Franz Szony

Photographic Work by Franz Szony

Raised in Reno, Nevada, Franz Szony is a writer and photographic artist whose main body of work, both in its fine art and commercial forms, embraces conceptual portraiture.

After finishing his primary education in 2014, which included art classes at an early age, Szony relocated to San Francisco where he attended the Academy of Art. At the academy, he initially studied fashion and illustration, and, later. focused on photography. After learning the technical aspects of photography, Szony returned to his hometown of Reno where, as a freelance artist, he photographed different advertisement campaigns for newspapers, theaters, and several casinos. He exhibited his own work in a small gallery he created and hosted monthly nude drawing workshops in that space.

Szony moved to Los Angeles in 2012 and settled in the Brewery Artist Loft complex, an industrially zoned area where artists rent living and working space. Inspired by the area’s creative energy, he photographed campaigns for perfume and fashion brands, created album covers, and did creative photographic work for companies, including Disney and Warner Brothers.

Influenced by illustrators such as Marc Davis and Erte, and, at an early age, by the extravagant stage shows of Reno’s casinos, Franz Szony’s conceptual portraiture work is lush both in its color and settings. His images are presented ambiguously in time and place, and androgynously in character. Szony’s photographs often contain symbolic or mythological elements and convey psychological, political, and sexual identity messages to the viewers.

Franz Szony is also a songwriter who has produced several music videos in which he has incorporated his poetry and visual art. Shot over a period of three days, his music video, “Petunia”, based on several of his photographic pieces, was released in 2018. Other music videos by Szony include “La Petite Mort”, “Antibeige”, and “Pansy”, also released in 2018; and “What You Seek” and “Surrender Dorothy”, both released in 2020.

Szony had solo exhibitions at Reno’s Sierra Arts Foundation in 2015 and at Hollywood’s World of Wonder Gallery in 2019. His work is included in many private collections. Franz Szony’s website is located at http://www.franzszony.com

William Orpen

William Orpen, “Self Portrait on Cliff Top in Howth”, cica 1910, Black Charcoal and Gouache, 50.5 x 36.5 cm, Private Collection

Born in County Dublin in November of 1878, William Newenham Montague Orpen was an Irish draftsman and portrait painter of London’s wealthy Edwardian society. A talented figure of British-Irish Post-Impressionism, he was the youngest son of wealthy, amateur painters and a gifted student who learned rapidly from a succession of celebrated tutors.

William Orpen was enrolled at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in 1891, where he studied from 1892 to 1896. He continued his studies at London’s Slade School of Art between 1897 and 1899, under figurative painter Henry Tonks, landscape painter Philip Wilson Steer, and genre and portrait painter Frederick Brown. Having mastered oil painting and different painting techniques, Orpen’s work, during his six years of study, received many prizes including the British Isles gold medal for life drawing.

Upon graduation from the Slade School, Orpen, along with his fellow graduate, Welsh painter Augustus John, opened in the autumn of 1903, the Chelsea Art School, a private teaching studio, near King’s Road in Chelsea. Although it was meant as a joint venture, most of the teaching and running of the school was undertaken by John, with Orpen’s chief contribution being a series of lectures on anatomy. Both male and female students were admitted to the school but, despite John’s own bohemian lifestyle, the sexes were segregated for the Life classes. The project was not a success, and, after the waning of both’s interest, the school closed in 1907.

From 1902 to 1915, William Orpen, in addition to his classes at the Chelsea School, taught at the Dublin Metropolitan School of At, where his pupils included portrait painter Margaret Clarke, romantic-realist painter John Keating, and cartoonist Grace Gifford. In the summer of 1904, he and his friend and mentor, the gallery director and art dealer Hugh Lane, traveled to Paris and Madrid. Orpen guided Lane on the purchase of Impressionist works, and Lane, several years later, commissioned Orpen for a portrait series of notable Irish figures to be displayed at Dublin’s Municipal Gallery of Modern Art. In 1908, Orpen began exhibiting his work regularly at London’s Royal Academy; the work in this period was done in a distinctive open-air style that featured figures composed of touches of color.

Starting in 1912, Orpen began his successful career as a portrait painter with a series of portraits of his favorite model, Vera Brewster Hone, the wife of writer Joseph Hone. This series, of such quantity that Orpen numbered them instead of naming them, included the 1912 “The Angler” and the 1918 “The Roscommon Dragoon”, which portrayed Vera Brewster wearing a Dragoon uniform. With the support of painter John Singer Sargent, Orpen built a reputation, in both Dublin and London, as a fashionable portrait painter who presented his subjects in a traditional, polished style. He also painted several group portraits, a popular genre at the time, which include the 1912 “The Cafe Royal in London”, depicting Orpen and Augustus John, and the 1909 “Homage to Manet”, with the subjects, including Hugh Lane and Henry Tonks, assembled before Manet’s portrait of Eva Gonzales.

