches courses on the history, criticism and theory of the mass media as well as on media law and ethics. In “Through the Objective Lens: The Ethics of Expression and Repression of High Art in Photojournalism,” she asserts that knowingly or not, photographers employ elements of art in terms of composition, line, texture and light.
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Yousuf Karsh, one of the greatest portrait photographers of the twentieth century, achieved a distinct style in his theatrical lighting. Karsh photographed many of the celebrated personalities of his time—Andy Warhol, Fidel Castro, Peter Lorre, Winston Churchill, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Pablo Picasso, and Albert Einstein, among many others. One of Karsh’s most famous photographs is this portrait of Ernest Hemingway taken in 1957. Recalling Hemingway as “a man of peculiar gentleness,” Karsh displays his gift for capturing the essence of his subjects.

Yousuf Karsh was born in Armenia-in-Turkey in 1908. To escape the massacres in their homeland, his family fled to Syria in 1922 and immigrated to Canada two years later, where he joined his uncle, George Nakash, a photographer living in Sherbrooke, Québec. Nakash arranged for Yousuf to go to Boston in 1928, to apprentice with John Garo, an eminent portrait photographer whose studio was on Boylston Street. Since the ebullient Garo photographed only by available light, on long winter evenings he welcomed artists from the worlds of literature, theater, and music. Karsh later wrote, “It was here I set my heart on photographing those men and women who leave their mark on the world.”

The empathy Karsh established with his sitters came naturally. He had great sensitivity and an instinctive understanding of each person who sat before his lens. He quickly established an atmosphere of trust so that the sitting became a true collaboration. Karsh was not only a uniquely gifted photographer, but also a superb printer. He was exacting in every stage of his work, and this artistic talent and technical skill were blended to produce iconic portraits of Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Casals, Helen Keller, John F. Kennedy, Frank Lloyd Wright, Andy Warhol and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Karsh worked through his 82nd year and closed his studio in 1992. By the time he retired, he had held 15,312 sittings, produced over 150,000 negatives, and left an invaluable artistic and historic document of the men and women who shaped our world.

Bliss is the name of a BMP image produced from a photograph of a landscape in Sonoma County, California, southeast of Sonoma Valley near the site of the old Clover Stornetta Inc. Dairy and Babe’s Burgers and Franks.  It is so named because it contains rolling green hills and a blue sky with stratocumulus and cirrus clouds. The image is used as the default computer wallpaper for the “Luna” theme, which is included with Microsoft Windows XP.

The photograph was taken by the professional photographer Charles O’Rear, a resident of St. Helena, Napa County, for digital-design company HighTurn. O’Rear has also taken photographs for Bill Gates’ private Seattle stock photography company Corbis and Napa Valley photographs for the May 1979 National Geographic Magazine article Napa, Valley of the Vine. Although O’Rear’s focus was on photographing winemaking in the Napa Valley, the hill in Bliss didn’t have grapevines when the photograph was being taken in the late 1990s. The photograph was taken aside the highway 12/121, and by a hand held view camera. The approximate location is 3028 Fremont Dr. (Sonoma Hwy.), Sonoma, CA.

O’Rear’s photograph inspired Windows XP’s US$ 200 million advertising campaign Yes you can., by the San Francisco division of New York City advertising company McCann-Erickson. The campaign was launched on TV on ABC during one of ABC Sports’s Monday Night Football. The TV commercials included Madonna’s Ray of Light song, whose TV rights cost Microsoft about $14 million.

In November 2006, artist collaboration Goldin+Senneby visited the site in Sonoma Valley where the Bliss image was taken, re-photographing the same view ten years later. Their work AfterMicrosoft  was first shown in the exhibition “Paris was Yesterday” at gallery La Vitrine in April 2007  and has later been exhibited at Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo , and 300m3 in Gothenburg.

