Biography:
Zoran Đorđević was born in Kragujevac, Serbia, which he is constantly leaving and to which he keeps returning.
He graduated top of the class from the Press Photography Department of the Yugoslav Institute for Journalism in Belgrade.
Đorđević started his career of photographer in the mid-eighties as contributor to magazines Omladinske novine, Mladina (Slovenia), Feral, Oko, Polet (Croatia) and Pogledi, where he soon became photo editor.
In 1986, he accepted an offer by the biggest automotive industry of former Yugoslavia and joined its advertising team, working on advertising campaigns for western markets. He cooperated with the design and marketing departments of BMW and Fiat, with designers in the U.S.A., and with many advertising agencies from the region of former Yugoslavia.
In 1996, working as press photographer for the weekly magazine Svetlost, Đorđević returned to life, the photographic genre which brought him the greatest success.
He won more than 80 awards on exhibition in the world and the most significant awards for photography, among them the Diploma of Anastas Jovanovic and the Award for the Best Photography of Yugoslavia and Serbia.
The Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts included his works in its reference book of photographs that had a historical impact on the development of this art in Serbia.
The artistic jury of the Photo Association of Serbia awarded Đorđević with the greatest photography title – Master of Photography, while the leading International Federation of Photographic Art, FIAP, granted him the title of EFIAP (Excellence FIAP).
His works were exhibited in Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Czechoslovakia, Danemark, Deutschland, England,  France, Hungary, Italy, Israel, India, Ireland, FRY Macedonia, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Serbia, Spain, Switzerland, Yugoslavia.
Books: The Guardian of Your Dreams.: “Slovo”, 1992.
Zoran Đorđević, monograph, Belgrade 2012.
Apart from being a photographer, Đorđević is also a lawyer by profession.
He is honorary member of “Cadre 36″, Zagreb, Croatia, photographers associations to promote analog photography.
He is member of FIPRESCI, the International Federation of Film Critics, and The Association of Applied Arts Artists and Designers of Serbia.
He is also a film lecturer at the Students’ Cultural Centre of Kragujevac.
Đorđević is one of the establishers of BELDOCS, the International Festival of Documentary Film in Belgrade.
He works at TV Kragujevac as documentary and film editor.

[Show as slideshow]

1 2 ►

Olivia Parker | American, 1941 –

After graduating from Wellesley College in 1963 with a degree in Art History, Olivia Parker began her career as a painter.
She became intrigued with photography in 1970.

Mostly self-taught in photography, she usually constructs what she photographs in the studio.
Her photographs are fundamentally still life inspired by those painted in the traditional Dutch, Flemish and Spanish 17th century style, with their torn petals, sumptuous but imperfect fruit and improbable insects.

Her photographs are fundamentally still life inspired by those painted in the traditional Dutch, Flemish and Spanish 17th century style, with their torn petals, sumptuous but imperfect fruit and improbable insects.

Parker feels that photographic still life is still an open arena precisely because of those intrinsic qualities of this contemporary medium that distinguish it from painting.

She says that the expression of the classical ideals of form is “dead matter” because the objects she chooses to photograph, whether alive or dead, are instead all signs of life.

She is drawn to the implication of visual edges; the swollen limits of a ripe pear touching a hard line or light downy feathers, confined by a metal grid. Her photographs ask viewers to continually evaluate their meaning by never truly defining where the eye comes to rest.

Olivia Parker has had more than a hundred one-person exhibitions in the United States and abroad, and her work is represented in several major private, corporate and museum collections.

She has exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Museum of Fine Arts – Boston and International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House. There have been three monographs of her work published (Godine and New York Graphic Society).

Still Life is one of the rarer themes in photography and it is a pleasure to find such an artist.

Do you like it – judge for yourself!

[Show as slideshow]

1 2 ►

“Well, I suppose nothing is meant to last forever. We have to make room for other people. It’s a wheel. You get on, you have to go to the end. And then somebody has the same opportunity to go to the end and so on.” – Vivian Maier

Vivian Maier (February 1, 1926 – April 21, 2009) was an American street photographer born in New York City. Although born in the U.S., it was in France that Maier spent most of her youth. Maier returned to the U.S. in 1951 where she took up work as a nanny and care-giver for the rest of her life. In her leisure however, Maier had begun to venture into the art of photography. Consistently taking photos over the course of five decades, she would ultimately leave over 100,000 negatives, most of them shot in Chicago and New York City. Vivian would further indulge in her passionate devotion to documenting the world around her through homemade films, recordings and collections, assembling one of the most fascinating windows into American life in the second half of the twentieth century.

Sometime in 1949, while still in France, Vivian began toying with her first photos. Her camera was a modest Kodak Brownie box camera, an amateur camera with only one shutter speed, no focus control, and no aperture dial.

In 1952, Vivian purchases a Rolleiflex camera to fulfill her fixation.

In 1956, when Maier moved to Chicago, she enjoyed the luxury of a darkroom as well as a private bathroom. This allowed her to process her prints and develop her own rolls of B&W film. As the children entered adulthood, the end of Maier’s employment from that first Chicago family in the early seventies forced her to abandon developing her own film. As she would move from family to family, her rolls of undeveloped, unprinted work began to collect.

It was around this time that Maier decided to switch to color photography, shooting on mostly Kodak Ektachrome 35mm film, using a Leica IIIc, and various German SLR cameras. The color work would have an edge to it that hadn’t been visible in Maier’s work before that, and it became more abstract as time went on. People slowly crept out of her photos to be replaced with found objects, newspapers, and graffiti.

Similarly, her work was showing a compulsion to save items she would find in garbage cans or lying beside the curb.

In the 1980s Vivian would face another challenge with her work. Financial stress and lack of stability would once again put her processing on hold and the color Ektachrome rolls began to pile. Sometime between the late 1990’s and the first years of the new millennium, Vivian would put down her camera and keep her belongings in storage while she tried to stay afloat. She bounced from homelessness to a small studio apartment the Gensburgs helped pay for. With meager means, the photographs in storage became lost memories until they were sold off due to non-payment of rent in 2007. The negatives were auctioned off by the storage company to RPN Sales, who parted out the boxes in a much larger auction to several buyers including John Maloof.

In 2008 Vivian fell on a patch of ice and hit her head in downtown Chicago. Although she was expected to make a full recovery, her health began to deteriorate, forcing Vivian into a nursing home. She passed away a short time later in April of 2009, leaving behind her immense archive of work…

Vivian Maier, Photographer

[Show as slideshow]

1 2 ►