Ryan McGinley (born 1977, 17th of October) is an artist photographer from New York City whose works are somewhat similar to certain confessional photographers like Nan Goldin, Larry Clark, and Wolfgang Tillmans.

His subjects include mostly color images of friends and lovers, as well as youth more so on the ‘fringes’ of society (e.g., skateboarders, graffiti writers, etc.)

As of 2006, his works have been seen in many galleries and museums. At 24 he was the youngest artist to have a solo show in New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. He has also had solo shows at New York’s PS1 and in Spain at the MUSAC in Leon. He is represented by Team Gallery in New York.

His apartment, at one point, had its walls covered with Polaroid pictures of everyone who had ever visited him.

In 2007 he was awarded the Young Photographer Infinity award by the International Center for Photography.

In 2008, the Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós used one of McGinley’s images for their fifth album Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust. The video for the first track from the album, “Gobbledigook”, is also inspired by his work.

more work +

Nick Veasey uses x-ray technology to create mesmerizing and intriguing art.

In a world obsessed with superficial appearance it is a refreshing change to be able to look beyond the surface.

Nick Veasey is an award-winning photographer, who works with clients from all over the world. His studio is a converted RADAR station on a hill in Kent. Nick has appeared on television in the UK and the USA (on the “Today” show). His x-ray photography has been featured in newspapers around the world, including the Daily Mail and the Daily Record in the UK, the New York Daily News in the USA, and the Adelaide Advertiser and the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia. His work has also been published in the Creative Review, Professional Photographer, Photo Magazine, Time and the British Journal of Photography. He lives in Kent.

Nick uses a variety of specialised imaging equipment to create images that see within. Often collaborating with scientists and boffins, he has built a strong body of work that enables the viewer to appreciate what goes on underneath the surface. The subject matter of these enlightening images is entertaining and wide ranging. X-rays are primarily used for diagnostic radiography and crystallography; they are a form of ionizing radiation and as such can be dangerous.Veasey works in a lead-lined studio which is locked, with him on the outside, during the exposure of the images. Geiger counters are used to ensure safety. Once the x-ray has been exposed on to film it is then scanned at ultra high resolution with special scanning equipment tailored for the process. These digital images are then composed and embellished on computer. The whole process can take weeks, or even months. Often improvising and experimenting, Nick Veasey has created images of the everyday and the bizarre. The contrasting influences of inner strength and outer beauty that these pictures highlight remind us all not to judge by outward appearances.

more work +
(more…)

Gibson is a master of dramatic understatement. His high-contrast pictures - usually focusing on one geometric element (the corner of a room) or a single human gesture (the curve of a hand) - form a kind of dream-narrative when gathered together. Or, as Gibson puts it: ‘I embrace the abstract in photography and exist on a few bits of order extracted from the chaos of reality’.

Gibson grew up in Hollywood, a child of divorce. After being thrown out of the house and into the military at 16, he proceeded to flunk out of the Navy’s photography school; he was allowed to return only after he promised to clean the latrine for six weeks. That was the end of his formal training in photography. He eventually apprenticed with Dorothea Lange and Robert Frank, yet, for all his contact with the giants of American documentary and his own life as a potential subject of their hardscrabble portraits, Gibson’s own photos are utterly sedate: formal studies of light and shadow, images that calmly explore a singular subject or theme, like a face, vase, or salt shaker, or the curves of light and shadow on the female body. His work has far more in common with that of Harry Callahan and other American formalist-diarists than of the snapshot-aesthetic practitioners of his generation.

Of course, it could be that because of his own difficult path to life as an artist, Gibson’s interests lie elsewhere - in the clinical, calming realm of the camera’s ability not to capture life, but to create a life of its own. Gibson has compared his photographs to objects, a melding of light and time to make not just a reproduction of life, but something new - an image made palpable, and abstraction made real. In his San Francisco (1960), the singular image of an old man’s - or old woman’s - ghostly white hand, holding a wooden cane against a brick wall, is at once rooted in reality and cut loose from it. Three of the most solid elements described in literature and art - flesh, bricks, wood - are temporarily loosed from reality by the abstracting influence of bright light and black shadow. Mediterranean light, the films of Ingmar Bergman, conceptual and minimal art, and especially the concrete instability of early Surrealism all influence Gibson’s work.

