Photography

Salvador Dali

2012-02-02T23:18:00.003+02:00

Andy Warhol

2012-02-02T23:14:00.006+02:00

Lewis Hine Photos

2012-02-02T19:16:00.000+02:00

Lewis Hine

2012-02-02T19:14:00.000+02:00

Lewis Hine, American, 1874-1940

Lewis Hine, who was best known for his use of photography as a means to achieve social reform, was first a teacher of botany and nature studies at the Ethical Culture School in New York. It was while he was teaching that he was given a camera by the head of the school. In his hand, the camera became a powerful means of recording social injustice and labor abuses.

Hine's interest in social welfare and in reform movements led him in 1905 to begin his first documentary series; immigrants on Ellis Island. In 1908 he left teaching to become an investigator and photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), and between 1908 and 1916 he traveled extensively photographing child-labor abuses. Hine would manage to gain access to the sweatshops and factories where children were employed, and then, if he could, photograph them at work. Hine inveigled his way into factories by posing as an insurance agent, bible salesman, postcard seller, or industrial photographer. Once inside, Hine quickly would go about his business of photographing the children working. Having been a teacher, Hine was comfortable talking with children and would attempt to get as much information as possible regarding their living conditions, the circumstances under which they were forced to work, and their name and age. If he was unable to determine a child's age by speaking to him, Hine would surreptitiously measure the child's height against the buttons on his vest and estimate the child's age by his height. If Hine was not able to gain admittance to a factory, he would wait outside the gates and photograph the children as the came to work. He visited children and families who worked at home and he wrote with impassioned sarcasm of the "opportunities for the child and family to enlist in the service of Industry."

Hine's photographs were used to make lantern slides for lectures and to illustrate pamphlets, magazine articles, and exhibitions. Through his photographs, Hine was able to inspire social change. His photos documenting the horrid conditions under which children were employed, made real the plight of these children. This led to the passage of child labor laws. Not only did Hine document the horrors of work, he also depicted the dignity of labor. This is best seen in his photos of the construction of the Empire State Building. From 1930 to 1931 he took hundreds of pictures of the Empire State Building under construction. These photos, as well as photographs of factory workers and other laborers, were published in Men at Work. While Hine's early photographs were often published, by the 1930s, interest in his work had declined. In 1938 he was denied a grant to photograph American crafts people at work. The Photo League in New York publicized his work, but it was not until a number of years after his death that he again received wide recognition. A new monograph was recently printed entitled, Lewis W. Hine Children At Work by Vicki Goldberg.

LEWIS HINE
Picturing the immigrant

Introduction from Inventing America: Readings in Identity and Culture
By Gabriella Ibieta and Miles Orvell
St. Martin's, 1996 (pp. 466-467)

The "foreignness" of the immigrant has often been exaggerated in drawings and cartoons carried by the popular press and in advertisements. . . . Such negative images of ethnic and racial minorities have created and reinforced barriers to social progress and integration. At the same time, however, the plight of the imigrants (who were crowded into tiny apartments; restricted, for all practical purposes, to the ghettos of the cities and forced to work for substandard wages) became of great concern to a group of reformers and progressive social critics around the turn of the century. These critics and reformers fought for better working conditions, better housing, and better education for American immigrants. One such reformer was the photographer Lewis Hine (1874-1940), who began photographing the immigrants on Ellis Island in 1905 and continued portraying their lives on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (in New York City) through the early decades ofthe century. (Ellis Island in Upper New York Bay, southwest of Manhattan, served as the main point of arrival for immigrants to the United States from 1892 to 1943.)

Hine was born in Wisconsin and, after a series of jobs following high school and some training in art, he enrolled briefly at the University of Chicago. He seized the opportunity to come to New York in 1901 to teach nature study and geography at the Ethical Culture School, where he was invited by the school's superintendent, Frank Manny, to use the camera for educational purposes. Photography soon fully engaged Hine's immagination. He took his students out into the country to photograph nature, but he also led them all around New York, photographing the economic life of the city and its inhabitants. Back at school, Hine and his students would study the images they had taken in the field and relate them to various aspects of their shudies-- from art to economics and geology. Hine became so interested in educational uses of the camera that he wrote a series on the subject during this time, promoting the use of use of the camera as a way of enhancing the taste, understanding, and analytic abilities of students.

One of Hine's strongest interests was the immigrants who were coming through Ellis Island in such great numbers, arriving from Russia, Ireland, Italy, and other lands, and settling in New York at that time. Through his photographs, Hine strove to render his subjects sympathetically, avoiding the common visual representations of the day--which tended to depict immigrants as either dumb beasts, fit for nothing but hard labor, or happy idiots who didn't seem to care what sort of lives they led. Opposed to both of these condescending attitudes, Hine sought to portray the immigrants with a kind of quiet dignity that emphasized that they were, in fact, as fully human as their viewers. Hine was supported in this endeavor by the Ethical Culture School's director, who wanted the students to view the recent immigrants with the same respect with which they perceived the original Plymouth Rock Pilgrims.

Hine was working within a tradition of documentarypPhotography that had been established in the late 1880s by Jacob Riss, who also focused on social conditions on Mantattan's Lower East Side, where many immigrants settled. Rut whereas Riis emphasized housing problems, Hine portrayed the immigrants in a more complex and well-rounded way: whereas Riis tended to see his subjects as victims, often with brutalized expressions on their faces, Hine saw the immigrant as a human being with positive feelings and aspirations as well.

Beyond his Ellis island and Lower East Side work, Hine was interested in furthering social reform and in changing the ways in which Americans viewed the working class. During the first two decades of thetwentieth century, he did much work for the National Child Labor Relations Committee, work that took him around the country to a variety of industrial locations where children were employed in factories, mines, and mills. In his Inter years, he photographed workers in factories and construction sites (such as that of the Empire State Building), producing photographs that allowed the viewer to see workers in a positive light, as people who were making a great contribution to the national economy.

Using a box-type 5 x 7 camera on a tripod, Hine provided photographic images to various social agencies and published his work as illustrations for articles in the reform journals of the day. He saw photography as a powerful force for the shaping of consciousness, relying on the viewer's belief in the reality of the subject while providing his own interpretation of that subject. The photographs included here were taken in the first decade of the twentieth century and were published in progressive and reform social survey magazines. They include images of Ellis island, Manhattan's LowerEast Side, and the immigrant working class.

Paul Strand Photos

2012-02-01T16:43:00.000+02:00

Paul Strand

2012-02-01T16:36:00.000+02:00

Paul Strand
Paul Strand's debut in photography coincided with the first stirrings of modernism in the visual arts in America. Born in New York in 1890, he attended both the class and club in photography taught by Hine at the Ethical Culture School in 1908. A visit to Stieglitz's 291 gallery arranged by Hine inspired Strand to explore the expressive possibilities of the medium, which until then he had considered a hobby. Although he was active for a brief period at the Camera Club of New York, whose darkrooms he continued to use for about 20 years, his ideas derived first from the circle around Stieglitz and then from the group that evolved around the Modern Gallery in 1915, including Sheeler and Schamberg. Strand's work, which was exhibited at 291, the Modem Gallery, and the Camera Club, gained prizes at the Wanamaker Photography exhibitions and was featured in the last two issues of Camera Work. From about 1915 on, he explored the visual problems that were to become fundamental to the modernist aesthetic as it evolved in both Europe and the United States. During the 1920s he mainly photographed urban sites, continued with the machine forms begun earlier, and turned his attention to nature, using 5 x 7 and 8 x 10 inch view cameras and making contact prints on platinum paper. In these works, acknowledged as seminal in the evolution of the New Objectivity, form and feeling are indivisible and intense. In addition, Strand's writings, beginning in 1917 with "Photography and the New God," set forth the necessity for the photographer to evolve an aesthetic based on the objective nature of reality and on the intrinsic capabilities of the large-format camera with sharp lens.
After service in the Army Medical Corps, where he was introduced to X-ray and other medical camera procedures, Strand collaborated with Sheeler on Manhatta, released as New York the Magnificent in 1921. Shortly afterward, he purchased an Akeley movie camera and began to work as a free-lance cinematographer, a career that he followed until the early 1930S when the industry for making news and short features was transferred from New York to the West Coast. Aware of the revolutionary social ideas being tested in Mexico through his visits to the Southwest, Strand sought the opportunity to make still photographs and to produce government-sponsored documentary films; Redes, or The Wave, released in 1934, depicted the economic problems confronting a fishing village near Vera Cruz. Following a futile attempt to assist the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein in the Soviet Union in 1935, Strand worked with Pare Lorentz on The Plough that Broke the Plains, following which he and other progressive filmmakers organized Frontier Films to produce a series of pro-labor and antiFascist movies. Their most ambitious production, Native Land, which evolved from a Congressional hearing into antilabor activities, was released in 1941 on the eve of the second World War, at which time its message was considered politically divisive.
Unable to finance filmmaking after World War II, Strand turned to the printed publication for a format that might integrate image and text in a matter akin to the cinema. Time in New England, a collaboration with Nancy Newhall, sought to evoke a sense of past and present through images of artifact and nature combined with quotations from the region's most lucid writers. Strand continued with enterprises of this nature after he moved to Europe in 1950, eventually producing La France de profil (A Profile of France) with Claude Roy (1952), Un Paese (A Village) with Cesare Zavattini (1955), and Tir a'Mhurain with Basil Davidson (1962), among other works. At his death in 1976, he had been photographing for nearly three-quarters of a century, gradually finding his ideal of beauty and decorum in nature and the simple life.

This is one of the finest and most potent small shows of anything, never mind photographs, that I have ever seen. But it bemuses me. My heart hangs back from it. The reason has to do with petrified meanings of the 20th century, notably the myth of something that we keep calling "modernism," as if we knew what we were talking about. The myth is fueled by oxymoronic feelings: drunk on clarity, for instance. During World War I in New York, Paul Strand nailed that sort of epochal delirium so authoritatively that one's first reaction to the work he made then may be to salute it like a flag.

Strand, in his 20s, gave photography specialized formal lexicons and professional attitudes keyed to a sense of the modern world as perfectly unprecedented and bound for intelligent glory. Like Pablo Picasso, James Joyce and other exemplary reinventors of their respective arts, he thereby released volcanic zest. Just try resisting the intellectual strength and visual excitement of the pictures in this show. But there is something increasingly alien and even a bit mad about the pictures, too, here at the century's wised-up end.

So-called modernism was a productive mental illness, perhaps, with heroic symptoms. (This would make so-called postmodernism a secondary malady, like a disease that a disease germ gets. I can't stand these puffy labels, which substitute for thought.) One symptom is a belief that by changing how the world is commonly seen, you change the world. You don't though. You only render yourself and your followers arrogantly impervious to inconvenient varieties of always uncontrollable, humbling fact. Modern art spewed self-crippling delusions, some fabulous.

Strand's early photographs still stun. The three justly most famous are Wall Street (1915) and White Fence and Blind (both 1916): object lessons in how to iconize the real. Pedestrians raked by morning light in a canyon of commerce, weathered wood dreaming of Plato down on the farm, and a sightless woman peddler trumpeting several kinds of visibility assert mighty capacities for photography. Each suggests that to see through a lens is to know, and that to know is to master essential reality. It can seem a simple step from such lucidity of vision to lucidity of action, taking the world in rational and enlightened, perhaps revolutionary hand.

Strand, a Jewish kid raised in a hothouse milieu of social and esthetic idealism (he went to Ethical Culture high school), began his career on a photographic scene dominated by the foggy loveliness of Pictorialism, as practiced by Edward Steichen and Clarence White. Met curator Maria Morris Hambourg, assisted by Laura Muir, has prefaced the Strand show with a wonderful selection of Pictorialist touchstones trumped at the end by Alfred Stieglitz's new-look talisman The Steerage -- the Demoiselles d'Avignon of photography. The terrific quality of those old-fashioned images retards a little the triumphalist flourish with which conquering "modernism" then makes its ritual grand entrance.

Pictorialism is underrated on a couple of counts. First, it acknowledged the subjectivity of all decisions in the photographic process. Second, it acknowledged the roots of subjective vision in conventions shared by painting and literature, among other mediums. Modern artists mystified these truths with fantasies of objectivity and originality. Appearing to transcend Pictorialism, Stieglitz and Strand really just replaced it with sharper-focus, subtler make-believe. To put it another way, they exalted hard exclusivity over soft inclusiveness, idealized masculine vigor over Victorian effeminacy.

It worked, picture after well-chosen picture -- in this show that moves from an impressionistic view of chickens in 1911 to a crisp 1917 composition of light and shadow in a city backyard hung with wash -- emits undying novelty. We see the piecemeal development of a bag of major formal and rhetorical tricks: high angles, diagonal ground planes, rhymings of substance and shadow, inside-out repoussoirs (framing elements in the background), giddy still-life close-ups imitating Cubism. Not that Strand was coldly tricky. The world interested him too much for that.

He set incredibly lofty standards for himself. A shot of his had to have just about everything in terms of formal rigor and inherent fascination to be worth printing, and his printing itself, commonly on platinum paper, crackles with sensitivity to nuances. The result almost always is something definitive -- as if each picture were the first and last in the world -- that happens to take as its subject a contingency of light and time. Charles Baudelaire's formula for beauty applies: the eternal plus the fleeting. But it applies excessively, I am surprised to feel.

