Jake Sommer Photography

04/17/2026

04/09/2026

04/04/2026

Andrei Tarkovsky was born on April 4, 1932, in Zavrazhye, on the banks of the Volga River. He grew up with his mother and sister and in 1954 entered the VGIK Film School in Moscow, where he was a student of Mikhail Romm. Recognized as one of the great cinematic masters of the 20th century, his work was marked by a spiritual quest and reflection on "the human condition," understanding cinema as an art capable of capturing time and revealing the infinite.

In addition to a filmography that includes Andrei Rublev (1966), Mirror (1975), Solaris (1972) or Stalker (1979), Tarkovsky also left an intimate and moving photographic legacy.

In 1977, he received a Polaroid SX-camera as a gift from director Michelangelo Antonioni, and from then on, he began capturing scenes of his everyday surroundings. He produced nearly 200 Polaroids taken between 1979 and 1983, during the end of his life in Russia and his exile in Italy.

Although he never intended to include these images in his film work, the photographs reveal the same aesthetic sensibility that characterizes his movies.

The selection of 60 Polaroids exhibited after his death shows his wife, his son, his dog, and rural landscapes, as well as Italian settings, during the making of the film Nostalghia.

Polaroids exude an atmosphere of domestic harmony and, at the same time, melancholy. They convey both familial love and the impossibility of domestic happiness, reflecting a generation marked by the absence of parents after the war.

The nature of the Polaroid, with its diffused and overexposed light, transforms each moment into a condensation of reality and memory, evoking both the sacred and the ephemeral.

Tarkovsky conceived artistic creation as an affirmation of life, or as a “denial of death.” His Polaroids, more than documents, are revelations: small portable temples of memory that idealize nature and everyday life, in dialogue with the romantic tradition of painters such as Caspar David Friedrich. The human presence appears as a mediation between the mystical landscape and the viewer, creating an affective geography that communicates their inner world with the environment.

Here, Tarkovsky allows himself a space for contemplation and idealization. Light, time and atmosphere are sculpted in photographs that transcend the documentary and become poetic visions. As Boris Groys pointed out, “rather than immortalizing, Tarkovsky recreates a new reality impregnated with romanticism and nostalgia, where nature becomes a mirror of the sacred.”

Today, 94 years after his birth, we remember Tarkovsky in his photographs, in an extension of his artistic search: snapshots that stopped time and revealed the spiritual beauty of everyday life. In them memory, nostalgia and love merge, inviting us to reflect on the capacity of the image to transform the experience of life into a poetic and transcendent vision.

03/28/2026

Edward Steichen, born on March 27, 1879 in Luxembourg, emigrated to the United States as a child and trained in Milwaukee. His mother influenced him in his artistic training, and at the age of 15 he began an apprenticeship as a lithographer, soon excelling in graphic design.
In 1900 he traveled to Paris, where he abandoned painting to dedicate himself to photography. There he met Rodin, with whom he collaborated closely. He also portrayed Anatole France, Richard Strauss and Henri Matisse.

In 1902 he returned to New York, where he opened a studio at 291 Fifth Avenue.
Invited by Alfred Stieglitz, he joined the Photo-Secession pictorialist movement and in 1905, they opened together the gallery “291”, where they exhibited Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso and Brâncuși, they were also founding partners of the magazine Camera Work.

Steichen experimented with techniques such as Autochrome and photography of insects, flowers and plants. But after the First World War he abandoned pictorialism and turned to “direct photography.”

In 1923, as head of Condé Nast, he portrayed the culture of the time and prominent figures in literature, dance, politics and cinema. His fame came from his photos for Vogue and Vanity Fair, creating some of the most stunning images of the 20th century and becoming the leading Art Deco photographer, founder of modern glamor photography.

His archive includes portraits of Greta Garbo, Winston Churchill, Marlene Dietrich, Amelia Earhart and Walt Disney. He also portrayed African-American figures such as Florence Mills and Paul Robeson.

In 1938 he settled in Connecticut, dedicating himself to botany and organizing an exhibition of his delphiniums. As director of the Department of Photography at MoMA (from 1947 to 1962), he organized 44 exhibitions in 15 years and published his autobiography "A Life in Photography

In 1955 he inaugurated The Family of Man, traveling through Europe and the United States where he compiled the photographs that would make up this magnificent and historic exhibition.

