Barbara Morgan (July 8, 1900 – August 17, 1992) was an American photographer best known for her depictions of modern dancers. She was a co-founder of the photography magazine Aperture.Morgan is known in the visual art and dance worlds for her penetrating studies of American modern dancers Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Erick Hawkins, Jose Limon, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman and others. Morgan’s drawings, prints, watercolors and paintings were exhibited widely in California in the 1920s, and in New York and Philadelphia in the 1930s.With two young children, Douglas born in 1932 and Lloyd in 1935, Barbara sought a workable way to be both a mother and an artist. To abandon painting in favor of photography seemed extreme, but for two saving factors; first, the emergence of an idea for a future book, and second, not requiring the uninterrupted daylight hours that painting does, and one could work at night in the darkroom. Although Barbara had exposed thousands of images, she still did not consider herself a photographer because she had not completed a cycle of developing and printing her own work. Thus she set up a new studio with a darkroom at 10 East 23rd Street, overlooking Madison Square, and began experimenting with the technical and darkroom aspects of photography in 1931. Barbara learned processing from Willard and worked on other gaps in her technique, chiefly with the 4x5 Speed Graphic camera and Leica with all lenses. She worked with Harold Harvey as he was perfecting his all temperature Replenishing Fine Grain Developer 777. During this time she started to explore photomontage
In 1935 Barbara attended a performance of the young Martha Graham Dance Company. She was immediately struck with the historical and social importance of the emerging American Modern Dance movement:
“The photographers and painters who dealt with the Depression, often, it seemed to me, only added to defeatism without giving courage or hope. Yet the galvanizing protest danced by Martha Graham, Humphrey-Weidman, Tamiris and others was heartening. Often nearly starving, they never gave up, but forged life affirming dance statements of American society in stress and strain. In this role, their dance reminded me of Indian ceremonial dances which invigorate the tribe in drought and difficulty.”
Morgan conceived of her 1941 book project Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs- the year she met Graham. From 1935 through the 1945 she photographed more than 40 established dancers and choreographers, and she described her process:“To epitomize…a dance with camera, stage performances are inadequate, because in that situation one can only fortuitously record. For my interpretation it was necessary to redirect, relight, and photographically synthesize what I felt to be the core of the total dance.”
Graham and Morgan developed a relationship that would last some 60 years. Their correspondence attests to their mutual affection, trust and respect. In 1980, Graham stated:
“It is rare that even an inspired photographer possesses the demonic eye which can capture the instant of dance and transform it into timeless gesture. In Barbara Morgan I found that person. In looking at these photographs today, I feel, as I felt when I first saw them, privileged to have been a part of this collaboration. For to me, Barbara Morgan through her art reveals the inner landscape that is a dancer’s world.”
In 1945, with sponsorship by the National Gallery and the State Department, Morgan mounted the exhibition La Danza Moderna Norte-Americana: Fotografias por Barbara Morgan – 44 panel mounted enlargements, exhibited first at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, then for a South American tour.Wikipedia
Walter Chappell (1925 – 2000) is known for intensely provocative photographs of the human body, landscapes, and his Metaflora photographs of the auras of plant and spiritual objects.
Soon after we opened a photography space in Santa Fe, New Mexico, we heard through Dick Thibideau, a wonderful man who ran a motel/hostel and was our single source of archival mat board, that the photographer Walter Chappell was living in Northern New Mexico. Dick was willing to arrange a meeting for us with Walter at the motel in the beautiful village of Pilar, on the Rio Grande.
Having known the work of Walter Chappell, mostly through past issues of Aperture Magazine and by reputation, we were amazed to hear that somebody of his renown and stature within the photography world was living so close to Santa Fe and it seemed that this was not common knowledge. With excitement we made our trip up to Pilar to meet with Walter for an afternoon. Entering a darkened motel room, work laid out on the bed, we immediately felt Walter’s intensity, kindness, and deep spiritual nature. Of course, this carried through to the photographs he showed us, the stories he told and the conversations that began that afternoon and spanned approximately the next 20 years.
From that day forward there was never a moment that we spent with Walter that wasn’t both challenging and in ways, enlightening at the same time. There are many stories written and told about Walter’s unique life style and chosen approaches to living. But beyond all the related narratives, it must be said that Walter stands out as one of the 20th century’s important photographers. From his innovative and ground breaking works dealing with the human form in the 50’s through the spiritually charged Metaflora images, Walter was always pushing the boundaries of photographic “seeing”.
One of our greatest experiences as gallerists was sequencing the photographs for an exhibition of Walter’s work. It is said that one of the definitions of great art is that it can both transcend time and subject matter. This was true for Walter’s work. We were amazed on that afternoon that photographs as varied as nudes, water studies, rock abstractions, and Metaflora’s hung seamlessly irrespective of dates or subjects. His vision, like his life, is both unique and transcendent. Although trying at times, we were pleased and honored to have counted Walter as friend and colleague.
From 1957-1958, he studied with Minor White in Rochester, New York, and introduced White to the teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. Together they published a series of articles in Aperture on reading the hidden meaning of things through photographs. Chappell was curator of exhibitions and prints at the George Eastman House from 1957-1961 and helped establish the Association of Heliographers, a cooperative photography gallery on Madison Avenue.
Walter Chappell lived in New Mexico at various times in his life: the 60’s, the 80’s and then back again in the 90’s where he lived in his wonderful home in El Rito, New Mexico until his death in 2000.(photographydealers.com)
Marilyn Monroe - Black Series 1956 - Milton H. Greene
Milton H. Greene (March 14, 1922 – August 8, 1985) was an American fashion and celebrity photographer and film and television producer, best known for his photo shoots with Marilyn Monroe.Greene initially established himself in high fashion photography in the 1940s and 1950s. His fashion shots appeared in Harper's Bazaar and Vogue. Greene then turned to portraits of celebrities. He photographed many high-profile personalities in the 1950s and 1960s, including Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Ava Gardner, Sammy Davis, Jr., Catherine Deneuve, Marlene Dietrich, and Judy Garland.
Greene's work with Marilyn Monroe (whom he first met after shooting her for a layout for Look in 1953) changed the course of his career. The two struck up a friendship and, when Monroe left Los Angeles to study acting with Lee Strasberg in New York City, she stayed with Greene, his wife Amy and young son Joshua in Connecticut. Together with Greene, Monroe formed Marilyn Monroe Productions, a production company in an effort to gain control of her career. Greene would go on to produce Bus Stop (1956) and The Prince and the Showgirl (1957). The two also collaborated on some 53 photo sessions, some of which became well known, including "The Black Sitting". Greene's photograph for one such sitting in 1954 featuring Monroe in a ballet tutu was chosen by Time Life as one of the three most popular images of the 20th century. Monroe and Greene's friendship ended after the production of The Prince and the Showgirl in 1957, and Monroe fired Greene.Wikipedia
Black and white photography Pedro Luis Raota
"Pedro Luis Raota was one of the 20th century's most important photographers. Since his first recognition in 1958, he garnered over 150 international awards and honors for his exceptional work in the humanitarian genre. His photographs have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and are included in public and private collections around the world.
Raota's unique and memorable talent for capturing the depth of human spirit in his photographs has brought him comparisons to other legendary photographers. Like Dorothea Lange or W. Eugene Smith, this Argentinian master presents haunting portraits of a stricken humanity. Other photographs are filled with joy or comical confrontations, spontaneous "decisive moments" akin to Cartier-Bresson or Robert Doisneau. There is a rare focused intensity of spirit in nearly all Raota's portraits, which has been compared to the work of Paul Strand. In the final analysis however, these extraordinary images step beyond comparisons to other photographers and stand apart as powerful masterpieces, unique and singularly moving.
This is a personal collection of work that comes from the heart of a Latin tradition stretching back through Goya to Ribera, and forward to contemporary Spainish cinema. Emotion is conveyed through an isolated face; gestures of people pictured together bind them into interdependent relationships; suffering is contained in dignity. Raota's artistry ranges from the sweetness of young innocence to raw realism. His compositions are as classical as the lighting is dramatic, yet without artifice. Each photograph becomes a direct, spontaneous glimpse into the life of his subject. The image lingers in our memory long after viewing. This unusal body of work adds a quality of personal feeling to the contemporary world of photography.
Raota has been called "one of the ten best photographers in the world" for the significant number of distinguished honors and awards he received from juries on five continents. Raota's images possess an unmistakable and distinctive style forged from a spirit of infinite tenderness, raw realism and deep humanity. His visual trademark - light highlights against a dark background - are recognizable at first glance and leave a powerful signature across virtually all his work. Today he stands apart from the rest of the world's renowned documentary photographers for the brilliant clarity of his darkroom craft as well as the engaging humanity and sophistication of his compositions. To the end of his life, Raota painstakingly made each print individually by his own hand.
Pedro Raota was born in Argentina on April 26, 1934 in a modest country home in the Province of El Chaco. At a young age he sold his bicycle to buy a camera, determined to learn the art of photography. He quickly took up portrait photography in Santa Fe de la Vera Cruz and later moved to Villaguary where he enthusiastically set up his own studio.
In 1966, he won First Place from Spanish World magazine, which he regarded as his first major award. In 1967, he won a competition held during the Cannes Film Festival, placing second out of 2,500 photographers from around the world. Greatly encouraged, from 1968 on, his awards began to rapidly multiply, including The Condor Trophy from the Argentine Federation of Photography in Buenos Aires and The Best Graphic Photographer in the World, given at La Haya, Holland. He was invited as a Guest of Honor to South Africa, Holland, Venezuela and Spain. In 1972, he received the First Place at the London International Exhibition of Photographic Art. In 1972, he won the Charles Pompidou in Paris, France and the Charles Kingsley trophy in the World Photographic Contest in 1972 and 1976. In 1975, Raota received the Golden Medal at the International Exhibition of Photographic Journalism in the United States, and more importantly, the Pracda 75 in Moscow. This final award gave him the opportunity to spend 45 days photographing in 28 different countries. The resulting work was exhibited at the Modern Art Museum in Buenos Aires eventually his images were shown around the world in countless international group exhibitions, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1975, he won the World Biennial EUROPA-75.
Two books of Raota's photography were published in Switzerland. The first, in 1977, was printed in five languages. He printed his first portfolio in 1979. The National Library in Paris has 60 of his photographs in their gallery. His work is included in the Hall of Fame by the Photographic Society of America. In 1981, Raota founded the Buenos Aires Institute of Photographic Art and oversaw the faculty until his death at the age of 52.In his native country Raota was already revered as the "Ansel Adams of Argentina" at the time of his death. Today Raota's original signed prints are extemely rare; each one hand printed by himself on Clorobromide paper. "(photographywest.com)
Artistic and experimental photography Zofia Rydet
"Her photographs are deceptively simple, taking an intimate, direct approach to her subject, trailing main tropes of Pictorialism, painting during the Young Poland period, abstraction and surrealism, and applying them to photography. ofia Rydet's images of children and rural families in Poland from the 1960s and 1970s are among the insightful and well-executed photographic series of postwar Poland. Born on the 5th of May 1911 in Stanisławowo, she became a member of the Gliwice Photography Association in 1954. There she met Jerzy Lewczyński link opens page in new window , Władysław Jasieński and Piotr Janik, photographers who were active in documenting changes of postwar Poland and the implementation of socialist ideals in urban planning and society.
Her first major exhibition took place in 1961, with the Little Man series of middle-class children in Poland and other socialist nations. The series was published as an album of over 140 photographs in 1965, edited by Wojciech Zamecznik, in 1965, and the book is considered one of the important albums of 20th-century Polish photography. Rydet described her approach in the series, saying she 'wanted to move away from the stereotype of a care-free angelic childhood and show the multifaceted complexity of childhood experiences and reactions. Through appropriate synthesis, I wanted to say something about mankind, because as Korczak once said 'everything that happens in the dirty adult world also happens in the children's world', alluding to the teacher and author Dr. Janusz Korczak link opens page in new window . Rydet shifted her focus to the broader sphere of children and adults between 1978 and 1989, in her Sociological Record. The series consists of tens of thousands of negatives taken in rural regions of Poland comprise the series, and present people from all walks of life in their typical surroundings. These works were characterised by particular senses of emotion, spanning the spectrum from loneliness, fear and loss, to happiness and hope. Rydet's Sociological Record has been compared to August Sander's work throughout German society in the 1920s, and to other socially minded documentary photographers.
Rydet lectured in photography at the Department of Architecture of the Silesian School of Engineering during this period. She also shifted to a more conceptual approach, manifested in the series Infinity of Long Roads and in the Silesian Suite. These works of the 1980s and 1990s were in large measure collage projects, building on and extending her earlier work.The centennial of Rydet's birth and the 50th anniversary of her first solo show occurred in 2011. Renewed interest in her work continued through 2012, with exhibitions in Polish galleries including the Asymetria Gallery in Warsaw. Asymetria represented Zofia Rydet at prestigious photography fairs between 2010 and 2012, including Paris Photo link opens page in new window . In 2015 the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw held the largest exhibition of Zofia Rydet's monumental photographic project Sociological Record. The cumulative effort of the four partners (the Foundation for Visual Arts, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Zofia Rydet Foundation, and the Museum in Gliwice) has created the possibility to digitise Sociological Record and to make the cycle available to the public almost in its entirety, complete with numerous source materials, within the online archive www.zofiarydet.com. The year 2016 will feature an international academic conference and two books related to Sociological Record (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw/Chicago University Press and the Museum in Gliwice) published.."(Author: Agnieszka Le Nart, update: January 2016, GS. culture.pl
Sociological Record - Zofia Rydet
Ruth Bernhard (October 14, 1905 – December 18, 2006) was a German-born American photographer.Bernhard was born in Berlin and studied at the Berlin Academy of Art from 1925–27. As an only child, she was raised by two schoolteacher sisters and their mother. Bernhard's father, Lucian Bernhard, was known for his poster and typeface design, many of which bear his name and are still in use.