In December of 1915, as World War One commenced, William Orpen was commissioned into the Army Service Corps. In January of 1917, through connections with the senior ranks of the British Army, he was given the title of an official artist, which included a promotion to major and unrestricted access to the Front areas in France. Throughout the war years, Orpen painted battle locations, trench scenes, and many portraits of both enlisted men and officers. For his work in this period, he stopped using half-tones and half-shades and adopted a new palettes of colors, with weak purples, bright greens, and large white spaces of sunlight. Many of these war artist works are in the collection of the Imperial War Museum in London.

Both before and after the war, Orpen produced a number of realistic self-portraits. in which he used his skills as a draftsman to resolve the challenges of surface, lighting, and reflection that he set for himself. His 1910 “Myself and Cupid” was actually a painting within a painting; in this portrait, Orpen painted a table top beyond which was hung a portrait of himself sitting next to a statue of Cupid. Orpen’s 1910 self portrait, known as “Leading the Life in the West”, shows him reflected full-length in a mirror in his studio, wearing a bowler hat and holding gloves and a riding crop. An IOU note is tucked in the frame of the mirror, a testament to the pleasures and distractions of his early career. In Orpen’s 1917 self-portrait “Ready to Start”, painted shortly after his arrival in France, Orpen is inspecting himself in the mirror wearing his military uniform. The French postcards and papers on the desk in the foreground set the scene of wartime France, while the bottles of wine and spirits reference Orpen’s dependence on alcohol during the war.

William Orpen’s life after the war was never the same: he became an alcoholic, grew distant from his wife and family, and mostly painted only to support the lavish lifestyle he took up in Paris with his mistress. Despite his personal problems he was still successful and continued to exhibit widely. Orpen was made a member of the prestigious Royal Academy in 1921 and, in 1923, he received a commission to paint a portrait of Edward, Prince of Wales, for the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews. In 1927 he was commissioned for a portrait of Prime Minister David Lloyd George, which was posthumously entered into the National Portrait Gallery. Orpen’s work was also part of the painting event at the 1926 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam.

Orpen became seriously ill in May of 1931, and , after a period of alcohol-induced illness and memory loss, died in London, at the age of fifty-two, in September of 1931. His contribution to the teaching of Irish art has always been recognized as he helped to nurture and influence Ireland’s most important painters of the twentieth-century.William Orpen is buried at Putney Vale Cemetery in southwestern London; a commemorative stone is located in the Island of Ireland Peace Park at Messines, Belgium.

Insert Images Top to Bottom:

William Orpen, Self Portrait, 1913, Oil on Canvas, 122.9 x 89.9 cm, Saint Louis Art Museum

Sir William Orpen, “Self Portrait”, circa 1901, Colored Chalk on Dark Gray Paper, 15.5 x 10.9 cm, Private Collection

William Orpen, “Self Portrait (Ready to Start)”, 1917, Oil on Panel, 60.8 x 49.4 cm, Imperial War Museum, London

Leonardo Corredor

The Black and White Photography of Leonardo Corredor

Born in Mérida, Venezuela, and based in New York City, Leonardo Corredor is a photographer and art film director. Before his photography career, he was professional model, named Best Venezuelan Model in 2007. Since his first appearance as an actor in 2010, Corredor has appearred in several acting roles on television series, including “Control Remoto”, “Dum Dum”, and “La Merienda”. He has also hosted Telemundo’s show “Invasion Casera”.

In 2012 Corredor became a creative director and fashion photographer for webzines, print magazines and fashion advertisers, including Essential Homme, Man About Town, Rollercoaster Magazine, Portrait, Fashionably Male, and Solar Magazine, among others. He is represented by The Industry MGMT, a artist and model management agency, focused on still and motion photography, with offices in New York and Los Angeles.

Examples of Leonardo Corredor’s photographic and video work can be found at his site located at: https://www.leonardocorredor.com

Glyn Warren Philpot

Glyn Warren Philpot, “A Young Breton”, 1917, Oil on Canvas, 127 z 101.6 cm, Tate Museum, London

Best known for his portraits of contemporary figures, Glyn Warren Philpot was a British painter and sculptor. Born in Chapham, London in 1884, he began studies at the Lambeth School of Art in 1900, under landscape painter Philip Connard. Philpot later studied at the studio of painter and sculptor Jean-Paul Laurens at the Académie Julian in Paris.

