India: A Celebration of Life is the culmination of nearly a decade of visits to the Indian subcontinent by documentary photographer and writer Manuel Rivera-Ortiz. This collection pulls together 120 photographs of the people and places of this incredible nation of polar opposites from Rajasthan to Kolkata, Mumbai to Kutch. Men, women, and children, mostly living on the fringes of Indian society, are represented here. But India. A Celebration of Life is more about hope than it is about despair. Rivera-Ortiz records the dignity of the people who still live disadvantaged in situations of poverty.
Manuel Rivera-Ortiz (b. 1968) is a documentary photographer and writer born relatively poor in Southern Puerto Rico. His work follows the tradition of »concerned photography.« He photographs in less developed corners of the world recording the dignity of the people who still live disadvantaged in situations of poverty. Rivera-Ortiz's work reflects the horrors of the life he himself witnessed growing up on dirt floors and in corrugated tin shanties. In 2009, with the help of friends, he founded The Manuel Rivera-Ortiz Foundation for Documentary Photography & Film. Rivera-Ortiz's photographs are held in museum and corporate collections, including George Eastman House in Rochester, and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.
After studying in Paris with Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Pierre Bourdieu,
Christian Caujolle became an art critic for the daily newspaper Libération in 1979 and focused on photography. In 1981 he became picture editor of the same newspaper and continued to write about photography books and exhibitions.
In 1986, he created VU' Agency, the first 'photographer's agency' and, ten years later he established the VU' Gallery. He left VU' in 2007 and teaches, writes, curates exhibitions and festivals.
He has been involved in a number of international juries, including World Press Photo and Prix Niepce and has published an important number of books about photographers like Lartigue, Salgado, Depardon, William Klein, Christer Strömholm, Anders Petersen, Cristina Garcia Rodero, Isabel Muñoz, Peter Beard, Bernard Faucon and many others.
Michael Benson (born March 31, 1962) works at the intersection of art and science. A photographer, writer, filmmaker, book-designer, and exhibitions producer, in the last decade he has staged a series of increasingly large-scale shows of planetary landscape photography internationally.
Enrico Stefanelli is a photographer and journalist who also teaches photography workshops. He founded and was, for 7 years, the artistic director of the international festival of photography and video art 'Lucca Photo Fest', established in 2005. Moreover, he is the founder and artistic director of the Photolux Festival, the new biennial of photography in Lucca.