Modern art at its best, such as here, can seem like one long demonstration project, reveling in sheer possibility. It shows that one may do this thing, and this and this, while continually postponing a sense of the reason for doing anything at all. It soars on utopian optimism, anticipating an explanatory, redemptive future. When the optimism has leaked away, such as now, that attitude becomes bizarre. Its cavalier dismissal of the past seems particularly foolish, as if on a warm day in winter one were to throw away one's overcoat.

One photograph in this show, new to me, gathers my mixed feelings into a complicated ecstasy: Twin Lakes, Connecticut (1916), a vertiginous shot of cloud-fretted sky with a corner of roofed porch intruding diagonally. You must see the original print, whose fine-grained registration of the sky is like a mathematical proof of the evanescent. If the spirit of the 20th century were to issue a souvenir brochure for time tourists, this image would be perfect for the cover. It is about drunkenness on clarity, or perhaps clarified drunkenness.

Humanly temporal architecture plus sublimely eternal sky divided by photography and multiplied by individual creative audacity equal a picture that reminds me of the title of Marshall Berman's book on modernity: All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. Strand took the sentiment a step farther, precipitating air into something solid. Yes, it was bonkers. Even as Strand innovated in busy New York, modern warfare was eviscerating European civilization. In 1917, America's entrance into the war traumatized him. Formerly a pacifist, he was soon in uniform. The experimental phase of his art was over, succeeded by less startling and more somber splendors until his death in 1976.

This show seems to me as catchy and sinister as old, wondrous martial music in a foredoomed cause. I won't march to it, but I'm damned if I can keep my toe from tapping.

André Kertész Interview

2012-01-31T14:59:00.000+02:00

Interview Master Photographers (1983)
BBC series

André Kertész Photos

2012-01-31T14:53:00.000+02:00

Andre Kertész

2012-01-31T14:47:00.000+02:00

Kertész André (1894-1985)

André Kertész (Born Andor Kertész July 2, 1894 - September 28, 1985) was a Hungary-born photographer distinguished by haunting composition in his photographs and was also a progenitor of the photo essay. In his lifetime, however, his then-unorthodox camera angles, which hindered prose descriptions of his works, prevented his work from gaining wider recognition. His use of symbolism also became unfashionable later in his life. Kertész is now recognized as one of the seminal figures of photojournalism.

Born in Budapest, the son of a bookseller, Kertész taught himself how to use a camera and, as part of the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I, had his first photos published. Even in 1914 (e.g. "Eugene, 1914") the influential style for which he became known was distinctive and mature.

After the war, Kertész emigrated to Paris in 1925, changed his first name from Andor, and became acquainted with members of the Dada movement. One of them dubbed André Kertész "Brother Seeing Eye"; an allusion to a medieval monastery where all the monks were blind except one. His greatest journalistic collaboration was with French editor Lucien Vogel, who ran his photographs without explanatory prose. He created portraits of (among others) the painters Mondrian and Chagall, the writer Colette, and film-maker Sergei Eisenstein. In Paris he found critical and commercial success, and monographs claim that he was the first photographer in the world to ever have a one-man exhibition (1927). He was a mentor to many famous names; "We all owe something to Kertész", said Henri Cartier-Bresson.

In 1936 Kertész and his wife Erzsebet (later altered to Elizabeth) went to the United States to escape the coming war. His photographic style did not mesh well with the straightforward fashion photography the American public (and magazines) expected, though. However, the Condé Nast Publishing empire had apparently signed Kertész to a long-term contract, and he spent most of his time photographing famous homes for House & Garden magazine.

He continued to exhibit his personal work as best he could but, slowly, his reputation faded, and he became disillusioned. His artistic reputation was later boosted with substantial help from the Museum of Modern Art - although he did not feature in Steichen's The Family of Man show in 1955.

It was in 1964, with John Szarkowski as the new photography Director at MoMA, that Kertész re-invented and relaunched himself with a solo MoMA show. He caught the mood of the times, and became seen as an 'elder statesman' by the photographers of the late 1960s and early 1970s who were seeking to validate a tradition of documentary/art photography, through linking it back to the Paris photographers of the 1920s and 1930s.

By the mid-1970s he was showing his work in galleries all over the world. He continued working very productively into old age, and was experimenting with instant Polaroid photography shortly before he died.

Brassai Photos

2012-01-30T13:01:00.000+02:00

Brassai - Gyula Halasz

2012-01-30T12:51:00.000+02:00

Brassai - Gyula Halasz

Gyula Halasz s-a nascut la 9 septembrie 1899, la Brasov, localitate de la numele careia isi va lua mai tarziu pseudonimul artistic. La varsta de 3 ani se muta, impreuna cu familia, la Paris, unde tatal sau primeste un post de profesor de literatura la Sorbona.

A studiat pictura si sculptura la Academia de Arte din Budapesta si apoi la Berlin (Akademische Hochschule), unde incepe sa colaboreze cu diverse ziare si publicatii. In 1925 revine la Paris, unde va ramane pentru tot restul vietii.

Din dorinta de a-si ilustra articolele si la recomandarea lui Andre Kertesz, incepe sa fotografieze (1928). Inchiriaza o camera de hotel in Montparnasse, camera care-i va servi si de laborator foto.

Face cunostinta cu lumea artistica: Henry Miller, Leon-Paul Fargue si Jacques Prevert. In 1930 adopta pseudonimul artistic "Brassai" care inseamna "din Brasov" si face cunostinta cu Picasso.

Este preocupat de viata de noapte din Paris, in special de locurile rau famate, demi-monde; fotografiaza prostituate, homosexuali, drogati, cafenele, dar si marile bulevarde si pietele celebre din oras, personaje marcante ale vietii intelectuale: Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Genet, Henri Michaux si multi altii. Brassai explica: "C'est pour saisir la beaute des rues, des jardins, dans la pluie et le brouillard, c'est pour saisir la nuit de Paris que je suis devenu photographe."

In 1933 publica albumul fotografic "Paris de Nuit", considerat de critica a fi una dintre cele mai remarcabile lucrari publicate vreodata. Prietenul sau, Henry Miller, intr-un eseu dedicat lucarii, il numeste pe Brassai "ochiul Parisului".

Incepind cu 1937 a colaborat cu Harper's Bazaar, pentru o perioada de peste 25 ani, unde avea libertate deplina in abordarea subiectelor. Reputatia sa depaseste oceanul si cateva din fotografiile sale sunt incluse in expozitia intitulata "Photography:1839-1937" la Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, New York). Filmul sau "Tant qu'il y aura des betes" este apreciat ca "cel mai original film" la Festivalul Filmului de la Cannes din 1956.

In 1961 renunta la fotografie declarind: "We should try, without creasing to tear ourselves constantly by leaving our subjects and even photography itself from time to time, in order that we may come back to them with reawakened zest, with the virginal eye. That is the most precious thing we can possess". Se concentreaza pe sculptura si tapiterie.

In 1962 verniseaza expozitia Graffiti, cu fotografii luate intr-un interval de aproape 30 ani.
In 1964 publica lucrarea " Conversations avec Picasso".
In 1966 este primit ca membru de onoare al American Society of Magazine Photographers, impreuna cu Ansel Adams.
In 1976 este decorat cu Legiunea de Onoare.
In 1978 publica doua noi lucrari: "Artists of My Life" si "The Secret Paris of the Thirties" si este decorat cu "Grand Prix National de la Photographie".

Se stinge din viata la 7 iulie 1984 si este inmormantat in Cimitirul Montparnasse din Paris. In anul 2000 Centre Georges Pompidou din Paris organizeaza o expozitie cu circa 450 lucrari ale autorului.

Brassai utiliza un aparat fotografic Voigtlander Bergheil, pe trepied. La inceput, fotografia cu timpi foarte lungi de expunere (pana la o jumatate de ora), avind grija sa mascheze sursele de lumina. Ulterior incepe sa lucreze cu blitzul: deschidea obturatorul si, la momentul oportun aprindea pulberea de magneziu. Intors la hotel, developa negativele si isi facea singur copiile pozitive. Brassai nu era interesat atat de redarea obiectelor sau cladirilor ci, mai degraba, de personajele care apareau in imagine si pe care le trata ca pe niste actori care-si intepretau rolul lor.
A calatorit mult si a fotografiat in Anglia, Spania, Statele Unite ale Americii, Grecia, Maroc, Sicilia si Brazilia. Multe din fotografiile sale au fost publicate in diverse reviste.

A publicat 17 carti si numeroase articole. Desi a facut sculptura, tapiterie, grafica, film si gazetarie, Brassai este cunoscut mai ales ca fotograf.

Citate Dorothea Lange

2012-01-29T13:50:00.000+02:00

Camera este un instrument care îi învaţă pe oameni cum să vezi, fără un aparat de fotografiat.

Deşi există, probabil, o provincie în care fotografia poate nu ne spun nimic mai mult decât ceea ce vedem cu ochii noştri proprii, nu există o altă în care ne dovedeşte cât de puţin ochii noştri ne permite să vezi.

Fotografie ia dintr-o clipă de timp, modificarea viaţă ţinându-l în continuare.

Acest beneficiu de a vedea ... poate veni numai dacă vă întrerupeţi un timp, te scoate din mob înnebunitor de impresii rapid battering neîncetat viaţa noastră, şi uită-te pe gînduri la o imagine linistita ... privitorul trebuie să fie dispuşi pentru a întrerupe , de a privi din nou, de a medita.

... Nu este o fotografie de fapt în sine. Fotografia documentar poartă cu ea un alt lucru, o calitate în subiectul pe care artistul răspunde. Este o fotografie care transportă sensul deplin al episod sau circumstanţă sau situaţie care poate fi dezvăluit numai - pentru că nu poţi recuceri cu adevărat - de această calitate, altele. Nu există nici o luptă reală între artist şi fotograf documentar. El trebuie să fie atât.

Dorothea Lange

2012-01-29T13:11:00.000+02:00

Dorothea Lange (1895-1965)

Textul de la Enciclopedia de Fotografie (1984)

Ca membru al Consiliului de Securitate Farm Administraţie (FSA) unitate fotografice sub Roy Stryker, Dorothea Lange lucrătorilor migranţi fotografiate, sharecroppers, fermierii chiriaş, şi alte victime ale depresiei în 22 de state, în special în sud şi vest, între 1935 si 1942. Ei "migranţi Mama" (1936) este una dintre imaginile clasice ale perioadei.
Dorothea Lange sa născut Margaretta Nutzhorn în Hoboken, New Jersey, de origine germană. Ca o tânără fată a fost lovit cu polio, care sa lăsat cu un şchiop pe viaţă care ea a crezut sporită sensibilitatea ei la suferinţele altora. Ea a participat la scoala din New York Lower East Side şi Şcoala de formare pentru profesori, de asemenea, la New York.
În 1914 a vizitat Lange a cincea studioul Avenue portret al lui Arnold Genthe, el ia dat-o primul aparat de fotografiat şi a încurajat munca ei fotografice în cursul anului viitor. În 1917-1918 Lange a studiat la Universitatea Columbia, cu imagini fotograf Clarence White. Mai târziu, în 1918 ea a devenit angajat ca photofinisher din San Francisco, unde a lucrat ca fotograf independent şi operate studioul propriu 1919 - 1940, moment în care ea a stabilit un studio din Berkeley, California. În 1932, după un deceniu ca un portretist de studio, Lange a început a fotografia oameni în contextele lor sociale pe străzile din San Francisco. Ea a fost obiectul unei expozitii Oakland, California,. În 1934 un articol critic despre Lange scrise de Willard Van Dyke a apărut în Camera de mână.
Cu Paul Taylor (care mai târziu sa căsătorit cu ea) Lange a început să lucreze pentru Rurală California Reabilitarea Administraţie în 1935. Exemplu stabilite prin eforturile lor a fost parţial responsabilă pentru crearea unităţii fotografice de reinstalare Administraţiei Federale mai târziu în acel an. Lange fotografiat cu RA / FSA 1935 - 1942. Ea a fost atribuit un Guggenheim Fellowship în 1941 pentru "studiu fotografic al scenei sociale americane", un proiect de ea a fost împiedicat de completare de la intrarea Statelor Unite în al doilea război mondial Lange a lucrat pentru război SUA Transferul Agenţiei în San Francisco, în 1942, şi pentru Biroul de Informare al doilea război, San Francisco, 1943 - 1945. Multe dintre fotografiile sale din această perioadă s-au pierdut în tranzit.
Săraci de sănătate Lange forţat să rămână inactiv pentru mai mulţi ani până la 1950-1951, atunci când ea efectuate de seminarii şi au participat la conferinţe fotografice. În 1954-1955 a fost un fotograf personal cu revista Life. Ea a lucrat din nou, ca un fotograf liber profesionist 1958 - 1965, care însoţeşte pe soţul ei misiuni de ajutor american în Asia, America de Sud, şi Orientul Mijlociu. Ea a murit de cancer din Marin County, California, în 1965, chiar înainte de deschiderea expozitiei retrospective ei majore la Muzeul de Arta Moderna din New York City.
Lange a fost plasat pe Roll de Onoare al Societatii Americane de Fotografi Magazine în 1963. Ea a fost onorat cu expozitii personale la San Francisco Museum of Art (1960), Muzeul de Artă Modernă (1966), Muzeul de Arta Oakland (1960, 1966, 1971 şi 1978), şi Victoria şi Albert Museum din Londra ( 1973). Munca sa a fost inclus în grupul de spectacole importante, inclusiv 6 femei Fotografi, The Family Man, şi amar de ani: FSA Fotografi 1935-1941 la Muzeul de Arta Moderna; Fotografie în secolul XX la National Gallery of Canada din Ottawa Femeile şi de Fotografie la Muzeul de Arta din San Francisco. prezentarea ei american Tara Femeia a fost expoziţia de cele mai populare vreodată distribuite de Informaţii Agenţia SUA. arhiva Lange a fost donat la Muzeul Oakland.

