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My Favourite Photographers:

• Balazs Gardi: Balazs Gardi is a freelance photographer, who focuses on documenting the everyday life of marginalized communities facing humanitarian crises. His current long-term project aims to capture how water-related social tensions and geopolitical conflicts shape the future of people worldwide. Gardi is a member of VII Network, and from 1996 to 2003 was a staff photographer with Hungary's largest national daily, Nepszabadsag, covering politics, sports, and arts, as well as producing feature stories. He studied journalism and photography both in Budapest, and at the University of Wales, Cardiff, and is a former participant of the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass (2000). His awards include one from World Press Photo, in 2003, a PDN Photography prize, in 2007, and three Photographer of the Year awards in Hungary (in 2002, 2000 and 1999).
• Dominique Issermann: Dominique Issermann is the photographer who inspired me to become a photographer. In every photo she does you can always tell its her work, her unique framing, lighting, shadowing, creates an unparalleled mood. Each and every one of her photos is like a painting that tells a story!
• Gary Knight: Gary Knight, born in England, started working as a photographer in Southeast Asia during the 1980s as Indochina emerged from bitter wars and the region came to grips with the end of Cold War. In 1993, he moved to collapsing Yugoslavia where he returned repeatedly from the siege of Sarajevo through the fall of Kosovo. Between assignments for Newsweek, he documented crimes against humanity. After 9/11, he worked in Afghanistan and two years later independently followed U.S. troops into Iraq. He covered wars in the Middle East, Africa, Europe and Asia and other breaking news, but Knight’s central focus is on the survival of the world’s poor and fundamental human rights issues. Knight is founding director of VII Photo Agency. He established the Angkor Photo Festival, is a board member of the Crimes of War Foundation, a trustee of the Indochina Media Memorial Foundation and Vice President of the Pierre & Alexandra Boulat Foundation.
• James Natchwey: Photojournalist James Nachtwey is considered by many to be the greatest war photographer of recent decades. He has covered conflicts and major social issues in more than 30 countries. For the past three decades, James Nachtwey has devoted himself to documenting wars, conflicts and critical social issues, working in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, Israel, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, South Africa, Russia, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Romania, Brazil and the United States. Nachtwey has been a contract photographer with Time since 1984. However, when certain stories he wanted to cover -- such as Romanian orphanages and famine in Somalia -- garnered no interest from magazines, he self-financed trips there. He is known for getting up close to his subjects, or as he says, "in the same intimate space that the subjects inhabit," and he passes that sense of closeness on to the viewer. In putting himself in the middle of conflict, his intention is to record the truth, to document the struggles of humanity, and with this, to wake people up and stir them to action.
• Jan Saudek: Saudek's father was a Jew and the family was therefore persecuted by Germans. Many of his family members died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp during World War II. Jan and his brother Karel were held in a children's concentration camp near the Polish border. He survived the war and worked for a printer starting in 1950. After completing his military service, he was inspired in 1963 by Steichen's Family of Man to try to become a serious art photographer. In 1969 he traveled to the United States and was encouraged in his work by curator Hugh Edwards. Returning to Prague, he was forced to work in a clandestine manner in a cellar, to avoid the attentions of the secret police, as his work turned to themes of personal erotic freedom, and used implicitly political symbols of corruption and innocence. From the late 1970s he gradually became recognised in the West as the leading Czech photographer, and also developed a following among photographers in his own country. In 1983 the first book on his work was published in the English-speaking world. Following this, in 1984 the Communist authorities allowed him to cease working in a factory, and gave him permission to apply for a permit to work as an artist. In 1987 the archives of his negatives were seized by the police, but later returned. Saudek currently lives and works in Prague. His brother Karel Saudek is also an artist, and is now the best-known Czech graphic novelist.
• Jean-Baptiste Mondino: Jean-Baptiste Mondino (born Aubervilliers, France in 1949) is a French fashion photographer and music video director. He has directed music videos for Madonna, David Bowie, Sting, Chris Isaak, Björk, China Moses (Dee Dee Bridgewater's daughter) and Les Rita Mitsouko. Jean-Baptiste Mondino has also photographed the covers and album packaging for the Marianne Faithfull albums Before The Poison (2005) and Easy Come, Easy Go (2008), Shakespear's Sister's Hormonally Yours (1992), and is Artistic Director for a DVD documentary included with a special edition of the latter album, directed by Ann Rohart.
• Matthieu Paley: Matthieu Paley is an award-winning photographer who divides his time between the Western Himalayas and Hong Kong, which he uses as a base for continuing his work throughout Asia. Since 1999, Matthieu has remained in the Western Himalayas on and off for over five years, working on documenting the remote mountainous regions of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Northern India, and Central Asia. Matthieu’s assignments have taken him all over Asia, from the base camp of the highest unclimbed mountain in the world in Bhutan, to Tuvalu to document the effects of global warming on this sinking island. His work has been published worldwide, as well as exhibited in galleries in North America and Europe. He has collaborated on numerous books and recently completed a book on Siberia. His next book on the Kyrgyz of the Afghan Pamir, the result of ten years of work in the region, is currently in production. More recently, Matthieu has lectured at various mountain festivals in Europe and North America.
