Born in Minneapolis, Tom Arndt's photography focuses on his native Minnesota. Belonging to the grand, classic tradition of American documentary photography, Tom Arndt's body of work offers us a sensitive, empathetic portrayal: a family album of the people who live in his state including their coffee shops and soda fountains, their streets, their shop windows, their parks, the popular state fairs. Pessimism and pity are out of place here. As Arndt's friend and well known writer Garrison Keillor points out, Tom Arndt photographs the DNA of Minnesotan culture–the poor and the left out.

Tom Arndt belongs to the silver print processing tradition; his printing is exceptionally beautiful. He spends at least several hours daily in the darkroom; he really loves the paper print.

His photographs are part of numerous American museum collections.

Born in Marseille in 1964, Jean-Christophe Béchet has lived and worked in Paris since 1990. After studying economics in Aix-en-Provence from 1982 to 1985, and photography in Arles from 1985 tom1988, he spent two years living and travelling in West Africa, from 1988 to 1990. He strives to find the 'right tool' for each new project, a tool that will allow him to put photographic material into intimate dialogue with an interpretation of the real. As a result, black and white and colour photos, silver and digital, 24x36 as well as medium-format, polaroids and photographic 'accidents' are all part of his repertoire. As a descendent of 'street photography' ? whether American, French or Japanese ? he has chosen not to abandon the 'subjective document', mixing reportage and landscapes, portraits and architecture. He shies away from closed series, preferring to uncover a certain photographic specificity through each new project. He is establishing his worldview book by book, where the printed page represents his 'natural' domain of expression. Man's place in the contemporary landscape, both urban and natural, is at the heart of his explorations. He is currently at work on the great European, Asian and American cities, and is also developing several series on areas located high in the mountains.

Sébastien Camboulive likes to play with ambiguities. He finds nothing so boring as a facile photographic work. His finished images always give one the impression of something paradoxical, whether it be works such as Spirale or La Limite Pluie Neige, or his series Ceux du Plateau and La Ronde. In them, he pursues his investigation into the domains of representation. But he is currently focusing his research on portraits. By deconstructing photographic procedures, Camboulive forces the viewer to question his own relationship to the real.

At the age of 20, Alexis travelled to Iraq where he took his first photographs, which were published in the UK in The Independent Magazine. He carried on working for the press for several years as a photo-reporter, in France and abroad (Kurdistan, Afghanistan, Bosnia, etc). His work on Somalia led to his first exhibition, in 1992, at the Visa pour l'Image festival in Perpignan, France. In 1995, he was selected to participate to the first World Press Masterclass.

In the late 90's, in search of new forms, he went away from the practice of photojournalism and return to such places as Rwanda or Palestine with other plastic requirements. He started using new medias and supports, as the cinema or the installation and created a new distance and a new duration, without establishing the one or the other one in aesthetic standard. His artistic research feeds on a critical reflection on the responsibility of the images and the ethics of the testimony.

Among other, he composed a trilogy about the genocide against the Tutsi that occurred in Rwanda: Itsembatsemba (1996), Confession (2004), Absences (2013).

His work has been shown at the Dokumenta XI (Kassel, 2002), at the ICP (New York, 2003), during the Month of Photography (Paris, 2010). It is also held in many permanent collections, including the French National Library, the French National Art Collection of Contemporary Art, the Nicephore Niepce Museum, the Neuflize Vie collection. He was awarded Lucien & Rodolf Herve Prize in 2010 and Arcimboldo Prize in 2011.

After having finished my studies of history at the University of Paris, I enrolled in the National School of Photography in Arles and finished my studies with a master degree and a special recommendation of the jury. For the past four years post-graduated in germanys Leipzig art academy, and two years in the masterclass of Timm Rautert. I´m living and working since 2007 in Cologne with my wife and my two children.

Arlene Gottfried, born in Brooklyn, graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, and worked as a photographer at an ad agency before freelancing for top publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Fortune, Life, and The Independent in London.

Her first photographs are of life on the streets, picturing her friends, relatives, and neighbors of the ethnically diverse area of Brooklyn she lives in. The photographs from the 1970s and 80s document a part of New York City that no longer exists, a rough environment where she gravitates towards individuals with unique characteristics and large personalities. She goes to festivals, block parties, and all the parades ? Gay Pride, St. Patrick's Day, Puerto Rican Day, and the early Halloween parade. She returns to the beaches of her childhood, Coney Island and Brighton Beach, photographs the Only nude bay in New York, Riis Beach's Bay One, and also clubs and disco that had a sense of wild and free self-expression in a world before the AIDS epidemic.