In February 2007, in the collective exhibition Accrochage Vaud 2007 at Espace Arlaud in Lausanne, Sébastien Mettraux, a Swiss artist showed a photograph titled “Colline verdoyante”, d’après Bill Gates, 2006, translated as “Bliss, after Bill Gates, 2006″. Mettraux, who lives and works near the Vallée de Joux, explained that it was taken in Les Esserts-de-Rives, Switzerland.

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Erwitt’s images have appeared in such publications as Life, Look, Holiday and Collier’s, as well as in the renowned 1955 Museum of Modern Art, New York exhibition The Family of Man. Born in Paris to Russian parents, Erwitt spent his childhood in Milan, then emigrated to the United States via France, with his family in 1939. As a teenager living in Hollywood, he developed an interest in photography and worked in a commercial darkroom before experimenting with photography at Los Angeles City College. In 1948 he moved to New York City and completed his formal education through film classes at the New School for Social Research. After service in the United States Army as a photographic assistant, Erwitt joined the prestigious Magnum Photos agency in 1953 with such famed photographers as Edward Steichen, Robert Capa and Roy Stryker.

Over the years, Erwitt has published numerous books as well as feature films, television commercials and documentaries, but he is probably best-known for his candid photographs of ironic and absurd situations within everyday settings.
American, b. Paris 1928

Born in Paris in 1928 to Russian parents, Erwitt spent his childhood in Milan, then emigrated to the US, via France, with his family in 1939. As a teenager living in Hollywood, he developed an interest in photography and worked in a commercial darkroom before experimenting with photography at Los Angeles City College. In 1948 he moved to New York and exchanged janitorial work for film classes at the New School for Social Research.

Erwitt traveled in France and Italy in 1949 with his trusty Rolleiflex camera. In 1951 he was drafted for military service and undertook various photographic duties while serving in a unit of the Army Signal Corps in Germany and France.

While in New York, Erwitt met Edward Steichen, Robert Capa and Roy Stryker, the former head of the Farm Security Administration. Stryker initially hired Erwitt to work for the Standard Oil Company, where he was building up a photographic library for the company, and subsequently commissioned him to undertake a project documenting the city of Pittsburgh.

In 1953 Erwitt joined Magnum Photos and worked as a freelance photographer for Collier’s, Look, Life, Holiday and other luminaries in that golden period for illustrated magazines. To this day he is for hire and continues to work for a variety of journalistic and commercial outfits.

In the late 1960s Erwitt served as Magnum’s president for three years. He then turned to film: in the 1970s he produced several noted documentaries and in the 1980s eighteen comedy films for Home Box Office. Erwitt became known for benevolent irony, and for a humanistic sensibility traditional to the spirit of Magnum.

Omayra Sanchez was a 13-year old victim of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano which erupted on November 13, 1985 in Armero, Colombia, causing massive lahars which killed nearly 25,000. She was trapped for 3 days in water, concrete, and other debris before she died.

Her image was taken by photojournalist Frank Fournier shortly before she died. The image caused controversy due to the photographer’s work and the Colombian government’s inaction in working to prevent the Armero tragedy despite the forewarning that had been available, when it was published worldwide after the young girl’s death.

Omayra Sanchez was 13 years old at the time and lived with her parents, her brother and an uncle. However, prior to the tragedy, her mother had traveled to Bogotá on business. The night of the disaster, she and her family had awakened and heard of the volcanic fluid going in their direction. In the process of evacuating to a nearby mount, Omayra’s grandmother fell into a water aqueduct hole, and Omayra herself stopped with the intent to rescue her trapped sibling, when the flow reached them. Omayra got trapped under her own home’s concrete and debris and could not escape. When rescue teams tried to help her, they realized that her legs were trapped.

Omayra was trapped up to her neck in water, concrete, and other debris for three days before she succumbed to gangrene and hypothermia. During three nights of agony, Omayra seemed strong but was suffering. According to Cristina Echandia, a journalist who kept records of the events, Omayra sang and had normal conversations with the people who were trying to help her. The little girl was thirsty and scared. On the third night, Omayra began hallucinating, saying that she did not want to be late for school. At some point she asked the people to leave her so they could rest.