Bernhard studied art history and typography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin before moving to New York to join her father.She began teaching on an ongoing basis at the University of California in 1958, while also giving lectures, classes and workshops all over the United StatesIn 1927 Bernhard moved to New York City, where her father was already living. She worked as an assistant to Ralph Steiner in Delineator magazine, but he terminated her employment for indifferent performance. She used her severance pay to finance her own photographic equipment. By the late-1920s, while living in Manhattan, Bernhard was heavily involved in the lesbian sub-culture of the artistic community, becoming friends with photographer Berenice Abbott and her lover, critic Elizabeth McCausland. She wrote about her "bisexual escapades" in her memoir. In 1934 Bernhard began photographing women in the nude.It would be this art form for which she would eventually become best known. In 1935, she chanced to meet Edward Weston on the beach in Santa Monica. She would later say;
" I was unprepared for the experience of seeing his pictures for the first time. It was overwhelming. It was lightning in the darkness...here before me was indisputable evidence of what I had thought possible—an intensely vital artist whose medium was photography"
Bernhard was so inspired by Weston’s work that, after meeting him in 1935, she moved to California (where he lived). In 1939, Bernhard moved back to New York for eight years, during which time she met photographer Alfred Stieglitz
By 1944 she had met and became involved with artist and designer Eveline (Evelyn) Phimister. The two moved in together, and remained together for the next ten years. They first moved to Carmel, California, where Bernhard worked with Group f/64. Soon, finding Carmel a difficult place in which to earn a living, they moved to Hollywood where she fashioned a career as a commercial photographer. In 1953, they moved to San Francisco where she became a colleague of photographers such as Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Minor White, and Wynn Bullock.
Most of Bernhard's work is studio-based, ranging from simple still lifes to complex nudes. In the 1940s she worked with the conchologist Jean Schwengel.She worked almost exclusively in black-and-white, though there are rumours that she had done some color work as well. She also is known for her lesbian themed works, most notably Two Forms (1962). In that work, a black woman and a white woman who were real-life lovers are featured with their nude bodies pressed against one another.
A departure was a collaboration with Melvin Van Peebles (as "Melvin Van"), then a young cable car gripman (driver) in San Francisco. Van Peebles wrote the text and Bernhard took the unposed photographs for The Big Heart, a book about life on the cable cars.In the early 1980s, Bernhard started to work with Carol Williams, owner of Photography West Gallery in Carmel, California. Bernhard told Williams that she knew there would be a book of her photography after her death, but hoped one could be published during her lifetime. Williams approached New York Graphics Society, and several other photographic book publishers, but was advised that "only Ansel Adams could sell black-and-white photography books." Bernhard and Williams decided to sell five limited edition prints to raise the necessary funds to publish a superior quality of book of Ruth Bernhard nudes. The ensuing edition was produced by David Gray Gardner of Gardner Lithograph, (also the printer of Adams's books) and was called The Eternal Body. It won Photography Book of the Year in 1986 from Friends of Photography. This book was often credited by Ruth Bernhard as being an immeasurable help to her future career and public recognition. The Eternal Body was reprinted by Chronicle Books and later as a deluxe limited Centennial Edition in celebration of Ruth Bernhard's 100th birthday in October, 2005. Carol Williams credited Ruth Bernhard with encouraging her to venture into book publishing, and later published several other photographic monographs.
In the 1980s Bernhard also started to work with Joe Folberg. Folberg bought Vision Gallery from Douglas Elliott (who founded it in 1979) in San Francisco in 1982. Bernhard and Folberg worked together until Folberg's death. The gallery split with Debra Heimerdinger taking over operations in North America and Folberg's son Neil moving the "Vision Gallery" to Jerusalem. Heimerdinger has worked with Bernhard to introduce platinum prints to her portfolio. Heimerdinger sells Bernhard's prints even today.
In 1967, Bernhard began a teaching career. This same year, Bernhard met United States Air Force Colonel Price Rice, an African American man ten years younger than her, and the two became lovers. They would remain together until his death in 1999. In her 90s, Bernhard cooperated with biographer Margaretta K. Mitchell in the book Ruth Bernhard, Between Art and Life, publicly revealing her many affairs with women and men throughout her lifetime.In 1984 Ruth worked with filmmaker Robert Burrill on her autobiographic film entitled, Illuminations: Ruth Bernhard, Photographer. The film premièred in 1989 at the Kabuki theater in San Francisco and on local PBS station KQED in 1991.Bernhard was inducted into the National Women's Caucus for Art in 1981. Bernhard was hailed by Ansel Adams as "the greatest photographer of the nude"Wikipedia
Conceptual art and photography Sarah Charlesworth
Sarah Edwards Charlesworth (March 29, 1947 – June 25, 2013) was an American conceptual artist and photographer. She is considered part of The Pictures Generation, a loose-knit group of artists working in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s, all of whom were concerned with how images shape our everyday lives and society as a whole.Charlesworth was born in East Orange, New Jersey. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Barnard College in 1969. Her undergraduate thesis project, a work of conceptual art devoid of text, was a 50-print study of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Prior to that she studied under Douglas Huebler at Bradford College. After completing her degree, she studied briefly under the photographer Lisette Model at The New School. After college, she worked as a freelance photographer and became active in downtown Manhattan art circles
Charlesworth worked in photographic series, but stated in a 1990 interview that she had not really thought of herself as a photographer. She stated, rather, that she viewed her work as investigating questions about the world and her role in it, but realized as of that point that she had been investigating those questions through the medium of photography for the past twelve years.In 1975, Charlesworth and fellow conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth founded The Fox, a magazine dedicated to art theory, but the magazine only remained in publication until 1976.Along with Glenn O'Brien, Betsy Sussler, Liza Bear, and Michael McClard, she co-founded BOMB magazine in 1981.Charlesworth also created the cover art for the very first edition of BOMB magazine.
Charlesworth worked in series, exploring one idea to its conclusion.For a series called Modern History (1977–79), she photographed, at actual size, the front pages of 29 American and Canadian newspapers and blanked out everything except for their photographs and mastheads. For Movie-Television-News-History (1979), a part of the series, Charlesworth selected a specific event — the shooting of American journalist Bill Stewart by the Nicaraguan National Guard — and presented it as it was reported on June 21, 1979, in 27 American newspapers. All images in the final work were printed at the same size as the original newspapers.
In February 1980, Charlesworth created Stills, a series of harrowing, six-and-a-half-foot-tall photographs depicting bodies falling from buildings.When Stills was first shown in 1980 in Tony Shafrazi’s East Village apartment, it consisted of seven images. To create the series, Charlesworth scoured news wires and the archives of the New York Public Library for images of people plunging through the air, having jumped out of a windows to commit suicide or because of a catastrophe like fire. After appropriating the photograph, she would crop or tear it, often leaving the edges ragged so that it appeared to be haphazardly torn like a homemade clipping. She would then rephotograph the image and enlarge it. Charlesworth later expanded the series, printing an eighth work from her original source material in 2009 and – as a commission of the Art Institute of Chicago – creating a set of six new ones from the original transparencies that were never printed. Each gelatin silver print was made and mounted to the exact specifications of those she created in 1980.
In her “Objects of Desire” series (1983-1988), Cibachrome prints of appropriated images – typically a cutout picture of a single object, including a gold bowl and a statue of a Buddha – are photographed against bright, laminated monochrome backgrounds that match their lacquered frames.In the series Renaissance Paintings and Renaissance Drawings (both 1991), Charlesworth combined imagery from disparate Italian Renaissance paintings and drawings to make new, often ironic paintings and drawings.
Charlesworth began to photograph actual objects only in the early 1990s.Her series The Academy of Secrets is Charlesworth's attempt to convey her emotions through using abstracted images of objects that have symbolic associations. She illustrated how the way light falls on objects affects our perceptions of them as the subject of her own 2012 solo exhibition Available Light.Charlesworth held various teaching positions at New York University, the School of Visual Arts, and Hartford University. Before her death she taught Master Critique in the MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Program and The School of Visual Arts. A major influence on a new generation of artists, including Sara VanDerBeek and Liz Deschenes, she was appointed to the faculty of Princeton University in 2012.Wikipedia
Black and White photography Elio Ciol
Elio Ciol (born 1929) is an Italian photographer and publisher who was born in Casarsa della Delizia in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, the region where he has principally lived and worked. His father was a photographer who kept a studio in their hometown and Elio was fascinated by the technical aspects and worked in the darkroom as a boy. A formative experience was when, during the Nazi occupation, a German doctor brought in films with photographs of the countryside rather than of people, "photographs that I myself should have been able to do and which I had not done or even imagined." He began practising photography at fifteen, worked full-time in the studio from nineteen, and spent an increasing amount of his free time taking photographs for his own interests. A trip to Assisi in 1951 made a great impression; Ciol subsequently spent much time there, taking many photographs.
Dissatisfied with the conventions demanded in Italian photographic contests, Ciol ambitiously entered contests abroad; in 1955 and 1956 he was encouraged by favorable mentions in the American magazine Popular Photography.
Ciol was greatly influenced by the ideas of Luigi Crocenzi, emphasizing sequence rather than single images when illustrating a book or other story (an example had been Crocenzi's Conversazione in Sicilia, with text by Elio Vittorini). Ciol moved to Milan in 1963 to work on projects for the firm of Altimani; this soon ran into financial difficulties and Ciol returned to Casarsa, but invigorated with new ideas for the illustration and layout of books. He has illustrated dozens of books since that time.
Ciol has concentrated on creating a photographic record and archive of Italian works of art, architecture, landscapes, and archaeological sites and artefacts, particularly in Friuli. His works are black and white, sometimes employing infrared-sensitive film. Some of his photographs show people so close as to be recognizable, but more often people appear as small figures within landscapes. More often still the landscapes are devoid of people.Wikipedia
"Cole Weston, born on January 30, 1919 in Los Angeles, was the fourth and youngest son of famed 20th Century photographer, Edward Henry Weston. Cole received his first camera, a 4 by 5 Autograflex, from his brother Brett in 1935. Cole graduated with a degree in theater arts from the Cornish School in Seattle in 1937 and then served in the Navy during World War II as a welder and photographer. After his discharge from the Navy in 1945 Cole worked for Life Magazine. In 1946 he moved to Carmel to assist his father Edward. During this time Eastman Kodak started sending their new color film, Kodachrome, for Edward to try out. Cole took this opportunity to experiment with this new medium and eventually became one of the world’s great masters of fine art color photography.In 1957 Cole began shooting his first color photographs of the magnificent Big Sur coast, Monterey Peninsula and central California. At this time he carried on his own portrait business while assisting his ailing father, who passed away in 1958. Edward had authorized Cole to print from Edward’s negatives after his death, so Cole continued printing Edward’s work while pursuing his own fine art photography.
In 1975 Cole began lecturing and conducting workshops on his father’s photography as well as his own. With his work in the theater arts Cole was a natural when it came to teaching and lecturing and his many students still comment on what a great workshop he gave. He traveled throughout the United States, England, Europe, Russia, Mexico, New Zealand and the South Pacific photographing and inspiring others with his characteristic enthusiasm and charm.In 1988 after three decades devoted to printing his father’s work, Cole at last set aside his responsibility to Edward’s legacy and refocused on his own photography. Cole had his first solo exhibition in San Francisco in 1971. Since then, his work has been featured in more than sixty exhibitions worldwide and has been collected by museums throughout the United States and Europe. His work has been featured in numerous gallery shows and publications with three monographs and numerous articles having been published on his exquisite photography. Michael Hoffman from Aperture Publications once quoted, “In the history of photography there are but a few masters of color photography, Cole Weston is assuredly one of these masters of the medium whose dramatic powerful images are a source of great joy and pleasure”. Cole passed away from natural causes on April 20th, 2003.Like Cole, who once carried on the legacy of his father’s photography, his children have decided, as a tribute to their father, to carry on printing and to offer Trust prints of Cole’s fine color photographs. Cole Weston was a dedicated artist and master of fine photography. Hopefully the availability of modern prints will make it possible for photographic enthusiasts everywhere to continue to enjoy his life’s work."(edward-weston.com/cole-weston)
Artist and photographer Erwin Blumenfeld
Erwin Blumenfeld (1897 – 1969) was a famous American photographer of German origin.In the 1930s, he published collages mocking Adolf Hitler. In 1936, he emigrated to Paris. With the German occupation, he was interned in a concentration camp in 1940 because he was Jewish. In 1941, he somehow made his way to the United States.
In the 1940s and 1950s he became very famous for his fashion photography, working for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, and also for artistic nude photography. In the 1960s, he worked on his autobiography which found no publisher because it was considered to be too ironic towards society, and was published only after his death.
Erwin Blumenfeld was a renowned photographer whose work originally appeared between 1930 and his death in 1969. He was born in Berlin on 26 January 1897, moved to the Netherlands in late 1918, and started a professional career in photography in 1934. He moved to France in 1936. From 1937 to 1939, his photographs were published in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. When the Second World War broke out, he was interned in the French camps Monthbard-Marmagne and Le Vernet as an alien, but was eventually allowed to leave for Morocco and then onto New York in 1941. He became a US citizen in 1946. His more personal work is in black and white; his commercial work in fashion, much for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, is mostly in color. In both media he was a great innovator. In black and white he did all his work personally in the dark room. In color he drew on his extensive background in classical and modern painting.He married Lena Citroen (b. 1897-d. 1994), who was a cousin of his best friend Paul Citroen, in the Netherlands in 1921, and had three children there: Lisette (May 1922-August 2011), Henry (1925-2011), and Yorick (b. 1933). Erwin's daughter Lisette was also put into a camp at Gurs when she was about 18. Erwin Blumenfeld died in Rome on 4 July 1969, and his widow Lena outlived him by twenty-five years. His son Henry recorded an oral history of his father and the family's life shortly before he died in 2011. The audio can be found online.Wikipedia
The World Bodypainting Festival
The World Bodypainting Festival (abbreviated WBF) is an annual bodypainting festival and competition used to be held in Pörtschach, Austria on lake Wörthersee. Now the WBF has changed its location and since 2017 the Festival is taking place in Klagenfurt, Austria. It attracts artists from 50 nations and attracts over 30,000 plus spectators
The WBF is held during the summer months of June/July. It attracts artists from 50 nations and attracts 30.000 plus spectators. It consists of a pre-week followed by 3 main days of the festival/competition. The pre-week consists of workshops and side events.
The workshops offer many educational programs and lessons by leading artists in brush & sponge, airbrush, special effects, beauty make-up, head dressing including colour theory and history. All workshops are run and handled under the WB Academy and are also scheduled throughout the year in various cities worldwide. Side events include parties such as the Surreal Costume Ball (Body Circus) and the newly added (Zombie Crawl) with international DJs and musical stage performances. Also included are exhibitions, gatherings, meeting points and industry discussions.