Text de la 20th Century Fotografie

"Jos mainile.!Nu pot supăra ceea ce am fotografie, nu pot amesteca si nu pot aranja" Asta a fost unul dintre principiile de American fotograf Dorothea Lange, a căror activitate a furnizat una dintre cele mai comise sociale documentare de fotografie, în secolul nostru. După studiile la Universitatea Columbia din New York sub Clarence H. White între 1917 şi 1919, Dorothea Lange a inceput ca un fotograf independent portret în San Francisco. Şocaţi de numărul de persoane fără adăpost în căutare de lucru în timpul Marii Crize, ea a decis să ia imagini de oameni în stradă să atragă atenţia la situaţia lor. În 1935 sa alăturat Farm Security Administration (FSA) şi raportat la condiţiile de viaţă în zonele rurale ale SUA. Într-o manieră directă neabătut ea documentate sărăcie amară a lucrătorilor migranţi şi familiile lor. imagini Dorothea Lange nu numai a arătat lipsa de speranţă şi disperare, dar, de asemenea, mândria şi demnitatea cu care oamenii îndurat situaţia lor. Una dintre cele mai renumite şi, cel mai frecvent publicat fotografii ale proiectului FSA este migranţi Mamă, portretul unui lucrător migrant californian cu cei trei copii. Fata de femeie tânără este marcată de riduri, privirea plină de griji îndreptate în depărtare. Pentru a dreapta şi stânga doi copiii mai mari, care caută protecţie, se rezema umeri, ascuns feţele lor din aparatul de fotografiat, in timp ce copilul mic a adormit în poala mamei lui. Acest lucru extrem de concentrată, compus strâns imagine a făcut Dorothea Lange o icoana de fotografie social angajat.

Text de la Femeile vin în faţă

Ca Esther Bubley, Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) documentate schimbare homefront, în special în rândul grupurilor etnice şi a lucrătorilor dezrădăcinate de război. Trei luni de la Pearl Harbor, presedintele Franklin Roosevelt a dispus mutarea japoneză-americani în lagăre de armate din Vest. Curând după aceea, războiul Relocarea Autoritatea angajat Lange a fotografia cartiere japoneză, centre de prelucrare, precum şi facilităţi tabără. Lucrări anterioare lui Lange documentarea ferma familii strămutate şi a lucrătorilor migranţi în timpul Marii Depresiuni nu o pregătească pentru tulburătoare rasiale şi aspecte legate de drepturile civile ridicate de japonez de internare. Lange repede se pomeni în contradicţie cu angajatorul său şi "subiecţi persecutori ei, guvernul Statelor Unite. Pentru a capta spiritul tabere, Lange a creat imagini care juxtapune frecvent semne de curaj şi demnitate umană cu dovezi fizice ale umilinţele de încarcerare. Deloc surprinzator, multe dintre lui fotografii Lange au fost cenzurate de către guvernul federal, în sine în conflict de existenţa unor tabere de simţit. Adevărat impactul Lange de lucru nu a fost până în 1972, când Muzeul Whitney încorporate douăzeci şi şapte de fotografii ei în Ordinul Executiv 9066 , o expozitie despre internarea japonez. New York Times, criticul de AD Coleman numit fotografii Lange este "o astfel de documente de mare pentru ca acestea să transmită sentimente de victime, precum şi faptele crimei."

De la Wikipedia, enciclopedia liberă

Lange Dorothea (5.26.1895 - 10.11.1965) a fost un fotograf documentar influent. Lange este cel mai bine cunoscut pentru lucrările sale Depresie din epoca de Securitate Farm Administraţie (FSA). Fotografiile lui Lange umanizat consecinţelor tragice ale Marii Depresiuni si a influentat profund dezvoltarea fotografiei documentare. Născut în Hoboken din New Jersey, Lange a inceput cariera in New York, mai târziu a migra spre San Francisco, unde a deschis un studio de portret în 1918. Odată cu declanşarea Marii Depresiuni, Lange transformat aparat de fotografiat lentilă ei din studio cu vedere la stradă, ei mistuitoare. Studii ale persoanelor fără adăpost imediat captat atentia locale de fotografi şi a dus-o la ocuparea forţei de muncă cu Administraţia Federală de reinstalare (RA) mai târziu numit FSA . De la 1935 la 1940, munca lui Lange pentru RA şi FSA a adus suferinţa săraci şi uitate, strămutate în special familiilor de fermieri, şi a lucrătorilor migranţi, în atenţia publicului. Distribuit gratuit la ziare în toată ţara, amar imaginile ei a devenit rapid icoane ale epocii), ei cel mai faimos. Fotografie, cunoscut sub numele de migranţi Mama (foto stânga, a fost al şaselea şi al cadrului ultima luate haotic vizitei lui Lange la o lucrătorilor migranţi "loc de campare. Ea a trecut iniţial de camping, dar douăzeci minute mai târziu, ea sa întors în jur de pe autostrada pentru a lua un alt uite. Zvon spune că se confruntă cu doi copii mai mici sunt întoarse de la aparatul de fotografiat, deoarece acestea au fost zâmbind şi râzând în timpul imaginea, dar nici unul din cele şase cadre le arata razand sau zambind. Lange le-a rândul său, departe de a da o imagine mai solemnă, starea de spirit disperat. În 1960, Lange a vorbit despre experienţa ei luând în fotografie:
Am vazut si sa apropiat de mama foame şi disperată, ca în cazul în care trase de un magnet. Nu-mi amintesc cum am explicat prezenţa mea sau meu aparat de fotografiat cu ea, dar îmi amintesc ea mi-a cerut nici o întrebare. Am făcut cinci expuneri, de lucru mai strânse şi mai aproape de aceeaşi direcţie. Eu nu am cerut numele ei sau istoria ei. Ea mi-a spus varsta ei, că ea a fost treizeci şi doi. Ea a spus că au fost de viaţă de legume congelate din câmpurile din jur, şi păsări care a ucis copiii. Ea a vandut doar anvelopele de la masina ei să cumpere produse alimentare. Acolo, ea stătea în faptul că macră la cort cu copiii ei inghesuiti in jurul ei, şi părea să ştie că fotografiile mele ar putea să o ajute, şi aşa mi-a ajutat. Nu a fost un fel de egalitate despre el.

În 1941, Lange a fost acordat o bursă Guggenheim pentru excelenţă în fotografie. După atacul de la Pearl Harbor, ea a renuntat la prestigiosul premiu pentru a înregistra evacuarea forţată din japoneză-americani (Nisei) în lagărele de transferul în vestul Americii. Lange În 1952 a fost unul dintre fondatorii Aperture. La data de 10.11.1965, Lange a murit la San Francisco, la vârsta de şaptezeci.

Alfred Stieglitz Photos

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Alfred Stieglitz

2012-01-27T12:13:00.000+02:00

Alfred Stieglitz proclaimed his belief in the uniqueness of his native heritage in a credo written for an exhibition of his work in 1921: "1 was born in Hoboken. I am an American. Photography is my passion. The search for truth my obsession." Nevertheless, as a body, his images suggest a complexity of influences and sources of which the American component was at first the least marked. The oldest of six children of a part-Jewish German family that had emigrated to the United States in 1849, Stieglitz spent his youth in a comfortable milieu that placed unusual emphasis on education, culture, and attainment. Taken to Germany in 1881 to complete his education, he enrolled in a course in photochemistry given by the eminent Dr. Hermann Wilhelm Vogel; from then on he was absorbed mainly by photography and by other visual art, although he continued an interest in science, music, and literature. Sun's Rays-Paula, Berlin, a study made in Berlin by Stieglitz in 1889, reveals a fascination with the role of light and with the replicative possibilities of photography, as well as an understanding of how to organize forms to express feeling.

After almost ten years abroad, during which his ability as a photographer had become recognized, Stieglitz returned to New York City in 1890 and became a partner in the Photochrome Engraving Company. He soon found himself more interested in campaigns to promote the recognition of photography as a means of artistic expression, working at first as editor of the journal American Amateur Photographer, then through the Camera Club of New York and its periodical Camera Notes, and finally through the Photo-Secession and Camera Work, which he published and edited from 1903 to 1917. Besides organizing and judging national exhibitions of Pictorialist photography, Stieglitz presided, until 1917, over 291, the Photo-Secession gallery, where, along with Steichen and, later, with Paul Haviland and Marius de Zayas, he helped awaken the American public and critics to modem European movements in the visual arts. He was in contact for a brief period in 1915 with the New York Dada movement through the journal 291 and the Modern Gallery.

In his development as a photographer, Stieglitz began to draw upon the urban scene for his subjects shortly after his return to New York in 1890. At the time, his motifs were considered inappropriate for artistic treatment in photography even though Realist and Impressionist painters in Europe had been dealing with similar material for over 40 years. As his personal style evolved, the influence of German fin-de-siecle painting, of the Japanese woodblock, and of Symbolist and Cubist currents became visibly interwoven into coherently structured and moving images that seem to embody the reality of their time. Following the closing of the gallery and journal in 1917, Stieglitz turned full attention to his own work - a many-faceted portrait of his wife-to-be the painter Georgia O'Keeffe. In the early 1920s, he undertook what he called Equivalents - images of clouds and sky made to demonstrate, he claimed, that in visual art, form, and not specific subject matter, conveys emotional and psychological meaning. Another series from later years consisted of views of New York skyscrapers taken from the window of his room in the Shelton Hotel, which incorporate abstract patterns of fight and shadow that express the duality of feeling, the fascination and loathing he had come to feel for the city.

Feeling incomplete without a gallery or publication, between 1917 and 1925 Stieglitz used rooms at the Anderson Galleries to promote the work of a circle of American modernists in painting and photography that comprised, besides himself, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, O'Keeffe, and Strand. The Intimate Gallery opened in 1925, lasted four years, and was followed by An American Place, which endured until his death in 1946.
Aside from exhibits of his own work, only four of photography were held between 1925 and 1946, suggesting that his interest in the medium had become parochial.

Stieglitz's career spanned the transition from the Victorian to the modern world, and his sensibilities reflected this amplitude of experience. His creative contribution, summed up by Theodore Dreiser in 1899 as a "desire to do new things" in order to express "the sentiment and tender beauty in subjects previously thought devoid of charm", was conjoined to a great sense of mission. While not unique, his efforts to improve the way photographs were presented at exhibitions and reproduced in periodicals were notably effective in the campaign for the recognition of the photograph as an art object, while his openness to new sensibilities enabled him to introduce Americans to European modernism and to the avant-garde styles of native artists. In both roles - as expressive photographer and impresario - he probably has had a more profound influence on the course of aesthetic photography in America than any other single individual.

Alfred Stieglitz - Early Work Pictorialism

Man Ray Photos

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Man Ray

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· 1890-1976, numele sau real este Emmanuel Radnitzky (fratele lui mai mare a sau mai mare o schimbat numele familiei in Ray din cauza anti-semitismului din America), nascut in Philadelphia

· Cunoscut ca Avant-gardist, Dadaist si suprarealist

· A lucrat mai ales in Paris deoarece in America miscarea Dada (impotriva artei traditionale) initiata de el si Marcel Duchamp nu a fost primita bine.

· Atelierul său din Paris era locul de întîlnire pentru artişti, negustori de artă, modele şi chiar pentru nobilime.

