Professional  swimmer turned photographer,  his series  Swallow is visually influential to me but even more in  what inspired it. In his youth he battled time. Between his training, family, friends, and the turmoil we have in our youth of loving  and missing but rebelling against our family. His past he says  shaped his photographs,as he assimilated to each new environment he was out in  in order to survive and in hopes to succeed. Growing up is a mess of battling your family, your expectations, and your own individuality. Shape-shifting even to find where we  belong. This series  spoke straight to who I am and what I have attempted in my own adolescent experience and  I believe that can be said for many my age these days.

Having grown up in a  cult, this artist/ photographer uses her New England hometown’s strict religious  culture to explore what she couldn’t as a child growing  up. That being femininity, sexuality yet she was infused with knowledge of witchcraft and strong female power. This series  in particular  known as Cult of Womanhood explores femininity in her life and the different interpretations and stages while growing up from being sexualized by older men to the pressure  of being female. These photos are dreamily  designed while also diving into a deeper meaning than aesthetics can allow through  subject matter. The use of the word cult is important and necessary to the interpretation of the work, as it adds a haunting sense to the  subjects.

A current associate professor of Photography at Indiana University Northwest, Jennifer Greenburg is best known for  her two bodies of  work named The Rockabillies and Revising History. The first took place over 2001-2009 and aims to document one of America’s  subcultures, the latter began in 2010 and is ongoing and is said to be evolving as a counterpoint to the first. She mainly hopes to  create a conversation  on the way the media is interpreted as well as how we record personal memories and essentially document history through images. I am particularly interested  in her fixation on the past, where we see the past in the present, and the documentation of the present as it will be seen when it’s the past.  Pastel blues and yellows spatter her work and mirror what colors we would have seen in her black and white series.

Jeremy Penn was introduced to  me by my dad, and  if my dad loves his work it must be special. He is a New-York based  artist with work displayed internationally and curators at in the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York have given honors to him for his wok. He was referred to as a Andy Warhol x Richard Phillips Hybrid by Refinery29 in 2014 and has had his work displayed in prestigious modern art collections around the world. His work  uses  vibrancy and contrast to create seductive silhouettes in one of his latest bodies of work and experiments with framing through words. Jeremy continues to create art for storefronts, hotels, galleries, and storefronts.

Living and working in Memphis Tennessee, Carl is an artist and designer focusing on identity  and color over the past few years. He explores the colors linked with certain identities and races to start a social conversation. His colors are explosive and vibrant and the contrast between light and dark is perfectly prevalent. He aims for the dialogue of his work to be the colors, though the visual narrative is the colors. This work is a great representation of the thought and purpose that goes into every artists piece. Things are not accidents in  artists work, every little underlying message you perceive was put there for you to perceive it.

American photographer Ken Rosenthal instantly captured me with his series Seen and Not Seen. The images are  at  once nostalgic but also historic. The anonymity and mystery that comes along with the lack of identity in the images brings you into a world where you can create the meaning. Meant to resemble old family photographs, the series is a look back  in time, in terms of   subject matter and technique. Maybe it’s the softness of the imagery, maybe it’s the anonymity, but I feel like  these are my own memories I can’t quite recall being presented to me.

A British-Kenyan photojournalist, artist, and artist in the early 90’s is one of the reasons Ia so drawn to photography. He was killed in Somalia while working as a photojournalist for Reuters, but accomplished much more than many can say in their career in his 23 years. Not only did he produce impactful images, but he left behind a series of journals from his life and travels that were beautifully designed and are more than journals but art. His mother ended up creating a legacy for her son and his story through the movie The Journey is the Destination which depicted his life and I can say in confidence, changed my life.  Not only did he risk his life to share the story of others, but he lost it and that makes his images and  work that much more impactful.

If there is any artist that is going to make work that matters, it is Alice. Photojournalist, documentary film-maker, active feminist, humanitarian, environmental, human, and women’s rights activist are just the start. Her work has brought her around the globe, most recently Lebanon, Serbia, Iran, Kiribati, and Somaliland. She documents the lives, struggles, and human condition of the hardest to reach and lest connected people. The refugee crisis has been her main focus as of late. She essentially seems as though she can do it all. Her work  is raw and unforgiving, but more importantly thoroughly impactful and absolutely breathtaking. There is insurmountable amount of inspiration I take from her work through her art as well as activism.

Albanian native and avid vintage movie lover, she draws inspiration from her surroundings and these films. Similar to Sarah Bahbah she experiments with photo series including a caption or blurb. In her case she creates a melancholy and almost ordinary feel to her photos, as id it is you in your regular day  thinking these thoughts and seeing these things. She has a very simple style that creates a comfortable familiarity. What I admire most is not her ability to but her want to take the ordinary and make you feel it, thoughts she knows you may have had yourself.

26 yearold Palestinian raised in Australia explores the depths of the millennial female psyche as well as  the importance of self love and indulgence. She creates series of photo  essays as a form of transmitting her message but arguably more  importantly self healing. She  revealed one of her series her struggle with child abuse. Her content creation agency  Possy has led her to collaborations with Gucci, Vogue, Capitol Records, and Topshop. Her dreamlike series pull you through time, seamlessly molding into the  next image as if it were a film. Exploring sexuality and love while the importance of being alone creates a unique paradox in her work. Visual and verbal storytelling working together in one frame drew me in immediately as I have always had a love for  reading foreign language subtitles on movies, so the addition of a poetic voice to a visually complicated piece makes her easily one of my favorite artists.