The three main days: Friday, Saturday and Sunday are open to the general public in a park also known as "Bodypaint City" where the World, Special and Amateur Awards are held. The festival is open to both adults and children and is considered a family-friendly environment. Spectators and visitors alike are able to step "into the surreal" filled with a unique world of art that excites the senses and the imagination. Visitors can also take part and express themselves in various activities throughout Bodypaint City. Artists compete on all three days with a given theme in the categories of brush & sponge, airbrush and special effects for the World Champion Award & title announced on Sunday with the special UV bodypainting World Champion Fluoro Award held and announced on Friday night. Also included is the World Facepainting Award, Armature Award, Installation Award, Special Effects Face Make-up, Make-up Battle Award and the Photo Award. All categories have separate prizes and trophies. Artists can use either male or female models. The festival is open for both adults and children, and many families come there together.The three main days of the festival also plays host to a VIP area, a bodypainting manufacture & suppliers' market, fashion & crafts market, food & beverage vendors, headline stage bands, performers and international DJs throughout various musical zones of Bodypaint City as well as the sun drenched pristine waters and beaches of lake Wörthersee. "There is something for everyone" including the closing Paint Party.
The festival was first created and launched in 1998 in Seeboden, Austria as the European Bodypainting Festival in order to promote summer tourism to the region by then tourism manager Alex Barendregt. It was a small gathering of artists and the first "boutique event" of its kind in the world. Also launched in conjunction was the WB Academy, which in 2008 was offered worldwide. As the Bodypainting Movement was growing, in 2001 Mr. Barendregt launched the WB Association followed by the launch of the WB Production in 2010.
Due to the increasing attendance of international artists and supporters to the festival, in 2004 the festival was renamed to "The World Bodypainting Festival" and in 2011 Mr. Barendregt left his position at the tourist office and moved the festival to its new home in Pörtschach, Austria on lake Wörthersee. Today it is the biggest annual event in the bodypainting culture, community and industry at large. It has become the "Center of Bodypainting" and "Home" to many. Combined with Mr. Barendregt's efforts, the WB Association, WB Production and the WB Academy are considered and responsible for providing a worldwide platform and introduction into the Art of Bodypainting.Wikipedia
Herman Leonard (March 6, 1923, in Allentown, Pennsylvania – August 14, 2010, in Los Angeles, California) was an American photographer known for his unique images of jazz icons.
"President Bill Clinton has called Herman Leonard, "The greatest jazz photographer in the history of the genre." Born March 6, 1923 and raised in Allentown, PA, at age 9, Herman Leonard witnessed an image being developed in his brother's darkroom and became enthralled with the magic of photography. As the official photographer for his high school, Herman quickly learned that with a camera in hand, he had an "open sesame" to people and events, that his shyness might have prevented him from experiencing. When it came time for college, Herman chose Ohio University, “The only university at the time that could offer me a degree in Photography”. His college studies were interrupted from 1943-1945, as Herman joined the United States Army and was sent to Burma with the 13th Mountain Medical Battalion. He had hoped to be a field photographer, but was ironically assigned as a combat anesthetist when he failed a test which required him to identify the chemical ingredients of film developer. After the war, Herman returned to college and graduated in 1947 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree.
Herman's most influential teacher was master portrait photographer, Yousuf Karsh, with whom Herman spent a year as an apprentice to in Ottawa, Canada from 1947-1948. Herman assisted Karsh in the darkroom and with photographic sittings including, Martha Graham, Harry Truman, and Albert Einstein.
In 1948, Herman's passion for jazz brought him to New York City's Greenwich Village, where he set up a small studio at 220 Sullivan Street. He made his way into the swinging clubs of Broadway, 52nd Street and Harlem. With the camera as his free ticket, he offered to shoot publicity stills of the jazz artists for admission. While shooting at The Royal Roost and Birdland, he photographed and developed friendships with some of the greats of jazz history, including Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Lena Horne, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and many more. Many of his photos eventually ended up on the covers of jazz albums while working for producer Norman Granz, as well as in Downbeat and Metronome magazines.In 1956 Leonard was chosen by Marlon Brando to be his personal photographer for an extensive research trip throughout the Far East. At the conclusion of the trip, Leonard had been bitten by the travel bug and headed for Paris, France. He continued to photograph the prolific jazz scene, with many of the American jazz artists now living there. Working for French recording label Barclay Records, he also photographed many French recording artists such as Charles Aznavour, Jacques Brel, Eddy Mitchell and Johnny Hallyday. He also became the European photographer for Playboy Magazine. Throughout the 1960’s and 70’s his work focused primarily on fashion and advertising at his studio in Paris’ chic Neuilly-sur-Seine neighborhood.
In 1980, Herman left Paris and moved to the Spanish island of Ibiza, where he remained with his family until 1988. During that time he rediscovered his jazz negatives that had been stored in a box under his bed, and in 1985 released his first book, The Eye of Jazz, published by Hachette/Filipachi Publications. In 1988 he moved to London where he had the first exhibition of his jazz photographs at the Special Photographers Company to great critical acclaim. In the first month, over 10,000 people came to view the exhibit of unseen images. The following year he premiered his first US show, which toured nationally.
After an exhibit in New Orleans in 1991, he fell in love with the city and moved there to immerse himself in its lively jazz and blues scene. He continued to exhibit his work around the world in numerous solo shows. In 1995, Herman released his second book, Jazz Memories, published by Editions Filipacchi, and in that same year was awarded an “Honorary Masters of Science in Photography” from The Brooks Institute of Photography. Other awards received at this time included the "Milt Hinton Award for Excellence in Jazz Photography," from Jazz Photographer's Association, the "Excellence in Photography Award" from the Jazz Journalists Association, and a "Lifetime Achievement Award" from Downbeat Magazine in 2004.
In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed Herman's home and studio. The storm claimed some 8,000 silver gelatin photographs that had been hand printed by him, a master printer in his own right. As the storm blew in, Herman's crew gathered the negatives and placed them in the care of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, where they were stored in an upper level vault. Following the devastation of Katrina, Leonard moved to Studio City, California, and re-established his life and business there. In 2006, he released his third book, "Jazz, Giants, And Journeys: The Photography of Herman Leonard", published by Scala Publishers, Ltd. In the forward to the book, Quincy Jones wrote, "When people think of jazz, their mental picture is likely one of Herman's."
Herman's jazz photographs, now collector's items, are a unique record of the jazz scene of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. The Smithsonian claims 155 original Herman Leonard photographic prints in its permanent collection, where they are considered as essential to American music history as Benny Goodman's clarinet or Louis Armstrong's horn. Herman's work is also represented in numerous public collections including, Jazz at Lincoln Center, NY, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, LA, and the George Eastman House, NY, as well as the private collections of Sir Elton John, Bruce Bernard, His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand and President Bill Clinton. The Herman Leonard Jazz Archive was established in 2007 and in 2008 was awarded a GRAMMY® Foundation grant for archiving and preservation. This project was successful in digitally archiving Leonard's vast catalog of over 35,000 negatives, comprising a visual documentation of America's original art form, and preserving it for future generations. Later in 2008, Herman was presented with the coveted Lucie Award for Portraiture from his dear friend Tony Bennett at an awards ceremony at Lincoln Center in NYC. Tony remarked, "He is my favorite artist of any technique, he's a painter with a camera." Herman also appeared on NBC's The Today Show, and in a BBC documentary SAVING JAZZ, which chronicled his experiences following Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Leonard returned to his alma mater of Ohio University as the commencement speaker for the graduating class of 2009, and was presented with an Honorary Doctorate. (hermanleonard.com)
J.D. 'Okhai Ojeikere
Johnson Donatus Aihumekeokhai Ojeikere (1930 – 2 February 2014), known as J.D. 'Okhai Ojeikere, was a Nigerian photographer who is known for his work with unique hairstyles found in Nigeria.Ojeikere was born in 1930 in Ovbiomu-Emai, a rural village in south-western Nigeria. He worked and lived in Ketu, Nigeria. At the age of 20 he pursued photography, which was out of the ordinary Ojeikere for people in Nigeria, especially those in his village. Cameras were not in high demand and were of low priority as they were considered a luxury. However in 1950 bought a modest Brownie D camera without flash, and had a friend teach him the fundamentals of photography.
Ojeikere started out as a darkroom assistant in 1954 at the Ministry of Information in Ibadan. After Nigeria gained its independence in 1960, Ojeikere pursued his first job as a photographer. In 1961 he became a studio photographer, under Steve Rhodes, for Television House Ibadan. From 1963 to 1975 Ojeikere worked in publicity at West Africa Publicity in Lagos. In 1967 he joined the Nigerian Arts Council. In 1968 he began one of his largest projects as he documented Nigerian hairstyles. This was a hallmark of Ojeikere's work and he printed approximately a thousand pictures of different African women's hair.A large selection of Ojeikere's work was included in the arsenale section of the 55th Venice Biennale d'arte, "Il Palazzo Enciclopedia" curated by Massimiliano Gioni in 2013.Ojeikere died on 2 February 2014, at the age of 83. He is the subject of a documentary film by Tam Fiofori entitled J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere: Master Photographer.Wikipedia
Industrial photography Ogle Winston Link
Ogle Winston Link (December 16, 1914 – January 30, 2001), known commonly as O. Winston Link, was an American photographer. He is best known for his black-and-white photography and sound recordings of the last days of steam locomotive railroading on the Norfolk & Western in the United States in the late 1950s. A commercial photographer, Link helped establish rail photography as a hobby. He also pioneered night photography, producing several well known examples including Hotshot Eastbound, a photograph of a steam train passing a drive-in movie theater, and Hawksbill Creek Swimming Hole showing a train crossing a bridge above children bathing.
Link and his siblings, Eleanor and Albert Jr., spent their childhood in the borough of Brooklyn, New York City, where they lived with their parents, Albert Link, Sr. and Anne Winston Jones Link. Link's given names honor ancestors Alexander Ogle and John Winston Jones, who had served in the U.S. House of Representatives in the 19th century.Al Link taught woodworking in the New York City Public School system, and encouraged his children's interest in arts and crafts and first introduced Winston to photography.Link's early photography was created with a borrowed medium format Autographic Kodak camera. By the time he was in high school he had built his own photographic enlarger. After completing high school, Link attended the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, receiving a degree in civil engineering. Before his graduation in 1937, he spoke at a banquet for the institute's newspaper, where he served as photo editor. An executive from Carl Byoir's public relations firm was present and was impressed by Link's speaking ability. He offered Link a job as a photographer.
Link worked for Carl Byoir and Associates for five years, learning his trade on the job. He adapted to the technique of making posed photographs looking candid, as well as creatively emphasizing a point. On his first major assignment, to photograph part of the state of Louisiana in the summer of 1937, he found himself in New Iberia, the location where Cecil B. DeMille's 1938 movie "The Buccaneer", about Jean LaFitte was being filmed. Here he met his future first wife, a former Miss Ark-La-Tex, now actress/model/body double, Vanda Marteal Oglesby, who stood-in for lead actress Franciska Gaal. They 'took a shine' to one another and later that year she posed for some of his photographs in the French Quarter of New Orleans. They eventually married in 1942, but later divorced. Some of Link's photographs from this time included an image of a man aiming a gun at a pig wearing a bulletproof vest, and one eventually known as "What Is This Girl Selling?" or "Girl on Ice," which was widely published in the United States and later featured in Life as a "classic publicity picture." According to Thomas Garver, a later assistant to Link, during his employment at Byoir's firm, Link "clearly defined a point of view and developed working methods that were to shape his entire career."
While in Staunton, Virginia, for an industrial photography job in 1955, Link's longstanding love of railroads became focused on the nearby Norfolk and Western Railway line. N&W was the last major (Class I) railroad to make the transition from steam to diesel motive power and had refined its use of steam locomotives, earning a reputation for "precision transportation." Link took his first night photograph of the road on January 21, 1955, in Waynesboro, Virginia. On May 29, 1955 the N&W announced its first conversion to diesel and Link's work became a documentation of the end of the steam era. He returned to Virginia for about twenty visits to continue photographing the N&W. His last night shot was taken in 1959 and the last of all in 1960, the year the road completed the transition to diesel, by which time he had accumulated 2400 negatives on the project.
Although it was entirely self-financed, Link's work was encouraged and facilitated by N&W officials, from President Robert Hall Smith downwards. Besides the locomotives, he captured the people of the N&W performing their jobs on the railroad and in the trackside communities. Some of his images were of the massive Roanoke Shops, where the company had long built and maintained its own locomotives.Link's images were always meticulously set up and posed, and he chose to take most of his railroad photographs at night. He said "I can't move the sun — and it's always in the wrong place — and I can't even move the tracks, so I had to create my own environment through lighting." Although others, including Philip Hastings and Jim Shaughnessy, had photographed locomotives at night before, Link's vision required him to develop new techniques for flash photography of such large subjects. For instance, the movie theater image Hotshot Eastbound (Iaeger, West Virginia), photographed on August 2, 1956 [negative NW1103], used 42 #2 flashbulbs and one #0 fired simultaneously. Link, with an assistant such as George Thom, had to lug all his equipment into position and wire it up: this was done in series so any failure would prevent a picture being taken at all; and in taking night shots of moving trains the right position for the subject could only be guessed at. Link used a 4 x 5 Graphic View view camera with black and white film, from which he produced silver gelatin prints.Wikipedia
Alabama - William Christenberry
William Christenberry Jr. (November 5, 1936 – November 28, 2016) was a photographer, painter, and sculptor who worked with personal and somewhat mythical themes growing out of his childhood experiences in Hale County, Alabama
Christenberry received his bachelor's (1958) and master's (1959) degrees in fine arts from the University of Alabama, studying under abstract expressionist Melville Price. Beginning in 1968 he taught at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C.His artistic career began with the painting of large abstract-expressionist canvasses, but gradually he began to be drawn to material that spoke about the place of his childhood. Although he was raised in Tuscaloosa, Christenberry spent his summers with extended family in rural Hale County. After graduating from the University of Alabama and beginning a promising, if not immediately rewarding, artistic career in New York City, he came across the 1941 book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in which James Agee describes in prose, and Walker Evans in photographs, the experience of living among the dirt-poor farming families of Hale County during the Great Depression. Some of Evans's photographs made a deep impression on Christenberry.
Shortly after beginning a professorship at Corcoran College, Christenberry began making annual visits to Hale County during the summer to visit family and to explore and make photographs. Originally these all were made with a Kodak Brownie camera given to him as a child, but he later moved to a large format view camera in order to capture more detail. On one occasion in 1973, Walker Evans, who had encouraged Christenberry to take his photographs seriously, accompanied him. This was Evans's first and only return to Hale County since 1936.
One of the results of this pilgrimage was a series of photographs documenting the decay of individual structures, which are photographed as nearly isolated objects. In 1974, Christenberry began translating some of these photographed buildings into detailed sculptures that accurately reproduce their state of decay and patina. Although detailed and properly proportioned, Christenberry did not refer to these creations as models, as he says they are not based on precise measurements, and he preferred that they be called sculptures. The bases for these sculptures often are set in soil taken from these places. On many of these trips, Christenberry collected old advertising signs and other found objects which inspired him. Some of these are incorporated into his work, while others hang in his studio.
