Oscar Fernando Gomez

How He talks about his journey :

When I was 18, I left Monterrey to look for work in Mazatlán, a town 12 hours away, near Mexico's west coast. But on the way I ran out of money, and ended up sleeping rough, eating whatever I could find, sleeping on street corners, just surviving. Eventually, I tried to hitch a ride to my aunt's house, not far from Mazatlán. When I finally got there, on a lorry carrying a load of strawberries, I weighed 45kg (7st).

Two decades on, I'm back in Monterrey, working as a taxi driver (and I now weigh about 110kg). One day, I saw this man while I was out driving. He reminded me of what I'd been through: first living on the streets, then doing a series of odd jobs, like street-sweeping or cleaning carpets. He had loaded his wheelbarrow with industrial waste – wood, metal, plastic – to sell to recycling companies for about three pesos (15p) a kilo. I, too, did this. As I drove past him, I noticed he had stopped to comb his hair very carefully. Intrigued, I asked if I could take his photograph: I wanted to show that even people who can't find work – who have nothing – can maintain their dignity. Often, it is all they have.

I started taking photographs when I left my aunt's town. I bought the cheapest camera I could find, a Kodak, and shot places that had been special to me, such as monuments and parks. When I got back to Monterrey, I bought a better camera, a 35mm Canon, and took more shots: rivers and landscapes at first, then wedding portraits.

When my wife and I decided to have a child, I started taking photos from the window of my taxi, to make an album to show our child what dad sees when he is out all day. Our daughter died at birth, but I carried on taking pictures: of poor people, people who have nothing. For me, the important thing is not technique or composition. It's about trying to show that the people who live the most humble lives are often the most worthy of respect."

Lucas Foglia

Lucas Foglia grew up with his extended family on a small farm in the suburbs of New York City. While malls and supermarkets developed around them, they heated their house with wood, farmed and canned their food, and bartered the plants they grew for everything from shoes to dental work. But while his family followed many of the principles of the back-to-the-land movement, by the time he was eighteen they owned three tractors, four cars, and five computers. This mixture of the modern world in their otherwise rustic life made him curious to see what a completely self-sufficient way of living might look like.

From 2006 through 2010, Foglia traveled throughout the southeastern United States befriending, photographing, and interviewing a network of people who left cities and suburbs to live off the grid. Motivated by environmental concerns, religious beliefs or the global economic recession, they chose to build their homes from local materials, obtain their water from nearby springs, and hunt, gather, or grow their own food.

All the people in Foglia’s photographs are working to maintain a self-sufficient lifestyle, but no one he found lives in complete isolation from the mainstream. Many have websites that they update using laptop computers, and cell phones that they charge on car batteries or solar panels. They do not wholly reject the modern world. Instead, they step away from it and choose the parts that they want to bring with them.

Wilson Alwin Bentley

Wilson Alwyn Bentley was born February 9th, 1865, on a farm in Jericho, Vermont. His mother was a former teacher, and home schooled his brother and him. His father taught him how to farm. A farm boy's life is close to nature, which well-suited Bentley because he loved nature and the weather. He was very curious, especially about snow. For his 15th birthday, his mother gave him a microscope. Looking at snow crystals through his microscope, Bentley was amazed at their beauty, complexity, and variety. He tried to make detailed drawings of magnified snow crystals, but the snow melted before he could finish. Frustrated but determined to capture the exquisite geometrical intricacies of snow crystals, he decided to try photography.


During the late 19th Century the camera was an expensive new technology. Bentley's father considered a camera an unnecessary luxury and would not buy him one--he did not understand why Bentley wanted such an expensive "toy". Fortunately, Bentley's mother helped change his father's mind, and when Bentley was seventeen he got a camera and new microscope.

It took Bentley two years of painstaking trial and error, but on January 15, 1885, at the age of 19 years, he made the world's first photomicrograph of a snow crystal. The process he developed was unique and innovative, and when he first shared his images with others many people, especially scientists and professional photographers, "doubted Bentley's ability and his images" authenticity. However, over time Bentley was recognized for what he had achieved. His boyhood interest in the snow's microscopic beauty expanded to include a scientific curiosity of snow crystals structure and development, and he devoted himself to his photography and study of snow and other atmospheric phenomenon.

