SoHo Gallery Director on Photographer David Zimmerman

Award-winning American photographer David Zimmerman will speak at his latest exhibition One Voice about this series of portraits that shows a cross-section of Tibetan exile society; nomads and revolutionaries, and the impoverished and members of Parliament. One Voice is on view at Sous Les Etoiles Gallery in Manhattan now through Nov. 30.

Sous Les Etoiles Gallery director Corinne Tapia discovered the work of photographer David Zimmerman when he received the Sony World Photography Awards Photographer of the Year in 2009. His winning landscape series “Desert” depicts the American southwest environment as a fragile ecosystem.

“It wasn’t art with cliche,” Tapia says of Zimmerman’s photos. “He was the kind of photographer who liked to experience… If you want to get something interesting, you have to jump into the subject and lose yourself.”

One Voice is an ongoing project that began in 2011 in which Zimmerman immersed himself into the lives of Tibetan refugees, creating a series of intimate portraits and audio recordings chronicling the stories of many hundreds of Tibetans living in exile. A small departure from his previous series, such as Last Refuge, which focuses on capturing details of tattered clothes and fabric to tell a moving story, One Voice instead focuses on portraits to present the beauty of a culture, its people and history.

“If you see his background, his work is always about landscape and the way people live,” Tapia says.

Through these portraits, Zimmerman determined to examine the notion of place, an integral to the core of human. Anywhere from 53 to 73 inches tall, each portrait challenges viewers head on as the subjects ask at once to make eye contact and to contemplate their journeys.

“One Voice is a tribute to what is beautiful, to ordinary people. A tribute about sharing, a tribute about the beauty of people. How they struggle, but how they overcome their difficulties and their past,” Tapia say. “It’s a very emotional show. [You can sense] how much the Tibetan people share with David and that’s why it’s very moving.”

Meet David Zimmerman: David Zimmerman will be at Sous Les Etoiles Gallery Monday, Oct. 21 to give a lecture on The Story Behind One Voice at 7 p.m. Sous Les Etoiles Gallery is located at 560 Broadway in Manahttan’s SoHo.

About Sous Leis Etoiles Gallery

The gallery presents six exhibitions annually, ranging from modern impressionistic works to stark, highly realized, brightly colored social documentations, to poetic abstractions.

Gallery founder, director and curator, Corinne Tapia focuses on discovering photographers who tell a story of people. The “heart,” personal story, spirit and commitment of each of her artists is as important to her as their talent and quality of their portfolios.

“I like the mix to be intellectual, cultural, multidisciplinary,” says Tapia, who describes her process to be reflective of her own life. Tapia, a French native, started off as a writer and studied law and information management when she began collecting her photography in France with her husband.

Tapia considers the photographers she works with as stars. Fittingly, the name of the gallery is French for “under the stars.”

Sous Les Etoiles Gallery participates in several photography and art fairs in the U.S. and Tapia collaborates with national and international portfolio reviews including: Photolucida (Portland), FotoFest (Houston), International Center of Photography (New York), and Les Rencontres d’Arles (France).