Christenberry was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2011. Christenberry died in Washington, D.C. on November 28, 2016 from complications of the disease.He was 80.
Though known more as a photographer and multi-media artist than as a painter, Christenberry taught painting. His work has been exhibited in solo and group shows around the world and is the subject of several monographs.Wikipedia
Black and White Photography Jeanloup Sieff
Jeanloup Sieff (November 30, 1933 – September 20, 2000) was a French photographer. He was born in Paris to Polish parents. He was a photography student of Gertrude Fehr. He is famous for his portraits of politicians, famous artists, landscapes, as well as for his nudes and use of wide-angle lens and visible dodging marks. He worked mainly in black and white and for the fashion.He died in Paris.
Experimental photography Heinz Hajek-Halke
Heinz Hajek-Halke was born in Berlin on December 1, 1898, but spent his childhood in Argentina. Back in Germany, he began to study graphics in Berlin in 1915. In 1916, he served as a soldier in World War I; thereafter he continued his studies.
Hajek-Halke began to take photographs in 1924, and soon he had work with the agency "Presse-Photo". He experimented with photographic techniques – among them light montages, double exposures, photo collages and photo montages. One special technique is "combi-photography," in which Hajek-Halke mounted several negatives for one print. His pictures were innovative and made use of the newly discovered possibilities for manipulating photographs.
According to Hajek-Halke himself, he wanted "to place [...] an illusionistic actuality next to natural reality with all of the means available through advanced photographic technology, maintaining artistic principles". He worked in advertising, created reportages and took nude photographs.
In 1933, Hajek-Halke opposed the order by the NSDAP to falsify documentary films and moved to Lake Constance, where he worked with macro photographs of insects. In 1937, he created several photo reportages in Brazil. Two years later, he worked as a photographer at the Dornier-Werken in Friedrichshafen. In the last year of the war, he found himself imprisoned in France, but was able to flee soon thereafter.
Hajek-Halke was fascinated with snakes and built his own viper farm; he kept working with experimental photography. He created flexible figures out of wire which served as subjects for his photographic experiments ("light graphics"). In 1949, he met Otto Steinert, who belonged to the group "fotoform". Hajek-Halke became a member of the group for a short while, and six years later he was appointed Professor of Photography and Photographics at the University of the Arts in Berlin.
His pictures were seen at the first exhibit "subjective photography".
Hajek-Halke died in Berlin on May 11, 1983. His work connected the photography of "Neues Sehen" [New Seeing] with the experiments of the group "fotoform" and of "subjective photography" in Germany of the post-war era.(art-directory.info)
Robert Heinecken (1931 – May 19, 2006)was an American artist who referred to himself as a "paraphotographer" because he so often made photographic images without a camera.Born in Denver in 1931, Heinecken grew up in Riverside, California, the son of a Lutheran minister. He joined the Navy in 1954 and served as a fighter pilot (though too short, he passed a height test by padding his socks with paper). Heinecken later served as an officer in the Marines, discharged as a captain in 1957.
Heinecken completed his bachelor's and master's degrees in art at UCLA, where he studied printmaking as well as photography.
Heinecken was known for appropriating and re-processing images from magazines, product packaging or television. In "Are You Rea" series from 1964 to 1968, for instance, he created a portfolio of images filled with unexpected and sometimes surreal juxtapositions by placing a single magazine page on a light table, so that the resulting contact print picks up imagery from both sides of the page.
In the late 1960s, he also began cutting up popular magazines such as Time and Vogue and inserting sexual or pornographic images into them. He would place his collage-publications back on newsstands in Los Angeles to be sold to unsuspecting buyers.
In the 1980s, he created several series on American news television that involved photographing images on the television or exposing the light of a television set directly to paper to create what he called "videograms
In 1962, he founded the photography program at UCLA. He taught there until 1991. In 1964 he helped found the Society for Photographic Education, an organization of college-level teachers. He also taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where his second wife, Joyce Neimanas, was on faculty. They split their time between the two cities for several years before they moved to New Mexico in 2004.
During his life he was mainly shown in traditional photography galleries, but two contemporary art galleries in L.A. began staging exhibitions of his work after his death: Marc Selwyn Fine Art and Cherry and Martin. Curators like Eva Respini at the Museum of Modern Art now place his work in a conceptual art lineage, associating him with Pictures Generations artists such as Cindy Sherman, John Baldessari and Richard Prince.Wikipedia
Fernand Fonssagrives (June 8, 1910 – April 23, 2003), born near Paris, France, was a photographer known for his 'beauty photography' in the early 1940s, and as the first husband of the model Lisa Fonssagrives. He died in 2003 at Little Rock, Arkansas.
Fonssagrives was a fashion photographer in the 1940s and 1950s when he took pictures for Town and Country and Harper's Bazaar magazines. At one point he was the highest paid photographer in New York. His later pictures featured female nudes with patterns of light on their skin. His photographic works are represented in Europe by Michael Hoppen Photography (London) and in the United States by Bonni Benrubi (New York) and Duncan Miller Gallery (Santa Monica). An image he created of his first wife Lisa is on the cover of the Spring Christie's photographic auction catalog (2008).
He was also an award winning sculptor working in Bronze, a painter and a writer.
Fonssagrives was married in 1935 to his first wife Lisa, whom he met at a dance school in Paris, and both became dancers. He said that he gave up dancing after he was injured in a diving accident. As a gift for recuperation Lisa gave Fernand a Rolleiflex camera. It was this that introduced him to photography, he becoming a noted photographer and her a noted model. They divorced in 1950.
Fonssagrives's second marriage—to Diane Capron, a professional figure skater and teacher—also ended in divorce. The native Frenchman lived the last 30 years of his life in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Fonssagrives was survived by a daughter from his first marriage, Mia Fonssagrives-Solow, a sculptor and jewelry designer who is married to real estate developer Sheldon Solow, and a son from his second marriage, Marc Fonssagrives.Wikipedia
Edward Hartwig (1909–2003) was a Polish photographer. Born on 6 September 1909 in Moscow and died on 28 October 2003 in Warsaw. His style was formed under the influence of Jan Bułhak’s work.
"He also admired other artists from the Photoclub in Vilnius. Hartwig proved himself to be a master of portraying morning fogs in the forms of impressionistic landscapes from the Lublin region. He also excelled in capturing genre scenes referring to the tradition of Polish painting. Sporadically he would take portraits in the Old Town in Lublin. His style gradually began to resemble that of the Belgian pictorialist Leonard Misonne and the Frenchman Pierre Dubreuil, who referred to Constant Troyon’s painting. Hartwig also successfully employed the so-called noble techniques such as print toning (he toned bromide prints with gold), which he used to create his photographs from Kazimierz Dolny – a town which he especially fancied. He was a prominent figure of the Lublin Photographic Society, which was founded in 1936. In 1938 the society organized the Exhibition of Polish Photography.
In the final stages of his career he experimented with colour photography. Once again he addressed the issues of the abstract image and its coexistence with the figurative form. In his artistic conception literally every representation underwent the processes of posterization and elimination of semitones. He altered negatives using various methods, which was a way of fulfilling modernity’s postulates. By doing so he followed in the footsteps of such artists as Bronisław Schlabs (fifties). Hartwig aimed to individually and characteristically aestheticize the images, which had chiefly painting qualities rather than photogenic features. This resulted in "artistic formalism" (the term was first used by Jerzy Olk). Hartwig’s works may be compared to the painting conceptions of the American Aaron Siskind, who in the fifties searched for universal values in abstract expressionism. Many of the Polish artist’s photographs are allusive abstractions or longings for abstraction, in which the realism of fragments reminds us about palpable reality (for instance people, fruit). He emphasizes the structures of given imaginary forms, the graphicness of lines, the often dark tones. This is a distinguishing feature of his experiments. The modern experiment was an important fingerpost on the very long path of the artist’s seekings. For Hartwig photography was a material used not only to posterize but also to multiply (pop-art’s influence) and to deform. In his multi-aspectual work one may also notice a fascination with the beauty of the female body, which he often juxtaposed with abstract structures. Since the fifties his name is a synonym of "artistic photography".(Author: Krzysztof Jurecki, Art. Museum in Łódź, May 2004. culture.pl/en/artist/edward-hartwig )
David Hamilton - artistic photography
David Hamilton (15 April 1933 – 25 November 2016) was a British photographer and film director best known for his nude images of young women and girls
His artistic skills began to emerge during a job at an architect's office. At age 20, he went to Paris, where he worked as graphic designer for Peter Knapp of Elle magazine. After becoming known and successful, he was hired away from Elle by Queen magazine in London as art director. Hamilton soon realised his love for Paris, however, and after returning there became the art director of Printemps, the city's largest department store. Hamilton began photographing commercially while still employed, and the dreamy, grainy style of his images quickly brought him success.
His photographs were in demand by other magazines such as Réalités, Twen and Photo. By the end of the 1960s, Hamilton's work had a recognisable style. His further success included many dozens of photographic books with combined sales well into the millions, five feature films, countless magazine publishings and museum and gallery exhibitions. In December 1977, Images Gallery in Manhattan showed his photographs, at the same time that Bilitis was released.At that time art critic Gene Thornton wrote in The New York Times that they reveal "the kind of ideal that regularly was expressed in the great paintings of the past". Hamilton has said that his work looks for "the candor of a lost paradise". In his book Contemporary Photographers curator Christian Caujolle wrote that Hamilton worked only with two fixed devices: "a clear pictorial intention and a latent eroticism, ostensibly romantic, but asking for trouble".In 1995 Hamilton said that people "have made contradiction of nudity and purity, sensuality and innocence, grace and spontaneity. I try to harmonize them, and that's my secret and the reason for my success". Besides his main theme of depicting young women Hamilton made pictures of flowers, men, landscapes, farm animals, pigeons and photographic still lifes of fresh fruits. Several of his photographs look alike oil paintings. Most of his work gives an impression of timelessness because of the absence of cars, modern buildings and advertisement boards. In 1976 Denise Couttès explained Hamilton's phenomenal success on page 6 of The Best of David Hamilton. She wrote that his images expressed "escapism. People can only escape from the violence and cruelty of the modern world through dreams and nostalgia".
His soft focus style came back into fashion at Vogue, Elle and other fashion magazines from around 2003. Hamilton was in a relationship with Mona Kristensen, who was a model in many of his early photobooks and made her screen debut in Bilitis. Later he married Gertrude Hamilton, who co-designed his book The Age of Innocence.but they divorced amicably.
Hamilton divided his time between Saint-Tropez and Paris. Since 2005 he had been enjoying a revival in popularity. In 2006 two new books were published: David Hamilton, a collection of captioned photographs, and Erotic Tales, which contains Hamilton's fictional short stories.Wikipedia
Robert Mapplethorpe (November 4, 1946 – March 9, 1989) was an American photographer, known for his sensitive yet blunt treatment of controversial subject-matter in the large-scale, highly stylized black and white medium of photography. His work featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female nudes, self-portraits and still-life images of flowers. His most controversial work is that of the underground BDSM scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s of New York City. The homoeroticism of this work fuelled a national debate over the public funding of controversial artwork.
Robert Mapplethorpe (November 4, 1946 – March 9, 1989) was an American photographer, known for his sensitive yet blunt treatment of controversial subject-matter in the large-scale, highly stylized black and white medium of photography. His work featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female nudes, self-portraits and still-life images of flowers. His most controversial work is that of the underground BDSM scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s of New York City. The homoeroticism of this work fuelled a national debate over the public funding of controversial artwork.
Other subjects included flowers, especially orchids and calla lilies, children, statues, and celebrities, including Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, Deborah Harry, Richard Gere, Peter Gabriel, Grace Jones, Amanda Lear, Laurie Anderson, Joan Armatrading and Patti Smith. Smith was a longtime roommate of Mapplethorpe and a frequent subject in his photography, including a stark, iconic photograph that appears on the cover of Smith's first album, Horses. His work often made reference to religious or classical imagery, such as a portrait of Patti Smith from 1986 which recalls Albrecht Dürer's 1500 self-portrait.
Robert took areas of dark human consent and made them into art. He worked without apology, investing the homosexual with grandeur, masculinity, and enviable nobility. Without affectation, he created a presence that was wholly male without sacrificing feminine grace. He was not looking to make a political statement or an announcement of his evolving sexual persuasion. He was presenting something new, something not seen or explored as he saw and explored it. Robert sought to elevate aspects of male experience, to imbue homosexuality with mysticism. As Cocteau said of a Genet poem, "His obscenity is never obscene."
— Patti Smith, Just Kids.Wikipedia
Photographs of nature Eliot Porter
Eliot Furness Porter (December 6, 1901 – November 2, 1990) was an American photographer best known for his color photographs of nature
An amateur photographer since childhood, he was known for photographing the Great Spruce Head Island owned by his family. Porter earned degrees in chemical engineering (A. B. 1924, Harvard College) and medicine (M.D. 1929, Harvard University), and worked as a biochemical researcher at Harvard
After meeting photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz in 1934, Porter showed his work to Stieglitz, who continued to critique Porter’s black-and-white work, taken with a Linhof view camera. In 1938, Stieglitz showed Porter's work in his New York City gallery, An American Place. The exhibit's success prompted Porter to leave Harvard in 1939 to pursue photography full-time.
It was around this period when he began to shift his attention to color film after a book proposal on birds was rejected because the publisher believed black and white wouldn't clearly differentiate the various species. Color photography up to this point was exclusively used in a documentary capacity. Porter, ever the scientist, sought to master it in an effort to get a book on birds published. In the 1940s, he began working in color with Eastman Kodak's new color film, Kodachrome to achieve this end.
Porter's reputation increased following the publication of his 1962 book, In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World. Published by the Sierra Club, the book featured Porter's color nature studies of the New England woods and quotes by Henry David Thoreau. A best-seller, several editions of the book have been printed. Porter served as a director of the Sierra Club from 1965 to 1971.He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971.
Porter traveled extensively to photograph ecologically important and culturally significant places. He published books of photographs from Glen Canyon in Utah, Maine, Baja California, Galápagos Islands, Antarctica, East Africa, and Iceland. His cultural studies included Mexico, Egypt, China, Czechoslovakia, and ancient Greek sites. His book on Glen Canyon, The Place No One Knew, memorialized the canyon's appearance before its inundation by the Lake Powell reservoir.