In his final years, he was named Director Emeritus of MoMA and was responsible for selecting the photographs that would construct his final exhibition as curator, “The Bitter Years.”

Today, 147 years after his birth, we remember Steichen as a tireless fighter for the recognition of photography as one of the fine arts, leaving a legacy, teaching and inspiring future generations.

03/21/2026

Alec Soth was born in 1969 in Minneapolis and studied at Sarah Lawrence College. A member and nominee of Magnum Photos, Soth published his first book, Sleeping by the Mississippi, in 2004, which established him as a leading voice in contemporary photography and within the documentary tradition of Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and William Eggleston.

Since then, he has published more than 25 books, including NIAGARA, The Last Days of W, Broken Manual, Dog Days Bogotá, Songbook, I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating, and A Pound of Pictures, among others.

His work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Walker Art Center in Minnesota, Media Space in London, and MoMA Hayama in Japan.

He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013 and a grant from the McKnight and Jerome Foundation. His series show portraits and landscapes along the Mississippi River, or in Songbook, made between 2012 and 2014 with Brad Zellar, where he shows meetings, festivals and community gatherings in the United States, highlighting the tension between individualism and the desire for connection.

The images are presented without context, with a fragmentary, lyrical and melancholic tone, where portraits and intimate interiors inspired by the poetry of Wallace Stevens and Emily Dickinson, with soft colours and more intimate atmospheres, reflect on the materiality of photography and its limited ability to preserve the ephemeral.

Soth identifies as a photographer who seeks vulnerability and authenticity in ordinary people rather than models or celebrities, believing that those less exposed to the camera reveal something more real.

For him, photography is a language with different dialects, and his work is a lyrical exploration rather than a narrative one. He has experimented with various formats and literary collaborations, championing the autonomy of the image and acknowledging that photography has limitations compared to narrative mediums like film or novels, while valuing its capacity for openness and fragmentation.

In 2016, after a sabbatical year and a trip to Helsinki, he changed his artistic style to a more intimate and less ambitious approach, seeking quieter and closer portraits.

He founded Little Brown Mushroom, a platform for visual experimentation, and has worked and taught in educational projects and residency programs such as the Winnebago Workshop, a mobile workshop for young artists.

Throughout his career he has maintained a constant: the exploration of loneliness, melancholy and the tension between isolation and interaction, always with a poetic gaze and open to interpretation.

03/11/2026

Ed van der Elsken was born in Amsterdam on March 10, 1925. He was one of the most relevant figures on the artistic scene of the second half of the 20th century in Netherlands, the first true Dutch street photographer.

He toured cities like Amsterdam, Paris, Hong Kong and Tokyo looking for what he called “his people”: authentic and genuine, with whom in many cases he identified.

Photography was for him a medium with which to experiment and externalize his own life, which is why his personality is reflected both in the relationship he establishes with his characters and in his numerous self-portraits. His work is characterized by dynamic images, with great visual impact and strong personal involvement, rather than by technical perfection.

Van der Elsken adopted a position between document and fiction, distancing himself from objective photoreportage. Preparing scenes was a constant in his career; He rarely waited for the moment and preferred to provoke it, obviously at first, but progressively more in the style of a dynamic and casual artistic director, occasionally writing down things that caught his attention in a notebook full of themes and even sketches.

His style was instinctive and unconventional, with an intense involvement with his characters. He was not interested in sophisticated photography or the search for the “perfect shot”; He immersed himself in reality and photographed it intuitively.

In 1956 he achieved international notoriety with Love on the Left Bank, a photo novel inspired by his own life in post-war Paris. The film structure, with flashbacks and changes in perspective, anticipated the artist he would become.

Throughout his career he published more than twenty photobooks, such as Bagara (1958), Jazz (1959), Sweet Life (1966), Amsterdam (1979), Avonturen op het land (1980) and Discovering Japan (1988) in which he experimented with editing techniques, creating dynamic and animated designs that became one of his hallmarks.

Starting in 1959, cinema occupied a central place in his work, his productions reflected themes of human depth giving an autobiographical and unconventional approach, including his own voice and presence on stage. After his death, his films were preserved, digitized and disseminated by Eye Filmmuseum.