Television coverage of the disaster introduced her to the world when she was still alive. The photo shown here was taken hours before her death and published after her death.

Frank Fournier was born in 1948 in Saint-Sever, France. The son of a surgeon he embarked on four years of medical studies before beginning his career in photography in 1975 in New York City. He first joined the office staff of Contact Press Images in 1977 and became a member photographer in 1982. A deeply humanistic photographer, he has since produced work on infants with AIDS in Romania, rape victims during the civil war in Sarajevo, Bosnia, and the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. In 1986 he received the World Press Photo Premier Award for his portrait of Omayra Sanchez, the 13-year-old victim of the Nevada del Ruiz volcano’s eruption in Columbia. He is based in New York City.

This is a well known photo of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. It was taken on March 5, 1960, in Havana, Cuba, at a memorial service for victims of the La Coubre explosion. The photo was not published internationally until seven years later.

Guerrillero Heroico (Heroic Guerrilla) is the name of Alberto Korda’s well-known photo of the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. It was taken on March 5, 1960, in Havana, Cuba, at a memorial service for victims of the La Coubre explosion. The photo was not published internationally until seven years later. Korda has said that at the moment he shot the picture, he was drawn to Guevara’s facial expression, which showed “absolute implacability” as well as anger and pain. Years later, Korda would say that the photo showed Che’s firm and stoic character. Guevara was 31 at the time the photo was taken.

Showing the image’s ubiquitous nature and wide appeal, the Maryland Institute College of Art called the picture a symbol of the 20th century and the world’s most famous photo. Versions of it have been painted, printed, digitized, embroidered, tattooed, silk-screened, sculpted or sketched on nearly every surface imaginable, leading the Victoria and Albert Museum to say that the photo has been reproduced more than any other image in photography. Jonathan Green director of the UCR/California Museum of Photography has speculated that “Korda’s image has worked its way into languages around the world. It has become an alpha-numeric symbol, a hieroglyph, an instant symbol. It mysteriously reappears whenever there’s a conflict. There isn’t anything else in history that serves in this way”.

As a young girl, Carol Guzy always wanted to be an artist. But as she was coming of age in a working-class family in Bethlehem, Pa., such an ambition seemed impossible. “Everyone I knew said, ‘Oh, if you’re an artist, you’ll starve,’” she recalls. “You have to do something really practical.’” So Guzy chose to go to nursing school. Halfway through she realized she would not, could not, be a nurse. “I was scared to death I was going to kill someone by making some stupid mistake,” she laughs. So while she was trying to figure out what to do with her life, a friend gave her a camera and she took a photography course. Her fascination with photography led to an internship and then a job at the Miami Herald. In 1988 she moved to The Post. Her photographs have won three Pulitzer Prizes and three Photographer of the Year awards in the National Press Photographers’ annual contest.

These four young refugees from Kosovo seem almost blown out of the right of the frame - a perfect blend of young joy in friendship within a double context of a windy hillside and the wider context of the war, from which presumably this is blessed relief.

It is one of the most perfect photographs I have ever seen because its form so perfectly enforces the spirit of its subject matter. Everything contributes, including the bits that might be considered imperfections; the right-hand girls’ almost closed eyes, the falling out of the right-hand side of the frame, the gap-toothed grin, the grandeur of the terrain, the sky-scape the upper right of the sun’s position, the floral sleeve that helps the little one peek out from the world and photographer from the embrace of safety, the wind coming up from down the valley, the threat of the dark clouds, the floral girl’s head position and the right-hand girls up raised arm continue the flow of wind and energy from bottom right, the shadow on the grey T-shirt which we hope (and trust) is benign, the shadow-shaping of the hills, the tightness of the embrace, the almost universal laughter, the sheer joie de vivre……………

Kosovar refugee Agim Shala, 2, is passed through a barbed wire fence into the hands of grandparents at a camp run by United Arab Emirates in Kukes, Albania. The members of the Shala family were reunited here after fleeing the conflict in Kosovo.