James Gleick’s book Chaos: Making a New Science (1987) caused Porter to reexamine his work in the context of chaos theory. They collaborated on a project published in 1990 as Nature's Chaos, which combined his photographs with a new essay by Gleick.Porter died in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1990 and bequeathed his personal archive to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas.Wikipedia
Sir Simon Neville Llewelyn Marsden, 4th Baronet (1 December 1948 – 22 January 2012) was an English photographer and author. He is known best for his uncommon black-and-white photographs of allegedly haunted houses and places throughout Europe. He succeeded his brother as baronet of Grimsby in Lincolnshire in 1997.Simon Neville Llewelyn Marsden was the younger son of Sir John Denton Marsden, 2nd Bt, and his wife Hope (née Llewelyn). The baronetcy was created in 1924 for a previous John Marsden, owner of a substantial fishing fleet in Grimsby. Marsden attended Ampleforth College in North Yorkshire, as well as the University of Sorbonne. From 1969, he worked as an assistant to Irish photographer Ruan O'Lochlainn, whose wife, Jackie Mackay, was a master printer from whom Marsden learned the skills of the darkroom.
The first of his works were published in photography periodicals at the end of the seventies. Two grants from the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1975 and 1976 allowed Marsden to undertake extensive journeys throughout Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, photographing the architectural subjects and varied landscapes he encountered.
Marsden's particular interest was "eerie" motifs like graveyards and old ruins, as well as the legends and tales that are often connected with these places. Yet the gloomy atmosphere of Marsden's pictures is not based on careful choice of the motifs alone, but to the same degree on Marsden's photography technique, which included the use of infrared film.
Marsden’s photographs already became world-famous and are exhibited at a large number of museums. Marsden released various illustrated books, and completed a variety of remittance works. The latter have, amongst other things, been used for the cover of English dark metal band Cradle of Filth's second album Dusk... and Her Embrace and Hecate Enthroned's first three releases, as well as an advertisement for the Japanese manufacturing firm Toshiba.Wikipedia
Joanna Maria Rybczyńska
Joanna Maria Rybczyńska (1960 - 2014) - Polish artist, photographer and painter. He lives and works in Warsaw.
"In years 1979-1981 worked as an artist and graphic designer in the German Institute of Culture (currently Goethe Institute) in Warsaw / Poland /. In the 1980es worked also as an artist and graphic designer in the Old Town's House of Culture in Warsaw. From 1985 she put main focus on painting (easel painting, watercolour, pastel). In the late 1980s she started her photographic work. From the year 2003 she switched from analogue to digital photography. Currently she also takes pinhole photographs.
Since 2009, she has been serving as a Secretary of the Assotiation Of Authors Polish Republic's Photoclub.
PAINTINGS: Her paintings could have been seen at individual exhibitions in Warsaw (Brama Gallery 2001, Brama Gallery 2002, Wisniowy Business Park 2002) and at prestigious International Exhibition of Contemporary European Pastel Painters EUROPASTEL (under patronage of UNESCO) in Italy (2002) and Russia (2003). Currently many works are in private collections in country and abroad (including Sweden, Austria, Germany, USA, Canada).
PHOTOGRAPHY: Photographs were exposed in Warsaw at an individual exhibitions ( Ochoty Theatre 2004, Van Golik Gallery 2009, Zapiecek Art Gallery 2009) and at many collective domestic exhibitions, and also abroad - at artistic photography salons under patronage of FIAP* and PSA** (USA, Argentine, Serbie, Canada, Luxembourg, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Qatar, Australia, France, Turkey, China, South Africa).
In total, between years 2002-2010, she participated in 89 group and post-competition exhibitions, and has been awarded 31 prizes and distinctions (including PSA Gold Medal, two FIAP Gold Medals, AL-THANI Gold Medal, FSS Gold Medal, FIAP Bronze Medal)."(.absolutearts.com)
Carlos Bernal Iglessias
".... my artistic work, which as a document, the message of my inner world of through my art that is so transgressive that almost nobody understands … but people who have done so They call it a revelator, and so it is … because I show the intangibility of the world through the synchronicities of my life as a form of communication of the sacred with the human being ... and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Because I loved the great vision and quality of the works that you represent....."
My name is Rustam, one of the founders of Kalos Fund - non profit fund based in Scotland.Because of ex-real estate agentship, this genre I call "Property Art". That's are night photos of "Khao Tam Tea House & gallery" on Koh Phangan, Thailand
THE NUBA - Leni Riefenstahl
Who are the Nuba?
Since the outbreak of the civil war in 1983 there have been living in the central Sudan in the Kordofanian province in the Nuba mountains still between 8,000 and 10,000 Masakin Quisar Nuba of different language groups and far from any civilization out of all Nuba tribes counting about half a million people all together. The Austrian anthropologist S.F. Nadel reported that there should have existed 105 different Nuba languages, not dialects but different languages as there are in Europe.
With these sensational pictures, Leni Riefenstahl raised an everlasting monument to this no warlike people in Africa.(leni-riefenstahl.de)
Born in 1902 Leni Riefenstahl grew up in Germany with her brother Heinz (1905–1944), who was killed on the Eastern Front in World War II. A talented swimmer and artist, she also became interested in dancing during her childhood, taking dancing lessons and performing across Europe.
After seeing a promotional poster for the 1924 film Der Berg des Schicksals ("The Mountain of Destiny"), Riefenstahl was inspired to move into acting. Between 1925 and 1929, she starred in five successful motion pictures. In 1932, Riefenstahl decided to try directing with her own film called Das Blaue Licht ("The Blue Light"). In the 1930s, she directed Triumph des Willens ("Triumph of the Will") and Olympia, resulting in worldwide attention and acclaim. Both movies are widely considered two of the most effective, and technically innovative, propaganda films ever made. Her involvement in Triumph des Willens, however, significantly damaged her career and reputation after the war. The exact nature of her relationship with Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler remains a matter of debate, although a friendship is claimed to have existed. After the war, Riefenstahl was arrested, but classified as being a "fellow traveler" or "Nazi Sympathiser" only and was not associated with war crimes. Throughout her life, she denied having known about the Holocaust, and won nearly 50 libel cases. Besides directing, Riefenstahl released an autobiography and wrote several books on the Nuba people.
Riefenstahl died of cancer on 8 September 2003 at the age of 101 and was buried at Munich Waldfriedhof. She was praised for her body of work following her death and remains one of the most acclaimed movie directors.Wikipedia
Akira Sato - black-and-white photographs
Akira Sato ( 1930–2002) was a Japanese photographer noted for his photographs of girls and of Europe.
Satō was born on 30 July 1930 in Tokyo. While a student of economics at Yokohama National University he was an avid reader of Life and other photographic and fashion magazines at the American CIE library in Hibiya. He graduated in 1953 and one year later became a freelance photographer, specializing in fashion. From around 1956 he was caught up with new trends in photography, and he participated in the 1957 exhibition Jūnin no me subsequently joining the collective "Vivo".
Satō had a series of one-man shows starting in 1961, alongside publications within the camera magazines. He specialized in black-and-white photographs of girls: their faces in close-up, their bodies surrounded by nature.
In 1963 Satō went to the US and then Europe; he returned to Japan in 1965. Thereafter he made many trips to Europe, particularly Scandinavia and Vienna, primarily photographing in color.
Satō died on 2 April 2002.Wikipedia
Abstract Photography Pery Burge
Pery Burge (1955 – 10 February 2013) was an English artist who, during the 2000s, worked with abstract images using ink in water or ink on paper, invoking natural processes such as surface tension driven flow, gravity, turbulence, rotation and erosion.
Born Peronel Burge, she grew up in Launceston, Cornwall. Pery's first main interest was music, she played the piano and violin. During this time period she was also involved with scientific experiments with direction from her father. Burge developed an interest in art during her early teenage years, and was inspired by a book her mother had given her called You Are An Artist by Fred Gettings (1965). In 1972 she attended various schools before she obtained a music and art teaching certificate from Gipsy Hill College, Kingston. She continued her education at the Gipsy Hill College, Kingston to complete a Bachelor of Arts degree. Gipsy Hill College merged with Kingston University in 1992.
In 2006, Pery Burge developed a new brushless art technique, which lead to experimenting with moving substrate. Burge found that ink in water, when using different surface tension, gave a colorful flow and movement, which she calls "Inkplosions".* Once this technique was mastered, Pery began photographing the sequences of the changing flow. Thus creating color variations that could be controlled by the surface tension. She presented her work at the 12th International Symposium for Flow Visualization(ISFV12) Göttingen, Germany, 2006.Wikipedia
Ian Cuttler Sala (1971–2014) was a Mexican art director, photographer and graphic design artist.Ian Cuttler was born in Mexico City, Mexico, in 1971. He lived with his brother Alex and two parents. His mother was crowned Miss Chile in 1968. He studied Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, (1991–1996). From 1991 to 1993 he co-owned Alebrije Estudio. In 1996, he moved to New York, New York City where he worked for Sony Music from September 1996 to January 2006. As an Art Director he created visual art campaigns for artists like Beyoncé, Ricky Martin, Billy Joel, Mariah Carey, Julio Iglesias, Marc Anthony and Destiny's Child.
In 2000, he was nominated to the Grammy Award for the Best Boxed Recording Package for Louis Armstrong: "The Complete Hot Five And Hot Seven Recordings". He was awarded the Grammy for the Best Boxed Or Special Limited Edition Package for Johnny Cash's "The Legend" box set in the 48th Annual Grammy Awards. In January 2006, he left Sony Music to establish his own studio: Ian Cuttler Photography where he worked with prominent firms.He died in a car accident in Los Angeles, California, on February 23, 2014.Wikipedia
Prabuddha Dasgupta (21 September 1956 – 12 August 2012) was a noted fashion and fine-art photographer from India.Known for his iconic black and white imagery, he had an extended career, primarily as a fashion photographer, spanning more than three decades.Amongst his books, he is most known for Women (1996), a collection of portraits and nudes of urban Indian women.
Dr. Masumi Hayashi (September 3, 1945 – August 17, 2006) was an American photographer and artist who taught art at Cleveland State University, in Cleveland, Ohio, for 24 years. She won a Cleveland Arts Prize; three Ohio Arts Council awards; a Fulbright fellowship; awards from National Endowment for the Arts, Arts Midwest, and Florida Arts Council; as well as a 1997 Civil Liberties Educational Fund research grant.
Dr. Hayashi created a large body of fine art "panoramic photo-collage" or photo collage involving shots taken on a tripod in successive rings, and later assembled as a more-or-less than 360 degree view. Of the over 200 pieces she created in this format, primary subject matter generally fit into the following series: WWII internment camps of Americans of Japanese ancestry, post-industrial landscapes, EPA Superfund sites, abandoned prisons, war and military sites, commissions, city works, and sacred architectures. In 2004, she launched Masumimuseum.com, which is now an online archive of her work.
Masumi Hayashi is perhaps best known for creating striking panoramic photocollages, using smaller color photographs (typically 4-by-6-inch prints) like tiles in a mosaic. Many of these large panoramic pieces involve more than one hundred smaller photographic prints; the rotational scope of the assembled collage can be 360 degrees or even 540 degrees. Much of her work explores socially uncomfortable spaces, including prisons, relocation camps, and Superfund cleanup sites.Later in her career, her artwork reflected a deep interest in sacred sites, and she traveled several times to India and other places in Asia, to photograph spiritually significant spaces.Wikipedia
Ernst Haas (March 2, 1921 – September 12, 1986) was a photojournalist and a pioneering color photographer. During his 40-year career, the Austrian-born artist bridged the gap between photojournalism and the use of photography as a medium for expression and creativity. In addition to his prolific coverage of events around the globe after World War II, Haas was an early innovator in color photography. His images were widely disseminated by magazines like Life and Vogue and, in 1962, were the subject of the first single-artist exhibition of color photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He served as president of the cooperative Magnum Photos, and his book The Creation (1971) was one of the most successful photography books ever, selling 350,000 copies.
Though Haas continued to use black-and-white film for much of his career, color film and visual experimentalism became integral to his photography. He frequently employed techniques like shallow depth of field, selective focus, and blurred motion to create evocative, metaphorical works. He became interested in, as he put it, "transforming an object from what it is to what you want it to be."Beyond the physical place, person, or object he depicted, Haas hoped to reflect the joy of looking and of human experience.
Haas supported his adventurous personal work with commercially viable photojournalism, advertising, and motion picture stills photography. While on such assignments, he would make his own photographs, translating his passion for poetry, music, painting, and adventure into color imagery. His reputation on the rise, Haas traveled the world, photographing the U.S., Europe, South Africa, and Southeast Asia in expressionistic color.
In the late 1940s, Haas switched from his medium format Rolleiflex to the smaller 35mm Leica rangefinder camera, which he used consistently for the rest of his career.Once he began working in color, he most often used Kodachrome, known for its rich, saturated colors. To print his color work, Haas used the dye transfer process whenever possible. An expensive, complex process most frequently used at the time for advertising, dye transfer allowed for great control over color hue and saturation.
As the technology of color photography evolved and improved during this period, audience interest in color imagery increased. Many of the magazines that published Haas’ work, such as Life, improved the quality of their color reproduction, and increasingly sought to include his work in the medium. Despite this progress, many photographers, curators, and historians were initially reluctant to consider color photography as art, given the technology’s commercial origins.Wikipedia
Poetry of everyday Marie Šechtlová
Marie Šechtlová (March 25, 1928 Chomutov – July 5, 2008 Prague) was a Czech photographer, one of the proponents of the "poetry of everyday" style.
Shinzo Maeda (1922–1998) was a Japanese photographer famous for landscape photographs and movies.
He published 46 photography books in Japan, and founded the Tankei Photo Agency Co. The Shinzo Maeda Photo Art Gallery in Biei, Hokkaidō, opened in 1987, and exhibits a number of his Hokkaidō photographs.
One of his movies, Tower on the Hill of Japan's Biei region, is often shown in HDTV format.Wikipedia
Edward Henry Weston
"Edward Henry Weston was born March 24, 1886, in Highland Park, Illinois. He spent the majority of his childhood in Chicago where he attended Oakland Grammar School. He began photographing at the age of sixteen after receiving a Bull’s Eye #2 camera from his father. Weston’s first photographs captured the parks of Chicago and his aunt’s farm. In 1906, following the publication of his first photograph in Camera and Darkroom, Weston moved to California. After working briefly as a surveyor for San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad, he began working as an itinerant photographer. He peddled his wares door to door photographing children, pets and funerals. Realizing the need for formal training, in 1908 Weston returned east and attended the Illinois College of Photography in Effingham, Illinois. He completed the 12-month course in six months and returned to California. In Los Angeles, he was employed as a retoucher at the George Steckel Portrait Studio. In 1909, Weston moved on to the Louis A. Mojoiner Portrait Studio as a photographer and demonstrated outstanding abilities with lighting and posing.) Weston married his first wife, Flora Chandler in 1909. He had four children with Flora; Edward Chandler (1910), Theodore Brett (1911), Laurence Neil (1916) and Cole (1919). In 1911, Weston opened his own portrait studio in Tropico, California. This would be his base of operation for the next two decades. Weston became successful working in soft-focus, pictorial style; winning many salons and professional awards. Weston gained an international reputation for his high key portraits and modern dance studies. Articles about his work were published in magazines such as American Photography, Photo Era and Photo Miniature. Weston also authored many articles himself for many of these publications. In 1912, Weston met photographer Margrethe Mather in his Tropico studio. Mather becomes his studio assistant and most frequent model for the next decade. Mather had a very strong influence on Weston. He would later call her, “the first important woman in my life.” Weston began keeping journals in 1915 that came to be known as his “Daybooks.” They would chronicle his life and photographic development into the 1930’s.
