Meet the Artists who have walked our Creative JourneyÂ
These are our CREATIVE ADVISORS, fine-art photographic artists and Masterclass graduates whose exhibition-worthy work and generosity of spirit help inspire and guide our growing community of fine-art photographers.
Guided by Artists who have walked the path
Our Creative Advisors are accomplished members of the Art Photography Academy who have completed the Masterclass programme and produced work of genuine exhibition standard. They are active voices in our community, answering questions, sparking ideas and helping shape the direction of the Academy. This page is their space to be seen, honoured and celebrated.
 Toni Niederwieser • Craig O'Flaherty • Leonie Scholtz • Engela Gobregts  •  Gill Davies • Andre de KokerÂ
Paulina Rodriguez Arango •  Detlev Bock • Lize du Plessis • Grace Remondo  • Hanli Smit
Mia Joubert  • David Schlosser  • Tara Murphy Crossley  • Ann Baret  • Ghail Binneman  • Alan Mason • Gillian Mager
Toni Niederwieser
Fieberbrunn, AUSTRIA
Photography has been Toni Niederwieser's companion for five decades, a self-taught journey spanning film, darkroom craft and eventually the digital world. In 2009 he completed his training as a master photographer, driven not by profession but by a deep and enduring passion for the medium. At the heart of his work has always been the Wildseeloder, his local mountain in Fieberbrunn, a place tied to his earliest memories and the continuing source of much of his imagery.
In recent years, his practice has evolved into new territory, combining photography with acrylic paint and freehand intervention to create images that move between memory, abstraction and personal interpretation.
Enter your text here.
Enter your text here.
Enter your text here.
Fine Art Photography, Mixed Media & Experimental, Landscape & Nature, Abstract.
Craig O'Flaherty
Cape Town, SOUTH AFRICA
Craig O'Flaherty's work is a celebration of light and shade, a place where poetry and photography weave together to engage the complex and contradictory nature of the world around him. Rather than seeking to rationalise or resolve what he encounters, he draws on John Keats's notion of negative capability, the capacity to remain in uncertainty, mystery and doubt without grasping for answers.
His gaze, whether through a lens or a line of verse, resists fixing things in place. What draws him to a photograph is not what it defines but what it is still becoming, and if it truly moves him, he finds himself changed by it.
Enter your text here.
Enter your text here.
Fine Art Photography, Mixed Media & Experimental, Landscape & Nature, Still Life.
Leonie ScholtzÂ
Still Bay, SOUTH AFRICA
From an early age, the arts were a constant companion, with a particular love of cinematography that later gave way to a deep fascination with photography during her years as a medical intern. Drawn into the discipline through numerous workshops under Martin Osner's instruction, she learned the foundations of the craft by processing and developing her own prints in a darkroom at home. Her work carries a natural tension between two ways of seeing the human body, one clinical and radiological, the other intimate and expressive, and this duality runs quietly through much of what she makes. After years of wildlife, landscape and Arctic photography, Leonie found herself seeking something more, eventually completing the full Master Class programme in Fine Arts at the Art Photography Academy, where the nitro transfer technique became a defining part of her practice. Today she works at the intersection of portrait photography and fine art, painting onto her images and reworking transferred prints to draw out deeper layers of meaning and emotion.
Enter your text here.
Enter your text here.
Enter your text here.
Fine Art Photography, Mixed Media & Experimental, Landscape & Nature, Documentary, Wildlife, Portraits.
Engela Gobregts
Cape Town, SOUTH AFRICA
Engela Gobregts's love of photography and nature reaches back to her childhood, shaped by a life spent in close relationship with the natural world and a career devoted to environmental education. For her, making art in nature is an act of mindfulness, a way of deepening her spiritual connection with life and with the world around her, and she creates first and foremost for the well-being of her own soul. Nature is her greatest teacher, and above all, it has taught her the value of presence, of being fully alive to the moment and open to the beauty and mystery that surrounds us. Through her photography she hopes to carry the viewer into that same quiet place, awakening a sense of wonder and inviting them to find the light within the shadows and the unseen within the seen.
Enter your text here.