In 1904 one of Philpot’s paintings was included in the Royal Academy’s annual Summer Exhibition and this led to his first portrait commission. By 1911, he was living and working in a studio flat in London and had become successfully established as a society portrait painter. Painting up to dozen portrait commissions a year, Philpot was able travel in Europe and America, where he absorbed the modernist influences of portraits by Diego Velázquez, Edouard Manet, and Francisco de Goya, among others.

Following his conversion to Catholicism in 1905, Glyn Philpot explored religious and spiritual subject matter throughout his career. After a visit to Florence and central Italy for the first time in the early 1920s, his production of religious-inspired paintings increased significantly. Philpot also produced narrative scenes that were less formal and done with looser brushwork. Some of these show the influence of the French Symbolist movement, which was disseminated throughout the European art forms at this time. These more personal works of Philpot were shown in 1910 at his first solo exhibition in London, however, these works received far less critical acclaim than his portraits.

Despite his conversion to Catholicism, Philpot’s interests in the male nude and portraits of young men show a gradual expression of his own homosexuality. A trip to Berlin in the autumn of 1931, where Philpot confronted both the shocking rise of Nazism and the sexual openness of the city, encouraged him to be less secretive about his own homosexuality. This trip further contributed to his belief in the need for a change and a new openness in his art. At an exhibition in 1932, Philpot showed transparently homoerotic portraits of Julien Zaïre, a Parisian cabaret artist, and Karl Heinz Müller, a young German man who had been Philpot’s companion in Berlin.

After the start of World War I, Glyn Philpot joined the Royal Fussiliers and, in August of 1915, attended a training course at Aldershot, known as the home of the British Army. There he met Vivian Forbes, a fellow soldier and aspiring artist.. In 1917, as officers, they were independently invalided out of the army and, together, they shared a home and studio at Lanstown House in London between 1923 and 1935. Formerly a business man in Egypt, Forbes, with encouragement from Philpot, became an artist and later exhibited at the Royal Academy and elsewhere throughout the 1920s. Although he was talented, charming and devoted to Philpot, Forbes demonstrated increasing emotional instability, within which he became insanely jealous of Philpot’s other friends and liaisons. Despite the tumultuous nature of the relationship, Philpot never disowned him and found inspiration in their relationship.

Philpot lived in Paris for a year in 1931, at a time when modernism was at its beginning. His exposure to modern art in Europe had an impact on Philpot’s work and influenced the change in style that characterized his early paintings in the 1930s. His “Acrobats Waiting to Rehearse”, painted in 1939 with monochromic light pink hues and contemplative mood, is similar in style to Picasso’s work of his Rose Period. Philpot was also acquainted with the art of Henri Matisse, whom he had met in 1930 when both were on the jury at the Carnegie International Competition, where Picasso was awarded first prize.

On visits to America and Paris, Glyn Philpot frequented jazz clubs and made sketches and painted portraits of black men. At a time when few portraits of black men were painted by white artists, Philpot’s paintings and drawings display empathy and sensitivity towards his sitters. In 1929, he met Henry Thomas, a Jamaican man who had missed his boat home, and became a steady companion and aide until Philpot’s death. Starting in 1932, Thomas would sit as the model for all of Philpot’s paintings of black men.

During the 1930s Philpot suffered from high blood-pressure and breathing difficulties. He passed the summer of 1937 in France where he spent time with Forbes. On December 18th, Philpot collapsed suddenly in London and died of a brain hemorrhage. Vivian Forbes returned from Paris in a highly distressed state to attend Philpot’s funeral at Westminster Cathedral on December 22. The following day he took his own life with an overdose of sleeping pills. Glyn Warren Philpot is buried in a pink granite tomb in St. Peter’s Churchyard, Petersham, in west London. The burial site of Vivian Forbes is unknown.

Note: In regards to Glyn Philbo’s 1917 painting “A Young Breton”, there is another picture of the same young man, full face, entitled ‘Guillaume Rolland, a Young Breton’, in the Art Gallery of Toronto, Canada. This painting most likely was painted about the same time as the Tate image, shown above.

