LSI 2023 Spring Conference Speakers
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Manfred Baumann was born in Vienna in 1968. The Leica photographer presents his work worldwide in the form of exhibitions, books and calendars. His photographs are displayed in museums as well as in international galleries. Over the past years, Baumann has taken his place among the most influential photographers of our time.
He lives in Austria and L.A., and works worldwide, having already photographed such greats as Sandra Bullock, William Shatner, Kirk Douglas, Olivia Newton John, Jack Black, Natalie Portman, Tony Curtis, Lionel Richie, John Malkovich, Bruce Willis, Juliette Lewis, Angelina Jolie and Evander Holyfield, as well as many international top models. His unique exhibitions such as the MUSTANGS, or THE AMERICAN BISON, END OF LINE, LIFE, REBIRTH, ALIFE, SPECIAL are popular worldwide! Manfred photographed for magazines like National Geographic, Vogue, Elle, People Magazine, GQ, Playboy, Bazaar, ….as well as for clients like BMW, Loreal, Swatch, Microsoft, Swarovski, RADO, Red Bull,...He campaigns for animal welfare, is a friend and honorary ambassador of Jane Goodall and also photographs for PETA. Manfred was the star guest & speaker at the largest Adobe MAX Conference 2022 in Los Angeles. He has been with his wife Nelly for more than 25 years, who also does his management! In the last few years the official Leica photographer Manfred Baumann has become one of the most influential photographers of his time! He enjoys a great media interest. In social media its range is over 1 million!
September Dawn Bottoms is a self-taught photographer from Oklahoma. Her work focuses on mental illness, family, poverty, and the intersection of the three. Her award-winning project, Blood Strangers, is an amalgamation of these themes; a visual memoir of the artist’s own family, shot through the lens of sexual trauma. A 2020 New York Times Photography Fellow and a World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass Participant, September is mentored by James Estrin of the New York Times and Ed Kashi of VII Photo. She has twice been awarded TIME’s best photojournalism, most recently in 2022 for her work photographing death doulas.
Debi Cornwall is a conceptual documentary artist and filmmaker who returned to visual expression in 2014 after a 12-year career as a civil-rights lawyer. Marrying dark humor with structural critique, she uses still and moving images along with testimony and archival material to examine the staging and performance of American power. Her two photography books, Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay and Necessary Fictions, both with Radius Books (2017 and 2020), explore “state-created realities,” from the offshore War on Terror prison and its global diaspora to the domestic military sites hosting immersive, realistic wargames. Her short found-footage films, Pineland/Hollywood (2021) and Jade Helm (2022), are screening at film festivals internationally.
Debi is an inaugural winner of the Leica Women Foto Award and has also been honored with a NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in Photography, a Harpo Foundation Visual Artist Grant, a Center for Emerging Visual Artists Grant, and Speranza Foundation Lincoln City Fellowships. She is one of eight mid-career photographers shortlisted for the biennial Swiss prize, the Prix Élysée. Her work is held in public collections around the world, and has been profiled in publications as diverse as Art in America, European Photography Magazine, National Geographic, the New York Times Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
A graduate of Brown University and Harvard Law School, Debi is an ICP faculty member and sits on the Women Photograph board
Mark de Paola is a New York City-based fine art and fashion photographer with over 30 years of experience shooting campaign and fine art commissions for the likes of Vogue Spain, Vogue Mexico, Gucci, Oscar de la Renta, Prabal Gurung, David Koma, Roksanda, and Saint Laurent.
De Paola has directed several hundred television spots in the fashion/beauty sector including those for Giorgio RED Perfume (Bergdorf Goodman windows and MoMA NY), Ducati, Leica Camera, Sony, Neutrogena, and Ford Motorsports.
De Paola's fine art work is included in public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Getty in Los Angeles, the San Diego Center of Photographic Arts, and the TOP Museum in Tokyo. His photography monographs Recent Work I (2018), Recent Work II (2019), and Five Years and Sixty Seconds (2020) can be found with Leica Camera retailers in major cities worldwide. De Paola's solo exhibitions have traveled around the world including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dali (China), Tokyo, Milan (Triennale Museum), and at home in New York City. De Paola's pictorialist work as a still and motion artist has been driven by his studies of the neurobiology and cognitive psychology of human vision.
Bruce Gilden is one of the most iconic street photographers of our time. Known for his graphic and often confrontational close-ups made using flash, his images have a degree of intimacy and directness that have become a signature in his work. Though he cut his teeth on the sidewalks of New York City where he grew up, he has since made significant bodies of work in Haiti, Japan, Moscow, France, Ireland and India. “I’m known for taking pictures very close,” says Gilden of his practice. “And the older I get, the closer I get.”
Gilden was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1946. He studied sociology at Penn State University but didn’t complete the course. Although he briefly flirted with the idea of being an actor, Gilden decided to become a photographer in 1967, when he bought his first camera. He attended evening classes at the School of Visual Arts in New York, but largely considers himself to be self-taught.
As well as his many acclaimed personal projects, Gilden has worked on commissions for Louis Vuitton, RATP Parisian transportation system, The Climate Group, and Mission Photographique Transmanche as well as publications including Wallpaper, New York Times Magazine.