· A introdus metode noi in fotografie the 1922 “the rayograph” , 1929 “solarization”

· Alaturi de Duchamp si Katherine Dreier a fondat 'Societe Anonyme' care a fost practic primul muzeu de arta moderna din America

· In Paris, s-a indragostit mai intai de Alice Prin, iar apoi de cea care i-a fost asistenta, muza si iubita, Lee Miller, artista suprarealista

· A participat la prima expozitie suprarealista din Paris alaturi de Joan Miro, Max Ernst si Pablo Picasso

· A participat si la realizarea unor filme

· S-a casatorit cu Juliet Browner si a murit in America. Mormantul lui se afla in Paris

· "Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask 'how', while others of a more curious nature will ask 'why'. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information." Man Ray

Ansel Adams Photos

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Ansel Adams

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Ansel Easton Adams (February 20, 1902 – April 22, 1984) was an American photographer and
environmentalist, best known for his blackandwhite
photographs of the American West, especially in
Yosemite National Park. One of his most famous photographs was Moon and Half Dome, Yosemite
National Park, California.
With Fred Archer, Adams developed the Zone System as a way to determine proper exposure and adjust
the contrast of the final print. The resulting clarity and depth characterized his photographs and the
work of those to whom he taught the system. Adams primarily used largeformat
cameras, despite their
size, weight, setup time, and film cost, because their high resolution helped ensure sharpness in his
images.
n 1927, Adams contracted for his first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras, in his new style,
which included his famous image Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, taken with his Korona view camera
using glass plates and a dark red filter (to heighten the tonal contrasts). On that excursion, he had only
one plate left and he "visualized" the effect of the blackened sky before risking the last shot. As he
stated, "I had been able to realize a desired image: not the way the subject appeared in reality but how it
felt to me and how it must appear in the finished print". As he wrote confidently in April 1927, "My
photographs have now reached a stage when they are worthy of the world's critical examination. I have
suddenly come upon a new style which I believe will place my work equal to anything of its kind."
With the sponsorship and promotion of Albert Bender, an artsconnected
businessman, Adams's first
portfolio was a success (earning nearly $3,900) and soon he received commercial assignments to
photograph the wealthy patrons who bought his portfolio. Adams also came to understand how
important it was that his carefully crafted photos were reproduced to best effect. At Bender's invitation,
he joined the prestigious Roxburghe Club, an association devoted to fine printing and high standards in
book arts. He learned much about printing techniques, inks, design, and layout which he later applied to
other projects. Unfortunately, at that time most of his darkroom work was still being done in the
basement of his parents' home, and he was somewhat limited by barely adequate equipment.
Between 1929 and 1942, Adams's work matured and he became more established. In the course of his
60year
career, the 1930s were a particularly productive and experimental time. Adams expanded his
works, focusing on detailed closeups
as well as large forms from mountains to factories.n 1932, Adams
had a group show at the M. H. de Young Museum with Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston and
they soon formed Group f/64, which espoused "pure or straight photography" over pictorialism ( f /64)
being a very small aperture setting that gives great depth of field). The group's manifesto stated that
"Pure photography is defined as possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of
any other art form."[33] In reality, "pure photography" did borrow from some of the established
principles of painting, especially compositional balance and perspective, and some manipulation of
subject and effect. By these standards, not only were "soft focus" lenses prohibited but Adams's earlier
photo Monolith, which used a strong red filter to create a black sky, would have been considered
unacceptable.
Following Stieglitz's example, in 1933 Adams opened his own art and photography gallery in San
Francisco which eventually became the Danysh Gallery after Adams's commitments grew too
burdensome. Adams also began to publish essays in photography magazines and wrote his first
instructional book Making a Photograph in 1935.During the summers, he often participated in
Sierra Club outings, as a paid photographer for the group, and the rest of the year a core group of the
Club members socialized regularly in San Francisco. During 1933, his first child Michael was born,
followed by Anne two years later.
During the 1930s, many photographers including Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans believed they had
a social obligation to reveal the harsh times of the Depression through their art. Mostly resistant to the
"art for life's sake" movement, Adams did begin in the 1930s to deploy his photographs in the cause of
wilderness preservation. In part, he was inspired by the increasing desecration of Yosemite Valley by
commercial development, including a pool hall, bowling alley, golf course, shops, and automobile
traffic. He created a limitededition
book in 1938, Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail, as part of the
Sierra Club's efforts to secure the designation of Sequoia and Kings Canyon as national parks. This
book and his testimony before Congress played a vital role in the success of the effort, and Congress
designated the area as a National Park in 1940.
Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast
edifice of stone and space. I know of no sculpture, painting or music that exceeds the
compelling spiritual command of the soaring shape of granite cliff and dome, of patina of
light on rock and forest, and of the thunder and whispering of the falling, flowing waters. At
first the colossal aspect may dominate; then we perceive and respond to the delicate and
persuasive complex of nature.
– Ansel Adams, The Portfolios Of Ansel Adams
In 1935, Adams created many new photos of the Sierra and one of his most famous photographs,
Clearing Winter Storm, captured the entire valley just as a winter storm relented, leaving a fresh coat of
snow. After courting Stieglitz for three years, Adams gathered his recent work and had a solo show at
the Stieglitz gallery "An American Place" in New York in 1936. The exhibition proved successful with
both the critics and the buying public, and earned Adams strong praise from the revered Stieglitz.
During the balance of the 1930s, Adams took on many commercial assignments to supplement the
income from the struggling Best's Studio. Until the 1970s, Adams was financially dependent on
commercial projects. Some of his clients included Kodak, Fortune magazine, Pacific Gas and Electric,
AT&T, and the American Trust Company. In 1939, he was named an editor of U.S. Camera, the most
popular photography magazine at that time
In 1940, Ansel put together A Pageant of Photography, the most important and largest photography
show in the West to date, attended by millions of visitors. With his wife, Adams completed a
children's book and the very successful Illustrated Guide to Yosemite Valley during 1940 and 1941.
Adams also began his first serious stint of teaching in 1941 at the Art Center School of Los Angeles,
which included the training of military photographers. In 1943, Adams had a camera platform
mounted on his station wagon, to afford him a better vantage point over the immediate foreground and a
better angle for expansive backgrounds. Most of his landscapes from that time forward were made from
the roof of his car rather than from summits reached by rugged hiking, as in his earlier days.
Romantic landscape artists Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran portrayed the Grand Canyon and
Yosemite at the end of their reign, and were subsequently displaced by daredevil photographers
Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, and George Fiske.[68] But it was Adams's blackandwhite
photographs of the West which became the foremost record of what many of the National Parks were
like before tourism, and his persistent advocacy helped expand the National Park system. He skillfully
used his works to promote many of the goals of the Sierra Club and of the nascent environmental
movement, but always insisted that, as far as his photographs were concerned, "beauty comes first". His
stirring images are still very popular in calendars, posters, and books.
Realistic about development and the subsequent loss of habitat, Adams advocated for balanced growth,
but was pained by the ravages of "progress". He stated, "We all know the tragedy of the dustbowls, the
cruel unforgivable erosions of the soil, the depletion of fish or game, and the shrinking of the noble
forests. And we know that such catastrophes shrivel the spirit of the people… The wilderness is pushed
back, man is everywhere. Solitude, so vital to the individual man, is almost nowhere."
Adams cofounded
Group f/64 with other masters like Edward Weston, Willard Van Dyke, and Imogen
Cunningham. With Fred Archer, he pioneered the Zone System, a technique for translating perceived
light into specific densities on negatives and paper, giving photographers better control over finished
photographs. Adams also advocated the idea of visualization (which he often called "previsualization",
though he later acknowledged that term to be a redundancy) whereby the final image is "seen" in the
mind's eye before taking the photo, toward the goal of achieving all together the aesthetic, intellectual,
spiritual, and mechanical effects desired. He taught these and other techniques to thousands of amateur
photographers through his publications and his workshops. His many books about photography,
including the Morgan & Morgan Basic Photo Series (The Camera, The Negative, The Print, Natural
Light Photography, and Artificial Light Photography) have become classics in the field.
He was elected in 1966 a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1980 Jimmy Carter
awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
Adams's photograph The Tetons and the Snake River has the distinction of being one of the 115 images
recorded on the Voyager Golden Record aboard the Voyager spacecraft. These images were selected to
convey information about humans, plants and animals, and geological features of the Earth to a possible
alien civilization. These photographs eloquently mirror his favorite saying, a Gaelic mantra, which
states "I know that I am one with beauty and that my comrades are one. Let our souls be mountains, Let
our spirits be stars, Let our hearts be worlds."
His lasting legacy includes helping to elevate photography to an art comparable with painting and
music, and equally capable of expressing emotion and beauty. As he reminded his students, "It is easy
to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art
medium."
"Ansel Adams", wrote John Szarkowski {New York Museum of Modern Art), "attuned himself more
precisely than any photographer before him to a visual understanding of the specific quality of the light
that fell on a specific place at a specific moment. For Adams the natural landscape is not a fixed and
solid sculpture but an insubstantial image, as transient as the light that continually redefines it. This
sensibility to the specificity of light was the motive that forced Adams to develop his legendary
photographic technique."
Notable photographs
The information for each photograph is taken from Adams's 1983 book Examples: The Making of 40
Photographs.
• Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, 1927.
• Rose and Driftwood, San Francisco, California, 1932.
• Georgia O'Keeffe and Orville Cox, Canyon de Chelly National Monument, 1937.
• Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park, 1940.
• Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941.
• Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine, California, 1944.
• Aspens, Northern New Mexico, 1958.
• El Capitan, Winter, Sunrise, 1968
Photographic books
This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.
• Sierra Nevada the John Muir Trail, 1938 (reprinted 2006 as ISBN 082125717X).
• Born Free and Equal, 1944. ISBN 1893343057.
• Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, text from writings of John Muir, 1948.
• The Land of Little Rain, text by Mary Austin, 1950.
• This is the American Earth, with Nancy Newhall, 1960 (Sierra Club Books. (reprinted by
Bulfinch, ISBN 0821221825)
• These We Inherit: The Parklands of America, with Nancy Newhall, 1962.
• The Eloquent Light (unfinished biography of Adams by Nancy Newhall), 1963.
• "Yosemite Valley" 1967 (45 plates in B&W edited by Nancy Newhall, published by 5 Associates,
Redwood City, California.
• Polaroid Land Photography, 1978. ISBN 0821207296.
• Ansel Adams: Classic Images, 1986. ISBN 0821216295.
• Our Current National Parks, 1992.
• Ansel Adams: In Color, 1993. ISBN 0821219804.
• Photographs of the Southwest, 1994. ISBN 0821206990.
• The National Park Photographs, 1995. ISBN 0896600564.
• Yosemite, 1995. ISBN 0821221965.
• California, 1997. ISBN 0821223690.
• America's Wilderness, 1997. ISBN 1561387444.
• Ansel Adams at 100, 2001. ISBN 0821225154.
• Born Free and Equal , 2002. ISBN 1893343057.
• Ansel Adams: The National Park Service Photographs , 2005. ISBN 9780896600560.
• Ansel Adams: The Spirit of Wild Places, 2005. ISBN 1597640697.
• Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs, 2007. ISBN 9780316117722.
Technical books
• Making a Photograph, 1935.
• Camera and Lens: The Creative Approach, 1948. ISBN 0821207164
• The Negative: Exposure and Development, 1948. ISBN 0821207172
• The Print: Contact Printing and Enlarging, 1950. ISBN 0821207180
• Natural Light Photography, 1952. ISBN 0821207199
• Artificial Light Photography, 1956. ISBN 0821207202
• Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs, 1983. ISBN 082121750X
• The Camera, 1995. ISBN 0821221841
• The Negative, 1995. ISBN 0821221868
• The Print, 1995. ISBN 0821221876

Group F.64

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Group f/64 was a group of seven 20th century San Francisco photographers who shared a common photographic style characterized by sharp-focused and carefully framed images seen through a particularly Western (U.S.) viewpoint. In part, they formed in opposition to the Pictorialist photographic style that had dominated much of the early 1900s, but moreover they wanted to promote a new Modernist aesthetic that was based on precisely exposed images of natural forms and found objects.
Group f/64 was created when photographer Willard Van Dyke and Ansel Adams decided to organize some of their fellow photographers for the purposes of promoting a common aesthetic principle. Van Dyke was an apprentice to Edward Weston, and in the early 1930s he established a small photography gallery in his home at 683 Brockhurst in Oakland. He called the gallery 683 "as our way of thumbing our nose at the New York people who didn't know us", a direct reference to Stieglitz and his earlier New York gallery called 291. Van Dyke's home/gallery became a gathering place for a close circle of photographers that eventually became the core of Group f/64.

In 1931 Weston was given an exhibition at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, and because of the public's interest in that show the photographers who gathered at Van Dyke's home decided to put together a group exhibition of their work. They convinced the director at the de Young Museum to give them the space, and on November 15, 1932, the first exhibition of Group f/64 opened to large crowds.

Formation and participants

A small poster at the exhibition said:

"Group f/64 -

* Ansel Adams
* Imogen Cunningham
* John Paul Edwards
* Sonya Noskowiak
* Henry Swift
* Willard Van Dyke
* Edward Weston

announces an exhibition of photographs at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum.

From time to time various other photographers will be asked to display their work with Group f.64. Those invited for the first showing are:

* Preston Holder
* Conseuella [sic] Kanaga
* Alma Lavenson
* Brett Weston.

This first exhibition consisted of 80 photographs, including 10 by Adams, 9 each by Cunningham, Edwards, Noskowiak, Swift, Van Dyke and Edward Weston, and 4 each by Holder, Kanaga, Lavenson and Brett Weston. Edward Weston's prints were priced at $15 each; all of the others were $10 each. The show ran for six weeks.

Photo historians generally agree that Group f/64 as an organized faction consisted of the first seven photographers, and the other four photographers are associated with the group by virtue of their visual aesthetics. In 1934 the group posted a notice in Camera Craft magazine that said "The F:64 group includes in its membership such well known names as Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Willard Van Dyke, John Paul Edwards, Imogene [sic] Cunningham, Consuela [sic] Kanaga and several others." While this announcement implies that all of the photographers in the first exhibition were "members" of Group f/64, not all of the individuals considered themselves as such. In an interview later in her life, Kanaga said "I was in that f/64 show with Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke and Ansel Adams, but I wasn't in a group, nor did I belong to anything ever. I wasn't a belonger."