Fine Art Photography | Mixed Media & Experimental | Landscape & Nature | Still Life
Gill Davies
UK, Exmouth, DEVON
Gill Davies's work grows out of a deep connection between photography and artistic expression, rooted in a love of people, landscapes and the quiet beauty found in everyday life. Beginning as a photographer, she gradually moved towards a more interpretive way of working, using light, composition, movement and texture to create images with a stronger emotional and expressive quality. In recent years, her practice has expanded into mixed media, blending photography with encaustic wax, colour transfer techniques, acrylic paints, inks and pastels to transform her images into individual works of art. Through layering, surface manipulation and a spirit of experimentation, she aims to create work that carries mood, memory and a genuine sense of connection with its subject.
Enter your text here.
Enter your text here.
Enter your text here.
Fine Art Photography, Mixed Media & Experimental, Landscape & Nature, Wildlife.
Andre De Koker
Napier, SOUTH AFRICA
André de Koker lives and works in Napier in the Overberg District of the Western Cape, a landscape that has shaped his artistic vision since he first picked up a camera some fourteen years ago. He is drawn to texture, colour and the quiet poetry of the natural world, finding in the rural scenes around him a depth and stillness that reward patient looking. Alongside his landscape photography, he works with mixed media, combining hand techniques, digital overlays and encaustic medium to move the image beyond documentation and into something more felt and personal. Much of this expanded practice grew out of his time with fine art photographers Martin and Samantha Lee Osner, whose influence helped him find a visual language that is very much his own.
Enter your text here.
Fine Art Photography, Mixed Media & Experimental, Landscape & Nature, Still Life.
Paulina Rodriguez Arango
MEXICO
Paulina Rodriguez Arango has been a photographer for more than 35 years, drawn from the beginning to environmental portraits and the quietly unnoticed moments of everyday life, family rhythms, simple interactions and the small corners where ordinary existence unfolds with its own natural grace. Her work has always been guided by a deep fascination with human expression and shaped by the interplay of light, colour, gesture, architecture and texture. In recent years, her practice has shifted towards something less figurative and more exploratory, with photography becoming one stage within a broader artistic process in which image, material and abstraction are brought together in an ongoing and evolving conversation.
Enter your text here.
Enter your text here.
Enter your text here.
Fine Art Photography, Mixed Media & Experimental, Documentary, Abstract.
Detlev Bock
Achern, GERMANY
Detlev Bock begins with photography but rarely treats the image as a finished record, working instead towards the moment when a photograph stops behaving like evidence and starts to hold atmosphere. Through layering, erosion, distortion, and both digital and painterly interpretations, he allows the original image to lose its certainty, covering, staining, and rebuilding faces, gestures, and fragments of bodies until they carry something beyond the scene in front of the camera. Many of his figures appear isolated, veiled or partly dissolved, present behind glass or within fractured spaces that feel remembered rather than observed, caught in a tension between exposure and concealment, closeness and distance. The altered surface matters to him precisely because it holds traces of touch, damage, memory and time, and it is in this disturbance of clarity that the emotional charge of the work lives.
Enter your text here.
Fine Art Photography, Mixed Media & Experimental, People & Portraits.
Lize du Plessis
Cape Town, SOUTH AFRICAÂ
Lize du Plessis returned to photography after three decades away, stepping back onto a path she had set aside, now with intention and a willingness to relinquish control over what her art should become. Her images are often abstract and emotive, reflections of inner and outer landscapes. She works across infrared, ICM, macro and multiple-exposure photography, drawn to visual languages to express the unseen rhythms of life and emotions spoken words often fail to reach. That deep longing, the profound unexplained sadness and quiet ache, fuel both determination and collapse. Under the guidance of Martin Osner, her practice now spans more tactile, hands-on processes where encaustic wax, generative AI, paint, botanicals, metallic leaf and found materials are woven into layered mixed media compositions. At the heart of everything is light, the quiet act of directing attention, until what is hidden is finally revealed, a quiet journey of becoming
without permission.
Enter your text here.
Enter your text here.
Enter your text here.
Fine Art Photography, Mixed Media & Experimental, Landscape & Nature, Abstract & Macro Photography.