Inser Images From Top to Bottom:

Glyn Warren Philpot, “Portrait of Henry Thomas”, Date Unknown, Private Collection

Glyn Warren Philpot, “Resurgam (Again)”, 1929, Oil on Canvas, 86 x 89 cm, Private Collection

:Glyn Warren Philpot, “The Man in Black”, 1913, Oil on Canvas, 76.8 x 69.2 cm, Tate Museum, London

Glyn Warren Philpot, “Portrait of Vivian Forbes”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 146 x 97 cm, Private Collection

The Liberty of a Frozen Morning

Photographer Unknown, The Liberty of a Frozen Morning

“The approach of a man’s life out of the past is history, and the approach of time out of the future is mystery. Their meeting is the present, and it is consciousness, the only time life is alive. The endless wonder of this meeting is what causes the mind, in its inward liberty of a frozen morning, to turn back and question and remember. The world is full of places. Why is it that I am here?”

—Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House

Henry Marvell Carr

Henry Marvell Carr, “Maurice Alan Easton”, 1944, Oil on Canvas, 76.2 x 63.5 cm, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

Born in August of 1894 in Leeds, England, Henry Marvell Carr was a British portrait and landscape painter. He studied at Leeds College of Art and did his postgraduate work at the Royal College of Art under painter and printmaker William Rothenstein, best known for his work as a war artist in both World Wars.

Henry Carr served in the Royal Field Artillery in France during World War I. The work he produced as a war artist was exhibited at London’s Royal Academy in 1921, and in other British and Parisian galleries. Among the works Carr painted during the 1920s were landscapes depicting England’s south coast and portraits of Olivia Davis, his daughter, and writer Aldous Huxley.

At the outbreak of war in 1939, Carr received an appointment by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee to serve as an official war artist. The first exhibition of his war paintings was held in July of 1940 at the National Gallery in London, which included his 1940 “Dismantling Emergency Water Tank”, a tableaux depicting the removal of one of the National Fire Services’s storage tanks installed during the Nazi bombardment of London. Other wartime works of Carr includes the 1941 “Incendiaries in a Suburb”, “Merchant Seaman Fireman” in 1942, and views of London’s gothic Saint Pancras Station and Saint Danes Church on the Strand.

Between 1942 and 1945, Henry Carr was later attached to the British First Army in North Africa and Italy, where he painted the battles, infantrymen, and casualties of these campaigns. Among his works in this period were portraits of General Dwight Eisenhower and naval telegraph operator Maurice Easton, and a 1945 depiction of a gun crew stationed at the entrance to the port of Algiers, entitled “A Bofors Gun, Algiers”. While stationed in Italy in 1944, Carr witnessed and painted a major eruption of Mount Vesuvius which occurred in late March and destroyed several towns.

After the war, Carr resumed his career as a portrait painter. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in 1948, and, in 1956, was awarded the Paris Salon’s Gold Medal. In 1966, Carr was elected Royal Academician at London’s Royal Academy. He published two academic works, the 1952 “Portrait Painting” and “Portrait Drawing” in 1961. Henry Marvel Carr died in South Kensington, London, in March of 1971 at the age of seventy-five.

Henry Carr’s 1944 head and shoulders portrait “Maurice Alan Easton” depicts Easton, who had a hostilities-only rating, in his seaman’s uniform and naval cap. As he was a telegraphist, Eason bears the radio communicator’s badge on his right arm. Originally a civilian railway clerk from Oxfordshire, Easton was selected from his naval barracks at Naples by Captain Carr who was working there as a wartime artist. In order to impart a symbolic significance to the portrait of the young man, Carr used fluid brushstrokes and portrayed Easton in a heroic stance.

Carr’s finished work was exhibited simply as “The Sailor” in the Navy League’s post-war “Naval Art Exhibition”, which was held at the Suffolk Street Galleries and opened by the First Lord of the Admiralty on the 29th of January in 1946. The image of Easton was also used as a poster for the show, which greatly astonished Easton when he was sent back to London at that time and saw his face on the advertising billboards. Greenwich’s Maritime Museum only learnt the identity of the sitter, and the circumstances surrounding the portrait, from a 1946 clipping of the Sunday Dispatch newspaper, that it received in 1975 from an acquaintance of Maurice Easton.

Insert Image: Henry Marvell Carr, “Staff Sergeant Major E. A. Billett”, 1943, Oil on Canvas, 60.9 x 51.4 cm, Imperial War Museum, London

Frank Duveneck

Paintings by Frank Duveneck

Born in October of 1848 in Covington, Kentucky, Frank Duveneck was an American etcher and painter. He began painting in his early teens and was employed as an assistant to Wilhelm Lamprecht, a graduate of Munich’s Royal Academy who began a mission to decorate churches in the Cincinnati region. In 1869, Duveneck traveled to Munich where he intended to continue his study of church decoration.

