About
allanmestel.com
Allan Mestel is a portrait photographer, photojournalist and filmmaker based in Sarasota, Florida.
Originally from Canada, Allan spent many years working in the advertising industry in Toronto where he directed national and international TV commercials for most of the major worldwide advertising agencies. He was the recipient of many awards including the Television Bureau of Canada’s Gold Bessie (awarded annually for the best TV commercial in Canada) and Saatchi and Saatchi’s First Cut Award for the top emerging directors in Canada. Allan’s commercial photography has also won major awards. For example, an advertisement for Replens in the United Kingdom won the 2022 Transport for London Diversity in Advertising Award, the prize for which was £500,000 of media placement.
Moving to Florida in 2014, Allan opened his photography studio, and since then his work has been exhibited across the US as well as Europe and the United Kingdom. He has dedicated thousands of hours shooting for human rights and social justice organizations and non-profits. His work photographing migrants on both sides of the US-Mexico border has been recognized in exhibitions and publications. These include images from migrant encampment in Matamoros, Mexico (the Human Rights Art Exhibit in California), and Haitian migrants in Del Rio, Texas (published in the New York Times).
Allan has extensively photographed Black Lives Matter street protests in Southwest Florida as well as in Minneapolis, Minnesota (during the Derek Chauvin trial) and Brooklyn Center, Minnesota (subsequent to the shooting of Duante Wright). He has also covered annual protest marches such as the Women’s March, the March for Science, March for Our Lives, Lights for Liberty and numerous other newsworthy events.
Most recently, Allan has travelled to the Ukrainian-Polish border where he spent a week in Medyka, Przemyśl, and Kraków photographing the current refugee crisis.
He has published two books, Migrants of Matamoros, curated from his 2018 images of the migrant camp of 2500 on the banks of the Rio Grande across the river from Brownsville, Texas and 48 Hours in Havana, street portraits in the town of Old Havana, Cuba.
- Status
- Private Company