Peter Beard

Photographer, collector, diarist, and writer of books.

His love affair with natural history and wildlife, which informs most of his work, began when he was a teenager. He had read the books of Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) and after spending time in Kenya and befriending the author, bought a piece of land near hers. It was the early 1960s and the big game hunters led safaris, with all the colonial elements Beard had read about in Out of Africa characterizing the open life and landscape, but the times were changing. Beard witnessed the dawn of Kenya’s population explosion, which challenged finite resources and stressed animal populations – including the starving elephants of Tsavo, dying by the tens of thousands in a wasteland of eaten trees.

from: 

http://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/photography/all/45702/facts.peter_beard_2_vols.htm

Tacita Dean

Dean’s films act as portraits or depictions rather than conventional cinematic storytelling, capturing fleeting natural light or subtle shifts in movement. Her static camera positions and long takes allow events to unfold unhurriedly. Other works have attempted to reconstruct events from memory, such as an infamous thwarted attempt to circumnavigate the world.

Boris Mikhailov

Ukrainian-born Boris Mikhailov is one of the leading photographers from the former Soviet Union. For over 30 years, he has explored the position of the individual within the historical mechanisms of public ideology, touching on such subjects as Ukraine under Soviet rule, the living conditions in post-communist Eastern Europe, and the fallen ideals of the Soviet Union.

Robert Frank

Robert Frank was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1924 and went to the United States in 1947. He is best known for his seminal book The Americans, first published in 1959, which gave rise to a distinct new art form in the photo-book, and his experimental film Pull My Daisy, made in 1959.

Duane Michals

The poet decorates his Muse with Verse, 2004

Duane Michals merges writing and photography into highly distinct and original bodies of work. Fed by literature, poetry, philosophy, film and art history, Michals moves between a melancholic gravity and a fanciful humor.