• Reza: His interest in photojournalism was sparked during the demonstrations in Iran in 1978. "One afternoon, I saw some students demonstrating in the street against the Shah," he recalls. "One of the students had a camera. As he was running way from the soldiers, he was taking pictures. And I thought, 'Well, Reza, something's happening in your country. What are you going to do?' So I decided to become a professional photographer. Before long, Reza's work for the French Press Agency had earned him a position as a Newsweek correspondent in Iran. When the Iranian hostage crisis began, he was the only photographer there to witness what was going on outside of the U.S. Embassy. His photos of the American hostages appeared in numerous magazines around the world. From 1989 to 1990 Reza served as a consultant to the United Nations humanitarian program in Afghanistan. He is also the founder of AINA, a non-profit foundation for the development of independent media and cultural expression in Afghanistan. The organization's sponsors include UNESCO, Reporters Sans Frontières, USAID, DFID (the British government's Department for Internal Development), International Media Support (IMS) and private sources.
• Sebastião Salgado: Sebastião Salgado (born in Brazil) is a Brazilian social documentary photographer and photojournalist. After a somewhat itinerant childhood, Salgado initially trained as an economist, earning a master’s degree in economics from the University of São Paulo in Brazil. He began work as an economist for the International Coffee Organization, often traveling to Africa on missions for the World Bank, when he first started seriously taking photographs. He chose to abandon a career as an economist and switched to photography in 1973, working initially on news assignments before veering more towards documentary-type work. Salgado initially worked with the Paris based agency Gamma, but in 1979 he joined the international cooperative of photographers Magnum Photos. He left Magnum in 1994 and formed his own agency, Amazonas Images, in Paris to represent his work. He is particularly noted for his social documentary photography of workers in less developed nations. Longtime gallery director Hal Gould considers Salgado to be the most important photographer of the early 21st century, and gave him his first show in the United States. Salgado works on long term, self-assigned projects many of which have been published as books: The Other Americas, Sahel, Workers, and Migrations. The latter two are mammoth collections with hundreds of images each from all around the world. His most famous pictures are of a gold mine in Brazil called Serra Pelada. He is presently working on a project called Genesis, photographing the landscape, flora and fauna of places on earth that have not been taken over by man. In September and October 2007, Salgado displayed his photographs of coffee workers from India, Guatemala, Ethiopia and Brazil at the Brazilian Embassy in London. The aim of the project was to raise public awareness of the origins of the popular drink.
• Steve Mc Curry; McCurry began studying film history cinematography and filmmaking at Penn State in 1968, but ended up getting a degree in theater arts and graduating cum laude in 1974. He became very interested in photography when he started taking pictures for the Penn State newspaper called The Daily Collegian. His photojournalism career began with his coverage of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. McCurry disguised himself in native dress and hid his film by sewing it into his clothes. His images were among the first of the conflict and were widely published. His coverage won the Robert Capa Gold Medal for Best Photographic Reporting from Abroad. McCurry continued to cover international conflicts, including the Iran-Iraq war, Beirut, Cambodia, the Philippines, the Gulf War, and Afghanistan. McCurry's work has been featured world-wide in magazines and he is a frequent contributor to National Geographic. He has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1986. McCurry's most recognized photo is that of "Afghan Girl", a previously unidentified Afghan refugee. The image itself was named as "the most recognized photograph" in the history of the National Geographic magazine and her face became famous as the cover photograph on the June 1985 issue. The photo has also been widely used on Amnesty International brochures, posters, and calendars. The identity of the "Afghan Girl" remained unknown for over 15 years until McCurry and a National Geographic team located the woman, Sharbat Gula, in 2002.
• Yann Arthus-Bertrand: Yann Arthus-Bertrand was born in Paris on March 13, 1946 in a renowned jewellers' family founded by Claude Arthus-Bertrand and Michel-Ange Marion. His sister Catherine is one of his closest collaborators. He's been interested in nature and wildlife from an early age. He founded the Altitude Agency in 1991, which was the world’s first press agency and images bank specialised in aerial photography (500,000 pictures taken in more than 100 countries by more than 100 photographers). In 1994 Arthus-Bertrand started a thorough study on the state of the Earth sponsored by UNESCO. Therefore he made a picture inventory of the world’s most beautiful landscapes taken from helicopters and balloons. The book from this project, Earth from Above (‘la Terre vue du ciel’) sold over 3 million copies and was translated into 24 languages. In 2000, his "Earth from Above" free exhibition was set up on numerous big posters on the gates of Jardins du Luxembourg in Paris. It then travelled worldwide from Lyon to Montreal, to 110 cities and was visited by 120 million people. In 2008, Earth from Above was released on the DVD.

Manuel Meszarovits Wedding photographer