Stephen Cohen, Gallerist and Founder of photo l.a., photo MIAMI and ART LA and other art fairs in New York, San Francisco & Santa Fe

New York native Stephen Cohen came to Los Angeles to attend USC film school, having earned an early degree in the arts from Brooklyn College, where he enrolled at the age of 16. After earning an MFA, he spent several years working in local film production. During this time he began to produce oral histories. Of note were projects for DGA and AFI, and WGA, where he produced an oral history on the Blacklist.

He returned to photography (he acquired his first camera at 15) selling off his large collection of Photography books, initiating himself into the Los Angeles fine art photography scene. Soon he was procuring and brokering prints for many of Los Angeles biggest galleries, dealers and collectors. With little time spent in the gallery world, Mr. Cohen realized that there was a large population of underserved museums, curators and collectors all across America and, in 1985, took his first cross-country trip. The trip established his reputation as a salesman. It also cemented many of the contacts that still hold strong today; from 1985 to 1991 he made the trip twice a year.

In 1991 Mr. Cohen undertook a gamble that ultimately paid off: organizing a 3-day photography exposition in Los Angeles: photo l.a. Just two months later he opened his first gallery. The next year he produced a similar photo fair in Santa Fe, New Mexico and then, in 1998, traveled to New York to create the very first vernacular photo fair. It was an instant success, drawing an impressive crowd of influential dealers and collectors who, like Mr. Cohen, were at the forefront of the vernacular photography movement. In 2000 photo santa fe moved and became photo san francisco. In 2004, he created photo new york. The year also marked his expansion into LAs burgeoning art scene, with artLA, the first contemporary art fair to be held in Los Angeles in over 12 years. Mr. Cohen had again recognized an underserved segment of the art world, and artLA was an immediate and resounding success and after only three years the buzz is so strong that there is a growing waiting list to participate. In December 2007 the second photo miami will take place during Art Basel Miami Beach.

Mr. Cohen's profile as an important figure in the contemporary art world continues to grow. American Photo Magazine recently included him in their Top 100 most influential people list, and he made Art + Auction’s power list in 2004.

October 2005 marked the opening of Cohen Amador Gallery, in the landmark Fuller Building on Madison Avenue and 57th street, the gallery will showcase contemporary photography.

Bruce Davidson, USA, Photojournalist/Documentary photographer, Magnum

Bruce Davidson began photography at the age of ten in Oak Park, Illinois and continued his passion while attending Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University. Davidson has created such seminal bodies of work as "The Dwarf", "Brooklyn Gang", and the "Freedom Rides" and also received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 to photograph what became a documentation of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1967, after photographing one block in East Harlem for a year, he was awarded the first grant for photography from the National Endowment for the Arts to continue photographing this body of work later published and titled "East 100th Street". Classic bodies of work from his 50-year career have been extensively published and are included in many major public and private collections around the world. He continues to photograph and create new bodies of work.

Elliott Erwitt, Born in France resides in USA, Advertising and journalistic photographer, Magnum

Elliott Erwitt is a world-renowned advertising and journalistic photographer. He is best known for his black and white candid shots of ironic and absurd situations within everyday settings -- the master of the "indecisive moment".

In the 1950s, Erwitt worked as a photographer's assistant for the United States Army, in Germany and France. Erwitt was influenced by his meeting the famous photographers, Edward Steichen, Robert Capa and Roy Stryker. Stryker, the former Director of the Farm Security Administration's photography department, hired Erwitt to work on a photography project for the Standard Oil Company. Joining the Magnum Photos agency in 1953, allowed Erwitt to shoot photography projects around the world.

Since the 1970s, he has turned much of his energy toward movies. His feature films, television commercials and documentaries include Beauty Knows No Pain (1971), Red, White and Bluegrass (1973) and the prize-winning Glassmakers of Herat, Afghanistan (1977).

Martine Franck, Magnum Photographer

Born in Belgium, Martine Franck grew up in the United States and in England. She studied art history at the University of Madrid and at the École du Louvre in Paris.

After a trip to the Far East with Ariane Mnouchkine, Franck worked at Time-Life in Paris as an assistant to the photographers Eliot Elisofon and Gjon Mili. Her friendship with Mnouchkine also led her to follow the Théâtre du Soleil from its beginnings in 1964 until now.

After joining the Vu Photo Agency, she contributed to the founding of the Viva agency in 1972. Franck took many portraits of artists and writers, including a noteworthy series of women for Vogue. She undertook more far-reaching work for the French Ministry of Women's Rights in 1983. That same year she became a full member of Magnum Photos.

Since 1985 Franck has collaborated with the International Federation of Little Brothers of the Poor, a non-governmental organization which cares for the elderly and outcasts of society. It was in 1993 that Franck first visited the island of Tory, off the northwest coast of Ireland. There she studied the daily life of a traditional Gaelic-speaking community separated from the mainland.

She next traveled to Asia to meet Buddhist Tibetan children in India and Nepal. With the help of Marilyn Silverstone, a former member of Magnum Photos who became a Buddhist nun, she encountered the Tulkus, the young lamas who are thought to be the reincarnations of ancient great spiritual masters.

In 2003 and 2004 undertook a theater project in which she shadowed the avant-garde stage director Robert Wilson at the Comédie Française, documenting his innovative rendition of La Fontaine's Fables.

Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin is internationally recognized as one of the leading photographers of the modern world. Born in Washington D.C., Goldin spent most of her early life in Boston, where she began taking photographs at the age of fifteen. Over the past three decades, she has lived and worked in New York, Bangkok, Berlin, Tokyo, Paris, and London.