Name and Purpose

There is some difference of opinion about how the group was named. Van Dyke recalled that he first suggested the name "US 256", which was then the commonly-used Uniform System designation for a very small aperture stop on a camera lens. According to Van Dyke, Adams thought the name would be confusing to the public, and Adams suggested "f/64", which was a corresponding aperture setting for the focal system that was gaining popularity. However, in an interview in 1975 Holder recalled that he and Van Dyke thought up the name during a ferry ride from Oakland to San Francisco. Regardless, the name became the now famous Group f/64.

The term f/64 refers to a small aperture setting on a large format camera, which secures great depth of field, rendering a photograph evenly sharp from foreground to background. Such a small aperture sometimes implies a long exposure and therefore a selection of relatively slow moving or motionless subject matter, such as landscapes and still life, but in the typically bright California light this is less a factor in the subject matter chosen than the sheer size and clumsiness of the cameras, compared to the smaller cameras increasingly used in action and reportage photography in the 1930s.

This corresponds to the ideal of straight photography which the group espoused in response to the pictorialist methods that were still in fashion at the time in California (even though they had long since died away in New York).

Contemporary photographic convention denotes lens apertures with a slash, such as f/22 or f/64, but in its writings the group always used a dot or period instead (as in "f.64").

Aesthetics

Photography historian Naomi Rosenblum described Group f/64's vision as focused on "what surrounded them in such abundance: the landscape, the flourishing organic growth and the still viable rural life. Pointing their lenses at the kind of agrarian objects that had vanished from the artistic consciousness of many eastern urbanites - fence posts, barn roofs, and rusting farm implements - they treated these objects with the same sharp scrutiny as were latches and blast furnaces in the East. However, even in California, these themes look to a vanishing way of life, and the energy contained in the images derived in many instances from formal design rather than from the kind of intense belief in the future that had motivated easterners enamored of machine culture."

In 1933 Adams wrote the following for Camera Craft magazine:

"My conception of Group f/64 is this: it is an organization of serious photographers without formal ritual of procedure, incorporation, or any of the restrictions of artistic secret societies, Salons, clubs or cliques…The Group was formed as an expression of our desire to define the trend of photography as we conceive it…Our motive is not to impose a school with rigid limitations, or to present our work with belligerent scorn of other view-points, but to indicate what we consider to be reasonable statements of straight photography. Our individual tendencies are encouraged; the Group Exhibits suggest distinctive individual view-points, technical and emotional, achieved without departure from the simplest aspects of straight photographic procedure."

Walker Evans Photos

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Walker Evans -Subway-

2011-06-03T20:11:00.005+03:00

Walker Evans

2011-06-03T20:07:00.001+03:00

Walker Evans is one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. His elegant, crystal-clear photographs and articulate publications have inspired several generations of artists, from Helen Levitt and Robert Frank to Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Bernd and Hilla Becher. The progenitor of the documentary tradition in American photography, Evans had the extraordinary ability to see the present as if it were already the past, and to translate that knowledge and historically inflected vision into an enduring art. His principal subject was the vernacular—the indigenous expressions of a people found in roadside stands, cheap cafés (1971.646.35), advertisements (1987.1100.59), simple bedrooms, and small-town main streets. For fifty years, from the late 1920s to the early 1970s, Evans recorded the American scene with the nuance of a poet and the precision of a surgeon, creating an encyclopedic visual catalogue of modern America in the making.

Born in 1903 in St. Louis, Missouri, Evans dabbled with painting as a child, collected picture postcards, and made snapshots of his family and friends with a small Kodak camera. After a year at Williams College, he quit school and moved to New York City, finding work in bookstores and at the New York Public Library, where he could freely indulge his passion for T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and E. E. Cummings, as well as Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert. In 1927, after a year in Paris polishing his French and writing short stories and nonfiction essays, Evans returned to New York intent on becoming a writer. However, he also took up the camera and gradually redirected his aesthetic impulses to bring the strategies of literature—lyricism, irony, incisive description, and narrative structure (1972.742.17)—into the medium of photography.

Most of Evans' early photographs reveal the influence of European modernism, specifically its formalism and emphasis on dynamic graphic structures. But he gradually moved away from this highly aestheticized style to develop his own evocative but more reticent notions of realism, of the spectator's role, and of the poetic resonance of ordinary subjects. The Depression years of 1935–36 were ones of remarkable productivity and accomplishment for Evans. In June 1935, he accepted a job from the U.S. Department of the Interior to photograph a government-built resettlement community of unemployed coal miners in West Virginia. He quickly parlayed this temporary employment into a full-time position as an "information specialist" in the Resettlement (later Farm Security) Administration, a New Deal agency in the Department of Agriculture.

Under the direction of Roy Stryker, the RA/FSA photographers (Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, and Russell Lee, among others) were assigned to document small-town life and to demonstrate how the federal government was attempting to improve the lot of rural communities during the Depression. Evans, however, worked with little concern for the ideological agenda or the suggested itineraries and instead answered a personal need to distill the essence of American life from the simple and the ordinary. His photographs of roadside architecture, rural churches (1999.237.3), small-town barbers (1999.237.1), and cemeteries reveal a deep respect for the neglected traditions of the common man and secured his reputation as America's preeminent documentarian. From their first appearance in magazines and books in the late 1930s, these direct, iconic images entered the public's collective consciousness and are now deeply embedded in the nation's shared visual history of the Depression (1987.1100.482).

In the summer of 1936, Evans took a leave of absence from the Resettlement Administration to travel to the South with his friend, the writer James Agee, who had been assigned to write an article on tenant farmers by Fortune magazine; Evans was to be the photographer. Although the magazine ultimately rejected Agee's long text about three families in Alabama, what in time emerged from the collaboration was Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a lyric journey to the limits of direct observation. Its 500 pages of words and pictures is a volatile mix of documentary description and intensely subjective, even autobiographical writing, which endures as one of the seminal achievements of twentieth-century American letters. Evans' photographs for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men are stunningly honest representations of the faces (2001.415), bedrooms, and clothing of individual farmers living on a dry hillside seventeen miles north of Greensboro, Alabama. As a series, they seem to have elucidated the whole tragedy of the Great Depression; individually, they are intimate, transcendent, and enigmatic. For many, they are the apogee of Evans' career in photography.

In September 1938, the Museum of Modern Art opened American Photographs, a retrospective of Evans' first decade of photography. The museum simultaneously published American Photographs—still for many artists the benchmark against which all photographic monographs are judged. The book begins with a portrait of American society through its individuals—cotton farmers, Appalachian miners, war veterans—and social institutions—fast food, barber shops, car culture. It closes with a survey of factory towns, hand-painted signs, country churches, and simple houses—the sites and relics that constitute the tangible expressions of American desires, despairs, and traditions (1987.1100.110).

Between 1938 and 1941, Evans produced a remarkable series of portraits in the New York City subway (1971.646.18). They remained unpublished for twenty-five years, until 1966, when Houghton Mifflin released Many Are Called, a book of eighty-nine photographs, with an introduction by James Agee written in 1940. With a 35mm Contax camera strapped to his chest, its lens peeking out between two buttons of his winter coat, Evans was able to photograph his fellow passengers surreptitiously, and at close range. Although the setting was public, he found that his subjects, unposed and lost in their own thoughts, displayed a constantly shifting medley of moods and expressions—by turns curious, bored, amused, despondent, dreamy, and dyspeptic. "The guard is down and the mask is off," he remarked. "Even more than in lone bedrooms (where there are mirrors), people's faces are in naked repose down in the subway."

Between 1934 and 1965, Evans contributed more than 400 photographs to 45 articles published in Fortune magazine. He worked at the luxe magazine as Special Photographic Editor from 1945 to 1965 and not only conceived of the portfolios, executed the photographs, and designed the page layouts, but also wrote the accompanying texts. His topics were executed with both black-and-white and color materials and included railroad company insignias, common tools, old summer resort hotels, and views of America from the train window. Using the standard journalistic picture-story format, Evans combined his interest in words and pictures and created a multidisciplinary narrative of unusually high quality. Classics of a neglected genre, these self-assigned essays were Evans métier for twenty years.

In 1973, Evans began to work with the innovative Polaroid SX-70 camera and an unlimited supply of film from its manufacturer. The virtues of the camera fit perfectly with his search for a concise yet poetic vision of the world: its instant prints were, for the infirm seventy-year-old photographer, what scissors and cut paper were for the aging Matisse. The unique SX-70 prints are the artist's last photographs, the culmination of half a century of work in photography. With the new camera, Evans returned to several of his enduring themes—among the most important of which are signs, posters, and their ultimate reduction, the letter forms themselves.

Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Cindy Sherman Photos

2011-05-28T19:44:00.000+03:00

Cindy Sherman

2011-05-28T19:43:00.000+03:00

Cindy Sherman (n.1954 ) regizoare si fotografa americana de autoportrete conceptuale. Sherman a studiat pictura si avand impresia ca nu face decat sa ii copieze pe altii, s-a apucat de fotografie. Prima ei serie celebra este Untitled Film Stills, un proiect cuminte de autoportrete reprezentand actrite din filme vechi. Palarii, voaluri, istorie. Apoi in proiectul Untitled 200 0 Cindy Sherman se fotografiaza in rolul ironizat al femeilor din show business, domnisoare care tanjesc dupa un rol la Holywood. Astfel fotografii cu ea jucand rolul unor fete foarte bronzate, super machiate, cu operatii estetice esuate, priviri lascive sau zambitoare si coafuri solemne, adica caricaturi de posibile vedete, sunt expuse inainte de decernarea premiilor Oscar in 2000. Cu o singura exceptie, in toate proiectele ei se foloseste pe sine drept model, nu considera insa fotografiile autoportrete, neregasindu-se in diferitele femei pe care ni le arata. Nici nu-si considera lucrarile feministe desi intotdeuna ironizeaza pozitia femeii si a sexului in societate si reflecta stereotipia prezentarii femeii in filme, televiziuni, reviste. Acea exceptie, proiectul din care ea lipseste e Sex Pictures. Close-up-uri cu parti sexuale din corpuri de plastic prin care spune ca a vrut sa socheze. Sherman a mai lucrat la Disasters and Fairy Tales, o serie de autoportrete grotesti, in care apare infricosator si deformat, cu bucati din papusi gonflabile, voma si alte secretii.

Robert Adams Photos

2011-05-13T18:54:00.000+03:00

Robert Adams

2011-05-13T18:53:00.000+03:00

Robert Adams

Robert Adams (born May 8, 1937) is an American photographer who came to prominence as part of the photographic movement known as New Topographics. He was a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in photography in 1973 and 1980, and he received the MacArthur Foundation's MacArthur Fellowship in 1994. In 2009, he received the Hasselblad Award for his achievements in photography.[1] He is represented by the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco and the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York.

Biography
Adams was born in the industrial town of Orange, New Jersey, relocating to Colorado as a teenager with his family. Adams became interested in documenting how the western landscapes of North America, once captured by the likes of Timothy O'Sullivan and William Henry Jackson, had been shaped by human influence. As part of the New Topographics in the 1970s, Adams approach to photographing these landscapes was to take a stance of apparent neutrality, refraining from any obvious judgments of the subject matter. His images are titled as documents, to establish his neutral position. However, in the words of John Szarkowski, Adams... "has, without actually lying, discovered in these dumb and artless agglomerations of boring buildings the suggestion of redeeming virtue." Adams's recent essays in Why People Photograph and Beauty in Photography make strong arguments for conservative and human approaches to making photography, writing clear criticism about photography, and the importance of encouraging responsible stewardship of the land.

Summer Nights
For about five years, beginning in 1974, Adams embarked on an experiment: he made a series of photographs at night—the opposite of the high-altitude daylight used in most of his previous photographs. The project brought an element of risk he had not experienced before. Passing motorists sometimes veered toward him on rural roadsides, and in urban centers police repeatedly questioned him about his activities.
Adams' archives are held at the Yale University Art Gallery, with which he is devising a large-scale retrospective of his work for touring around the USA.