Ray K. Metzker

Ray K. Metzker

Ray K. Metzker has quietly been making extraordinary photographs for the better part of six decades. Today, he is recognized as one of the great masters of American photography, a virtuoso who has pursued his chosen medium passionately for fifty years.

Metzker was born in 1931 in Milwaukee and attended the Institute of Design, Chicago--a renowned school that had a few years earlier been dubbed the New Bauhaus-- from 1956 to 1959. He was thus an heir to the avant-garde photography that had developed in Europe in the 1920's. Early in his career, his work was marked by unusual intensity. Composites, multiple-exposure, superimposition of negatives, juxtapositions of two images, solarization and other formal means were part and parcel of his vocabulary. He was committed to discovering the potential of black and white photography during the shooting and the printing, and has shown consummate skill in each stage of the photographic process. Ray Metzker's unique and continually evolving mastery of light, shadow and line transform the ordinary in the realm of pure visual delight.

Major American museums began showing an interest in Metzker's work in the 1960's. Cementing his reputation as a master photographer, the museum of Modern Art in New York gave him his first one-man show in 1967. Retrospectives were organized in 1978 by the International Center of Photography in New York, and in 1984 by the Museum of fine Arts inHouston. The Houston exhibit was subsequently shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the International Museum of Photography,Rochester, and the National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC.

Edward Steichen

Edward Steichen and his family emigrated to the United States from Luxembourg in 1881 because his mother believed that he would have a better life in Midwestern America. They lived for a time in Michigan and then moved in 1889 to Milwaukee. Between the years of 1894-1898, Edward Steichen apprenticed as a designer for a lithographic company in Milwaukee, studied painting, and helped to organize an Art Students League.

At this time he decided to become a painter, but in 1896 his father gave him his first camera and he was hooked immediately. He studied with a local photographer and by 1899 he entered his first exhibition at the Second Salon of Philadelphia. He went to New York in 1902 and met with Stieglitz who bought some of his work and the two men quickly became friends. Along with Stieglitz, he was principal in the pictorial movement. Edward Steichen was one of the founders of the Photo-Secession. He helped to organize the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession (291), and he was instrumental in designing the cover and typography for the Photo-Secessionists' quarterly, Camera Work.

Between 1906-1914, Edward Steichen lived in Paris where he continued to study painting and photography, and he helped make connections between Stieglitz and such artist's as Rodin. In 1914, during WWI, he commanded the Photographic Division of Aerial Photography in the American Expeditionary Forces. He retired in 1918 as a lieutenant colonel and decided to burn all of his paintings and concentrate on photography full time. His experience during the war shifted his creative drive away from impressionistic style photographs to creating sharp, clear close-up images of still lives. He also continued to take portraits and was written up in Vanity Fair as "the world's best portrait photographer". This led him to the position of chief photographer for Conde Nast publications which allowed him to travel to Europe to photograph fashion, famous writers, artists, and politicians. Between 1923 and 1938, Edward Steichen's celebrity portraits and fashion photographs were published in Vanity Fair and Vogue and he was widely recognized as one of the best in his field.

In 1938, Edward Steichen had saved up enough money to close down his studio and move to France where he planned on spending his time as a horticulturist. In 1942, he was once again called into duty and served as a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy where he was in charge of photographing the naval aspects of the war. Between 1947-1962, he was the director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In 1952, Edward Steichen began to organize an exhibition which would be a compilation of the best photographers in the world. He went to 29 cities in 11 European countries and the endeavor took 3 years, but the exhibition entitled, The Family of Man, was well worth it. The exhibition was seen by more than nine million people in 69 countries and millions of books from the exhibition were sold. Over the span of his 77 year photographic career, this was probably his consummate achievement.