Gottfried has exhibited at the Leica Gallery in New York and in Tokyo, and at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., among others. Her photographs can be found in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The New York Public Library, and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Berenice Abbott International Competition of Women's Documentary Photography. Gottfried is the author of Bacalaitos & Fireworks (powerHouse Books, 2011), Sometimes Overwhelming (powerHouse Books, 2008), Midnight (powerHouse Books, 2003) and The Eternal Light (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 1999). A lecturer and a teacher, Gottfried lived and worked in New York City until her death in 2017.

Living as we do in the digital age, it is difficult for us to imagine the number of photographers who found their calling after discovering the work of Ernst Haas. His publications were the bedside reading of an entire generation. His experiments with colour and movement were met with great enthusiasm... We've forgotten now, but colour film was difficult to handle. It was light years ago, in 1952, when the American magazine Life asked him use colour to work on the city of New York. Capa, at Magnum, was the only person who understood why he wanted to experiment with colour. After all, black and white was still king. But Ernst Haas was unperturbed. In order to understand his highly singular adventure, we must see it in its historical context. Born in 1921 to a Jewish family, Haas lived through the trauma of the Second World War. Subsequently, in 1951, he emigrated to the United States, a country he had dreamed of since his youth. He was an optimistic man, with no professional strategy, for he himself had never asked anything of anyone. He was a free man.

Dazzling. That's the first word that comes to mind when one thinks of Rodolf Hervé (1957-2000). Dazzling due to the relative brevity of his existence. And especially dazzling in regard to his work. Back at a time–mid-1980s to mid-1990s–when digital photography didn't yet exist, it wasn't by trivial chance that Rodolf Hervé chose the Polaroïd. Out of urgency. Urgency to appropriate and transform his space. Polaroïd on which he could act as a painter on his canvas. For Rodolf Hervé was just as much a painter, musician, or video-maker as a photographer.

Born in 1952, Pascal Kern lived and worked in Paris, where he studied at the Sorbonne. Kern uses photography to produce « sculptures », which explore the question of volume in all its aspects : the relationships between volume and surface, fullness and emptiness, mass and colour, depth and contour. Using found or natural forms, he elevats the every-day to an almost Iconic status ; fascinated with the space created and occupied by the subject, and the purity of it's form. The metal industrial objects and wooden moulds are retrieved from old factories and foundries, while the vegetables are grown from seed. The artist lived with his subject matter for a period of time before photographing, taking only one photograph which is later reproduced to life-sized. The cibachrome photographs of each subject are presented as diptychs, triptychs or polyptychs, in frames constructed with related materials. The final stage in the long process of crafting these incredible works is for them to be hung specifically (with precise instructions from the artist) to achieve a perfect balance ; the work appearing almost weightless whilst creating an unusually powerful presence.

Piecing together Vivian Maier’s life can easily evoke Churchill’s famous quote about the vast land of Tsars and commissars that lay to the east. A person who fit the stereotypical European sensibilities of an independent liberated woman, accent and all, yet born in New York City. Someone who was intensely guarded and private, Vivian could be counted on to feistily preach her own very liberal worldview to anyone who cared to listen, or didn’t. Decidedly unmaterialistic, Vivian would come to amass a group of storage lockers stuffed to the brim with found items, art books, newspaper clippings, home films, as well as political tchotchkes and knick-knacks. The story of this nanny who has now wowed the world with her photography, and who incidentally recorded some of the most interesting marvels and peculiarities of Urban America in the second half of the twentieth century is seemingly beyond belief. An American of French and Austro-Hungarian extraction, Vivian bounced between Europe and the United States before coming back to New York City in 1951. Having picked up photography just two years earlier, she would comb the streets of the Big Apple refining her artistic craft. By 1956 Vivian left the East Coast for Chicago, where she’d spend most of the rest of her life working as a caregiver. In her leisure Vivian would shoot photos that she zealously hid from the eyes of others. Taking snapshots into the late 1990′s, Maier would leave behind a body of work comprising over 100,000 negatives. Additionally Vivian’s passion for documenting extended to a series of homemade documentary films and audio recordings. Interesting bits of Americana, the demolition of historic landmarks for new development, the unseen lives of ethnics and the destitute, as well as some of Chicago’s most cherished sites were all meticulously catalogued by Vivian Maier. A free spirit but also a proud soul, Vivian became poor and was ultimately saved by three of the children she had nannied earlier in her life. Fondly remembering Maier as a second mother, they pooled together to pay for an apartment and took the best of care for her. Unbeknownst to them, one of Vivian’s storage lockers was auctioned off due to delinquent payments. In those storage lockers lay the massive hoard of negatives Maier secretly stashed throughout her lifetime. Maier’s massive body of work would come to light when in 2007 her work was discovered at a local thrift auction house on Chicago’s Northwest Side. From there, it would eventually impact the world over and change the life of the man who championed her work and brought it to the public eye, John Maloof. Currently, Vivian Maier’s body of work is being archived and cataloged for the enjoyment of others and for future generations. John Maloof is at the core of this project after reconstructing most of the archive, having been previously dispersed to the various buyers attending that auction. Now, with roughly 90% of her archive reconstructed, Vivian’s work is part of a renaissance in interest in the art of Street Photography.