In 1922 Weston visited the ARMCO Steel Plant in Middletown, Ohio. The photographs taken here marked a turning point in Weston’s career. During this period, Weston renounced his Pictorialism style with a new emphasis on abstract form and sharper resolution of detail. The industrial photographs were true straight images: unpretentious, and true to reality. Weston later wrote, “The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.” Weston also traveled to New York City this same year, where he met Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler and Georgia O’Keeffe.In 1923 Weston moved to Mexico City where he opened a photographic studio with his apprentice and lover Tina Modotti. Many important portraits and nudes were taken during his time in Mexico. It was also here that famous artists; Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and Jose Orozco hailed Weston as the master of 20th century art.
After moving back to California in 1926, Weston began his work for which he is most deservedly famous: natural forms, close-ups, nudes, and landscapes. Between 1927 and 1930, Weston made a series of monumental close-ups of seashells, peppers, and halved cabbages, bringing out the rich textures of their sculpture-like forms. Weston moved to Carmel, California in 1929 and shot the first of many photographs of rocks and trees at Point Lobos, California. Weston became one of the founding members of Group f/64 in 1932 with Ansel Adams, Willard Van Dyke, Imogen Cunningham and Sonya Noskowiak. The group chose this optical term because they habitually set their lenses to that aperture to secure maximum image sharpness of both foreground and distance. 1936 marked the start of Weston’s series of nudes and sand dunes in Oceano, California, which are often considered some of his finest work. Weston became the first photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship for experimental work in 1936. Following the receipt of this fellowship Weston spent the next two years taking photographs in the West and Southwest United States with assistant and future wife Charis Wilson. Later, in 1941 using photographs of the East and South Weston provided illustrations for a new edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
Weston began experiencing symptoms of Parkinson’s disease in 1946 and in 1948 shot his last photograph of Point Lobos. In 1946 the Museum of Modern Art, New York featured a major retrospective of 300 prints of Weston’s work. Over the next 10 years of progressively incapacitating illness, Weston supervised the printing of his prints by his sons, Brett and Cole. His 50th Anniversary Portfolio was published in 1952 with photographs printed by Brett. An even larger printing project took place between1952 and 1955. Brett printed what was known as the Project Prints. A series of 8 -10 prints from 832 negatives considered Edward’s lifetime best. The Smithsonian Institution held
the show, “The World of Edward Weston” in 1956 paying tribute to his remarkable accomplishments in American photography. Edward Weston died on January 1, 1958 at his home, Wildcat Hill, in Carmel, California. Weston’s ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean at Pebbly Beach at Point Lobos."(edward-weston.com)
Africa - Kiripi Katembo
Kiripi Katembo, also known as Kiripi Katembo Siku, (June 20, 1979 – August 5, 2015) was a Congolese photographer, documentary filmmaker and painter. Katembo's short films, photography and other projects focused on the daily lives of the people of Kinshasa, as well as the economic and social challenges facing the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He was also a founding director of Mutotu Productions, his film production company, and the executive director of Yango Biennale, based in Kinshasa.
Katembo was born on June 20, 1979, in Goma, Zaire (present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo).He attended the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Kinshasa
Katembo, a noted Congolese photographer, was best known for his series, Un regard, released in 2009. The exhibition used a photography technique called mirroring. In Un regard, Katembo photographed his subjects by capturing their reflections in puddles of water found on the streets of Kinshasa. Katembo explained his goals for Un regard in an interview, "Photography also provides a way of seeing beyond reflection as it opens up a poetic window on another world, the world in which I live. I want each image to tell of the children born here who have to grow up surrounded by pools of water, and of the families who survive while others leave to live in exile. To me, this is one way of campaigning for a healthier environment and to denounce through images what Kinshasa’s inhabitants see as fate."
In a 2015 interview with Jenny Stevens of The Guardian, Kitembo also explained that the Congolese, including Kinshasaians, don't usually like having the picture taken, noting .that a photographer usually has to ask permission. It was one of then reasons Kitembo utilized the mirroring of puddles in Un regard, saying "That’s why I started shooting reflections – it was a way to document people going about their lives."
Katembo's work has been featured at Bamako Encounters, the Royal Museum for Central Africa, the Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, and the TAZ in Ostend, Belgium. Photos from Un regard collection were on display as part of the "Beauté Congo – 1926-2015 – Congo Kitoko" exhibition at the Foundation Cartier in Paris at the time of his death in 2015.
He also designed the official poster for the 67th Festival d'Avignon in 2013
He was the founder of Yebela, an art collective in Kinshasa.Wikipedia
Leila Alaoui (10 July 1982 – 18 January 2016) was a French-Moroccan photographer and video artist.She worked as a commercial photographer for magazines and NGOs and completed assignments on refugees. Her work was exhibited widely and is held in the collection of Qatar Museum. Alaoui died from injuries suffered in a terrorist attack in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso
Alaoui was born in Paris to a Moroccan father and a French mother, and grew up in Marrakesh, Morocco.During her childhood and adolescence, she was regularly exposed to tragic stories of migrants drowning at sea while undertaking hazardous journeys, which she interpreted as stories of social injustice.When Alaoui turned 18, she moved to New York City to study photography at the City University of New York.Alaoui felt that studying in the United States allowed her to become "even more exposed to questions of belonging and identity construction."She returned to Morocco in 2008.
Alaoui believed that photography and art could be used for social activism, and should be used for "reflecting and questioning society". As a result, she chose to focus her work on social and national realities of cultural identity and diversity, migration and displacement.To do this, she used image creation, reports and studio video installations. One of her commonly used techniques was to set up a portable studio in a public place such as a market square and to invite interested passers-by to be photographed. Alaoui stated that her inspiration for this type of portrait photography came from Robert Frank's portrayal of Americans in the post-war era, such as in The Americans (1958).Alaoui often emphasizes her subjects, minimizing the background of some of her portraits.
Art critics described her work as "post-Oriental", referring to the theory of Orientalism proposed by Edward Said.
Alaoui was hired by UN Women and Amnesty International to work on a photographic assignment on women's rights in Burkina Faso. On January 16, 2016, during her first week working on the assignment, she was seriously wounded by gunshots while sitting in a parked car with her driver outside the Cappuccino cafe whilst gunmen attacked the Cappucino and the Splendid Hotel. Mahamadi Ouédraogo, the driver, sustained critical injuries and died in the vehicle. Alaoui was quickly taken to a hospital and seemed initially in a stable condition following an operation. She died three days later of a heart attack.Her remains were flown to Morocco at the expense of King Mohammed VI of Morocco.On her death, the director of the Maison européenne de la photographie and the president of Arab World Institute made a joint statement praising her work giving "a voice to the voiceless"and noting that she was "one of the most promising photographers of her generation.Wikipedia
Miroslav Tichý (November 20, 1926 – April 12, 2011) was a photographer who from the 1960s until 1985 took thousands of surreptitious pictures of women in his hometown of Kyjov in the Czech Republic, using homemade cameras constructed of cardboard tubes, tin cans and other at-hand materials
During the years he wandered through Kyjov taking photographs with his crude cameras, the tall, shabby Tichý was tolerated by the townspeople but regarded as an eccentric. He shot about 90 pictures a day, returning to his disordered home to develop and print them.
Homemade telephoto lenses allowed him to work unnoticed at a distance from his subjects. He frequented the streets, the bus station, the main square, the park across from the town swimming pool, stealing intimate glimpses of the women of Kyjov. Although he was not permitted to go to the pool, he could photograph undisturbed through the wire fence. The fence often appears in his pictures, its presence adding a suggestion of forbidden fruit.
According to a review by R. Wayne Parsons published in The New York Photo Review,
We see women photographed from the rear, from the front, from the side; we see their feet, legs, buttocks, backs, faces, as well as complete bodies [as when drawing a nude at the Academy]; we see them walking, standing, sitting, bending over, reclining. There are a few nudes, though the poor image quality sometimes makes it difficult to determine if we are looking at a nude or a woman with not much on. [...] Whatever eroticism is present is limited to that of the voyeur; these women are not inviting us into their world.
Tichý's pictures were created for his own viewing pleasure, not for sale or exhibition. Each negative was printed only once
Tichý's subtle photographs use themes of movement, composition and contrast, but the main theme is an obsession with the female body. Technically, his pictures are full of mistakes that compound the built-in limitations of his equipment — underexposed or overexposed, out of focus, blemished by dust in the camera, stained by careless darkroom processing. Tichý explains, "A mistake. That's what makes the poetry.Wikipedia
Michigan City, Indiana, USA
|beef sticks, objectification shoot, models pietre and callista, michigan city, indiana|
|Barber College, gary, indiana|
|lilly, objectification shoot, jackson, Michigan, model lilly rose|
|Michigan city beach view, cooling tower in the background, michigan city, indiana|
Loose Goose Art
1. Be Impeccable with your Word: Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the Word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your Word in the direction of truth and love.
2. Don’t Take Anything Personally
Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.
3. Don’t Make Assumptions
Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.
4. Always Do Your Best
Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse, and regret.
Philippe Halsman (2 May 1906 – 25 June 1979) was an American portrait photographer. He was born in Riga in the part of the Russian Empire which later became Latvia, and died in New York City.
Born to a Jewish family of Morduch (Maks) Halsman, a dentist, and Ita Grintuch, a grammar school principal, in Riga, Halsman studied electrical engineering in Dresden.
In September 1928, 22-year-old Halsman was accused of his father's murder while they were on a hiking trip in the Austrian Tyrol, an area rife with antisemitism. After a trial based on circumstantial evidence he was sentenced to four years of prison. His family, friends and barristers worked for his release, getting support from important European intellectuals including Freud, Einstein, Thomas Mann, Henri Hertz, and Paul Painlevé, who endorsed his innocence. He was pardoned and released in 1930.
Halsman consequently left Austria for France. He began contributing to fashion magazines such as Vogue and soon gained a reputation as one of the best portrait photographers in France, renowned for images that were sharp rather than in soft focus as was often used, and closely cropped. When France was invaded by Germany, Halsman fled to Marseille. He eventually managed to obtain a U.S. visa, aided by family friend Albert Einstein (whom he later famously photographed in 1947).
In 1941 Halsman met the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí; they began to collaborate in the late 1940s. The 1948 work Dalí Atomicus explores the idea of suspension, depicting three cats flying, a bucket of thrown water, and Dalí in mid air. The title of the photograph is a reference to Dalí's work Leda Atomica which can be seen in the right of the photograph behind the two cats. Halsman reported that it took 28 attempts before a satisfactory result was achieved. Halsman and Dalí eventually released a compendium of their collaborations in the 1954 book Dali's Mustache, which features 36 different views of the artist's distinctive mustache. Another famous collaboration between the two was In Voluptas Mors, a surrealistic portrait of Dalí beside a large skull, in fact a tableau vivant composed of seven nudes. Halsman took three hours to arrange the models according to a sketch by Dalí. Various reenactments of and allusions to In Voluptas Mors have appeared over the years; most famously, a version was used subtly in the poster for the film The Silence of The Lambs, while an overt reenactment appeared on a promotional poster for The Descent..Wikipedia
Martín Chambi Jiménez or Martín Chambi de Coaza, (Puno, Peru November 5, 1891 – Cuzco, September 13, 1973) was a photographer, originally from southern Peru. He was one of the first major indigenous Latin American photographers.
Recognized for the profound historic and ethnic documentary value of his photographs, he was a prolific portrait photographer in the towns and countryside of the Peruvian Andes. As well as being the leading portrait photographer in Cuzco, Chambi made many landscape photographs, which he sold mainly in the form of postcards, a format he pioneered in Peru.In 1979, New York's MOMA held a Chambi retrospective, which later traveled to various locations and inspired other international expositions of his work.
Martín Chambi was born into a Quechua-speaking peasant family in one of the poorest regions of Peru, at the end of the nineteenth century. When his father went to work in a Carabaya Province gold mine on a small tributary of the River Inambari, Martin went along.There he had his first contact with photography, learning the rudiments from the photographer of the Santo Domingo Mine near Coaza (owned by the Inca Mining Company of Bradford, Pa). This chance encounter planted the spark that made him seek to support himself as a professional photographer. With that idea in mind, he headed in 1908 to the city of Arequipa, where photography was more developed and where there were established photographers who had taken the time to develop individual photographic styles and impeccable technique.
Chambi initially served as an apprentice in the studio of Max T. Vargas, but after nine years set up his own studio in Sicuani in 1917, publishing his first postcards in November of that year. In 1923 he moved to Cuzco and opened a studio there, photographing both society figures and his indigenous compatriots. During his career, Chambi also travelled the Andes extensively, photographing the landscapes, Inca ruins, and local people..Wikipedia
Saul Leiter (December 3, 1923 – November 26, 2013) was an American photographer and painter whose early work in the 1940s and 1950s was an important contribution to what came to be recognized as the New York school of photography.:259 His work is in the collections of many prestigious public and private collections.
Leiter was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father was a well known Talmud scholar and Saul studied to become a Rabbi. His mother gave him hist first camera at age 12. At age 23, he left theology school and moved to New York City to become an artist. He had developed an early interest in painting and was fortunate to meet the Abstract Expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart.
Pousette-Dart and W. Eugene Smith encouraged Leiter to pursue photography and he was soon taking black and white pictures with a 35 mm Leica, which he acquired for a few Eugene Smith prints. In 1948, he started taking color photographs. He began associating with other contemporary photographers such as Robert Frank and Diane Arbus and helped form what Jane Livingston has termed the New York School of photographers during the 1940s and 1950s:259
Leiter worked as a fashion photographer for the next 20 years and was published in Show, Elle, British Vogue, Queen, and Nova. In the late 1950s the art director Henry Wolf published Leiter’s color fashion work in Esquire and later in Harper’s Bazaar
Edward Steichen included Leiter’s black and white photographs in the exhibition Always the Young Stranger at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953. Leiter’s work is featured prominently in Jane Livingston’s book The New York School (1992) and in Martin Harrison’s Appearances: Fashion Photography since 1945 (1991). In 2008, The Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris mounted Leiter’s first museum exhibition in Europe with an accompanying catalog.