Grace Remondo
Cape Town, SOUTH AFRICA
For Grace Remondo, photography is a language of quiet contemplation, a form of visual storytelling, and a means of societal advocacy, drawing together conceptual fine art, landscape, and street photography in an exploration of memory, loss, and restoration. What draws her most to fine art photography is its capacity to hold space for the invisible, to look beyond the surface of a fractured world and find a profound, quiet beauty beneath. Her practice has become deeply tactile and meditative, treating the photograph as a living object rather than a static image, extending well beyond the shutter click to the physical manipulation of the print through photomontage, organic materials, heavy acrylics, mica powder, overpainting, and the delicate act of stitching gold thread into paper. Inspired by the philosophy of finding beauty within brokenness, her work is ultimately an invitation to pause, to look more closely at our shared vulnerabilities, and to find the light that filters through the cracks.
Enter your text here.
Conceptual Fine Art Photography, Mixed Media & Experimental, Landscape & Nature, Documentary.
Hanli Smit
Johannesburg, SOUTH AFRICAÂ
Hanli Smit, an accomplished fine art photographer.
With her Graphic and Fashion Design background, and her love for painting and
drawing, Hanli has always interwoven creativity in all she does. Thus, Hanli is
often found not just behind the camera, but actively involved in the actual design
of the entire costume, make-up, props accessories, ect. that goes into one of her
photographic portraits or creations.
In 2020, as testament to her creative talent in photography, Hanli ranked up
impressive awards in prestigious national competitions.
She was placed in the top 10 of Photo Africa Awards where she won the Portrait
section as well as the Fashion category which ultimately resulted in her winning
the Prestigious Award of Photograper of the Year 2020
During the last 2 years Hanli is also rewarded with images being selected for the
International Portrait Awards “Monthly collection”
Hanli just found out that her image “ Black Bride” was chosen by Maurizio
Galimberti and his team to participate in an exhibition FACES and being one of a
hundred photographers to compete in the “Best Portrait Award 2025”
Enter your text here.
Enter your text here.
Enter your text here.
Fine Art Photography, Mixed Media & Experimental, Still Life & Botanical
Mia Joubert
Pretoria, SOUTH AFRICA
Mia Joubert's photography is rooted in a lifelong connection to dance and the arts, and the years she spent as a dancer gave her a profound understanding of movement, expression and the relationship between the human body and emotion. This sensibility continues to shape everything she makes. She works across portraiture, landscape, wildlife and conceptual photography. Still, she is most deeply drawn to fine art, drawn to images that transcend documentation and invite the viewer to pause, reflect and find their own meaning within the frame. Her practice embraces experimental and mixed media approaches, moving freely between compositing, texture work, multiple exposures, body painting, transfers, clay and paint, allowing each project to evolve in its own way and on its own terms. Nature plays an equally important role, whether she is photographing dancers beneath jacaranda trees, working in forests or capturing the dramatic landscapes of Iceland and Namibia, always searching for the point where light, place and human presence come together into something dreamlike and quietly alive.
Enter your text here.
Fine Art Photography, Mixed Media & Experimental, Dance & Portraiture.
David Schlosser
Essex Fells, USA
David Schlosser's work is guided by a deep belief in personal expression over convention, drawn to the fleeting moments and feelings that carry genuine emotional weight and resist easy explanation. His photography is bold, experimental and strongly narrative, moving fluidly between fine art, mixed media and street-influenced imagery to create work that is layered, psychologically charged and visually striking. There is a consistent fascination with identity, memory and the pressures of modern life running through his images, whether he is working with fragmented portraiture, urban texture or the quiet tension between light and darkness. At its heart, his practice is about finding honesty and connection in the everyday, and sharing that through a visual language that is unmistakably his own.
Enter your text here.
Enter your text here.
Enter your text here.
Fine Art Photography, Mixed Media & Experimental, Landscape & Nature, Abstract.
Tara Crossley
Rome, ITALY
Tara Murphy Crossley's visual life began in Vancouver, working behind the scenes on gallery and promotional shoots before developing her own practice through freelance and newspaper photography, experiences that gave her a lasting understanding of light, atmosphere, composition and the emotional possibilities within an image. International assignments in documentary and editorial photography followed, working across publishing and humanitarian contexts, and those encounters shaped a deep attentiveness to human presence, gesture, silence, and the psychological spaces beneath the surface of a photograph. Over time, her practice shifted from professional image-making towards something more personal and exploratory, expanding into mixed media through transfers, layering, texture, and overpainting, always drawn to the tension between control and unpredictability and to the way an image can transform through process. More recently, a growing engagement with observational drawing and oil painting has brought new rigour and patience to her work, and it is somewhere within the intersection of photography, painting and traditional discipline that she feels her most personal visual voice is beginning to emerge.