Bernice Abbott Photos

2011-05-06T01:30:00.000+03:00

Bernice Abbott

2011-05-06T01:25:00.000+03:00

BERENICE ABBOTT was born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1898.
She went to public schools in Columbus and Cleveland, and to Ohio State University. In 1918 she left for New York to study sculpture on her own - not with any teacher. She has always been independent. She moved on to Europe in 1921, still studying sculpture; first to Paris, then to Berlin, then back and forth. From 1923 to 1925 she worked as assistant to the American photographer in Paris, Man Ray.
During her years of portrait photography in Paris, 1925 to 1929, she established an enviable reputation, which was solidified in 1926 by her first one-man show of photographs: Portraits Photographiques. She photographed everyone who was anyone, and did it superbly. The pictures are both beautiful and honest-a rare combination in portraiture. "Successful" portrait photographs tend to be one or the other, not both. The most celebrated portrait photographers are often those most skilled and shameless in flattering-that is, obliterating-their victims. The person is erased and replaced by a fantasy. You won't find much flattery in Abbott portraits. She has concentrated on finding the best in people and trying to understand exactly who they are.
She first saw photographs by Eugene Atget in 1925. Nearly forty years later she wrote, in The World of Atget: "Their impact was immediate and tremendous ... a sudden flash of recognition-the shock of realism unadorned ......
She soon met Atget. In 1927 he came to her studio at 44 rue du Bac to be photographed, wearing a huge new overcoat. When she had made the first prints of his portraits, she went to show them to him, but found his apartment empty. Atget had died. His old friend, the actor André Calmette, inherited his photographs.
In the fall of 1928 Calmette sold Atget's work to Berenice Abbott; he saw that she loved those photographs. How right he was. She took care of the work for forty years and did all she could-it was a great deal-to win recognition for Atget. Thanks to her, he is securely recognized as one of the great photographers.
Eminently successful in Paris, she may have become homesick. In 1929 she left Europe; in the New Yorker's words, "taking herself and her talent back to New York and the Hotel des Artistes." Once there she discovered a passion for New York. Professionally, she photographed a series of American businessmen for Fortune, and, on her own initiative, began to document New York City with her camera. Later she photographed scientific subjects for Life: the three preoccupations represented in this book are not new.
In 1930 she had a one-man show of her photographs at the Contemporary Art Club at Harvard, the first of many. She has exhibited almost continuously in the United States ever since. The same year, she arranged for the publication of one of the first books of Atget's work, and furnished most of the pictures. Atget, Photographe de Paris, with a preface by Pierre MacOrlan, was published in New York by E. Weyhe.
Another phase of her career began in 1934 when she began to teach photography one evening a week at the New School for Social Research in New York. She continued to teach there until 1958.
Photographing New York City took first place from 1935 to 1939 when she supervised and photographed a document, "Changing New York," for the Federal Art Project. This culminated in 1939 in the book, Changing New York, with photographs by Berenice Abbott and a text by Elizabeth McCausland, published by E. P. Dutton. More than half of the places photographed on this project have since been demolished.
In 1954 she was photographing Route One along the Atlantic coast and discovered the state of Maine. She bought a house there in 1956 and moved into it permanently twelve years later.
In 1958, still in New York, she began work on a huge project for the Physical Science Study Committee of Educational Services, Inc. The photographs of physical phenomena were largely produced then.
Berenice Abbott is a photographer with sensibility. She's aware, receptive, sensitive, and has common sense. Her work is refreshingly straightforwardstrong, clear pictures with art but without pretense. Berenice has no use for purple prose or precious prints. She belongs to no school or movement.
She wrote down some of her beliefs so clearly that it would be foolish not to quote her. The article, "It Has to Walk Alone," appeared in Infinity magazine in 1951; parts of it were reprinted by Nathan Lyons in his 1966 book, Photographers on Photography. She tells what she's up to in a few essential sentences:
"Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.
"If a medium is representational by nature of the realistic image formed by a lens, I see no reason why we should stand on our heads to distort that function. On the contrary, we should take hold of that very quality, make use of it, and explore it to the fullest."

That is what Berenice Abbott does.

Arnold Newman Photos

2011-04-21T21:43:00.000+03:00

Arnold Newman

2011-04-21T21:28:00.000+03:00

Text by Arnold Newman, "A Life in Photography", from Arnold Newman

As a "portrait" photographer I know there is no final definition of a portrait, nor can there ever be one. Yet one thing is certain - a good portrait must be a good photograph, or image, whatever the medium might be. One must be a good artist before becoming a good photojournalist, or a good still life, fashion, sports, landscape, portrait photographer. The only difference is one's own interests, passions and the ability to communicate. We do not take pictures with our cameras, but with our hearts and minds. Good art cannot be defined. There is only great art that creates new ideas and then there are imitations of varying degrees. There is no best way or only way. We learn from the past, in order to understand the present. The past is our foundation, the springboard into the future. Tradition and past ideas are important bases to begin with, but can be traps if misunderstood.

Ideas, conceptual and visual, are what all forms of art are about. Everything else is nothing more than subject matter and technique, which is easily learned. It is not what we photograph or assemble physically or digitally that counts, but how we create our images. Cezanne used only traditional materials and subject matter, still lifes, people, landscapes, but it was his ideas that revolutionized the 20th century art world and laid the groundwork for modern art, including photography. It was not what he painted but how he painted. It is the same for photographers. It is how we photograph that matters not what we photograph. Too often exotic or unusual subject matter is confused with good photography and extolled by the public as well as by artists and critics, regardless of the quality of the interpretation.

As for myself, I work the way I do because of the kind of person that I am - my work is an expression of myself. It reflects me, my fascination with people, the physical world around us, and the exciting medium in which I work. I do not claim that my way is the best or the only way, it is simply my way. It is an expression of myself, of the way I think and feel.

Generally, I build my images carefully, even if they are created in just a moment. They are based on my experience, intuition, and my background as a painter, both by natural inclination and by training. When I switched from painting to photography in 1938, it was first from financial necessity in the middle of the Great Depression, and then from love. Immediately I realized the creative differences - conceptual, visual, as well as technical and proceeded from there.

Mostly I seek ideas, visual concepts, and the vague and preconceived images that have begun to form in my mind, and then (hopefully) find them. One should be flexible and open to discover the unexpected, which is an integral part of this medium. The unexpected often reveals new ideas and unexplored paths. Therefore, one must learn to "look." Nothing should restrict one's manner of expression as long as "it works." No amount of words can describe a photograph or create one. Frequently, we "find" without seeking, acting upon Pasteur's expression "Chance favors the prepared mind." That is why so many great "accidents" seem to happen to the better photographers.

I prefer the risk of failure in experimentation to the alternative of safe repetition and boredom. I do not change for the sake of change, but for experimentation that may lead to new visual ideas. Inevitably, there must be a great deal of the photographer in his finished work. In other words, the photographer must be a part of the photographic process. However, continuous exploration of a single theme in the development of a visual concept should not be confused with repetition. Ideas do not always reveal themselves immediately, and their pursuit often takes a longtime. But it's fun to try!

Rigid rules, regulations, official schools and current trendy "with it" styles needed by the unimaginative are deadly to creativity. History is full of "Golden Rules," laws of composition and other indispensable guidelines. Yet not one great image has ever been created through their application. Style is a natural result, not an aim.

Equally destructive are the schools of "anything goes," of shock, technical flamboyance, self-indulgent, grandiose ideas, or of size for the sake of size. These are all too often labeled the "cutting edge," devoid of lasting meaning or information, and championed by some for their own personal acclaim or interests. Yet new and original voices always emerge to once again open up new paths not thought of by the theorists. Original voices will always emerge.

Unaltered, or traditional, photographs are not real at all. They are flat in a three dimensional world. Color is distorted by a real lack of control. Black and white photography is further distorted or abstracted in a world of reality. Straight photography is not real at all - it is an illusion of reality, sometimes forming into fantasy, abstraction, or any other form the photographer wishes to create. Altered images, such as collages or digital images, are newer forms for the creative mind. It is these illusions and fantasies that we create our own private worlds with. What are they? The truly innovative artists create ideas and images unrelated to anything we have experienced or seen before, new ways of seeing and thinking about our own familiar worlds. This is the real creative artist we all aspire to be. I have been fortunate to photograph the great, the fascinating, the famous and sometimes infamous all over the world and in all walks of life. But most of my subjects are not famous. And just what is fame? One can be famous on one side of an ocean and totally unknown on the other side - or in one country or city, but not in another. And just how long does fame last? And what is fame when it is used to describe a person of true accomplishment? How is it different from the "celebrity" syndrome created by public relations as grist for the media and an obsessed public?

For me, I am interested in what motivates individuals, what they do with their lives, their personalities, and how I perceive and interpret them. But of equal importance, or of perhaps even greater importance is that, even if the person is not known or already forgotten, the photograph itself should still be of interest or even excite the viewer. That is what my life and work is all about.

Text from The Photography Encyclopedia

Newman, Arnold (1918-): American portrait photographer

A master of portraiture, Newman has produced indelible images of people from all walks of life. He is best known for his portraits of celebrities, particularly artists, whom he depicts in the contexts of their profession, identifying the sitter with his or her accomplishments. Among his subjects have been such figures as John F. Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson, Marilyn Monroe, Alexander Calder, Carl Sandburg, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Born in New York City, Newman grew up in Atlantic City and Miami Beach. As a teenager he displayed a marked aptitude for art and pursued art studies at the University of Miami, where he met David Douglas Duncan, who would go on to become a renowned photojournalist. Financial problems led to Newman's leaving school and taking a job offered by a family friend in a Philadelphia photo studio.

As he learned the craft of photography, his interest in the medium replaced his ambition to become a painter. He was able to support himself as a portrait photographer while pursuing his personal vision, experimenting with cut out images, assemblage, and other modernist design possibilities. On trips to New York he met Alfred Stieglitz, Beaumont Newhall, and Dr. Robert Leslie of the A D Gallery, who offered him his first exhibit.

Newman moved to New York at the opening of the exhibit in 1942 and at this time conceptualized the basic philosophy of his future work, "to take pictures of people in their natural surroundings with a little stronger feeling about not just setting it up." In 1946 he worked on assignments for Alexey Brodovitch, and Harper's Bazaar and Life were his major clients. He took some of his most famous portraits at this time, including one of Igor Stravinksy sitting at his piano, which ironically Brodovitch, in one of the most noted gaffes in photo history, rejected.

Newman's assignments from magazines have taken him around the world. He was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery in London to photograph major British figures in the arts and politics. A film about him, The Image Makers - The Environment of Arnold Newman, was produced in 1977, and he has won numerous awards, including the American Society of Media Photographers Lifetime Achievement in Photography.

Newman's work has been exhibited in one man and group shows worldwide, in museums that include the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Israel Museum in Tel Aviv. Selections of his work have been published in One Mind's Eye (1974) and Arnold Newman, Five Decades (1986).

Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.
-Arnold Newman

Arnold Newman describes his private world as one born of instinct, in which a lifetime of learning, knowledge, and intuition are brought together harmoniously through a single moment of inspiration. This instinct for visual expression is a way of seeing life as an artful interlude between waste and fulfillment, and a means of harnessing the output of human emotions that drive interior engines of poetry, song, and visual pleasure. Newman's own visual instinct was honed and tempered by his friendships with many of the world's leading artists, writers, poets, politicians, and other personages of great accomplishment.

From the 1940s to the present he photographed leaders of world culture and society in what has been called "environmental portraiture"; his subjects are photographed in the physical milieu of their particular profession or personal creations. But it is Newman's selection and imaginative portrayal of his subjects' environments in conjunction with the subjects themselves that sets his work at the pinnacle of the long tradition of portrait photography. From the haunting portraits by Julia Margaret Cameron in the 19th century to Newman's prolific achievement today, the aesthetic aim of portraiture has been to evoke a sense of the inner being of individuals.

Arnold Newman has lived and worked in New York City for most of his career as a freelance photographer for magazines like Fortune, Life, Newsweek, and Esquire, among others. His professional work began, however, in Miami and West Palm Beach in 1938, where he also developed a mature vision for making socially conscious photographs of urban poor. By the mid-1940s, after a short tenure in Philadelphia, he had found his own vision in the strong empathy he had for artists and their world. Both Alfred Stieglitz and Beaumont Newhall encouraged and supported his work in this direction, and by 1945 Newman moved to New York to stay.

Today Newman continues to photograph leading international figures for the publishing world and for himself. The distinction between works commissioned and self-generated by Newman has little meaning. His professional work and his aesthetic ideas spring from the same well and remain irrevocably driven by a desire to release symbolic visions of the human spirit.

Through a special grant, Eastman Kodak Company has made it possible for Newman to present a gift of 176 prints to George Eastman House. This exhibition is drawn from that collection, and is organized by James L. Enyeart and Marianne Fulton of George Eastman House. Special to this gift is Newman's inclusion of rare, vintage prints, making the exhibition a unique opportunity for viewers to study and enjoy the finest prints that exist from throughout his sixty years of image making. In addition, ICP has supplemented the George Eastman House exhibition with examples of recent work, specially selected by Newman.

Arnold Newman is the recipient of ICP's 1999 Infinity Award for Master of Photography.

Text by Philip Brookman, from Arnold Newman

Breaking Ground

Throughout history, portraits have documented our legacy, creating a gallery of faces, a representation of ourselves that connects who we are today with who we were in years past. This legacy - the tie that binds, as we say - allows us to construct and remember an image of the past that becomes, in all its forms, visual history. On one level, this implies an ancestral shrine, history entombed, or a simple catalogue of memories: the family album. Each face stands for a life lived, for who we were at any given moment. However, history and memory are fluid concepts. Like the reflection of headlights on a stormy highway, they are always changing, never still. There is poetry in this dance of light. Therefore, we can glean many layers of information from the faces of our times. Behind these masks - we don them to cloak the psychological mysteries that delineate history - there are unseen clues to who we were, who we are, and who we will become.

So what is a portrait, really? This question has many different answers when applied to Arnold Newman's photographs. He has earned a reputation as one of the most influential portraitists of our time, a photographer who has changed the way we look at ourselves. Crafted with a deep understanding of the creative process, Newman's art is widely seen and reproduced in print media. He has, over time, influenced our vision of the world by projecting on a global screen the defining images of political leaders, cultural icons, and everyday people. Often, when we think of Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, Jackson Pollock, or Lyndon B. Johnson, to name but a few, we conjure up one of his images.