Much of Gibson’s photography can be found in his many books, most published by his own Lustrum Press, founded in 1969. One of his pieces ‘Overtones’ (1997), based on his theory that two individual images, when seen side by side, combine to form a third image, or ‘overtone’ in the viewer’s mind.

more work +

The man dubbed the “Grand Seigneur of the Hollywood Portrait,” was born in Covington, KY, across the river from Cincinnati, in 1904.

By the time he was eight, young George Hurrell had developed an interest in painting and drawing. He fell into photography almost by accident, originally learning how to use a camera so that he could photograph his paintings.

After studying at the Art Institute of Chicago, Hurrell was commissioned to photograph paintings and painters in Laguna Beach, CA, art colony in 1925, prompting Hurrell move west to continue his art studies. Before long, however, taking pictures took the place of painting pictures as he found more work shooting portraits.

One of Hurrell’s first subjects was the famed aviatrix Poncho Barnes. Through her, he met silent-screen star Ramon Novarro, who commissioned a series of portraits from Hurrell. Thrilled with the results, Novarro showed off his new stills to co-workers at MGM, where they caught the eye of leading lady Norma Shearer. Shearer was desperate to convince her husband, MGM production chief Irving G. Thalberg that she could generate enough sex appeal to play the lead in The Divorcée. She hired Hurrell to take some sizzling photos that landed her the role. Thalberg and Shearer were so impressed with Hurrell’s work that he was hired as head of the MGM portrait gallery in 1930.

Hurrell in the studioFor the next two years, Hurrell photographed every star at M-G-M, from Joan Crawford, Clark Gable and Greta Garbo to Wallace Beery and Marie Dressler. His work set a new standard for Hollywood portraits. It even inspired a new name for the genre - glamour photography.

After a disagreement with M-G-M publicity head Howard Strickling, Hurrell left to set up his own studio on Sunset Boulevard. The stars flocked to Hurrell for portraits.

It was the movies that remained Hurrell’s first love. After six years, he moved to Warner Bros., helping build the careers of such stars as Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn and James Cagney. Hurrell moved to Columbia, where he shaped Rita Hayworth’s image.

During WW2 after he served in with the First Motion Picture Unit of the U.S. Army Air Force, he shot training films and photographed generals at the Pentagon. After the war, Hurrell returned to Hollywood, but soon found glamour photography had fallen out of fashion. He relocated to New York and continued shooting advertising and fashion layouts through the 50’s.

The master in FRONT of the camera!In 1952, Hurrell returned to Hollywood and started a television production company with his wife, Phyllis. It was located on the Disney lot. After two years, he returned to New York. He settled in Southern California permanently in 1956, eventually moving back into the film industry as a unit still man.

Beginning in 1965 with an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern-art his work has been showcased at museums throughout the world. One of the first books published “The Hurrell Style” by John Day & Company, in 1976, was followed by other commemorative books and special-edition prints of his work. It was during these years that he shot stars like Liza Minelli, Paul Newman, and Robert Redford. Even after his retirement in 1976, he continued to shoot portraits, adding to his portfolio such representatives of the new Hollywood as Sharon Stone, Brooke Shields and John Travolta.

Among his last assignments were photographing Warren Beatty and Annette Benning for Bugsy, Natalie Cole for the best-selling “Unforgettable” album and a fashion layout with Jennifer Flavin, his last photographic subject.

George Hurrell died of cancer in 1992.

more work +

more work + 

Duret-Lutz:
“All these pictures are 360°x180° panoramas projected to look like small planets.

To build a 360°x180° panorama you have to take pictures on all directions, but not only on the horizon. You should also shoot the sky (zenith) and the ground (nadir). A missing zenith is not important if you only plan to build a planet.

This initial panorama is built from many individual pictures with the following tools:
* autopano-sift to create control points,
* hugin to figure out, from the control points, how each picture should be distorted,
* enblend, to stitch the distorted pictures together.

Rob Park’s tutorial about the above tools really helped me when I started making panoramas (I have a separate set for “straighter” panoramas). Unfortunately Rob has removed this tutorial from his site. You can still read the text, without the pictures, at webarchive, however today it might be better to start from the list of Hugin tutorials.

Converting the panorma into a planet can be done in different ways:
* Dirk Paessler posted a tutorial showing how you can use the “polar coordinates” filter of your photo editor (The Gimp has one)
* Sébastien Perez-Duarte (Seb Przd on Flickr) explored stereographic projections instead, and I find it usually looks far better. Consequently, that’s what I’ve been using too. This can be achieved with the mathmap plug-in for The Gimp. (Do not use the “stereographic projection” that comes with mathmap, it doesn’t do what you want. Just work from this formula.) Mathmap has a group on flickr where you can ask your questions.
If you can’t stand maths, or can’t use mathmap, you can also achieve the stereographic projection using hugin. Please refer to Manu’s explanations.