Gilden has received many awards and grants for his work, including National Endowments for the Arts fellowships (1980, 1984 and 1992), French “Villa Medicis Hors les Murs” grant (1995), grants from the New York State Foundation for the Arts ( 1979, 1992 and 2000), a Japan Foundation Artist Fellowship (1999) and in 2013 a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. Since the seventies, his work has been exhibited in museums and galleries all over the world. He has published 27 monographs of his work: Lost and Found (2019), Cherry Blossom (2021), and early 2022, Black Country as well as most recently The Circuit. Gilden joined Magnum Photos in 1998. He lives in Beacon, New York.
Todd Hido (born in Kent, Ohio, 1968) wanders endlessly, taking lengthy road trips in search of imagery that connects with his own memories. Through his unique landscape process and signature color palette, Hido alludes to the quiet and mysterious side of suburban America—where uniform communities provide for a stable façade—implying the instability that often lies behind the walls. His photographs are in many private and public collections, including at the Getty, Whitney Museum of American Art, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Pier 24 Photography holds the archive of all of his published works. Hido has published more than a dozen books, including the award-winning monographs House Hunting (2001) and Excerpts from Silver Meadows (2013), as well as innovative B-Sides Box Sets, which function as companion pieces to his books. His Aperture titles include Todd Hido on Landscapes, Interiors, and the Nude (2014) and Intimate Distance: Twenty-Five Years of Photographs (2016). His latest book is Bright Black World (2018). His upcoming publication, which was titled before the pandemic, The End Sends Advance Warning, will be published in 2023. Hido is also a collector, and over the last twenty-five years has created one of the most notable photobook collections, which was featured in Bibliostyle: How We Live at Home with Books (2019).
Eric Luden is the founder and CEO of Digital Silver Imaging. Luden started Digital Silver Imaging after leaving Ilford Photo where he was a VP of Marketing. Luden has a long history of innovation and involvement in the photo industry. Luden started in photo retail management and has served on the boards of The Griffin Museum of Photography and the Social Documentary Network.
Cheriss May is based in Washington, D.C. She works as a freelance editorial and portrait photographer and is an adjunct professor at Howard University. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, People, ABC News, and has been published on The White House website, and other publications. Her work is featured in the permanent collections of the African American Museum in Philadelphia, PA, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, NY. Her current exhibit, Cheriss May – Soul Connection, is running at Busboys & Poets in D.C. through the end of May 2023.
Stan Shire is a professor emeritus of photographic imaging with an M.Ed in Computer Imaging.
He first got interested in photography at age 12 and never stopped. At various stages of his life he’s been a photojournalist (UPI and the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin), an advertising (Rolls Royce, Mercedes Benz, USA) and architectural photographer (Architectural Record and Architectural Digest). When he retired from 27 years of college teaching, he decided to learn to be a machinist and spent a great deal of the next 5 or 6 years building small stationary steam engines. With all of that, his primary love, is photography. His first Leica, was either a IIIf or a IIIg and was purchased in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s from a lovely little shop off Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia run by George Knechtsberger.
About 25 years ago, he began collaborating with Shelly Lependorf (also a member of LHSA) creating limited edition fine art photography which is in many corporate and private collections. Their work is owned by the National Football League, Comedy Central, Sloane -Kettering Cancer Center, Thomas Jefferson Medical Center and many others.
Three years ago, Stan and Shelly sold all of their Nikon equipment and replaced them with Leicas. Stan thought that it would be interesting to go back to film and his first purchase was a beautiful M6 which he shot with for a year until he had enough of developing film and scanning. Then came his current camera , an M10. Most lenses were bought from and old friend, the late Ken Hanson. He joined LHSA and Shelly followed not long after. He’s been to the Asheville, ,Boston, Seattle and Colorado Springs events and the Dublin meeting.
Stan and his wife, Dr. Glenna Shire have one son and split their time between Philadelphia and Naples, Florida. He also builds furniture and has been known to play the harmonica, banjo and ukulele. Stan is also retired from The United States Air Force Reserve in the 514th Military Airlift Wing’s Combat Camera where he documented operations in Somalia and Desert Storm. In addition to LSI, Stan is also a member of Mensa.
Andrea Zocchi is a partner at Digital Silver Imaging and head of Marketing and Promotions. Zocchi was an art director at F+W Media and CEO of his own publishing company. Andrea has directed and taught photo workshops in Italy for Massachusetts College of Art, SUNY Alfred, and the University of Colorado Denver.
Phil Penman, UK-born, NY-based photographer, has documented the rapid flux of New York City’s streets for over 25 years. With clients ranging from People Magazine to The Daily Telegraph, he has photographed living legends including Jennifer Lopez and Bill Gates, and captured historical moments such as the September 11th Terrorist Attacks. Penman’s distinctive style, versatility, and dedication to his craft have won him prestigious awards and exhibitions, and a distinction as one of the “52 Most Influential Street Photographers” alongside industry luminaries Henri Cartier-Bresson and Sebastião Salgado. His debut book “STREET” launched as the Number 1 new release on Amazon for Street Photography and has since become a best seller and been featured at MoMA in New York. A curated selection of images from the book were also exhibited in Harrods, London in the fall of 2020.