According to Newman, "The portrait is a form of biography. Its purpose is to inform now and to record for history." He reminds us in this straightforward statement that a portrait is a record of a moment in time, of history writ large and made for the ages - a moment that is frozen as if in a glacier, to be unearthed by anthropologists in the future. However, when we start to dig deeper, to scan all the complex information in one of Newman's photographs, his words "to record for history" become symbolic of far more. His pictures often hold within them some of the clues to understanding the personalities he depicts: a colorful mask, an aesthetic presence, an interior silence, a creative psychology, or a relationship to the surrounding space or other people. He understands that photography always reveals some truth in its gaze and creates a fictional paradigm from this veracity.

Newman's portraits record specific histories and interpret the personalities he photographs. He connects these to the pictorial environment that best represents his intuitive understanding of a person. He creates a visual tension between a moment and a psychological presence. It is this tension - between the instant we see and the eternity that makes up our interior lives - that brings these pictures to life. They are not documents of events but photographs created with broad strokes. They elucidate something as intangible as a personality, using all available tools to uncover a relationship between his subjects and their changing world.

If the people in Newman's images are always changing, as is the photographer's vision, whose viewpoint is depicted in this work? Do we see through Newman's eyes or those of the sitter? His photographs are created through a process of give and take, in which he carefully studies the people he depicts and prepares them with an understanding of his work. Through observation, communication, and collaboration - a conversation, really - he finds a set of symbols and ideas, creating a point of view with which to perceive that person. In this way he constructs his images...

ext from John Szarkowski, Looking at Photographs

In 1857 the photographer Robert Howlett made a portrait of the ship designer I. K. Brunel standing in front of the monstrous anchor chains of one of his ships. This interesting photographic precedent for what later came to be called environmental portraiture bore few progeny, partly because the photographer could make more sittings if the subjects came to the studio, and perhaps partly because most people really didn't want to be identified with what they did.

One would have thought that the miniature camera would make such interpretive portraits common, but it did not work that way. The very ease and availability of the small camera tended to mean that the ship builder was photographed in the Automat, or getting out of an airplane. Howlett's idea depended on a conceptual approach, one thought first and executed afterward.

In the 1940's, at a time when most photographers were discovering the special potentials of the small camera (flexibility, quickness, spontaneity of response), Arnold Newman was learning to use the ancient virtues of the classic stand camera (enforced deliberation, precise framing, exact description) to help him make portraits that might suggest. by their graphics and their symbolic allusions, who the person in the picture might really be, or at the very least, what he might be famous for. One of the best known pictures that Newman made in pursuit of this idea was a portrait of Igor Stravinsky, his head small in a lower corner of the picture, with the great kidney-shaped sounding board of a grand piano silhouetted above him. It was an original and very handsome picture, and doubtless greatly enhanced Stravinsky's popular image as a piano player. Nevertheless, the picture did identify the subject with the world of music and, more important. with a kind of rigorous economy of form. which is saying a great deal.

The portrait reproduced here is more natural and less insistently formalized and symbolized than many of Newman's portraits. If one did not know that Kuniyoshi was a painter, one probably wouldn't guess it from the picture. Although one might. The classical stiff life with compote, the modified Madame Recamier chaise on the uncarpeted floor, and the gentle skylight quality of the modeling are all suggestive. More important, one would almost surely sense a man who did what he did with a relaxed and stylish elegance.

The chaise may be the one on which he painted those ethereal, alabasterskinned women.

Paul Outerbridge Photos

2011-04-12T16:29:00.000+03:00

Paul Outerbridge

2011-04-12T16:27:00.000+03:00

Paul Outerbridge
(1896-1958)
Fashion/Glamour, Fine Art

"Art is life seen through man's inner craving for perfection and beauty--his escape from the sordid realities of life into a world of his imagining. Art accounts for at least a third of our civilization, and it is one of the artist's principal duties to do more than merely record life or nature. To the artist is given the privilege of pointing the way and inspiring towards a better life."
--Paul Outerbridge

Biography: Paul Outerbridge, Jr. was born into a wealthy family in New York and went to various private schools before studying at the Art Students League. In 1917 he joined the Canadian Royal Flying Corps, but was soon discharged following an accident; he then joined the US Army and took his first photographs as a part of his service.

In 1921 he went to study at the Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York, photographing nude and still life on large format. His prints were finely made on expensive platinum paper, and one was publihed in Vogue the following year.

His work at this time was very much in the style of Paul Strand's which had been published in Camera Work some years earlier. Featuring everyday objects in still-life abstractions, Outerbridge's work was marked by an attention to every detail in both lighting and composition. Outerbridge often worked from detailed sketches and the sculpture classes he was taking with Alexander Arpichenko doubtless aided his appreciation of form. Soon he was busy with similar commercial work, which appeared in Vanity Fair and other magazines.

Outerbridge went to London in 1925 and lived for several years in Paris, where he joined the avant-garde artistic establishment. It was in Paris where Outerbridge got to know photographers such as Man Ray and Berenice Abbott, as well as artists including Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso and others. Outerbridge also photographed for Paris Vogue with Edward Steichen.

In 1929 he returned to New York, where he experimented with the technically difficult tri-color carbro process; soon he was a successful commercial colour photographer, shooting many covers for House Beautiful. His classic book 'Photography in Color', was released in 1940.

In 1943 Outerbridge moved to Hollywood, but found it impossible to get work in the film business due to the tight grip of the unions. He opened a portrait studio in Laguna Beach, but soon closed this to work away from photography in the fashion industry. In the late 1940s and early 1950s he travelled and produced a number of illustrated stories for magazines and for a short time had a monthly column in US Camera magazine.

Working with colour gave Outerbridge's models a reality that the American public was not ready for during his era. This, together with the surreal and often fetishistic nature of some of his work, made it impossible for his work to be shown in public at the time. Outerbridge's work did, however, sell at high prices to private collectors. His pictures seem very much to be a collaboration with the models, and although unusual and at times erotic, they would hardly be considered pornographic now.

Helmut Newton Photos

2011-03-17T22:48:00.000+02:00

Helmut Newton

2011-03-17T22:45:00.000+02:00

Helmut Newton

Helmut Newton, numele la naştere Helmut Neustädter (n. 31 octombrie 1920, Berlin, Germania - d. 23 ianuarie 2004, West Hollywood, California, SUA) a fost un fotograf de modă germano-australian care a devenit faimos mai ales datorită fotografiilor sale a nudurile feminine.
Newtown s-a născut ca fiu al proprietarului germano-evreu al unei fabrici de nasturi şi al unei americance. Mama sa a studiat la Newton-Heinrich von Treitschke-Realgymnasium şi la Şcoala Americană din Berlin. Interesat de fotografie de la o vârstă fragedă, Helmut Newton a lucrat cu fotograful german Yva (Else Neulander Simon). În 1938, Newton a părăsit Germania pentru a scăpa de persecuţie şi a lucrat pentru scurt timp în Singapore ca fotograf de la Straits Times (cf. de.wiki a fost dat afară după două săptămâni pentru inepţie), înainte de a ajunge în final la Melbourne, Australia.
Odată ajuns în Australia, a fost mai întâi pus sub observaţie, împreună cu mulţi alţi "străini inamici", înainte de a servi în Armata Australiei în cel de-al doilea război mondial ca şofer de camion. În 1946, Newton a înfiinţat un studio fotografic la Flinders Lane unde a lucrat în principal ca fotograf de modă în anii prosperi de după război. În 1948, Newton s-a căsătorit cu actriţa June Browne, care mai târziu a devenit un fotograf de succes, sub pseudonimul ironic "Alice Springs" (numele unui oraş central australian). Newton a obţinut, de asemenea, naţionalitatea australiană. S-a asociat apoi cu fotograful Henry Talbot în 1956, şi această asociere a continuat chiar şi după 1959, când a părăsit Australia pentru Londra. Studioul foto a fost redenumit "Helmut Newton şi Henry Talbot".
Newton s-a stabilit la Paris în 1961 şi a început să lucreze pentru un timp ca fotograf de modă. Lucrările sale au apărut în reviste, inclusiv în Vogue. El a stabilit un anumit stil aparte marcat de erotism, scene stilizate, adesea cu subtexte sado-masochistice şi fetişiste. Un atac de cord, dîn 1970, l-a încetinit oarecum, dar mai apoi şi-a extins activitatea şi notorietatea. Faima sa a crescut exponenţial, mai ales după seria din anii 1980 "Big Nudes", care a marcat apogeul stilului său erotic-urban, susţinut de excelente aptitudini tehnice. Newton a mai lucrat la studii de portrete şi fotografii de fantezie producând fotografii memorabile.
Fiind extrem de mândru de oraşul său natal Berlin, în octombrie 2003, Helmut Newton a donat o vastă colecţie de fotografii Fundaţiei de Moştenire Culturală Prusacă. Această colecţie este în prezent expusă la Muzeul de Fotografie din Berlin, aflat aproape de gară şi gradina zoologică.
În ultimii ani ai vieţii, Newton a trăit la Monte Carlo şi în Los Angeles. Fotograful a decedat atunci când maşina sa s-a lovit de un zid aflat pe o alee către vestitul hotel Chateau Marmont, de pe Sunset Boulevard, care timp de mai mulţi ani i-a servit ca reşedinţă în California de Sud. S-a speculat că Newton ar fi suferit un atac de cord în momentul dinaintea coliziunii. Cenuşa sa este îngropată alături de cea a Marlenei Dietrich, la Städtischer Friedhof III în Berlin.

Stephen Shore Work Video

2011-01-30T19:39:00.004+02:00

Stephen Shore Photos

2011-01-30T19:35:00.004+02:00

Stephen Shore

2011-01-30T19:30:00.003+02:00

Stephen Shore (born 1947 in New York City) is an American photographer known for his deadpan images of banal scenes and objects in the United States, and for his pioneering use of color in art photography.
Stephen Shore was interested in photography from an early age. Self-taught, he received a photographic darkroom kit at age six from a forward-thinking uncle. He began to use a 35mm camera three years later and made his first color photographs. At ten he received a copy of Walker Evans's book, American Photographs, which influenced him greatly. His career began at the early age of fourteen, when he made the precocious move of presenting his photographs to Edward Steichen, then curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Recognizing Shore's talent, Steichen bought three of his works. At age seventeen, Shore met Andy Warhol and began to frequent Warhol's studio, the Factory, photographing Warhol and the creative people that surrounded him. In 1971, at the age of 24, Shore became the second living photographer to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Shore then embarked on a series of cross-country trips, making "on the road" photographs of American and Canadian landscapes. In 1972, he made the journey from Manhattan to Amarillo, Texas, that provoked his interest in color photography. Viewing the streets and towns he passed through, he conceived the idea to photograph them in color, first using 35mm and then an 4x5" view camera before finally settling on the 8x10 format. In 1974 an NEA endowment funded further work, followed in 1975 by a Guggenheim grant and in 1976 a color show at MoMA, NY. His 1982 book, Uncommon Places was a bible for the new color photographers because, alongside William Eggleston, his work proved that a color photograph, like a painting or even a black and white photograph, could be considered a work of art. Many artists, including Nan Goldin, Andreas Gursky, Martin Parr, Joel Sternfeld , and Thomas Struth, have acknowledged his influence on their work.
ARTINFO’s Philip Gefter notes that Stephen Shore as well as William Eggleston borrowed from photorealist painters, such as Robert Cottingham, Richard Estes and Ralph Goings. Gefter notes, “[Shore and Eggleston’s] interpretation of the American vernacular — gas stations, diners, parking lots—is foretold in photorealist paintings that preceded their pictures.”
Books of his photographs include Uncommon Places: 50 Unpublished Photographs; Essex County; The Gardens at Giverny; Stephen Shore: Photographs 1973 - 1993; and The Velvet Years, Andy Warhol's Factory, 1965 - 1967. In 1998, Johns Hopkins University Press published The Nature of Photographs, a book Shore wrote about how photographs function (reprinted in an expanded edition by Phaidon Press). Most recently, Aperture has published Uncommon Places: The Complete Work, and Phaidon has published American Surfaces.
Shore is represented by 303 Gallery in New York; Sprüth Magers in Cologne, Munich, and London; and Rodolphe Janssen in Brussels.
Currently Shore is the director of the photography department at Bard College, a position he has held since 1982.

Dorothea Lange Photos

2011-01-29T13:12:00.000+02:00

Mamiya RZ67

2011-01-26T18:50:00.004+02:00

The Mamiya RZ67 line of medium format single-lens reflex cameras manufactured by Mamiya includes three successive models, the RZ67 Professional (first model released in 1982), RZ67 Professional II (released in 1995) and RZ67 Professional IID (released in 2004). RZ67 is a modular camera system, meaning lenses, viewfinders, ground glasses, film winders and film backs are all interchangeable. It is primarily designed for studio use, but can also (though with reservations) be used in the field. The RZ67 Sekor lenses have built-in electronic leaf shutters which are cocked and triggered from the body. Focusing is performed with a bellows on the body instead of the lenses.

