ERDEN CANTÜRK | PHOTOGRAPHER

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All images © Erden Cantürk

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KAZUYOSHI NOMACHI | PHOTOGRAPHER

Kazuyoshi Nomachi has always been a documentary photographer, since his first trip in the Sahara when he was twenty five years. In Africa was fascinated by the great outdoors and the strength of the people who live in such difficult environments. For over 40 years, around the theme "the prayer of the search for the sacred," he turned his attention to the most diverse traditional cultures which are the expression of the peoples who inhabit the lands harsher, to the four corners of the world. Nomachi was able to capture the spirituality that runs through the landscapes of unique and extraordinary beauty, where the portraits and human figures assume an absolute dignity and blend with the context in almost pictorial compositions, dominated by a dazzling light, real and transcendental at the same time.

Nomachi was born in Japan in 1946 in Kochi Prefecture. He studied at Kochi Technical High School and started taking photographs then as a teenager. In 1969 He studied photography under Takashi Kijima.
In 1971 he began his career as a freelance advertising photographer and in the next year he made his first trip to the Sahara where he was shocked to see the strong life of the people living under the harsh environment of the area. This made him to switch his career to photojournalism.
Through his long experience at the extreme dryness of the Sahara, he gained an inspiration from the Nile which was fostered as the theme, “The Nile ever lasting water flow that never dry up while running through the dryness of the Sahara”. With this theme, from 1980 he started his coverage of the White Nile from the Nile Delta up to its first drip of water at an iceberg in Uganda and up the Blue Nile to its origin at the highlands of Ethiopia. The coverage of the two flows allowed him to capture the images of the strength of the environment and the people of this vast region of Africa.
Since 1988 he turned his attention to Asia. With the occasion of his coverage of the western areas of China, he got attracted with the people living at the extreme altitude of Tibet and the Buddhism. This encounter led to his visit to almost whole area of Tibetan cultural zone and initiated his visit to the origins and the whole area of the sacred Ganges which is also the roots of Hinduism from 2004 to 2008.
From 1995 to 2000 Nomachi had access to the holiest city of Islam and travels for five years in Saudi Arabia, having the very opportunity to photograph the largest annual pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. It had been the first to document so deep and wide the miraculous pilgrimage of over 2 million Muslims towards their holy city, Mecca. And from 2002, he visited the Andes highlands, Peru and Bolivia with a theme of the blending of the catholic belief with the Inca civilization. His visit to this area still continue since then.
Concentrated in 12 major anthological issues, his photographs have been published worldwide and appeared in major photo magazines, such as The National Geographic, GEO and Stern. The work carried out in the Sahara , along the Nile, in Ethiopia, Tibet and Arabia, have aroused great admiration over the years , even in Western countries and have won numerous awards, including the Annual Award of the Photographic Society of Japan in 1990 and 1997 and the Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon in 2009.

All images © Kazuyoshi Nomachi

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VALDIR CRUZ | PHOTOGRAPHER

Since 1994, Brazilian-born Valdir Cruz has taken photographs of the Yanomami Indians, a native tribe of both northern Brazil and remote regions of Venezuela whose lives and culture have been threatened by the encroachments of the modern world. Since the mid-1970’s, they have been devastated by disease and malnutrition caused by intruders into their isolated homelands. In hisFaces of the Rainforest photographs, his work is a mediator for this society, unseen by outside eyes, and gives a lasting voice to the Yanomami people.

Also available is his Waterfall Series — a striking collection of photographs from his newest book, O Caminho das Águas. Through this work, Cruz, who has been deeply affected by the slow disappearance of waterfalls and entire river landscapes in Brazil due to construction projects, expresses what he feels is his sacred responsibility to document the threatened beauty of what remains. Cruz has exhibited his photographs of South American indigenous peoples and the rainforest in galleries from Rio de Janeiro to New York City.

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All images © Valdir Cruz 

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