Emmet Gowin

If I didn't like incorporating performance and social experiments into my photography, this is the life I'd want and the photographer I'd want to be. I still want to be like this, photographing my family and those close to me in such a beautiful, loving, playful and haunting way. Emmet Gowin will always be one of my favorite photographers...

Jacob Aue Sobol

Jacob Sobol is a Danish photographer. He creates gritty, high contrast black and white photographs of city streets, sex and relationships and other experiences he has encountered. One of my favorite projects of his is called "Sabine" which is about living in Greenland with his girlfriend. The project was made over a 3 year period, and the final product is accompanied by narratives and personal excerpts. The pictures are intimate and inviting. I think they're really gentle and beautiful, despite the harsh nature of some of their compositions.

Leonie Purchase (now Leonie Hampton)

Leonie Purchase is a British photographer who spent many years creating photo essays about various family dynamics and communities. She then created a project, which I'm featuring here, called "In the Shadow of Things" which is about her own family. She explains in an article that her mother and father divorced when she was young, whereafter her mother moved with her new partner and their son to "an isolated house at the end of a long dirt track." 16 years later, the house is still mostly unpacked, which is mostly because of her mother's severe OCD which immensely impacts her daily life. The project reminded me of Lisa Lindvay's in some ways, although I think Leonie Purchase approaches the project in a very different way. Maybe my eye is overly critical or sensitive after hearing Lisa speak so much about her project, but these photos don't seem to retain any sense of familial love. Instead they seem so bleak and almost detached, but many of the photographs are beautiful!

I can't find a lot of her images online, so I'll attach a few but I'm also going to attach the link to a page where she talks about the project and there are a larger selection of her images, especially some of her mother and the state of the house, which I wasn't able to find as easily floating online.

http://www.ingemorath.org/index.php/2010/05/leonie-purchas-uk/

Rong Rong

It's really hard to find any clear or official information on Rong Rong but from what I can find he is a contemporary Chinese artist who is one of the founders of the experimental and avant-garde art movements in China. He works mainly with photography, his early work consists mostly of Bejing urban landscapes and decay which then moved more towards naked couples in different natural and beautiful landscapes. Since 2000 he has been working in collaboration with Japanese artist Inri, who I'm pretty sure is also his wife. They create beautiful photographs within which I think they are often featured. They both have incredibly long and dark hair and do not face the camera in most of their photos, which creates a weird twin/double sensation when seeing them model. The photographs are incredibly beautiful and haunting.