The photo is part of The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning entry (2000) about the plight of Kosovo refugees.

From the series:
So Alone
Lost in Illness
Finding Tenderness

A teenage girl sits in the dayroom of the children’s ward near a pool of urine. The staff and other patients cannot keep up with cleaning the floors. Urine and feces are often everywhere.

More about Carol Guzy. . .

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Some of us may be familiar with a picture called “The Baby Hand,” taken on Aug. 19, 1999, by photojournalist Michael Clancy for USA Today, which first published the picture. Clancy was assigned to document a spina bifida operation performed in utero on a 21-week unborn baby named Samuel Armas by Dr. Joseph Bruner, a surgeon at Nashville’s Vanderbuilt University Medical Center.

The picture and its story have been circulated on the internet so often that some question whether they are authentic. They are.

Clancy describes the famous picture this way: “Samuel thrusts his tiny hand out of the surgical opening of his mother’s uterus. As the doctor lifts his hand, Samuel reacts to the touch and squeezes the doctor’s finger. As if testing for strength, the doctor shakes the tiny fist. Samuel held firm. At that moment, I took this ‘Fetal Hand Grasp’ photo.”

In a story he wrote about the incident, Clancy added,

“As a doctor asked me what speed of film I was using, out of the corner of my eye I saw the uterus shake, but no one’s hands were near it. It was shaking from within. Suddenly, an entire arm thrust out of the opening, then pulled back until just a little hand was showing. The doctor reached over and lifted the hand, which reacted and squeezed the doctor’s finger. As if testing for strength, the doctor shook the tiny fist. Samuel held firm. I took the picture! Wow! It happened so fast that the nurse standing next to me asked, ‘What happened?’ ‘The child reached out,’ I said. ‘Oh. They do that all the time,’ she responded.”

Clancy said the experience changed him from pro-choice to pro-life.

Not only did USA Today run the photo, but so did a number of other media sources in the United States, Canada, Ireland, England, France, Norway, Singapore, and South America.
The photo generated controversy at Fox News, where then-talk show host Matt Drudge was prevented by the network from broadcasting the image on his show. That was in the early years of Fox, before the cable giant rose to the top by appealing to conservatives. Drudge–who is strongly pro-life–quit over the dispute in the fall of 1999. Not long afterward, Fox ran the picture, anyway, as part of a story on spina bifida.

Samuel was born on Dec. 2, 1999, weighing 5 pounds 11 ounces–four weeks premature. By all indications, he appeared healthy. Today, he’s a “chattering, brown-eyed 3½-year-old.”

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Edward Burtynsky is probably the most famous Canadian artist working today. Burtynsky’s critically acclaimed images of manufactured landscapes and his colourful series on life in China made him an international superstar.

His latest exhibition Quarries, at the Nicholas Metivier Gallery, focuses on a series of quarries in the Iberian Peninsula. The show coincides with the release of his book Edward Burtynsky: Quarries.

At the exhibition’s opening reception on November 1, I saw the crème of the Toronto art scene crammed into the Metivier Gallery with buyers and students. The atmosphere was full of celebration, and for good reason: Burtynsky’s images are stunning. Some may even go so far as to call them beautiful. The photos are so striking that the viewer forgets the subject matter is not some inactive landscape scene, but actual working quarries. From these places come the stone that builds our skyscrapers and our schools. Burtynsky’s talent, of course, is taking photographs that look like perfect compositions of these active, living sites.

Some look like expansive landscapes, such as* Iberian Quarries 14 A, B, and C. Others have such a strong verticality as to make the viewer feel like they are looking down from a helicopter, such as *Iberian Quarries #9. Still others resemble an abstract expressionist painting from a distance, such as Rock of Ages #38. My personal favourite is Iberian Quarries #8 (pictured right), an aerial view of a quarry with an unmistakably crucifix-shaped body of water in the bottom.