Leiter is the subject of a 2012 feature-length documentary In No Great Hurry - 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter, directed and produced by Tomas Leach. Leiter is a featured subject, among others, in the documentary film Tracing Outlines (2015) by 2nd State Productions.
Martin Harrison, editor and author of Saul Leiter Early Color (2006), writes, "Leiter’s sensibility . . . placed him outside the visceral confrontations with urban anxiety associated with photographers such as Robert Frank or William Klein. Instead, for him the camera provided an alternate way of seeing, of framing events and interpreting reality. He sought out moments of quiet humanity in the Manhattan maelstrom, forging a unique urban pastoral from the most unlikely of circumstances."
Early Color book cover
Leiter died on 26 November 2013 in New York City.He is represented in New York by the Howard Greenberg Gallery.Wikipedia
Old Photos of Japan Kusakabe Kimbei
Kusakabe Kimbei(1841–1934) was a Japanese photographer. He usually went by his given name, Kimbei, because his clientele, mostly non-Japanese-speaking foreign residents and visitors, found it easier to pronounce than his family name
Kusakabe Kimbei worked with Felice Beato and Baron Raimund von Stillfried as a photographic colourist and assistant before opening his own workshop in Yokohama in 1881, in the Benten-dōri quarter, and from 1889 operating in the Honmachi quarter. He also opened a branch in the Ginza quarter of Tokyo.
Around 1885, he acquired the negatives of Felice Beato and of Stillfried, as well as those of Uchida Kuichi. Kusakabe also acquired some of Ueno Hikoma's negatives of Nagasaki.
He stopped working as a photographer in 1912-1913.
Most of his albums are mounted in accordion fashion.Wikipedia
Jem Raid Self portrait figurative video artist
Fifty years of photography and tired of the single image led me to making digital art montages. This in turn to finding the CSS code to make cross fading before and after images. From there another step to using video creation software to put together many images cross fading into each other. Finally to making the sound tracks myself on a drone synthesizer that I made myself.
Making these videos is the most rewarding thing I have ever done, it brings together the two sides of my life on one side artistic interpretation and on the other the technical know how, I am also my own model and therefore always available. This gives me total control of the processes from inception to presentation.
"Interview with Jem Raid self portrait figurative video artist
Milena; Please tell me something about your self
Jem: I was born in Birmingham UK and when I retired I moved to Derbyshire. I'd been a photographer for fifty years and had become tired of the single image. In 2011 I decided to teach myself how to make digital art montages. Having mastered those techniques I realised that I was still producing single images and sought CSS code to make 'before and after' cross fading images. Late in 2015 I realised that better results could be achieved by using video software
Milena; How is your personality reflected in your work?
Jem: My video work is figurative and I am the figure, I have posed for self images for twenty years. I believe that there is nothing like a self portrait to personalise an image or video.
Milena; Can you tell us about where you are right now?
Jem: I'm continually making new videos and entering them into art and video festivals worldwide.
Milena; Are there particular artists who have influenced you?
Jem: Two spring to mind straightaway and are the most important in my life; Catherine McIntyre whose digital montage art I have loved for 20 years, she is lovely person and has been a great help to me. Anne Brigman who in 1908 posed for her self image, 'The soul of the blasted pine' I carry that image around with me, I feel that she is my sister in time.
Milena; What do you think are some of the most inspiring things happening in video currently?
Jem: The resurgence of the figurative image has helped me enormously it's lovely to see so much good work appearing all over the world.
Milena; How do you overcome creative blocks?
Jem: I do get scared of starting another work and often just take a couple of images that are totally unrelated and find someway of merging them. And the muse comes back into the room and I'm off to create something.
Milena; What is the most important thing that has happened to you this year?
Jem: There are two things that have given me a real boost; the first is having eleven exhibitions of my work and having been approved by and having my videos for sale on Sedition Art"
Mário Cravo Neto
Mário Cravo Neto (Salvador, April 20, 1947 — Salvador, August 9, 2009) was a Brazilian photographer, sculptor and draughtsman. Mário Cravo, son of the sculptor Mário Cravo Júnior, is considered one of the most important photographers of Brazil. Since his early life, he was in contact with circle of artists and, when an adolescent, he met with Pierre Verger, friend of his father. In 1968, he studied for two years at the Art Students League of New York. After that, he returned to Brazil and first exhibits the sculptures created in New York at the 12th São Paulo Art Biennial. He worked mainly with black-and-white photography, and representing the religion of Candomble. In 2005, he exhibited at Rencontres d'Arles festival.Wikipedia
Manuel Álvarez Bravo
Manuel Álvarez Bravo (February 4, 1902 – October 19, 2002, age 100) was Mexico’s first principal artistic photographer and is the most important figure in 20th-century Latin American photography. He was born and raised in Mexico City. While he took art classes at the Academy of San Carlos, his photography is self-taught. His career spanned from the late 1920s to the 1990s with its artistic peak between the 1920s to the 1950s. His hallmark as a photographer was to capture images of the ordinary but in ironic or surrealistic ways. His early work was based on European influences, but he was soon influenced by the Mexican muralism movement and the general cultural and political push at the time to redefine Mexican identity. He rejected the picturesque, employing elements to avoid stereotyping. Over his career he had numerous exhibitions of his work, worked in the Mexican cinema and established Fondo Editorial de la Plástica Mexicana publishing house. He won numerous awards for his work, mostly after 1970.Wikipedia
Horst P. Horst
Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann (August 14, 1906 – November 18, 1999) who chose to be known as Horst P. Horst was a German-American fashion photographer.
Horst is best known for his photographs of women and fashion, but is also recognized for his photographs of interior architecture, still lifes, especially ones including plants, and environmental portraits. One of the great iconic photos of the Twentieth-Century is "The Mainbocher Corset" with its erotically charged mystery, captured by Horst in Vogue’s Paris studio in 1939. Designers like Donna Karan continue to use the timeless beauty of "The Mainbocher Corset" as an inspiration for their outerwear collections today. His work frequently reflects his interest in surrealism and his regard of the ancient Greek ideal of physical beauty.
His method of work typically entailed careful preparation for the shoot, with the lighting and studio props (of which he used many) arranged in advance. His instructions to models are remembered as being brief and to the point. His published work uses lighting to pick out the subject; he frequently used four spotlights, often one of them pointing down from the ceiling. Only rarely do his photos include shadows falling on the background of the set. Horst rarely, if ever, used filters. While most of his work is in black & white, much of his color photography includes largely monochromatic settings to set off a colorful fashion. Horst's color photography did include documentation of society interior design, well noted in the volume Horst Interiors. He photographed a number of interiors designed by Robert Denning and Vincent Fourcade of Denning & Fourcade and often visited their homes on Manhattan and Long Island. After making the photograph, Horst generally left it up to others to develop, print, crop, and edit his work.
One of his most famous portraits is of Marlene Dietrich, taken in 1942. She protested the lighting that he had selected and arranged, but he used it anyway. Dietrich liked the results and subsequently used a photo from the session in her own publicity.Wikipedia
Lillian Bassman (June 15, 1917 – February 13, 2012) was an American photographer and painter.
From the 1940s until the 1960s Bassman worked as a fashion photographer for Junior Bazaar and later at Harper's Bazaar where she promoted the careers of photographers such as Richard Avedon, Robert Frank, Louis Faurer and Arnold Newman. Under the guidance of the Russian emigrant, Alexey Brodovitch, she began to photograph her model subjects primarily in black and white. Her work was published for the most part in Harper’s Bazaar from 1950 to 1965.
Her parents were Jewish intellectuals who emigrated to the United States from Ukraine (then in Russia) in 1905 and settled in Brooklyn, New York. She grew up in Brooklyn and Greenwich Village, New York, and studied at the Textile High School in Manhattan with Alexey Brodovitch and graduated in 1933.
By the 1970s Bassman’s interest in pure form in her fashion photography was out of vogue. She turned to her own photo projects and abandoned fashion photography. In doing so she tossed out 40 years of negatives and prints - her life’s work. A forgotten bag filled with hundreds of images was discovered over 20 years later. Bassman’s fashion photographic work began to be re-appreciated in the 1990s.
She worked with digital technology and abstract color photography into her 90s to create a new series of work. She used Photoshop for her image manipulation.
The most notable qualities about her photographic work are the high contrasts between light and dark, the graininess of the finished photos, and the geometric placement and camera angles of the subjects. Bassman became one of the last great woman photographers in the world of fashion.
Bassman died on February 13, 2012, at age 94.Wikipedia
Experimental photography Maurice Tabard
Maurice Tabard (July 12, 1897 – February 23, 1984)was a French photographer. Tabard was one of the leading photographers of the Surrealist movement, which he entered under the influence of his friend, American phtographer Man Ray
Tabard was born in Lyon, France in 1897 to a silk industrialist and an amateur musician. His first artistic experiences were as a pattern designer for silk textiles. In 1914, he and his father left Paris for New York, where he pursued photography at the New York Institute of Photography. He continued his studies through to 1920 with fellow photographer, Emile Brune
Following the death of his father in 1922, Tabard became a professional portrait photographer for Backrach Studio in Baltimore. He went on to photograph important homes and well-known people, including future President Calvin Coolidge and his family.
In 1928, Tabard returned to Paris and became a fashion photographer. It was there he met Surrealist writer, Philippe Soupault, who in turn acquainted him with various prominent magazine editors including Lucien Vogel, Giron, and Alexey Brodovitch. He went on to work for a number of publications, such as Bifur, Vu, and Jardin des Modes. He made the acquaintance of Surrealists Man Ray and René Magritte, with his work beginning to reflect the influence of Surrealism. In the late 1920s, he also met Roger Parry, whom he taught photography to, and André Kertész.Wikipedia
Shōji Ueda ( 1913–2000) was a photographer of Tottori, Japan, who combined surrealist compositional elements with realistic depiction. Most of the work for which Ueda is widely known was photographed within a strip of about 350 km running from Igumi (on the border of Tottori and Hyōgo) to Hagi (Yamaguchi).
Ueda was born on 27 March 1913 in Sakai (now Sakaiminato), Tottori. His father was a manufacturer and seller of geta; Shōji was the only child who survived infancy. The boy received a camera from his father in 1930 and quickly became very involved in photography, submitting his photographs to magazines; his photograph Child on the Beach Hama no kodomo) appeared in the December issue of Camera.
The postwar concentration on realism led by Domon, followed by the rejection of realism led by Shōmei Tōmatsu, sidelined Ueda's cool vision. Ueda participated in "Japanese Photography" at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1960 and had solo exhibitions in Japan, but had to wait till a 1974 retrospective held in the Nikon Salon in Tokyo and Osaka before his return to popularity.
Ueda remained based in Tottori, opening a studio and camera shop in Yonago in 1965, and in 1972 moving to a new three-storey building in Yonago: Ueda Camera on the first floor, the Charanka coffee shop on the second, and Gallery U on the third. The building served as a base for local photographic life.
From 1975 until 1994, Ueda was a professor at Kyushu Sangyo University.Wikipedia
Photo painting Anton Solomoukha
Anton (Anatole) P. Solomoukha (November 2, 1945 – 21 October 2015) was a Ukrainian-born French artist and photographer, and a foreign member of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts. From 1980 he specialized in narrative figuration. After 2000 he developed photo projects and is known as the inventor of a new form of expression in contemporary photography: “Photo painting”. In it he associates the photographic image with pictorial research in tableaux frequently requiring a multitude of models.
The first series; “The girl with the cup-and-ball”, “The Sex of Angels”, “I Fuck Your TV” are characterized by the choice of a closed space and a dark background. He uses mirrors, as ‘a complementary character’ for the construction of a subject, ironic or poetic, inspired by historical myths and the biblical subjects. His obsession with these projects has evolved into a rejection of temporal social topics. His relationship with painting appears more and more and was the principal theme of a series of photo compositions in the monumental style: “Little Red Riding Hood visits the Louvre”. Although these big square “panoramic” compositions are technically photographs, in reality they are projected and constructed as if they were painted pictures. “Photo-painting” has a role to play in the creation of a new contemporary art form.
Mona Lisa di Antonio Maria (Antonmaria) Gherardini del Giocondo
The photographic ‘paintings’ of this series are theatrical. The backgrounds are dark. The foregrounds are filled by actors: characters from the streets of Paris interposed with naked models, animals and elements of still life. An infinite number of small objects are strewn on the ground and cover the walls. The theatrical tableaux style of this collection enabled the artist to break with the traditional photographic image and create a paradoxical metaphysical space. In them, each character, as in an opera, plays a part while remaining an independent element, related to the other characters only if the artist wills it! In 2009 Anton Solomoukha continues to refer to classical art in his project “Little Red Riding Hood visits Tchernobyl”. His preference for “ironic allegory” allows him to create works in a form reminiscent of paintings in the Louvre, morbid scenes of the Tchernobyl .Wikipedia
Incredible Nature Peter Dombrovskis
Peter Dombrovskis (2 March 1945 – 28 March 1996)was an Australian photographer, known for his Tasmanian scenes. In 2003 he was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame, the first Australian photographer to reach this milestone
Dombrovskis was born in 1945 in a refugee camp in Wiesbaden, Germany of Latvian parents; together with his mother, migrated to Australia in 1950, and settled in Fern Tree, a suburb of Hobart. The protégé of noted wildlife photographer and activist Olegas Truchanas, his photographs of the Tasmanian Wilderness—particularly his own annual Tasmanian Wilderness Calendar and the Wilderness Calendar produced by the Tasmanian Wilderness Society—brought images of once remote and inaccessible areas of the State into the public realm. Dombrovskis founded West Wind Press in 1977 and later went on to print calendars entirely of his own work featuring incisive commentary from pre-eminent environmental professionals.
His most famous photograph was Morning Mist, Rock Island Bend, Franklin River, which some commentators believe played a part in the victory for Bob Hawke in the 1983 federal election. The photograph portrayed a section of the Franklin River which was to be submerged by the proposed Franklin Dam and spearheaded the visual appeal of the Franklin River in the contentious 'No Dams' campaign of 1982. Dombrovskis later co-authored with Bob Brown an example of his skill in photographing the Gordon River and the Franklin River in his 1983 book, Wild Rivers.
On 28 March 1996, Dombrovskis died of a heart attack while photographing near Mount Hayes in the Western Arthurs mountain range of South West Tasmania.