After developing an interest in easel painting, Duveneck enrolled in 1870 at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where he studied under painters and illustrators Wilheim Diez and Alexander Strähuber.. Gaining distinction for his work, Duveneck won a prize in 1872 that entitled him to a studio of his own. Some of his best known works were painted during his time in Germany, including his 1872 “Whistling Boy”. one of Duveneck’s first renditions of working-class ruffians, now housed in the Cincinnati Art Museum.

Frank Duveneck’s work of this period are painted in a vigorous style that reveals the influence of Wilhelm Leibi, who was the leader of a group of young German realists guided by French realist Gustave Courbet’s innovative and social-themed work. Duveneck’s early style, with its generally dark colors and expressive brushwork, was a melding of contemporary German practice with his interest in the techniques of the Old Masters, particularly the seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painters.

Duveneck returned to Cincinnati in 1873, and, in the following year, exhibited portraits he had painted in Germany. His reputation as an artist in the United States began with a successful 1875 Boston exhibition of his work where his bold and spontaneous style caused a sensation. Despite encouragement to stay in Boston and paint commissioned portraits, Duveneck returned to Germany where he set up a studio in Munich and began to develop a reputation among its American students.

After a trip to Venice in 1877, Frank Duveneck opened his own painting school in Munich, which soon drew the attention of studying artists. His students, who would become known as the Duveneck Boys, included such future artists as portrait painter and illustrator John White Alexander, and impressionist landscape painters Theodore Wendel and John H. Twachtman. In 1879 Duveneck and his students traveled to Italy, where they would remain for the next two years spending winters in Florence and summers in Venice.

Duveneck was elected to the Society of American Artists in 1880. Around this time, he became interested in etching and produced several works in this medium which were similar in style to those of James Whistler, whom Duveneck had met in Venice. This collection of works were exhibited in a London exhibition in 1881. After 1880 Duveneck altered his painting style to one of lighter colors and less somber lighting effects, which might have been a response to his stay in Italy.

In March of 1886, Frank Duveneck married Elizabeth Boott, one of his students. They lived at Villa Casteliani in Florence for two years and had one son, Frank Boott Duveneck. After his wife’s 1988 death of pneumonia in Paris, Duveneck made the decision to return in the following year to the United States. He taught painting classes at Cincinnati, New York and Chicago, and frequently traveled to Europe throughout the 1890s. Duveneck became a teacher at the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 1890 and became a regular faculty member in 1900. He was elected into the National Academy of Design in 1905, and became a full Academician in 1906.

Duveneck exhibited his works in a private room at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition held in San Francisco; his works were received with great acclaim, and he was awarded a Special Gold Medal of Honor. Before his death in Cincinnati on January 2, 1919, Frank Duveneck donated a large and important group of his works to the Cincinnati Art Museum, which remains the center for Duveneck studies. His works can be seen at the New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery in Washington, DC, Boston’s Museum of Fine Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.

Top Insert Image: J. Land, Portrait of Frank Duveneck, 1877, Detail, Photographic Sepia Print on Cabinet Card, Smithsonian Institution

Middle Insert Image: Frank Duveneck, “Study for ‘The Harem Guard”, 1879, Oil on Canvas, 76.2 x 66 cm, Fine Art Museums of San Francisco

Bottom Insert Image: Frank Duveneck, “Self-Portrait”, 1877, Oil on Canvas, Cincinnati Art Museum

August Sander

August Sander: Portraits from “People of the Twentieth Century”

Born in 1876 in Herdorf, a small village east of Cologne in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, August Sander was a photographer, now viewed as a forefather of conceptual art and a pioneering documentarian of human diversity.

Sander spent his time, between 1897 and 1899, as a photographer’s assistant during his military service. In 1901, Sander started working for a photo studio in Linz, Austria, became a partner in 1902, and then the proprietor in 1904. By this time, he already had several exhibitions and purchases of his work by museums. After many successful exhibitions of his work, Sander relocated his studio to Cologne.

In 1911, August Sander began the first series of portraits for what would be his monumental project, “People of the Twentieth Century”, an archived and sustained photographic enterprise of twentieth-century man, These emphatically objective photographs from the years of the Kaisers, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime, and the early Federal Republic make up an unprecedented document of both the individual and the collective recent history of the German people.

In 1927, August Sander traveled through Sardinia for three months, where he took hundreds of photographs. A exhibition of his portraits at the Kölnische Kunstverein in 1927 received positive reviews from both critics and the public. This exhibition led to the 1929 publishing of Sander’s “Antlitz der Zeit (Faces of Our Time)”, which included the first sixty portraits from his twentieth-century series and an introduction by German novelist and essayist Alfred Döblin.

