Lana Slezic is a Canadian photojournalist

Lana Slezic is an award winning photographer of international acclaim. She studied photojournalism and interned at the Magnum Photo Agency in New York. She’s worked for The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star for two years and her clients now include The New York Times, Paris Match Magazine, National Geographic Magazine, The Sunday Times Magazine and a host of others. Lana is represented by Panos Picture Agency in the UK and the Marcia Rafelman Fine Arts gallery in Toronto and has shown her work in galleries and auctions in Europe and North America. Lana’s first photography book, Forsaken, was published in Fall 2007 in seven countries.

Canadian-born Lana Slezic is a photographer whose striking images trace the roughened edges of life. Slezic focuses on realities she feels acutely empassioned by – from the quiet resilience of Dubrovnik, to the Mennonites in all their simple splendour. Slezic’s images don’t idle, they leap – and simmer and brew.

Using a local photographer’s old box camera in a Kabul market, Lana Slezic started taking these extraordinary pictures of Afghan women and girls – a subject she had focused on in her book project Forsaken - in 2007.

As she slowly familiarised herself with the etiquette of taking pictures of women in Afghanistan, realising that women would be more likely to agree when not accompanied by a man, Lana started to create unique images of these women, so often overlooked in the haze of conflict.

http://www.lanaslezic.com

Miroslav Tichý (1926-2011) : photographer

Miroslav Tichý (1926-2011) was known as the crazy old man harmlessly toting his homemade cameras around town. Women didn’t mind his constant gaze since they thought his wire and cardboard cameras didn’t work. Few people in the Czech town of Kyjov knew Tichý developed their photographs in his outdoor tub and later discarded them on his floor.

This last master of the 20th century photography was only discovered some 6 years ago and left a radical and unorthodox body of photography focussed on the female figure. After studying at the Academy of Arts in Prague, Miroslav Tichý withdrew to a life in isolation in his hometown of Kyjov, Moravia, Czech Republic. In the late 1950s he quitted painting and became a distinctive Diogenes-like figure. From the end of the 1960s he began to take photographs mainly of local women, in part with cameras he made by hand. He later mounted them on hand-made frames, added finishing touches with pencil, and thus moved them from photography in the direction of drawing. The result are works of strikingly unusual formal qualities, which disregard the rules of conventional photography. They constitute a large oeuvre of poetic, dreamlike views of feminine beauty in a small town under the Czechoslovak Communist régime.

Miroslav Tichy said that to be famous today, you have to be the worst at something. His underexposed blurry voyeuristic images of women in his small hometown are the antithesis of today’s overindulgent snapshot culture. Here is a throwback to a time when a camera was a magical instrument, one capable of inciting wonder and rarity. Tichy’s photographs from the sixties and seventies have retained the mystical quality that photography innately possesses. Women seen through his home made mouse nibbled lenses and self constructed scrapyard cameras are honest and poignant and most importantly, and herein lies his credit- fresh and new.Women as though glimpsed for the first time.

http://www.tichyocean.com/