Grete Stern

In 1935, two months after arriving in Argentina, Grete Stern and her husband Horacio Coppola presented what the magazine Sur called “the first serious exhibition of photographic art in Buenos Aires,” which comprised work produced in Germany and London between 1929 and 1935: portraits, compositions, advertising photographs and landscapes. Her work showed an unconventional approach to photography: advertisement collages and studies with crystals, objects and still-lifes. Even the most accepted subjects at the time, such as portraits and landscapes, were done in unconventional ways: perfect definition, wide chromatic spectrum, flat lighting, simple poses and untouched negatives. Between 1935 and 1981 she continued with this work in Argentina, adding an important series of photomontages, reproductions of art work and portraits. Stern brought with her from Germany a modernist sensibility, developed in bohemian Berlin and at the legendary Bauhaus School, that shook up the staid approach to photography in Argentina at that time and established her as one of the founders of Argentine modern photography.

Grete Stern was born in Elberfeld, near Wuppertal, Germany, on May 9, 1904. She was the first child of Frida Hochberger and Louis Stern, who died in 1910. Her family was involved in the textile business and often traveled to visit relatives in England, where Stern attended her first years of elementary school. She studied piano and guitar and from 1923 to 1925 studied graphic design with Prof. Ernst Schneidler at the Kunstgewerbeschule (Am Weissenhof) in Stuttgart. In 1926 she worked as a freelance graphic design and advertising artist in her home town of Wuppertal. After seeing a photography exhibition of Edward Weston and Paul Outerbridge she was inspired to study photography.

In 1927 Stern moved to Berlin to live with her brother Walter, who was working as a film editor. He sent her to meet photographer Umbo (Otto Umbehr) who in turn sent her to take private lessons with Walter Peterhans, a photographer well known for his meticulously produced still lives. In 1928 Peterhans also accepted Ellen (Rosenberg) Auerbach as a student. Stern and Auerbach began a profound friendship that lasted throughout their lifetime. “He taught us to see photographically. For him the camera was not just a mechanism to take a photograph. It was a new way of seeing,” she said in an interview in 1992. In 1930 Walter Peterhans was named Master of Photography at the renowned Bauhaus School for art and design in Dessau. Using the proceeds from an inheritance Stern bought his equipment and with Auerbach started a photography studio for advertising, fashion and portrait photography. They thought that calling it “Rosenberg [Ellen’s birth name] and Stern” sounded too much “like a Jewish clothes manufacturer” so they called it ringl+pit, after their childhood nicknames (Ringl for Grete, Pit for Ellen). They decided to sign all their work together.

Mary Ellen Mark

MARY ELLEN MARK has achieved worldwide visibility through her numerous books, exhibitions and editorial magazine work. She has published photo-essays and portraits in such publications as LIFE, New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. For over four 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.

Mary Ellen was presented with the Cornell Capa Award by the International Center of Photography in 2001. 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. She was also presented with honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees from her Alma Mater, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of the Arts; three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts; the Photographer of the Year Award from the Friends of Photography; the World Press Award for Outstanding Body of Work Throughout the Years; the Victor Hasselblad Cover Award; two Robert F. Kennedy Awards; and the Creative Arts Award Citation for Photography at Brandeis University.

She has published eighteen books including Passport (Lustrum Press, 1974), Ward 81 (Simon & Schuster, 1979), Falkland Road (Knopf, 1981), Mother Teresa's Mission of Charity in Calcutta (Friends of Photography, 1985), The Photo Essay: Photographers at work (A Smithsonian series), Streetwise (second printing, Aperture, 1992), Mary Ellen Mark: 25 Years (Bulfinch, 1991), Indian Circus,(Chronicle, 1993 and Takarajimasha Inc., 1993), Portraits (Motta Fotografica, 1995 and Smithsonian, 1997), a Cry for Help (Simon & Schuster, 1996), Mary Ellen Mark: American Odyssey (Aperture, 1999), Mary Ellen Mark 55 (Phaidon, 2001), Photo Poche: Mary Ellen Mark (Nathan, 2002), Twins (Aperture, 2003), Exposure (Phaidon, 2005), Extraordinary Child (The National Museum of Iceland, 2007), Seen Behind the Scene (Phaidon, 2009) and Prom (Getty, 2012.) Mark's photographs have been exhibited worldwide.