9 Photographers for the Planet

Martin Parr was born in Epsom, Surrey, Great Bretain, in 1952. Martin Parr is a photographer, editor, curator, collector and a member of Magnum Photos. He has published over 80 books of his own work and edited another 30. He is currently editing a series of books for Nazraeli Press and often does much work to promote new photographers, when, for example he was the artistic director of the Arles Festival and the Brighton Photo Biennial. He has just finished working on the History of the Photobook, Volume 3, published by Phaidon
and The Chinese Photobook, published by Aperture.


Sebastião Salgado is one of the greatest contemporary photographers. He was
born in 1944 in the state of Minas Gerais, in Brazil. Before starting his career in photography in 1973, he worked for the International Coffee Organization. He has published and exhibited numerous ambitious projects, which he has spent many years working on. These include: Workers: Archaeology of the Industrial Age, Migrations and Genesis, which have enjoyed massive international success. He has always been passionate about human rights and the environment, and in 1998 he founded the Instituto Terra, with his wife, Lélia Wanick. The aim of this organisation is to restore the ecosystem of the Atlantic
Forest to its natural state, working in the area of the Doce River valley, between the states of Minas Gerais and Espìrito Santo in Brazil.

Alessandra Sanguinetti is a recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Hasselblad Foundation Grant, Robert Gardner Fellowship, and a Rencontres D’Arles Discovery Award. Her photographs are in major public and private collections, such as the New York Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. Her monographs On the Sixth Day and The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and The Enigmatic meaning of their Dreams were published by Nazraeli Press in 2005 and 2012. Her latest monograph Sorry Welcome was published by TBW books in 2013. She is a member of Magnum Photos and is represented by Yossi Milo Gallery in New York and Ruth Benzacar Gallery in Buenos Aires. She currently resides in San Francisco and Buenos Aires.


Gianni Berengo Gardin was born in Santa Margherita Ligure in 1930 and began taking photographs in 1954. In 1965 he settled in Milan and began his professional career. He has worked with many important Italian and foreign magazines, but has mainly concentrated on producing books. From 1954 to 1965 he worked with Il Mondo, then edited by Mario Pannunzio. He has received numerous prizes, including one from World Press Photo in 1963, and he received the Leica
Oskar Barnack Award in 1995 for his book La disperata allegria. Vivere da zingari a Firenze. In 2008 he received the prestigious Lucie Award for Lifetime Achievement.He had more than 200 solo exhibitions in Italy and abroad and his photographs are part of numerous museums collections. In 2014 the volume Gianni Berengo Gardin. Il libro dei libri that collects all the books published by the italian photographer during his long career, is issued.

Irene Kung was born in Switzerland and trained as a painter. In recent years she expanded her repertoire to include photography and has achieved international recognition. She has exhibited at the Bozar Museum in Brussels, Belgium, and in the spectacular surroundings of the Certosa di San Giacomo in Capri, Italy. Her work has appeared in numerous international magazines such as AD, The Sunday Times Magazine and The New York Times Magazine and was selected by the international jury at ParisPhoto 2010. The Invisibile City (Contrasto), a book on her architecture photographs, was published in 2012 in English, Italian, French and Chinese.

Joel Meyerowitz is an award-winning photographer whose work has appeared
in over 350 exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world. He was born in New York in 1938. He began photographing in 1962. He is a “street photographer” in the tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, although he now works exclusively in color. As an early advocate of color photography (mid-60’s), Meyerowitz was instrumental in changing the attitude
toward the use of color photography from one of resistance to nearly universal acceptance. His first book, Cape Light, is considered a classic work of color photography and has sold more than 150,000 copies during its 30-year life. He
is the author of 20 other books, including Legacy: The Preservation of Wilderness in New York City Parks (Aperture), and his 50 year retrospective book, Taking My Time, was published by Phaidon Press in 2013.

Ferdinando Scianna was born in Bagheria, Sicily, in 1943. He started taking photographs in the 1960s while attending the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy at Palermo University. During this period, he systematically photographed Sicily, its people and itsfestivals, publishing Feste religiose in Sicilia (Leonardo Da Vinci Editrice) in 1965. In 1967 Scianna moved to Milan and worked for the magazine L’Europeo as a reporter and then as its correspondent in Paris. In 1977 he published in France Les Siciliens (Denoel), and Villa deimostri (Giulio Einaudi Editore) in Italy. He got to know Henri Cartier-Bresson and, in 1982,
joined Magnum. Since 1987 he has alternated reportage with fashion photography. Scianna has published a vast number of photobooks, articles on photography and on photo-based communication. From 2013 he issues two books of photographs and texts Ti mangio con gli occhi and Visti e scritti (Contrasto).

George Steinmetz is a regular contributor to National Geographic and GEO Magazines. Born in Beverly Hills in 1957, Steinmetz graduated with a degree in Geophysics. He began his career in photography after hitchhiking through Africa for 28 months. His current passion is photographing the world’s deserts while piloting a motorized paraglider. This foot-launched aircraft enables him to fly low and slow to capture unique images impossible by traditionalaircraft. Since 1986, George has completed 27 major photo essays for National Geographic and 32 stories for GEO Magazines. George has won numerous awards for photography
during his 30-year career, including two first prizes in Science and Technology from World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year Overseas Press Club and Life Magazine’s Alfred Eisenstaedt Awards. He has published three books, African Air about his 30 years of exploring Africa, Empty Quarter, about the Arabian Desert, and his magnum opus, Desert Air, an exhaustive study of all the world’s extreme deserts.

Best known for his vibrant and complex color work, Alex Webb has published 11 books, including The Suffering of Light, a collection of 30 years of his color photographs, and most recently Memory City (with Rebecca Norris Webb.) He has exhibited in museums worldwide including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. His work is in the collections of
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, the Guggenheim Museum of Art, NY, and the
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Alex became a full member of Magnum Photos in 1979. His work has appeared on National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, Geo, and other magazines. He has received numerous awards and grants including a Hasselblad Foundation Grant in 1998 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007.