While I’m now using a DSLR on tripod with a panoramic head, my first planets were shot handheld with a point-and-shoot camera.

I have been shooting handheld until 2006-11-12, at which point I bought a simple tripod without panoramic head. Even though the tripod won’t rotate the camera around its nodal point, it still helps to reduce the errors. My brother then offered me a panoramic head which I’ve been using since 2007-01-01: no more parallax errors.

The first 48 planets (shot and uploaded before 2007-02-17) were all shot with my
Sony DSC-T5 point-and-shoot camera. The problem of this camera is that there is no way to lock the exposure, so the 50+ shots it takes to make a panorama are all exposed differently. At some point, Seb Przd pointed me to PTblender as a way to adjust the color of a picture to match its neighbor. Using PTblender to color correct an entire panorama is difficult as time consuming (see this comment for a description of my technique, this comments for an interesting side-effect, and this picture for some time estimation). I then bought a DSLR (Pentax K10D), so it’s likely that all panoramas taken after 2007-02-17 will be shot with it. I have been using the K10D kit’s 18-55mm lens until 2007-04-07, I’m now using a Pentax 10-17mm fisheye lens.

There is a last tool I’d like to mention here: I use exiv2 to copy the EXIF data from one of the shot into the final panorama. This way flickr knows when the panorama was taken, and people can look at it if they want.”

more work +

more work + 

Called “a poet of the ordinary” by the Los Angeles Times, Mr. Carter’s haunting, enigmatic photographs have been widely exhibited in Europe, The U.S., and Latin America. They are included in numerous permanent collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the George Eastman House; the Museum of Fine Arts of Houston; and the Wittliff Collection of Southwestern and Mexican Photography at Southwest Texas State University.

From an Essay written by Bill Wittliff:
Among his earliest memories is waking in the middle of the night from a pallet on the floor to see a small orange safelight above the kitchen sink where his mother stands. He steps over beside her then raises himself on tiptoes to watch in wide-eyed wonder as one of her photographic images slowly comes up in the developer. It is magic, indeed it is a miracle – and to this day my friend Keith Carter has never gotten over it.

His father had deserted when Keith was still in pre-school. The Episcopal Church gave his mom enough money to keep her little family intact until she could get back on her feet. Earlier, before marriage, she had made a bit of a living photographing college and sorority girls in the Midwest. Photography was essentially the only skill she knew that might put bread on the table for her daughter and two young sons, so she picked up her camera again and opened a small studio on Calder Avenue, there in Beaumont. Her forte was children. She’d run $5.95 specials on the weekends, sometimes photographing as many as sixty kids in a single day, then stay up night after night making the 5×7 black and white prints in the kitchen sink. It was tough going, but she never complained, never once uttered a bitter word against her former husband for leaving them in this fix. Whatever void his absence left in his children’s lives she filled as best she could.

The little studio prospered. In time, Keith – then half-heartedly limping toward, of all things, a business degree at the local college – became his mom’s part-time framer. One day he chanced upon a photograph she made of a little girl wearing a straw hat and holding a basket of kittens. It was a cliche of course, but it stopped him in his tracks. He got down on one knee for a better look. It was not so much the picture itself that had grabbed him, but rather the light. The image was backlit and everything in it was absolutely rimmed in light. To Keith it seemed everything was radiating and glowing from within. It was a small epiphany: he had never before realized light – simple everyday light right out of the sky – could be so stunningly, so supremely beautiful.
(more…)

Tina Modotti was a remarkable woman and an outstanding photographer whose legendary beauty and relationships with famous men have until now eclipsed a life integrally linked to the most important artistic, political and historical developments of our century.

In 1913 Tina Modotti left her native Italy for San Francisco, becoming a star of the local Italian theatre before marrying the romantic poet-painter Roubaix de I’Abrie Richey. By 1920, she had embarked on a Hollywood film career and immersed herself in bohemian Los Angeles, beginning an intense relationship with the respected American photographer, Edward Weston. On a trip to Mexico in 1922 to bury her husband, she met the Mexican muralists and became enthralled with the burgeoning cultural renaissance there. Increasingly dissatisfied with the film world, she persuaded Weston to teach her photography and move with her to Mexico. Her Mexico City homes became renowned gathering places for artists, writers and radicals, where Diego Rivera courted Frida Kahlo. Turning her camera to record Mexico in its most vibrant years, her photographs achieve a striking synthesis of artistic form and social content. Her contact with Mexico’s muralists including a brief affair with Rivera, led to her involvement in radical politics.

