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.

Arndt received a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (1968) and did graduate study at the University of Minnesota (1969-1971). His photographs have been exhibited at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and other venues. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Pierre Boucher began as an illustrator in the advertising department of the Printemps department store chain, then joined the Tolmer workshop (led by Claude Tolmer and Alexey Brodovich who held his classes there from 1926 to 1927).
The House, which specialised in advertising for companies connected to the world of luxury goods and fashion (Piguet, Lelong, Molyneux, Patou, etc.) incorporated a graphics workshop where Pierre Boucher worked from 1927 to 1928, and a photography workshop where Jean Moral worked from 1928 to 1932. Jean Moral worked on illustrations and photography, drawing Pierre Boucher's attention to photography.
From 1928 to 1930, during his military service, Boucher studied photography in the air force's photography division. Perhaps because of his beginnings at the Tolmer studio, Boucher was more aware of graphics, and never lost his taste for photomontage and recomposing images. His photos range from experimentation to documentary photography, dipping into photo-graphics, industrial photography, reportages and nude photography along the way.
Of the photographers here, he was certainly the most open to different currents. His collaboration with René Zuber4, who was aware of the Bauhaus' aesthetic, put him on the path toward New Objectivity, and his work with nudes turned towards phantasmagoria.
"Like Man Ray, Pierre Boucher is above all an illustrator. He astonishes us with the extreme richness of his ideas, his limitless imagination, his original, confident taste. For him, photography is a second way of expressing the artistic thought that his pencil has already sketched »

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, La Ronde or Contiguïté. 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.

Since 1948, Roger Catherineau's photographic work has been built as a quest for experimentation. Rejecting any notion of depiction of reality, he elaborates unreferenced, troubled and most often abstract images. Developing the notion of "productive transformation", he wishes to compose from scratch the image he has of an object, and not to reproduce it.

It is therefore without any precise rules, but according to his instinct, that he discovers and then perfects the methods of processing and printing, to which he will add superimposition, solarisation, and other chemical manipulations. At the beginning of the 1950s, he made the photogram his favourite process. A contact and camera-free photographic technique, the photogram allowed Catherineau to compose his works using only light and the imprint of the object. Detached from the first generation of experimental photography of the 1930s, he does not practice the photogram as an automatic play, but rather as a demanding and disciplined compositional. During his experiments and in the last part of his life, he even destroyed all the prints that he considered minor or imperfect, leaving only works of great intensity.

Trained at the EFET School of Photography, Marion Dubier-Clark perfected herself in the art of portraiture and landscape through various travels, particularly in the United States.

She produces Fine Art prints for the French National Library, exhibits in several galleries in Paris and collaborates with various magazines. In 2009, she self-published and distributed a first book "100 Polaroids".

After the success of this first experience, she self-edited again in 2011: "Polaroids / From New York to New Orleans" and in 2012 "From San Francisco to Los Angeles" presenting his impressions of travel across the USA. In September 2013, she was exhibited in Tokyo.

In 2014, she became a Fuji ambassador.

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. IŽm 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.

Hervé Guibert (1955-1991) was a French writer and photographer. A critic for Le Monde, he was the author of some thirty books, most notably To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, which presents an intimate portrait of Michel Foucault, and played a significant role in changing public attitudes in France toward AIDS. First published by Régine Desforges in 1977, Hervé Guibert, who wrote in the wake of Jean Genet, Hermann Ungar and Thomas Bernhard, also produced an important body of photographs, which was exhibited in 2011 as a retrospective by the Maison européenne de la photographie.

In Ghost Image, a book whose subject is photography and in which no photographs appear, Guibert offers a singular look at this art form. La pudeur ou l’impudeur, Guibert’s only film, follows the last months of his life in plenary detail. Hervé Guibert died at the age of 36 in Paris. His journals, The Mausoleum of Lovers, spanning the last fifteen years of his life, were published posthumously and published in an English translation in 2014 (Nightboat Books).

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.

