Sebastiao Salgado

Sebastião Salgado studied economics and began his career as a professional photographer in 1973 in Paris. He is one of the most celebrated photographers in the world today. After working with the photo agencies Sygma, Gamma, and Magnum Photos until 1994, he and his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, founded Amazonas Images.He has travelled and photographed in over 120 countries worldwide.

His work is presented in numerous books, including Other Americas (1986), Sahel: l’homme en détresse (1986), Sahel: el fin del camino (1988), Workers (1993), Terra (1997), Migrations and Portraits (2000), Africa (2007), and Genesis — an epic project lasting from 2004 to 2011 that documents the world’s unspoiled wildernesses.

Touring exhibitions of his work have been, and continue to be, presented around the world. Salgado has been awarded numerous major photographic prizes in recognition of his accomplishments, and his work is held in major museum collections worldwide.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948) is a contemporary Japanese photographer whose esoteric practice explores memory and time. Using the intrinsic quality of long-exposure photography, the artist provides insight into how the medium can both obscure and alter reality.

Influenced by Dadaist and Surrealist theory, Sugimoto’s Seascapes, Dioramas, and Theaters craft mysterious scenes from vernacular subject matter.“Photography is like a found object. A photographer never makes an actual subject; they just steal the image from the world,” the artist said. “Photography is a system of saving memories. It’s a time machine, in a way, to preserve the memory, to preserve time.”In the mid-1970s, Sugimoto moved to New York.

He was the recipient of the Hasselblad Award in 2001 and the subject of a mid-career retrospective in 2006, organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.The artist currently lives and works between New York, NY, and Tokyo, Japan.

Sugimoto’s works are presently held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Centre for Contemporary Art in Kitakyushu, Japan.

Kacper Kowalski

Polish photographer Kacper Kowalski (b. 1977) lives and works in Gdynia. His unique photographs are aerial pictures of natural and urban environments across Poland.

After studying architecture, he devoted himself entirely to flying and photography—two of his passions. As a paraglider, a pilot of small aircraft, and a gyrocopter, Kowalski would fly into the air with an engine strapped to his back to discover the world of form, shape, and pattern. From 150 meters above the ground level, the landscape he chose to see and capture on camera became abstracted.

He has received numerous awards, including the Sony World Photography Award for Best Landscape Photography (2023) and the World Press Photo Award (2009, 2014, 2015), the Picture of the Year International (POYi) Award (2012, 2014, 2015, 2016), and many others. His first photography book, Side Effects, was published in early 2014, and his second photo-book, OVER, in September 2017; Arché in 2021; and Event Horizon in 2022. Rising in the frosty, cold air, Kowalski feels suspended in time and space.

He describes reaching a new point of view that resulted in poetic and personal photographs, where a state of mind is communicated beyond patterns, shapes, and colours. His work feels very meditative and channels liberating themes such as perspective and interpretation.

Verena Bachl

Verena Bachl (*1985, Wörth a.d. Donau, DE) follows a post-minimalist approach in her sculptures and installations, characterized by a strong conceptual foundation.

By employing charged materials—metaphorically and physically—such as marble, silicon, fluorescent tubes and magnets, she stages matter and its interactions as works of art. Some of her works incorporate industrial objects as architectural structures through which she explores the potential of material memory and processes of storage by means of energy and information.

The presence of her chosen materials often evokes both mystical and digital associations, allowing physical phenomena to transform into sculptural form.Her practice unfolds through a dynamic collision of material autonomy, ephemeral abstraction, and the elemental forces of physics.

Light and energy permeate her installations, immersing her sculptures in synthetic atmospheres that oscillate between the archaic and the futuristic.By staging functional objects as relics—stripped of their original purpose and reimagined as ambiguous artefacts—Bachl creates speculative scenographies. These juxtapositions of minimalist form, technological implementation, and contrasting textures of metal, glass, and stone open a poetic space of uncertainty, resistance, and the irreducible presence of the unknown.