Enter your text here.
Fine Art Photography, Painting, Mixed Media & Experimental, Landscape & Nature, Abstract.
Ann BaretÂ
Somerset West, SOUTH AFRICA
Ann Baret, who signs her work as Kaniek, a name rooted in childhood freedom and creative instinct, makes photographs that are less about seeing than about feeling. Working with multiple exposures and mixed-media techniques, she layers fragments of landscape, gesture, and light to create images that move between presence and absence, clarity and obscurity, reality and recollection. Her work is drawn to the moment when memory ignites, when an image holds contradictions within itself, darkness blooming into colour, the known dissolving into the imagined. Each piece carries the full complexity of nature as she experiences it, layered, fleeting, fierce and tender all at once.
Enter your text here.
Enter your text here.
Enter your text here.
Fine Art Photography, Mixed Media & Experimental, Landscape & Nature.
Ghail Binneman
Pretoria, SOUTH AFRICA
Ghail Binneman is drawn to the extraordinary within the everyday, finding beauty where others might pass by and capturing moments in time that can never be relived, images that carry her back to the feelings she experienced in the instant she made them. Her journey began with landscape photography, but the smaller details within the bigger picture drew her towards macro work, and Martin Osner's Fine Art Photography courses opened an entirely new world to her and set her creativity on a different path. She is inspired by the Impressionists, particularly Monet, and by the extraordinary detail of Degas, and her favourite technique is encaustic wax, which she loves for its ability to build texture and transform an ordinary photograph into something that invites the viewer to look again and look more closely. It has been a journey of growing confidence, experimentation and genuine artistic discovery, one she continues to pursue with curiosity and a willingness to be surprised.
Enter your text here.
Fine Art Photography, Mixed Media & Experimental, Landscape & Nature, Abstract.
Alan MasonÂ
Johannesburg, SOUTH AFRICA
Alan Mason's journey into art began in 2019, when he stumbled upon Martin Osner's Landscape Photography Course online and signed up alongside four friends, not yet realising the seed being planted. He soon joined Martin's first Art Painting Retreat in Napier, where the group's work was framed and exhibited in the Napier Gallery. Invited to show at Martin's IGNITE exhibition in Hout Bay, Alan's piece went unsold there, but when the work moved to Napier, he sold his very first painting. Now hooked, he attends weekly sessions at a local art studio, working in acrylic and watercolour. Already an accomplished landscape photographer, Alan has since found an artistic layer above that skill, one that lets him express himself in a more personal, painterly way, moving well beyond the landscape into art that is deeply personal and fulfilling.
Fine Art Photography, Mixed Media & Experimental, Landscape & Nature, Abstract
Enter your text here.
Enter your text here.
Enter your text here.
Fine Art Photography, Mixed Media & Experimental, Landscape & Nature, Abstract
Gillian Mager
Komani, SOUTH AFRICA
Nature and the outdoors are where Gillian finds solace and herself. She loves the bush, its sights, sounds, smells, colours, and endless details that reflect a Master Creator. Wildlife photography was her first passion, but art photography has opened up new creative possibilities, alongside a growing love of painting in oils, acrylics, mixed media and encaustic. Trees have become a favourite subject, she never tires of their majesty and mystery, how they are shaped by the seasons and emerge more beautiful and full of character. She loves to touch and feel the textures of nature, marvelling at the colours and shapes in things we take for granted: rocks, leaves, bark, flowers, animals and birds. Art photography is her therapy, joy and challenge, and it has taught her to see the world in more depth, detail, emotion and colour.
Enter your text here.
Fine Art Photography, Mixed Media & Experimental, Landscape & Nature, Wildlife, Abstract
Are You Inspired? Your Journey Begins With a Single Step
The artists on this page began exactly where you may be standing now, curious, perhaps uncertain, and drawn by a quiet sense that there was something more to be made with a camera. What you see here is the result of dedication, courage, and the kind of sustained creative growth that comes from working within a truly supportive community.
We are enormously proud of each and every one of our Creative Advisors, not only for the remarkable work they have produced but also for the generosity with which they give back, sharing their knowledge, experience, and time with every student who joins the Academy.
If their work has moved you, or if something here has stirred a sense of what might be possible for you, we would love to welcome you to the beginning of your own journey.