After graduating from The School of Industrial Arts, Sid worked from 1956 until 1962 at a series of nondescript minimumwage jobs in the photography industry. As Sid describes, “It was a perfect way to learn, to sharpen up and practice my craft and skills at someone else’s expense.” These years eventually led to a black-and-white printer’s position at Compo, the premiere custom lab in Manhattan.
At Compo, Sid printed for some of the greatest photographers of the last 50 years, including Philippe Halsmann, Robert Capa, Weegee, and most of the members of Magnum. In 1968 Sid left Compo to become an independent printer. “My life had become too much darkroom and not enough photography,” he decided. At 10 East 23 Street Sid built a darkroom and set up shop, printing “any- and everything that came through the door.” W. Eugene Smith occupied an adjacent loft for several years, and Ralston Crawford was a neighbor. Ralph Gibson introduced Sid to Robert Frank in 1969 and Sid became Frank’s printer, a relationship that lasted thirty-five years. Sid’s clientele grew to include Allen Ginsberg, who also became a neighbor when Sid relocated his darkroom to Avenue A in the East Village. Since 1972, Sid has been a faculty member of the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where he teaches black-and-white darkroom courses.
He has made more than 91,000 images, not counting the bad rolls of film he decided not to keep.
The Rose Library at Emory University, Atlanta, GA récently purchased Sid Kaplan’s negatives, contact sheets, and two copies of all of the images.

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 un materialistic, 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.

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.

At his father's death, Jean Moral was placed in a boarding school, where he used his free time to draw. In 1925, at the age of seventeen, he discovered photography. he attempted to capture the places and people that were dear to him out of fear of losing them, the suffering of his childhood. Moral engaged in photography with a new eye and as an autodidact. According to his Daughter, "Jean Moral, a ward of the state following his father's death in 1914, was a tormented soul of incredible sensitivity... His vision could not but be one of a free world. He liked naturalness and immediacy. He framed almost all his prints in the heat of the viewfinder. The manufacturer Rolleiflex was not mistaken when it chose him, in its advertisements, as the model of the photographer of movement and direct shots"6.
Jean Moral, a wanderer with his Rolleiflex in easy reach always favoured outdoor photography. Low-angle shots, close-ups, experimental angles inhabit many of his photographs, for the subject is merely an excuse for the composition. For the first few years, in his laboratory, he worked on transforming his outdoor shots through solarisation and double exposure. His compositions were often created in the heat of the moment and rarely in the dark room. A man who loved fresh air, he was one of the first to put models on streets for fashion photography, playing with urban space to galvanise and bring the city's energy into the heart of a craft that until then had been carried out exclusively in a studio. His work was noticed by Carmel Snow, the high priestess of American fashion, making him the only French person under contract at Harper's Bazaar and allowing him to cover the Paris collections for the great fashion magazine for many years.
An avid sportsman and outdoor aficionado, like Boucher and Steiner, Moral developed his style in the shots of beaches, mountains, the DELIGNY swimming pool that would be published in Paris-Magazine for a decade.
In his shots, he aims for maximum expression by using unusual perspectives. They take over the world by photographing it in an unusual way: in three close-ups, disturbed by the counter-framing, in an aerial view, by the high-angle shot and the low-angle shot. He tightens the composition to the point where the limit becomes an essential internal element to the composition.

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.

Since the early 1980s, Paul Pouvreau has been developing a body of photographic work that highlights ordinary, insignificant objects: domestic appliances, boxes, plastic bags, dust... His aim is to "focus attention on those little things of no consequence that often house just about everything". His work is also marked by a figure with an imperceptible face, treated anonymously and on the same level as the objects. While plumbing the real, Pouvreau also dips into the History of Art and sets up his photographs as installations. What interests him is the way in which the visual signs he chooses (logos and various types of packaging) dialogue with both everyday space and the space of the exhibition. Continually questioning the image and its representation, his artistic work integrates drawings and collages as well.

André Steiner earned a degree in electrical engineering in Vienna (Austria) where he emigrated from his native Hungary after the First World War. He began taking amateur photos in 1924, assisting professor Josef Maria Eder at the Technische Hochschule. Eder was also the president of the Photographic Society of Vienna. ?Still a student in 1924 and working in a laboratory of material technology, he had in his hands one of the first four hundred Leicas, which had been provided by Leitz to certain centers of study? From 1928 onward, he owned a Leica, and six years later, having completely mastered its technical aspects, he was a photgrapher?8. He came to Paris in 1928 where he worked as an engineer at Alsthom until 1932. In 1933 he set up his first Photography studio.
Steiner approached his first years of photographic experimentation almost like a scientist, exploiting photography?s technical potential (deformation, solarisation, over-exposure) to get photographic material to speak. He was an avid sportsman who had been a decathlon champion at the World Student Games in 1928. He photographed the world of sports, the body in movement, in space freed of heaviness. He continued his artistic investigations of nudes, faithful to his first works with his young wife Lilly. The nudes from the mid-thirties leave behind the classic pose in search of a composition where each part of the body is in tension. The body is no longer defined by is external curves, its envelope. Steiner was looking for its internal architecture, its tensions; he highlighted its construction.
A sort of bodily architecture in the vein of the new metal structures invading modern space.

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