Ed van der Elsken was considered the "enfant terrible" of Dutch photography. His work is mentioned alongside that of Robert Frank and William Klein, and inspired contemporary artists such as Nan Goldin or Paulien Oltheten.

His legacy, made up of photographs, photobooks and films, establish him as a voice of his time and as one of the most influential figures in 20th century photography.

03/03/2026

Louis Faurer was born in Philadelphia in 1916. He studied advertising design at the School of Commercial Art and Lettering and, after World War II, moved to New York, where he shared a studio with Robert Frank. He was also admired by Walker Evans, who connected him with Vogue.

Although he worked for magazines, his passion was street photography, and he was a key member of the “New York School” alongside Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, and William Klein. Fascinated by the “hypnotic light of dusk,” he sought out gestures and moments of vulnerability. His work reveals interiority, isolation, and fragility amidst the urban bustle, each image a challenge to silence and indifference.

He experimented with blurring, double exposure, superimposed negatives, low contrast, and the grain of night photography. His compositions, reminiscent of film noir, emphasize shadows, reflections, and juxtapositions—a poetic style that transformed documentary photography into an intimate and personal language.

Honest, he rejected the obscenity of violent scenes, projecting himself onto the people he photographed and appearing as a reflection in some images. He found beauty in the overlooked and in anonymous beings. Edward Steichen called him “a poet of the camera, who sought and found the magic of life.”

Although he did not achieve widespread recognition in his time, he was admired by his colleagues and was included in the exhibitions “In and Out of Focus” (1948) and “The Family of Man” (1955). In 2016, his legacy was rediscovered in the centennial exhibition organized by the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris.

Faurer is remembered as a master and cult experimental photographer, whose poetic and avant-garde vision constitutes an essential contribution to the language of photography.

02/26/2026

Jeff Mermelstein was born in August 1957 in New Jersey. At age 13, he received a camera as a gift and began taking photographs, fascinated by color. He studied at Rutgers College and the International Center of Photography (ICP), where he encountered the work of Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, and William Eggleston—influences that shaped his interest in street photography. In 1983, he received his first commission for GEO Magazine and, since then, has worked for publications such as LIFE, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine.

His career combines personal projects with editorial commissions. He has received the Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Award (1991) and the European Publishers Award for Photography (1999), which led to the publication of his first book, SideWalk.

His works are part of the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, and the New York Public Library. He has taught at the ICP since 1988.

Mermelstein is known for his absurdist vision of urban life. His photographs capture human idiosyncrasies in seemingly banal moments; what others might overlook, he transforms into images charged with irony and mystery.

His series bring together women twirling their hair and people running. Without working with themes or even ideas, these collections became a habit, showing how dialogues emerge after accumulating photographs.

Combining a restless and instinctive rhythm, like the flight of a butterfly, Mermelstein breaks unwritten rules by treating images as part of his life.

During 9/11, he rushed to Lower Manhattan to document the devastation. Images of firefighters, ash-covered bystanders, and destroyed trees became iconic testimonies, a documentary extension of what he has always done.

His style is characterized by speed and audacity. “Taking photos without permission, like stealing something without asking, but without feeling guilty.” For him, in street photography, “you don’t think, you see, and you do it; it has to be quick, because otherwise, it’s gone.”

Mermelstein champions the importance of staying true to one's personal vision, setting aside commercial considerations and emphasizing the value of the ordinary: "the thrill of creating something extraordinary from the banal."

His creative process involves disregarding the images before even viewing them, achieving an emotional distance that allows him to edit objectively and rediscover his own photographs.

His work is a cross between photojournalism and street photography, documenting human behavior with humor and compassion.

02/20/2026

“When words become confusing, I will focus on photographs. When images prove insufficient, I will be content with silence.” Ansel Adams was a visionary who helped shape the foundations of the landscape genre. Born in San Francisco in 1902, Adams grew up in the city's outskirts, where the rugged dunes, forests, and ever-changing coastal light awakened in him an early fascination with the natural world. His father fostered his curiosity and reverence for nature, values ​​that would become the foundation of his art.

A restless child with little interest in the traditional, Adams developed a passion for music, training as a pianist, which would later influence the rhythm, structure, and tonal sensibility of his compositions.