Under the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany, Sander’s work and personal life were greatly restrained. In 1934, Sander’s son Erich, a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party, was arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison, where he died shortly before the end of his sentence. The printing blocks for Sander’s “Antlitz der Zeit” were destroyed and unsold copies impounded in 1936 by the authorities, most likely due to the publication’s image of a heterogeneous German society of which the Nazi Party disapproved.

Despite the political situation in Germany between 1933 and 1945, August Sander continued working in his Cologne studio, portraying intellectuals, Jewish citizens, National Socialists, as well as regular people from the street. Many of these commercial portraits were included in his opus ”People of the Twentieth Century” where they became a political statement. Beginning in 1942, Sander started to relocate the most important parts of his negative archive to Kuchhausen, a small village in Westerwald, where he continued both his commercial photographic work and his project wor

Although August Sander’s main studio in Cologne was destroyed in a 1944 bombing raid, tens of thousands of his negatives, which he had left behind in the basement of a former apartment in Cologne, survived the war. In a later 1946 fire, approximately twenty-five thousand negatives were destroyed in the same apartment basement. In 1946, Sander continued his historical archive with a post-war photographic documentation of the bombed city of Cologne in 1946.

Sander sold a portfolio of four-hundred and eight photographs of Cologne, taken between 1920 and 1939, to the Kölnisches State Museum in 1953. These photos would form the 1988 book “Koõin wie es War (Cologne As It Was)””. In 1962 an edition of eighty photographs from the “People of the Twentieth Century” was published as a book entitled “German Mirror: People of the Twentieth Century”. Still working on his project at the age of eighty-eight, August Sander died of a stroke on April 20th in 1964. His body was buried next to his son Erich in Cologne’s Melaten Cemetery.

One of the most ambitious undertakings in the history of photography, the “People of the Twentieth Century” project occupied Sander for some 40 years, from the early 1920s until his death, during which he took portraits of hundreds of German citizens and then categorized them by social type and occupation — from farm laborers to circus performers to prosperous businessmen and aristocrats. Remarkable for their unflinching realism and deft analysis of character and lifestyle, Sander’s individual images stand out as high points of photographic portraiture and collectively propose the idea of the archive as art.

Although the Nazis confiscated the first publication of Sander’s work, and the majority of his negatives were later destroyed by fire, approximately eighteen hundred portrait negatives for “People of the Twentieth Century” survived, as well as Sander’s notes and plans. Together with the existing vintage prints, they have provided the basis for current reconstruction of Sander’s ambitious project in both book and exhibition form.

Middle Insert Image: August Sander, “Workmen in the Ruhr Region”, 1928, Silver Gelatin Print, August Sander Archive, VG, Bild-Kunst

Leonardo Corredor, “João Knorr”

Leonardo Corredor, “João Knorr”, Los Angeles Photo Shoot for Man About Town, January 2019

Examples of Leonardo Corredor’s photographic and video work can be found at his site located at: https://www.leonardocorredor.com

Ashim Shanker: “In Union Shall You Drift”

Photographers Unknown, In Union Shall You Drift

“There will be times in which things appear hopeless. You will begin to doubt everything around you. You will even begin to doubt yourself. You will think things will never look up and you may be in the deepest, darkest, loneliest place in the world. Everything which had once been infused with wonder may appear disappointing and harsh. You may grow cynical and come to believe that this is simply the way the world is…that one must bear with the unforgiving realities of the world and only hope that it doesn’t get worse. You might grow suspicious of others, as adults tend to do, and close yourself off from the rest of the world. You might just look to the past and reminisce about better days…or you might just dwell in one place for a little too long and become nostalgic for the future. Just remember—regardless of where you are, what experiences you have, and who you have become—that there will always be those who have loved you. Those whom you may have taken for granted, but have nonetheless, always had you in their hearts and in their hopes and wishes. Lives that you have touched: whether you realize it or not. To separation you may venture, but indissolubly in union shall you drift…you will always be at the whims of forces, both great and small, and far beyond your capacity to control. That’s how all our stories go. Innumerable arcs intersect and scatter into a vast indefinite sea.”

—Ashim Shanker, Don’t Forget to Breathe

Born in Allentown, Pennsylvania to Indian immigrants, Ashim Shanker graduated from Pennsylvania State University and briefly worked in the wireless communications industry in New York. He struggled early in life with the complexities of identity and found writing to be a suitable outlet for analyzing the many contradictions he faced on a daily basis. The page became the medium for all the questions that had no particular answer.