The camera accepts 6x7, 6x6 and 6x4.5, 120 and 220 film magazines and Polaroid as well as Quadra 72 4x5 sheet film backs. Mamiya RB67 backs are also supported via the G-Adapter. The film speed is set on each RZ back via a dial. There are two versions of the 6x7 and 6x4.5 backs, the model II versions have a second film counter to always show the film count on the top. The RZ67 operates on one 6V silver oxide 4SR44 battery, or 6V 4LR44 alkaline battery. It can be used in emergency mode fully mechanically with a fixed 1/400 sec shutter speed. Multiple exposures are possible in the M-mode. Mirror flip up is supported. The body has one standard flash hot shoe on its left side, one plug for a standard remote shutter cable release, and a socket for an electronic shutter trigger. The RZ67 measures 104 mm (W) x 133.5 mm (H) x 211.5 mm (L) with the 110mm f/2.8 lens, and weighs approximately 2.4 kg (5.29 lbs). The flange distance is 105 mm.

The RZ67 name is adopted from the model name of the Mamiya RB67 (where RB stands for Revolving Back), which was first introduced in 1970, thus the RZ67 also takes backs which can be rotated 90 degrees to provide a horizontal or vertical composition. The orientation is shown in the viewfinder with black guides. The viewfinder also hosts LEDs informing of the state of the camera (flash ready, low battery, dark slide not removed, shutter not cocked). In addition to manual operation (photographer chooses aperture and shutter speed), the RZ67 is able to operate in AEF mode with an AE viewfinder (AE being an abbreviation for automatic exposure), which transmits exposure information directly to the body. In RBL compatibility mode, the RZ67 is able to use RB67 lenses. The biggest difference between RB67 and RZ67 is, that RB67 is completely mechanical. The RZ67 has also mechanical couplings between the parts, but the shutter is electronic, and parts are able to transmit exposure information with electronic couplings. In addition, the RZ67 has plastic exterior body, which makes it somewhat lighter.

Original RZ67 Professional (RZ67 Pro I):

* Electronic shutter 8 sec - 1/400 sec with full EV steps

RZ67 Professional II (RZ67 Pro II):

* Some improvements of the electronics
* An additional knob was added to the right side of the focusing unit for fine tuning of the focus
* Shutter can be adjusted in 0.5 EV steps

RZ67 Professional IID (RZ67 Pro IID):

* Has an integrated interface for communicating with digital backs (the earlier versions need either an interface plate or external triggering wires)
* Minor internal mechanical improvements.

Roy DeCarava Photos

2011-01-23T19:07:00.005+02:00

Roy DeCarava

2011-01-23T19:04:00.001+02:00

Roy DeCarava was an American photographer.

Roy DeCarava was born in Harlem in December of 1919, and lived there through many decades of important changes to the neighborhood. In DeCarava’s youth, Harlem was cultivating its reputation as a flourishing African American neighborhood, and he came of age during a time when many prominent black artists, musicians and writers were in their prime. He was close to poet Langston Hughes, and would later publish a book with him titled, The Sweet Flypaper of Life, which chronicled one woman’s life in Harlem.
DeCarava was raised by his single mother, and to earn money he began working at an early age. He continued to hold odd jobs throughout most of his career as a photographer. Through diligence and hard work, he secured admission to The Cooper Union, but left after two years to attend classes at the Harlem art center. Deciding early on that he wanted to be an artist, he began working as a painter and commercial illustrator, and many of his early photographs were meant only as reference for serigraph prints. He was drawn to photography by “the directness of the medium”, and he soon found himself communicating the themes and ideas of his paintings photographically.
While many of the great photojournalists of his time worked as outsiders, DeCarava’s status as a black Harlem resident afforded him a more personal view of his subjects. He operated as a street photographer at the same time as Garry Winogrand and Helen Levitt, but his work has a very different feel. Levitt and Winogrand kept a distance from the people they photographed, while DeCarava was exploring more intimate views of his subjects, even if they were strangers.
Roy DeCarava worked for a time as a journalist for Sports Illustrated magazine, but found it difficult to adjust his style and schedule to the constraints of commercial work. He did a series on the set of Requiem for a Heavyweight in 1962, which the director liked so much he bought nearly 200 prints. Despite his successes DeCarava felt very strongly about maintaining the artistic integrity of his images, and eventually gave up magazine and freelance work in order to take on a job teaching at Hunter College, where he is still a distinguished member of the faculty.
He is the subject of several books and many loving essays by his wife, Sherry.

Henri Cartier Bresson Interview

2011-01-18T18:53:00.014+02:00

Dialog

2011-01-14T22:36:00.006+02:00

"Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask 'how', while others of a more curious nature will ask 'why'. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information." Man Ray (1890-1976)

Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) a fost un artist american care a petrecut cea mai mare parte din cariera sa în Paris. A fost un admirator al picturilor lui Ingres Jean Auguste Dominique și a făcut o serie de fotografii inspirate din nudurile acestuia. Este descris ca un modernist și avantgardist și a contribuit atât la evolutia Dadaismului cât și a mișcărilor suprarealiste. Suprarealismul este un curent artistic si literar de avantgardă care proclamă o totală libertate de expresie. După convingerea suprarealiștilor arta nu este niciodată produsul unei raţiuni pe deplin conștiente.

„Le Violin d’Ingres” de Man Ray o arată pe Kiki de Montparnasse, cu spatele gol către privitor, cu două semne de vioară (f-hole) imprimate pe spate. De asemenea, a ales titlul „Le Violin d’Ingres”, un idiom francez ce înseamnă hobby. Titlul pare să sugereze faptul că vioara era hobby-ul lui Ingres în timp ce Kiki ar fi fost hobby-ul lui Man Ray. Fotografia menţine o tensiune între obiectivitate si aprecierea formei feminine.
Kiki a fost un dispozitiv pe scena din Montparnasse și un model de artist popular, pozând pentru zeci de artiști. În anii 1920 a lucrat cu Man Ray. Ea este obiectul din cele mai cunoscute lucrări ale sale, inclusiv notabila imagine suprarealistă „Le violin d’Ingres”. La vârsta de douzeci si opt de ani Kiki a fost declarată Regina Montparnasse. Chiar și în perioadele dificile, ea a menţinut atitudinea ei pozitivă, declarând că: „tot ce am nevoie este o ceapa, un pic de pâine și o sticlă de vin roșu; și voi găsi întotdeauna cineva care să-mi ofere”.

Dialogul dintre lucrarea lui Man Ray și fotografia personală este o comparaţie între modelul feminin, Kiki, și modelul feminin actual. Man Ray transformă corpul feminin într-un instrument muzical, o metaforă ce transpune aprecierea poetică a armoniei corpului, în timp ce modelul feminin actual este apreciat ca fiind o bancă de investiţii mereu nerăbdătoare. De asemenea, frumuseţea corpului feminin este alterată în timpurile noastre de diferite intervenţii plastice și reconstructive.
Nu este de mirare că percepţia noastră despre frumos este distorsionată și lipsită de un adevărat interes atât in artă cât și în viaţa de zi cu zi.

Robert Doisneau Photos

2011-01-12T23:57:00.003+02:00

Robert Doisneau

2011-01-12T23:55:00.001+02:00

Biography
[Born: 1912; died: 1994]
[Nationality: French]
Robert Doisneau is one of France's most noted photographers. He is noted for the many playful and unsuposing images chronicling everyday French life. His prolific outbook over the course of several decades provides us a marvelous record of French life. His images don't seek to overcome the viewer. They are often modest in scope and playful. He is at his best with people. His images of French childhood are especially helpful for HBC. He was influenced by the work of Kertesz, Atget, and Cartier-Bresson who also provided wonderful images of childhood. He published ober 20 books providing realistic, but charming images of quiet, often personal moments in the lives of individuals. He wrote: "The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street."
Childhood

Robert was born in Gentilly in the Val-de-Marne, France. We do have not information on his childhood at this time or how his childhood affected his work.
Education
Robert studied engraving at the Ecole Estienne in Chantilly, but found his training antiquated and useless upon graduation. Engraving had been a major activity before the development of photo lithography, but was much in demand after the turn of the 20th century. With his rather antiquated training, he had great difficulty obtaining work as a lithographer.
Photography
Doisneau was exposed to photography in the advertising department of a pharmaceutical firm. He embrrced this new-found interest in photography and largely taught himself. Outside of his job, he began to see photography as a medium for at first a hobby--recording every day life during his wanderings through the streets of Paris. He began photographing details of objects in 1930. He sold his first photo-story to the Excelsior newspaper in 1932. He was a camera assistant to the sculptor Andrei Vigneaux and did military service prior to taking a job as an industrial and advertising photographer for the Renault auto factory at Billancourt in 1934. He was fired in 1939 and was forced to try freelance advertising and postcard photography to earn his living. The postcards were a majot outlet for photgraphers at the time and France had Europe's largest industy. Post cards in the early 20th century served the purpose of modern greeting cards as well as vacation souveinrs, although this was changing in the 1930s. Doisneau was hired by the Rapho photo agency in 1939 and worked there for several months until the inset of World War II.
World War II
Doisneau was drafted in 1939. He was a member of the Resistance both as a soldier and as a photographer. While his training in engraving was not helpful in his attempts to get a job, it proved invluable to the Resistance. He used his engraving skills to forge passports and identification papers. He photographed the Occupation and Liberation of Paris. some of these images, especially of the liberation of Paris are photographic masterpices. His classic photographs capture the exileration and joy of liberation in Paris like no other photographer.
Post War Period
Some of Doisneau's most remembered photographs were taken in the post-war era. He returned to freelance work and sold photographs to Life and other important international magazines. He joined the Alliance photo agency for a short time and began working with Rapho again in 1946. Against his better judgement Doisneau did high-society and fashion photography for Paris Vogue from 1948 to 1951. During his assignments with Vogue, the photographer became acquainted with high-society circles, for which, however, he did not have as much sympathy as he did for the common people in the streets. All through this period, however, he took realistic photographs of daily life on the streets of Paris. These are the photographs we remember him for and many of his high-society photographs are virtually forgotten. Certainly the appeal to the French was his ability to capture the simple joys of everyday life--so much more meaningful after the dark days of NAZI occupation.
Film Stock
A French reader reports that after World War II the photographs taken by many Europeans were of poor quality. This was primarily because the film available was very poor quality. The devestation of the War had serious affected the photographic industry as well as most other industries. Doisneau's photographs, however, continued to be high quality. He probably has access to American film.
Revival
The photography of Robert Doisneau has enjoyed a revival in the last ten years or so. Many of his portraits and photos of Paris from the end of World War II through the 1950's have been turned into calendars and postcards and have becomes icons of French life. Perhaps his most famous photograph is "Kiss in front of the Palace of City Hall." This photogrpah has been reproduced by the millions and is perhaps the most famous French photograph. It became a ymbol of young, boisterous love in Paris--of course the city most associated with love. The realism of Doisneau's photographs make a wonderful record of both style and lifestyle. In addition to his reportage photography, he has photographed many noted artists including Giacometti, Cocteau, Leger, Braque, and Picasso.
The Recipe
Doisneau writes of his photography, "In fact there isn't any recipe - that would be too easy - but all these images that are growing old so gracefully were taken instinctively. I put all my trust in intuition, which contributes so much more than rational thought. This is a commendable approach, because you need courage to be stupid - it's so rare these days when there are so many intelligent people all over the place who've stopped looking because they're so knowledgeable. Yet that little extra something supplied by the model is precisely a `look,' like a legacy handed down to you from the distant past. It shoots straight along the optical axis and bores right through the photographer, the celluloid, the paper, and the viewer, like a laser beam scorching everything in its path, including, and a very good thing too, your critical faculties."
Children
Some of Doisneau's most appealing photographs are those of French childhood--perhaps the best ever taken. He took photographs on the street as well as homes and schools. Some were candid. Others were posed. As he photographed extensively from the 1930s-50s, his photographs record not only the texture of French, but developing fashion patterns before, during, and after World War II. The images provide a wonderful record of the clothes sworn by children during the period and thus is very useful to HBC.
Accolades
Doisneau won the Prix Kodak in 1947. He was awarded the Prix Niepce in 1956 and acted as a consultant to Expo '67, Canada. A short film, "Le Paris de Robert Doisneau", was made in 1973. Doisneau has been the subject of major retrospectives at the Bibliotecque Nationale in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and the Witkin Gallery in New York City.
Later Years
Doisneau was in many ways a shy and unassuming man, rather like his photography. He lived in the Paris suburb of Montrouge. He died in 1994.

Leica S2

2011-01-12T23:45:00.001+02:00

Cu modelul S2, Leica stabileste un nou standard in segmentul aparatelor foto profesionale, aducand un senzor cu dimensiuni apropiate formatului mediu intr-un corp de dimensiunile unui DSLR. Leica S2 are un senzor CCD de mari dimensiuni 30x45mm (fiind cu 56% mai mare decat un senzor full frame) si o rezolutie de 37.5 megapixeli.

Citate Brassai

2010-12-22T13:20:00.004+02:00

„Nu inventez nimic, imaginez totul”
„Documentez cu fotografia, acest mijloc de exprimare pe care l-am ales pentru că e cel mai apropiat de realitate”
"There are many photographs which are full of life but which are confusing and difficult to remember. It is the force of an image which matters."
"We should try, without creasing to tear ourselves constantly by leaving our subjects and even photography itself from time to time, in order that we may come back to them with reawakened zest, with the virginal eye. That is the most precious thing we can possess".