In 1987 I arrived in Marseille, where I knew next to nothing about 'the Mediterranean horizon'. It was a radical shift in my perception of the world. After a period of instability and questioning, I began a work on the Marseille coastline, which produced hazy, grey images and a desire in me to flee a certain type of reality. A few years later, I joined the organisation Sud Image Terrirotoire where I took up 'a new geography': the landscape and its territory, its transformation and evolution, as well as the alternation of 'Landscapes and Humans'. I am always very sensitive to the question of man's place in these spaces. I try to keep a measured distance and an approach to the real in order to show tension and emptiness and to see loss. For me, photography is a way of thinking, of living and of questioning oneself.

Ray K. Metzker holds a special place in the history of American photography. A fixture in the best-known institutions, his work, consisting exclusively of black and white images, is completely representative of an entire generation of profoundly experimental photographers. Born in 1931, Metzker was deeply influenced by his studies at Chicago's Institute of Design. For over fifty years he continued to innovate, often working in his dark room with only his intuition as a guide. His work on negatives evolved slowly over the course of many years. Montages, juxtaposition, multiple exposures, double exposures... Metzker set no limits on his creativity.

Neak Sophal (b. 1989, Cambodia), graduated at the Royal University of Fine Arts, is considered one of the rising talents of the Cambodian art scene with a clear and determined vision.  She has been actively involved in workshops and group exhibitions locally and internationally over the last four years including Photo Phnom Penh Festival (Phnom Penh, 2015) and Angkor Photo Festival (Won the first prize of the workshop, 2014).

Carlos Javier is a director, cinematographer and documentary photographer who focuses on urban life, gun violence, racism, poverty and marginalized communities. In 2016, Carlos received a Guggenheim Fellowship for film/video. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in a variety of venues including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts; the International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago; the Detroit Institute of Arts; and the Library of Congress.

As a conceptual and visual artist, the work of Pierre Schwartz doesn’t manage to muffle the humanist fiber that governs the carrying out of his project and undoubtedly vibrates a little more over the most humble playing fields, when the goals aren’t all, as in Sarajevo, in Mexico City, or in Istanbul those solid and regulation tubes of metal of standard dimensions of 6m x 2,1m. In Vietnam as in Ghana or in South Africa, the standard follows the possibility of the three sticks assembled in a precarious parallelogram to propose as elsewhere a quality of the game, the energy of the combat and perhaps the beginning of a career ambition. Necessary pause in this long traveling that unfolds without notice the backgrounds of a factory, of empty playing fields, perspectives of pylons and walls of cities, the bush country, the forest, the banks of big rivers bringing their rustic and poetical halftime, as the school bus takes their dreams elsewhere.

Hervé Le Goff, « Cages de gloire », extract

Homer Sykes belongs to a talented generation of British photographers alongside Martin Parr, Chris Killip, Graham Smith, Chris Steel Perkins and Ray-Jones; a generation which, from the very start, saw photography in terms of style and asserted their aesthetic choices in works that were as informative as they were creative.

Michael Houlette

Sabine Weiss's work has continued to grow and expand since 1942. She takes on all genres without privileging any. Of course, children are one of her favorite subjects to photograph… but there are many more. She never places more importance on the anecdotal than on sensations themselves, “ones that capture the expression of feelings”. She does not recoil at the label “humanist photographer”, but she does believe that it is too narrow for her work. The only thing that has sparked her interest and nourished her throughout the years is painting. Unclassifiable and fiercely independent, Sabine Weiss is a fascinating subject.

Having studied at the University of Rochester, Bruce Wrighton, is neither a reporter on the fly nor a social commentator. He chats with his models, putting them at their ease. With his 20x25 optical chamber, he searches for the ideal spot for a pose, often a corner of a wall. His portraits feel like they take up space, like sculptures. In his series entitled Dinosaurs and Dreamboats, he has the same way of capturing cars in their setting, of circling around them before immobilising them. In St George and the Dragon, his third series, Wrighton is truly attempting to uncover the spirituality of everyday life through outsiders, cars and public places, bars and churches. Unfazed by everything that glitters, he is a privileged witness of a fragment of the America of the Reagan years, which he has succeeded in making timeless.

Brigitte Ollier

Extract from the article Les désunis d'Amérique published in Libération on November 17, 2010