Shanker relocated to Japan in 2003 and spent the next eleven years as a teacher and a content planner for textbooks and software. While working at several jobs, he continued to write and, in 2008, published his first novel of his absurdist Migrations fiction series, “Don’t Forget to Breathe”. Still living in Japan, Shanker finished the second installment of the series, “Only the Deplorable”, in 2013, as well as his first book of short stories and poems, “Sinew of the Social Species”, which was published in 2014.

Ashim Shanker moved back to the United States for his graduate work and completed a Master’s Degree in International Educational Policy at Harvard University. His teaching experience in international and public school environments have contributed to his fervent advocacy for systemic reform in global educational policy and delivery.

Shanker contributed to educational research publications in collaboration with UNICEF and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). He also contributed to a collection of educational case studies profiled in the 2018 book. “Building Bridges to the Future”.

In 2019, Ashim Shanker completed his third novel in the Migrations series, “Inward and Toward”, and released his second book of short stories entitled “branches para parallax leapfrog” in 2020.

Eden Yerushalmy, “Yuval Sliper”

Eden Yerushalmy, “Yuval Sliper”, 2020, Eroticco Magazine

Eden Yerushalmy is a professional hair stylist and photographer of portraits and fashion; he is living and working in Tel Aviv, Israel. Yerushalmy has done work for: the clothing company Urban Outfitters and the online magazines Graveravens, Maxculine Dosage, Kaltblut Magazine, Yup Magazine, and The Male Fashion..

Yeurshalmy”s exclusive photo shoot of Yuval Sliper, an Israeli model with the BOLD talent agency, was posted in the November 2020 issue of the online Eroticco Magazine, located at: https://eroticcomagazine.com..

For information on Eden Yerushalmy’s work, a link to the artist’s sites is located at: https://www.instagram.com/edenyeru/

Travis Chantar

Photography by Travis Chantar

Born in California and raised in the mountains of Idaho by two moms, Travis Chantar studied music in Minnesota and settled in Brooklyn, New York, as an artist and freelance photographer. He first developed a passion for decorating and portrait photography in high school, after which he progressed to creating poster imagery for shows in college. Upon graduation, Chantar combined his enthusiasm for painting and portraiture to produce a solo exhibition entitled “Tribe”, a body painting series which resulted in a published art monograph of the same name. A subsequent series entitled “Flowers” consisted of images of nude sitters adorned with flower and petal arrangements.

In 2014, Chantar began assisting Ryan Pfluger, a New York and Los Angeles based freelance photographer, in his high-profile shoots for publications such as Vogue, New York Times, Billboard, Elle, Netflix, and other image oriented companies. Chantar’s work has included both book and album covers, product campaigns, and portfolio work for creative agencies. Most recently, Chantar published editorials in Risk Magazine, Out Magazine, FGUK Magazine, Natural Pursuits Magazine, Kaltblut Magazine, and VMAN Magazine.

For more information and images, the artist’s website is located at: http://www.chantarphotography.com

Domenico Baccarini

The Artwork of Domenico Baccarini

Born in December of 1882 at Faenza, Italy, Domenico Baccarini studied sculpture at Faenza’s School of Arts and Crafts under Massimo Campello and drawing under the sculptor and medalist Antonio Berti, who introduced him to the renowned ceramic crafts of the city. Since the Middle Ages, Faenza was considered an excellent ceramic center which was known for its high-quality majolica pottery. After graduating and obtaining a study grant from the city of Faenza, Baccarini attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence between 1900 and 1903.

During this period in Florence, Baccarini associated with many artists including symbolist illustrator and print maker Adolfo De Carolis, painter and engraver Giovanni Costetti, and painter and poet Lorenzo Viani. He produced several sculptures in the years 1901 and 1902, which are now housed in the collection of the municipality of Forli’s Aurelio Saffi Library. These include his sculptural works “Bust of a Young Woman”, “Spring”, “Nymphs”, and “Sensations of the Soul”.

Baccarini visited the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts, held in Turin in 1902, and, in the following year, attended the Fifth International Biennial of Art in Venice. Settling in Rome in the autumn of 1903, Baccarini worked as an illustrator for the La Patria newspaper, which later organized an exhibition of his work at its headquarters in summer of 1904. During this time in Rome, Baccarini was in a relationship with the future model for many of his works, Elizabetta Santolini known as Bitta,, who would in 1905 give birth to their daughter Maria Teresa.

In the beginning of 1904, Baccarini achieved admission to the Nude School of the French Academy located in central Rome’s Villa Medici. He often frequented the home of monumental and frieze sculptor Giovanni Prini and met with other artists, such as painters and sculptors Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla, both leading members of Futurist movement, and musician and composer Alberto Gasco, a proponent of musical Modernism. Baccarini exhibited his work in 1904 with success at the Romagna Regional Exhibition of Ravenna.

