Photographer Profiles

Today drones are better known as unmanned military aircraft that appear in the news with ever-increasing frequency. There was less coverage years ago when they were used strictly for surveillance. But now, as they fire ordinance on suspected terrorist targets, these high-tech vehicles are rewriting the rules of aerial warfare.

Renowned Magnum photographer Elliott Erwitt will be honored at the 2015 Sony World Photography Awards. Erwitt (age 86) will receive the Outstanding Contribution to Photography prize in person at the annual gala dinner in London on April 23, 2015.

To coincide, a show celebrating Erwitt’s work from his 60 year career will be presented at Somerset House, London from April 24 to May 10, 2015 as part of the Sony World Photography Awards Exhibition. A rare public talk between Erwitt and his long-time book designer Stuart Smith will also take place on April 24th.

“It was a two-month expedition, and it had taken weeks just to hike into the area and weeks to get to this point on the mountain,” photographer Tom Bol recalls about the above image.

The recent book Transformational Imagemaking: Handmade Photography Since 1960 is a groundbreaking survey of significant work and ideas by imagemakers who have pushed beyond the boundaries of photography as a window on our material world. These artists represent a diverse group of curious experimentalists who have propelled the medium’s evolution by visualizing their subject matter as it originates from their mind’s eye. Many favor the historical techniques commonly known as alternative photographic processes, but all these makers demonstrate that the real alternative is found in their mental approach and not in their use of physical methods.

Since 2011, photographer and physician Jeff Gusky has been rooting around ancient rock quarries in France on a mission to document a vast labyrinth of underground cities from World War I. The hidden cities lay beneath former WWI trenches, where tens of thousands of soldiers went about their daily lives under the French countryside as the Great War raged above them.

Beth Moon’s photo book Ancient Trees: Portraits of Time is the result of a 14-year-long global journey in search of the oldest, most ancient trees on Earth. In this book of gorgeously reproduced black-and-white images, Moon takes us to into magical primordial forests and to isolated islands on a voyage of discovery.

Carleton Watkins was perhaps America’s greatest 19^th century landscape photographer yet today he’s largely unknown. His breathtaking landscapes of the Yosemite Valley were instrumental in preserving the valley for future generations and paving the way for both the National Parks system and the environmental movement.