Burtynsky has long been obsessed with landscape as architecture and this latest series may be viewed as a culmination of this 17- year obsession. After the book and this exhibition, Burtynsky says it’s the end of his fixation with quarries. These images, however, will stay with me, and no doubt with Burtynsky, for years to come.

He has become well-known for his documentation of industrial sites across Canada, the U.S. and Europe. He reveals the disturbingly sublime landscapes created through plunder of the earth and through these images raises environmental and ethical questions regarding the alteration of the landscape. For Burtynsky, refineries, quarries, oil fields and recycling plants are monuments of civilization, records of human activity and markers of history. They become the ruins of modern times.
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Vanessa Winship of the United Kingdom has been named overall winner and Photographer of the Year in the Sony World Photography Awards (2008), winning $25,000 cash prize for her portraiture of Turkish girls titled “Sweet Nothings.” She received her award in ceremonies Friday from Honorary Board Member and legendary photographer Elliott Erwitt at the Palais des Festivals in Cannes.

World Press Photo, first prize portrait stories 2008
Sony World Photography Award photographer of the year, Iris D’or overall winner Sweet Nothings 2008
Orvetia Book Prize Italy Black Sea 2008
Oskar Barnack, finalist Black Sea 2008
Oskar Barnack, honourable mention Albanian Landscape 2003
World Press Photo, first prize Arts category stories 1998

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Yann Arthus-Bertrand (born March 13, 1946) is a renowned and internationally-recognised French photographer. He originally specialised in animal photography, but later turned to aerial photography of subjects in many locations across the world. He has produced over 60 books of his landscape photographs taken from helicopters and balloons. Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s work has often been published in the National Geographic magazine.

His works have both political and aesthetic connotations, and have been exhibited in public spaces all over the world.

In 1991, he founded the Altitude Agency in Paris, a photographic library that specializes in aerial photography. It is the only one of its kind.

In 2000, Arthus-Bertrand created an exhibition with a collection of 100,000 photographs taken in 76 countries which make up his Earth from the Air exhibit. Some of these have been published in his book 365 days: Earth from the Air and exhibited in London, Singapore, Poland, The Netherlands, Finland and elsewhere.

Arthus-Bertrand is a member of the “Académie des Beaux-Arts de l’Institut de France”.

One of Arthus-Bertrand’s most well-known photographs is of the ‘heart’ of Voh in New Caledonia, which he has used as the cover of several of his books: The Earth from the Air and Earth from Above.

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Two deer take refuge in the Butterfoot river as there forest home burns.

John McColgan, a BLM firefighter, took photos on August 6th, 2000 while fighting fires in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana. McColgan says he “just happened to be in the right place at the right time” with his Kodak DC280 digital camera.

This photo originally came to people via e-mail, with numerous forwards making its origin highly difficult to trace. It bore only the following message:

“This awesome picture was taken in Bitteroot [sic] National Forest in Montana on August 6, 2000. The photographer, John McColgan, is a fire behavior analyst from Fairbanks, Alaska. He took the picture with a digital camera. Because he was working at the time he took the picture he cannot profit from it; however, we feel the picture is a once-in-a-lifetime shot and should be shared.”

It was subsequently popularized and published in various journals.

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Ryan McGinley (born 1977, 17th of October) is an artist photographer from New York City whose works are somewhat similar to certain confessional photographers like Nan Goldin, Larry Clark, and Wolfgang Tillmans.

His subjects include mostly color images of friends and lovers, as well as youth more so on the ‘fringes’ of society (e.g., skateboarders, graffiti writers, etc.)

As of 2006, his works have been seen in many galleries and museums. At 24 he was the youngest artist to have a solo show in New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. He has also had solo shows at New York’s PS1 and in Spain at the MUSAC in Leon. He is represented by Team Gallery in New York.

His apartment, at one point, had its walls covered with Polaroid pictures of everyone who had ever visited him.

In 2007 he was awarded the Young Photographer Infinity award by the International Center for Photography.

In 2008, the Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós used one of McGinley’s images for their fifth album Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust. The video for the first track from the album, “Gobbledigook”, is also inspired by his work.

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