Goldin first garnered recognition in the early 1980s for The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a slide show of approximately 750 photographs with an accompanying soundtrack that began as an impromptu evening performance in a New York nightclub. In this piece and the myriad others that have followed, Goldin has continued to explore themes of sexuality, gender, addiction, and intimacy. Her photographs unabashedly portray personal moments in her own life as well as the lives of those around her. Private and heartrending though these moments may be, Goldin’s photographs serve to elevate these difficult themes as well as those who endure them. These images in turn celebrate the inhabitants of a world that exists outside the social norm, a subculture that is often ignored and reviled.

Goldin’s work is featured in collections of art institutions all over the world and her photographs have been exhibited at venues such as SFMoMA, San Fransicsco, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

In 2006 she received the Commander Order of Arts and Letters, the highest arts award in France. In 2007 she received the prestigious Hasselblad Foundation Award in Photography. In 1995, she made a film for the BBC, I'll Be Your Mirror, with Edmund Coulthard and Ric Colon. Goldin has received the Englehard Award from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (1986), the Photographic Book Prize of the Year from Les Rencontres d'Arles (1987), the Camera Austria Prize for Contemporary Photography (1989), the Mother Jones Documentary Photography Award (1990), and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1991). In 1991, she received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and was a DAAD artist-in-residence in Berlin. She currently lives and works in Paris, London, and New York.

Mary-Ellen Mark, USA, Documentary photography

MARY-ELLEN MARK has achieved worldwide visibility through her numerous books, exhibitions and editorial magazine work. She is a contributing photographer to The New Yorker and has published photo-essays and portraits in such publications as LIFE, New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. For almost three decades, she has traveled extensively to make pictures that reflect a high degree of humanism. Today, she is recognized as one of our most respected and influential photographers. Her images of our world's diverse cultures have become landmarks in the field of documentary photography. Her portrayals of Mother Teresa, Indian circuses, and brothels in Bombay were the product of many years of work in India. A photo essay on runaway children in Seattle became the basis of the academy award nominated film STREETWISE, directed and photographed by her husband, Martin Bell.

Recently, Mary Ellen was presented with the Cornell Capa Award by the International Center of Photography. She has also received the Infinity Award for Journalism, an Erna & Victor Hasselblad Foundation Grant, and a Walter Annenberg Grant for her book and exhibition project on AMERICA. Among her other awards are the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Matrix Award for outstanding woman in the field of film/photography, and the Dr. Erich Salomon Award for outstanding merits in the field of journalistic photography; the World Press Award for Outstanding Body of Work Throughout the Years; the Victor Hasselblad Cover Award; and two Robert F. Kennedy Awards.

She was voted "Most Influential Woman Photographer" in a recent poll of American Photo readers.

Susan Meiselas, USA, Photojournalist/Documentary photographer Magnum

Susan Meiselas' first major photographic essay focused on the lives of women doing striptease at New England country fairs. She photographed the carnivals during three consecutive summers while teaching photography in the New York public schools. Carnival Strippers was published in 1976, and a selection of the images was installed at the Whitney Museum of Art in June 2000. Meiselas received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College, New York, and her MA in visual education from Harvard University. She joined Magnum Photos in 1976. Best known for her coverage of the insurrection in Nicaragua and for her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America, her second monograph, Nicaragua, June 1978-July 1979, appeared in 1981.
Meiselas edited and contributed to El Salvador: The Work of 30 Photographers and edited Chile from Within, which features work by photographers living under the regime of Augusto Pinochet. She has co-directed two films: Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family (1986) and Pictures from a Revolution (1991) with Richard P. Rogers and Alfred Guzzetti. In 1997 she completed a six-year project curating a 100-year visual history of Kurdistan. Her 2001 monograph, Pandora's Box, which explores a New York S&M club, was followed by Encounters with the Dani, an account of an indigenous people living in Indonesia's Papua highlands.
Meiselas received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for 'outstanding courage and reporting' from the Overseas Press Club for her work in Nicaragua; the Maria Moors Cabot Prize from Columbia University for her coverage of Latin America; and, in 2005, the Cornell Capa Infinity Award. In 1992 she was named a MacArthur Fellow.

Martin Parr, UK, Social documentary, fashion and advertising, Magnum

Martin Parr studied photography at Manchester Polytechnic from 1970-73, since that time he has worked on numerous photographic projects. He has developed an international reputation for his innovative imagery, his oblique approach to social documentary and his input to photographic culture. In 1994 he became a full member of Magnum Photographic Corporation. In recent years he has developed an interest in film-making and has started to use his photography within fashion and advertising.

Rankin, UK, Portrait Photographer

Iconic photographer, publisher and film director Rankin's mischievous and witty eye have made him the essential ingredient to any major fashion or culture campaign, and a string of highly successful exhibitions, magazines, ad campaigns and books have gained him a reputation as one of the world's leading photographers. He lives in London and has a 11-year-old son, Lyle.

Tom Stoddart, UK, Photojournalist

Tom began his photographic career on a local newspaper in his native North-East of England. In 1978 he moved to London and began working freelance for publications such as the Sunday Times and Time Magazine.

During a long and varied career he has witnessed such international events as the war in Lebanon, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the election of President Nelson Mandela, the bloody siege of Sarajevo and the wars against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. In 1997 Tony Blair gave Stoddart exclusive behind the scenes access to his election campaign, as Labour swept to victory after 18 years of Conservative government. Ten years on he photographed Gordon Brown as he replaced Blair as Prime Minister. His recent extensive work on the catastrophic AIDS pandemic blighting Africa has been widely published and exhibited.

Now established as one of the worlds most respected photojournalists, Stoddart continues to produce powerful photo-essays on the serious world issues of our time.