His works are represented at the National Gallery of Victoria, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, the Australian Heritage Commission and in private collections.Wikipedia
Gjon Mili (November 28, 1904 – February 14, 1984) was an Albanian-American photographer best known for his work published in LIFE which he photographed artists such as Pablo Picasso .
Born to Vasil Mili and Viktori Cekani in Korçë, in the Manastir Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire (present-day Albania). Mili spent his childhood in Romania, attending Gheorghe Lazăr National College in Bucharest, later he migrated to United States in 1923. In 1939, Mili started to work as a photographer for Life (a position he held until his death in 1984). Over the years his assignments took him to the Riviera (Picasso); to Prades, France (Pablo Casals in exile); to Israel (Adolf Eichmann in captivity); to Florence, Athens, Dublin, Berlin, Venice, Rome, and to Hollywood to photograph celebrities and artists, sports events, concerts, sculptures and architecture.
Working with Harold Eugene Edgerton of MIT, Gjon Mili was a pioneer in the use of stroboscopic instruments to capture a sequence of actions in one photograph. Trained as an engineer and self-taught in photography, Gjon Mili was one of the first to use electronic flash and stroboscopic light to create photographs that had more than scientific interest. Many of his notable images revealed the beautiful intricacy and graceful flow of movement too rapid or complex for the naked eye to discern. In the mid-1940s he was an assistant to the photographer Edward Weston.
In 1944, he directed the short film Jammin' the Blues, which was made at Warner Bros., and features performances by Lester Young, Red Callender, Harry Edison, "Big" Sid Catlett, Illinois Jacquet, Barney Kessel, Jo Jones and Marie Bryant. Mili did not serve as cinematographer for the film (Robert Burks did) but the film used multiplied images that in many ways recall the multi-image still-frames done with the strobe. The imaginative use of the camera makes this film a minor landmark in the way that musicians have been filmed.
Over the course of more than four decades, thousands of his pictures were published by Life as well as other publications. He died in Stamford, Connecticut on February 14, 1984, of pneumonia at the age of 79.Wikipedia
Bahman Jalali (1944 – 15 January 2010) was an Iranian photographer who played a significant role in educating a new generation of Iranian photographers. He taught photography at several universities in Iran over a 30-year period
Jalali graduated with a degree in Economics from Melli University in Tehran, then started his career as a photographer with Tamasha Magazine in 1972. In 1974 he joined the Royal Photographic Society in Great Britain. He is best known for his documentary photographs from the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and from the Iran-Iraq war, but after the revolution he focused more on teaching photography at Iranian universities than practicing it. Jalali was a founding member and curator at the Museum of Photography in Tehran (also known as Akskhaneh Shahr), Iran's first museum of photography.
His last work was a photo series called "Image of Imaginations", which took three years (2003–2006) for him to complete. It was a mixture of flowers or Iranian calligraphy with old photographs drawn from Iranian photographic history. Jalali later explained: “I have been exposed to many images by little known photographers around the country. Those that I could keep, I have held as mementos, and others have left their marks on my imagination.” The Museum of Fine Arts in Nantes bought this photo series for their collection.
Jalali was given a special homage for his forty-year career in photography by the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona with a solo exhibition curated by Catherine David from September to December 2007 and the publication of a monograph. He was a contributor to the exhibition in the British Museum, London, "Word into Art : Artists of the Modern Middle East" in 2006.Wikipedia
Oluwarotimi (Rotimi) Adebiyi Wahab Fani-Kayode (20 April 1955 - 21 December 1989)was a Nigerian-born photographer, who moved to England at the age of 12 to escape the Nigerian Civil War. The main body of his work was created between 1982 and 1989. He explored the tensions created by sexuality, race and culture through stylised portraits and compositions.
Rotimi was born in Lagos, Nigeria, in April 1955, as the second child of a prominent Yoruba family (Chief Babaremilekun Adetokunboh Fani-Kayode and Chief Mrs Adia Adunni Fani-Kayode) that moved to Brighton, England, in 1966, after the military coup and the ensuing civil war. Rotimi went to a number of British private schools for his secondary education, including Brighton College, Seabright College and Millfield, then moved to the USA in 1976. He read Fine Arts and Economics at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, for his BA, continued on for his MFA in Fine Arts & Photography at the Pratt Institute, New York. While in New York, he became friendly with Robert Mapplethorpe, who he has claimed as an influence on his work.
Fani-Kayode returned to the UK in 1983. He died in a London hospital of a heart attack while recovering from an AIDS-related illness on 21 December 1989. At the time of his death, he was living in Brixton, London, with his life partner and collaborator Alex Hirst.
Fani-Kayode admitted to being influenced by Mapplethorpe's earlier work but he also pushed the bounds of his own art, exploring sexuality, racism, colonialism and the tensions and conflicts between his homosexuality and his Yoruba upbringing through a series of images in both colour and black and white. His work is imbued with the subtlety, irony and political and social comment. He also contributed to the artistic debate surrounding HIV/AIDS.
He started in 1984 to exhibit and was part of eight other exhibitions by the time of his death in 1989. His work has been featured posthumously in many exhibitions and retrospectives. His work has been exhibited in the United Kingdom, France, Austria, Italy, Nigeria, Sweden, Germany, South Africa and US.
In 1987 along with Mark Sealy, he co-founded Autograph ABP and became their first chair. He was also an active member of the Black Audio Film Collective. He was a major influence on young black photographers in the late 1980s and 1990s. Following Hirst's death in 1992, some controversy has persisted about works attributed to Fani-Kayode. Wikipedia
Raghubir Singh (1942–1999) was an Indian photographer, most known for his landscapes and documentary-style photographs of the people of India. He was a self-taught photographer who worked in India and lived in Paris, London and New York. During his career he worked with National Geographic Magazine, The New York Times, The New Yorker and Time. In the early 1970s, he was one of the first photographers to reinvent the use of color at a time when color photography was still a marginal art form
Singh belongs to a tradition of small-format street photography, pioneered by photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom he met in 1966 and observed for a week while the latter was working in Jaipur, and who, with Robert Frank, was to have a lasting impact of his work; however, unlike them, he chose to work in color, as for him this represented the intrinsic value of Indian aesthetics. In time Singh was acknowledged with William Eggleston, Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld as one of the finest photographers of his generation and a leading pioneer of colour photography.He travelled across India with the American photographer Lee Friedlander who according to him ‘was often looking for the abject as subject’; in the end Singh found Friedlander’s approach of ‘beauty as seen in abjection’ fundamentally western, which suited neither him nor India; thus, he built his own style and aesthetic imprint, which according to his 2004 retrospective created "a documentary-style vision was neither sugarcoated, nor abject, nor controllingly omniscient". Deeply influenced as he was by modernism, he liberally took inspiration from Rajasthani miniatures as well as Mughal paintings, and Bengal, a place where he felt the fusion of western modernist ideas and vernacular Indian art took place for the first time, evident in practitioners of the Bengal school, and also the humanism of the filmmaker Satyajit Ray, who later became a close friend. "Beauty, nature, humanism and spirituality were the cornerstones of Indian culture" for him and became the bedrock for his work.
Singh published 14 well-received books on the Ganges, Calcutta, Benares, his native Rajasthan, Grand Trunk Road, and the Hindustan Ambassador car.Today his work is part of the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, amongst others.Wikipedia
Francesca Stern Woodman (April 3, 1958 – January 19, 1981) was an American photographer best known for her black and white pictures featuring either herself or female models. Many of her photographs show young women who are nude, blurred (due to movement and long exposure times), merging with their surroundings, or whose faces are obscured. Her work continues to be the subject of much critical acclaim and attention, years after she killed herself at the age of 22, in 1981
Woodman was born to artists George Woodman and Betty Woodman (Abrahams). Her mother is Jewish and her father is from a Protestant background. Her older brother, Charles, later became an associate professor of electronic art.
Woodman attended public school in Boulder, Colorado, between 1963 and 1971, except for second grade, which she attended in Italy, where the family spent many summers between school years. She began high school in 1972 at Abbot Academy, a private Massachusetts boarding school. There, she began to develop her photographic skills and became interested in the art form. Abbot Academy merged with Phillips Academy in 1973; Woodman graduated from the public Boulder High School in 1975. Through 1975, she spent summers with her family in Italy
Woodman moved to New York City in 1979. After spending the summer of 1979 in Stanwood, Washington whilst visiting her boyfriend at Pilchuck Glass School, she returned to New York "to make a career in photography." She sent portfolios of her work to fashion photographers, but "her solicitations did not lead anywhere". In the summer of 1980, she was an artist-in-residence at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.
In late 1980, Woodman became depressed due to the failure of her work to attract attention and to a broken relationship. She survived a suicide attempt in the autumn of 1980, after which she lived with her parents in Manhattan.
On January 19, 1981, Woodman died by suicide, jumping out of a loft window of a building on the East Side of New York.Wikipedia
Guy Bourdin (2 December 1928, Paris – 29 March 1991, Paris), was a French artist and fashion photographer known for his provocative images. From 1955, Bourdin worked mostly with Vogue as well as other publications including Harper's Bazaar. He shot ad campaigns for Chanel, Charles Jourdan, Pentax and Bloomingdale's. His work is collected by important institutions including Tate in London,MoMA, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Getty Museum. The first retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 2003, and then toured the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, and the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris. The Tate is permanently exhibiting a part of its collection (one of the largest) with works made between 1950 and 1955. He is considered as one of the best known photographers of fashion and advertising of the second half of the 20th century. He set the stage for a new kind of fashion photography.
"While conventional fashion images make beauty and clothing their central elements, Bourdin’s photographs offer a radical alternative."Wikipedia
Maya Deren (April 29, 1917 – October 13, 1961), born Eleanora Derenkowskaia, was one of the most important American experimental filmmakers and entrepreneurial promoters of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer and photographer.
Lucien Clergue (August 14, 1934 – November 15, 2014) was a French photographer. He was Chairman of the Academy of Fine Arts, Paris for 2013.Lucien Clergue was born in Arles, France. At the age of 7 he began learning to play the violin, and after several years of study his teacher admitted that he had nothing more to teach him. Clergue was from a family of shopkeepers and could not afford to pursue further studies in a college or university school of music, such as a conservatory. In 1949, he learned the basics of photography. Four years later, at a corrida in Arles, he showed his photographs to Spanish painter Pablo Picasso who, though subdued, asked to see more of his work. Within a year and a half, young Clergue worked on his photography with the goal of sending more images to Picasso. During this period, he worked on a series of photographs of traveling entertainers, acrobats and harlequins, the « Saltimbanques ». He also worked on a series whose subject was carrion.
Clergue’s photographs are in the collections of numerous well-known museums and private collectors. His photographs have been exhibited in over 100 solo exhibitions worldwide, with noted exhibitions such as in 1961, at the Museum of Modern Art New York, the last exhibition organized by Edward Steichen with Lucien Clergue, Bill Brandt and Yasuhiro Ishimoto. Museums with large collections of his work include The Fogg Museum at Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His work, Fontaines du Grand Palais (Fountains of the Grand Palais), is in Museo cantonale d'arte of Lugano. His photographs of Jean Cocteau are on permanent display at the Jean Cocteau Museum in Menton, France. In the U.S., an exhibition of the Cocteau photographs was premiered at Westwood Gallery, New York City.
In 2007, the city of Arles honored Lucien Clergue and dedicated a retrospective collection of 360 of his photographs dating from 1953 to 2007. He also received the 2007 Lucie Award.Wikipedia
Clarence John Laughlin
Clarence John Laughlin (1905 – 2 January 1985) was an American photographer best known for his surrealist photographs of the U.S. South.
Laughlin was born into a middle-class family in Lake Charles, Louisiana. His rocky childhood, southern heritage, and interest in literature influenced his work greatly. After losing everything in a failed rice-growing venture in 1910, his family was forced to relocate to New Orleans where Laughlin's father found work in a factory. Laughlin was an introverted child with few friends and a close relationship with his father, who cultivated and encouraged his lifelong love of literature and whose death in 1918 devastated his son.
Although he dropped out of high school in 1920 after having barely completed his freshman year, Laughlin was an educated and highly literate man. His large vocabulary and love of language are evident in the elaborate captions he later wrote to accompany his photographs. He initially aspired to be a writer and wrote many poems and stories in the style of French symbolism, most of which remained unpublished.
Laughlin discovered photography when he was 25 and taught himself how to use a simple 2½ by 2¼ view camera. He began working as a freelance architectural photographer and was subsequently employed by agencies as varied as Vogue Magazine and the US government. Disliking the constraints of government work, Laughlin eventually left Vogue after a conflict with then-editor Edward Steichen. Thereafter, he worked almost exclusively on personal projects utilizing a wide range of photographic styles and techniques, from simple geometric abstractions of architectural features to elaborately staged allegories utilizing models, costumes, and props.
Through this period one of his favorite models was Dody Weston Thompson who went on to become a notable photographer in her own right.
Many historians credit Laughlin as being the first true surrealist photographer in the United States. His images are often nostalgic, reflecting the influence of Eugène Atget and other photographers who tried to capture vanishing urban landscapes. Laughlin's best-known book, Ghosts Along the Mississippi, was first published in 1948.
He died on January 2, 1985 in New Orleans, leaving behind a massive collection of books and images. Thanks to the 17,000 negatives that he preserved, his work continues to be shown around the United States and Europe. Laughlin's library, comprising over 30,000 volumes, was purchased by Louisiana State University in 1986. The collection's focus in on science fiction, fantasy, mystery and the macabre. Other subjects represented include 20th-century art and design, European and American architecture, photography, Victoriana, humor, sex and sexuality, psychology, spiritualism, and the occult.Wikipedia
Wynn Bullock (April 18, 1902 – November 16, 1975) is a recognized American master photographer of the 20th century whose work is included in over 90 major museum collections around the world.He received substantial critical acclaim during his lifetime, published numerous books and is mentioned in all the standard histories of modern photography.Bullock was born in Chicago and raised in South Pasadena, California. As a boy, his passions were singing and athletics (football, baseball, swimming and tennis). After high school graduation, he moved to New York to pursue a musical career and was hired as a chorus member in Irving Berlin’s Music Box Revue. He occasionally sang the primary tenor role when headliner John Steele was unable to appear and then was given a major role with the Music Box Review Road Company. During the mid-1920s, he furthered his career in Europe, studying voice and giving concerts in France, Germany and Italy.
While living in Paris, Bullock became fascinated with the work of the Impressionists and post-Impressionists. He then discovered the work of Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy and experienced an immediate affinity with photography, not only as an art form uniquely based on light, but also as a vehicle through which he could more creatively engage with the world. He bought his first camera and began taking pictures.Wikipedia