The pivotal moment in his life came during a family trip to Yosemite National Park in the summer of 1916. His father gave him an Eastman Kodak Brownie camera, which ignited a passion that would stay with him for life.

Yosemite, with its spectacular granite cliffs, majestic waterfalls, and ancient forests, became not just a destination, but a revelation, a place he would frequent, honing both his technique and his vision, and where, in its vastness, he would find a spiritual refuge.

In his early years as a photographer, Adams experimented with the soft approach of pictorialism, which sought to emulate the atmosphere and texture of painting, using diffusion and manipulation to create dreamlike images. This resulted in romantic and melancholic prints that reflected this aesthetic, but by the late 1920s his perspective began to shift. During a visit to New Mexico, Paul Strand, a key figure in photographic modernism, showed Adams a series of negatives. The encounter proved pivotal: Strand's images, characterized by crystalline clarity and striking directness, convinced Adams that photography did not need to imitate painting to achieve artistic power. This led him to embrace what he termed "straight photography," adopting sharp focus, tonal depth, and a reverence for natural light.

In 1932, along with Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, and others, Adams founded the f/64 group, which promoted the use of large-format cameras with minimal apertures and contact printing. Later, Adams aligned himself with the modernist movement, helping to establish a new visual language that did not seek to idealize, but rather to reveal the essence through discipline and awe.

What makes Adams's work endure is both its formal rigor and its emotional depth. Using filters and a meticulous darkroom process, he created photographs that are both monumental and meditative. Their sharpness and rich tonal range spanned from deep black to pure white; Adams, in collaboration with Fred Archer, invented the Zone System for developing film and prints, which he published in a series of technical manuals. This development allowed him to preview how each tonal value would appear in the final print, translating his vision into technique with extraordinary precision.

Adams' creative choices are usually evident in his use of cropping, exposure, contrast, and brightness.

He produced works inspired by both artistic and contemplative imagination. In his photographs, the scale and serenity of the world are depicted with almost symphonic control. The light itself becomes a kind of rhythm and harmony. His images are both representations and meditations on our relationship with the world, reminding us that observation itself can be an act of reverence. In a world saturated with images, Adams's photographs invite stillness and demand a more contemplative gaze, teaching us to find emotion in the splendor of the world, not only for its beauty, but as a call to protect that which surrounds us.

As a champion of photography as an art form, he was known for his educational and expressive role, and for sharing his techniques in workshops and publications. He helped Beaumont Newhall and David McAlpin establish the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1940, founded the Department of Photography at the California School of Fine Arts in 1946, and in 1967 founded the Friends of Photography in San Francisco.

He received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1980 was awarded the Presidential Medal, the highest civilian honor, in recognition of his legacy.

His landscapes served as inspiration and testimony in campaigns to protect America's natural spaces and were fundamental in shaping public perception. The richness of his archives also reveals his evolving perspective over time. Adams's influence on photography is immeasurable, multifaceted, and legendary.

02/15/2026

Norman Parkinson, known for his innovative and unique artistic approach, participated in the transformations that took place in 20th-century fashion photography. He developed a distinctive style over a 56-year career, working tirelessly until his death in 1990.

During the 1940s and 1950s, he began a long period of collaboration with Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Town & Country, producing images that suggested a new narrative, earning him international acclaim.

In addition to innovating, Parkinson promoted photography outside the studio, “living and being part of the world,” with scenes that simulated “naturalness,” and gained recognition working with an unconventional and revolutionary style.

Today, 36 years after his death, we remember Parkinson in “the freedom of being oneself”. He didn’t do what everyone else was doing, he didn’t follow their paths, he followed his own.

02/11/2026

Thomas Ruff developed his photography as an autonomous art form, giving it a distinct disciplinary identity within architecture, electronics, anthropology, and industrial work. Ruff studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Bernd and Hilla Becher, who guided him to reflect on the history, genres, techniques, limits, and possibilities of photography, as well as its relationship with other art forms.

His interest in conceptual photography was characterized by its emphasis on neutrality. Digital manipulation became a central axis of his work, and today Thomas Ruff is remembered as an artist who took photography to new realms of recognition; “beyond human vision,” thus consolidating a paradigm shift in contemporary photography.