Returning to Faenza in 1905, Domenico Baccarini began to work in the medium of ceramics. As part of the Art Nouveau and the late symbolism period of Faenza ceramics, he was responsible for some of the most interesting artistic, ceramic and decorative concepts at the turn of the twentieth century. Baccarini played a key role in the renewal of Faenza’s ceramic production, especially that of the Fabbriche Riunite Ceramiche workshop of Achille Calzi and the Manifatture Fratelli Minardi owned by the Minardi brothers, Virginio and Venturino.

While working in ceramic design, Baccarini continued his own drawing and sculptural works, of which three were presented at the Sixth Venice Biennale. He was very engaged in his artwork throughout 1905: exhibiting in Milan’s Fine Art Exhibition for the opening of the Sempione and at the first Exhibition of the Società del Risveglio Cittadino in Faenza. Baccarini also produced illustrations for Rome’s L’Avanti della Domenica magazine and started collaborating with writer and journalist Antonio Beltramelli on illustrations fo the author’s short stories.

After being abandoned by Bitta and suffering economically, Domenico Baccarini returned to Rome where he received a commission from the charity institution, Casa del Pane, for a series of drawings to illustrate their workers in the field. During this second stay in Rome, his already poor physical condition worsened rapidly, which forced his return to his hometown of Faenza. It was there that Domenico Baccarini died on January 31 of 1907, at the age of twenty-four.

For the celebration of the centennial anniversary of the passing of Domenico Baccarini, the Municipal Art Gallery of Faenza held two exhibitions of his paintings and drawings in their collection. On the same occasion, the Museum of Art of Ravenna held an exhibition entitled “Domenico Baccarini: A Meteor of the Early Twentieth Century”, which retraced his life through his work.

T M Davy

The Artwork of T M Davy

Born in New York, New York in 1980, T M Davy is a painter whose body work is characterized by realistic oil portraits. Davy studied at the National Academy of Design in New York in 2001, and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York where he currently teaches. In 2012 , he was an artist in residence at BOFFO in Fire Island, New York.

T M Davy’s work relies on scenes that are directly connected to his life and surroundings. Persistent themes in his work are the issues of intimacy, love, and friendship. Past subjects in his work have included candle-lit scenes of domestic life with family, his husband Liam, and his circle of friends. Davy has also painted a series of images centered on horses, inspired by the time he spent on a relative’s farm, and a series of images of candles lit in darkness.

The consistency of Davy’s technical execution and the sophistication of its realism are apparent in his oil on canvas work, whether in a small or a large-scale format. A connecting link in all of his paintings is his use of the chiaroscuro effect, a technique used also by painters Caravaggio and Anthony van Dyck, which emphasizes the interaction of light and shadow.He has also worked in the mediums of pastel and gouache, with which he produced several series of open air spontaneous drawings in a smaller scale format.

In his work produced on Fire Island, New York, Davy portrays many of his beachside figures entering or in the water, exemplifying the union of bodies with nature, a prominent theme of the artist. His portraits celebrate his inseparable communion with his husband, Liam Davy, as well as the intimacy and bond among close friends. His “Fire Island” series are a meditation on the power and freedom born from togetherness—between figure and landscape, mind and body, human and human.

Davy’s work has been included in group exhibitions at the “No Soul for Sale” exhibition at theTate Modern in London; the “B-Out” exhibition at the Andrew Edlin gallery in New York; the 2009 “Nudes” exhibition at Galeria Fortes Vilaca in São Paolo; and the 2019 “Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall” at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, among others. He has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Thomas Fuchs in Stuttgart, Germany in 2018: the Exile gallery in Berlin, Germany, 2012; and gallery 11R in New York in 2014 and 2017.

“We exist in an age of complete transition. The time is now to communicate the beauty of queer love around the world. A paradigm shift in people’s conception of love is happening. If I can, I want to play a small part in that–in revealing how true and how eternal it is. Transcendence is a movement to the broadest spectrum. “ —T M Davy, 2019

Information of T M Davy’s work and exhibitions can be found at the artist’s site: http://www.tmdavy.com

Naur Calvalcante

Photography by Naur Calvalcante

Naur Cavalcante is a designer and photographer, specializing in portraiture and commercial advertising, working in both Três Lagoas and São Paulo, Brazil. His work has been presented in the magazines: “Revista Planter”, “Revista Ella”, “Em Focco”, and the online magazines “Image Amplified” and “Morphosis”.

More information on the artist’s work can be located at: https://naurcavalcante.46graus.com