Biographies
Alec Soth (b. 1969) is a photographer born and based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has published over twenty-five books including Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004), NIAGARA (2006), Broken Manual (2010), Songbook (2015) and I Know How Furiously Your Heart is Beating (2019). Soth has had over fifty solo exhibitions including survey shows organized by Jeu de Paume in Paris (2008), the Walker Art Center in Minnesota (2010) and Media Space in London (2015). Soth has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2013). In 2008, Soth created Little Brown Mushroom, a multi-media enterprise focused on visual storytelling. Soth is represented by Sean Kelly in New York, Weinstein Hammons Gallery in Minneapolis, Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, Loock Galerie in Berlin, and is a member of Magnum Photos.
Cristina de Middel investigates photography’s ambiguous relationship to truth. Blending documentary and conceptual photographic practices, she plays with reconstructions and archetypes in order to build a more layered understanding of the subjects she approaches. Working from the premise that mass media is reducing our real understanding of the world we live in, De Middel responds to an urgency to re-imagine tired aesthetic tropes and insert opinion in place of facts. Her impulse for an unconventional angle developed after a 10-year career as a photojournalist when De Middel stepped outside of straight documentary and produced the acclaimed series The Afronauts (2012). It explored the history of a failed space program in Zambia in the 1960s through staged reenactments of obscure narratives, challenging the traditional depiction of the African continent. De Middel’s ongoing project Gentleman’s Club (which began in Rio de Janeiro in 2015 and has now expanded to every continent around the globe bar Australasia) focuses on prostitution’s less documented side: the male clients. Her intimate portraits of these men subvert the paradigms of the status quo to provide new sources of insight and understanding. As well as her acclaimed personal projects, De Middel has worked on commission for clients including The Nobel Peace Foundation, Christian Dior, Vanity Fair USA, Vogue USA and FC Barcelona. De Middel was born in Spain and is based between Mexico and Brazil.
Bieke Depoorter (1986, Belgium) received a master’s degree in photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent in 2009. Three years later, when just 25 years old, she was made a nominee of Magnum Photos, of which she was named a full member in 2016. Depoorter has won several awards and honors, including the Magnum Expression Award, The Larry Sultan award and the Prix Levallois. She has published four books: Ou Menya, I am About to Call it a Day, As it May Be, and Sète#15. She worked together with Aperture, Editions Xavier Barral, Edition Patrick Frey, Lannoo, Hannibal and Le bec en l’air to publish these books.
The relationships Depoorter establishes with the subjects of her photographs lie at the foundation of her artistic practice. Accidental encounters are the starting point, and how these interactions naturally develop dictates the nature of Depoorter’s work. But several recent projects have been the result of Depoorter questioning the medium. In As it May Be, she gradually became more aware of her status as an outsider, both culturally and as a photographer. So, in 2017, she revisited Egypt with the first draft of the book, inviting people to write comments directly onto the photographs. In Sète#15, and also Dvalemodus, a short film she co-directed, she began to see her subjects as actors. Although she portrayed them in their true environments, she tried to project her own story onto the scenes, fictionalizing the realities of her subjects in a way that blurred the lines between their world and hers.
In the ongoing project Agata, a project about a young women Depoorter met at a striptease bar in Paris in October 2017, she explores her interest in collaborative portraiture. It’s an example of Depoorter’s interest in finding people that can work with her in telling a story. These stories are always partially hers, and partially theirs.
Alex Majoli becomes apprentice in the photo studio F45 in Ravenne from the age of 15, notably specialised in the reproduction of artworks from the great Italian painting. Graduated from the Art Institute of Ravenne in 1991, he joins Grazia Neri agency for which he covers the yugoslav conflict for several years.
His work on the closing of the famous psychatric institution in Leros, Greece, in 1994-1995 marks a turning point in his practice. Influenced by the 1970’s forefront italian theatrical and notably Luigi Pirandello’s writings, Alex Majoli tries to explore the daily life theatricalness, when the borders between reality and fiction fade. His work Tudo Bom, continuation of his research, interrogates the forms of violence omnipresent in brasilians daily lives.
With his last project SCENE, initiated in 2010 in Europe, he starts a new phase of experimentation. In his photographs, results of a performed action, each of his subjects becomes actor of his own history as well as a silent fragment of a collective history.
Laureate of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016, Alex Majoli published numerous books, including Andante (Cesura, 2018), Congo (Aperture, 2015), Libera Me (Trolley Books, 2010), Leros (Trolley Books, 2009) and One Vote (Filigranes Editions, 2004). His work has been exhibited at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Ravenne, the Rencontres d’Arles and the Galerie Nationale d’Art Moderne of Rome.
Alex Majoli is born in Ravenne in 1971, he lives and works between New York and Sicilia. Member of Magnum Photos from 2001, he has been represented by the Howard Greenberg Gallery.