In 1929, she was framed for the murder of her Cuban lover, gunned down at her side on a Mexico City street. A scapegoat of government repression, she was publicly slandered in a sensational trial before being acquitted. Expelled from Mexico in 1930, she went to Berlin and then to the Soviet Union, where she abandoned photography for a political activism that brought her into contact with Sergei Eisenstein, Alexandra Kollontaii, La Pasionaria, Ernest Hemingway and Robert Capa. Returning to Mexico incognito in 1939, she died three years later, a lonely - and controversial - death.

website +

It all started with a college graduate travelling to Europe looking to experience a part of the world that he had never seen. “I had never really shot with an SLR before.” He borrowed a camera from his father and went to Europe with four rolls of color negative and one roll of black and white film. “I had never travelled before and this is what I thought you were supposed to do; See the sites and capture the images. Put that crosshair in the middle, press the button, and advance the film.”

After travelling around Europe for a while, Colin’s grandmother became upset that he hadn’t yet visited his homeland of Northern Ireland, so he booked a ferry trip to Belfast. “I remember showing up to the Europa Hotel and was shocked to see that it was surrounded by walls and barbed wire, and that I had to go through security to get in. I had no idea, but at that period in time the Europa Hotel was the most bombed hotel in Europe.”

At the end of his stay in Belfast, Colin and his friend were on their way to the train station, heading for their next destination. As they were walking, his friend was carrying a guitar which prompted a group of British soldiers to approach them. “One of the soldiers quickly jumped out of the back of their truck, lifted his rifle and aimed it at us. My friend quickly ran out of the way, but my first reaction was to lift my camera and point it back at the soldier. The soldier was looking through his scope and I was looking through my viewfinder, and I snapped the shot.” The unfortunate part was that when Colin returned home and developed the film, absolutely nothing was there. The film had never advanced to the first frame.

Colin Finlay Quote But this entire experience, in conjunction with a timely viewing of the blockbuster movie Dances with Wolves in which Kevin Costner tells the stories of the native Indians through his journals and writings, is what shaped Colin’s career and propelled him into the world of documentary photography. “It was like a lightning bolt went off in my head. I had always thought I was going to become a teacher, and was actually in the process of getting my masters when I decided that I wanted my life and career to be about telling the stories of people.” Colin had been looking for what set him on fire, and he had finally found it. “Giving people the ability to speak through my camera is what charges me.”

Colin decided to go back to Belfast so he could capture the stories of the lives and experiences of the people living there. This time he was armed with an old Canon SLR and a 100mm lens. He went back to the Hotel Europa and spent a lot of time on Falls Road where most of the turmoil had taken place. “While I was there, I was adopted by some street urchins and they took me around and helped me survive among the locals.” Unfortunately, upon his return and after developing the images from this trip, Colin was completely disappointed with his results. “I was still learning about my equipment and what I needed to do technically to achieve the results I was looking for.” He returned to Belfast again, this time with a 24mm lens on his Canon body and felt now that he had stepped into the space, the wide angle view, from which the majority of his images would soon be made.
(more…)

website +

more work +

Creating a genre unique within the photo world, the ParkeHarrisons construct fantasies in the guise of environmental performances for their Everyman – a man dressed in a black suit and starched white shirt – who interacts with the earths landscape. Tapping into their surreal imagination, the artists combine elaborate sets (which can take up to – months to construct) and an impeccable sense of wit and irony, to address issues about the earth and mankind’s responsibility to heal the damage he has done to its landscape.

Consistently dressed in a his trademark outfit, this Everyman is earth’s protector, healer and communicator, using low-tech implements as his aid. This Everyman then takes shape as fabricated props for theatrical performances, which are staged to be photographed. Like a production reserved for the cinema, the ParkeHarrison invent their settings, which tend to look more like scenes from Metropolis or Blade Runner rather than the family photo album.

Biography
The ParkeHarrisons received a Guggenheim Fellow in 1999, an Artist Grant in Photography from the Massachusetts Cultural Council in 2001 and 1996, among other awards. Their monograph, The Architect’s Brother, was published by Twin Palms Twelve Trees Press in 2000 with a second edition in 2002. Their works are included in numerous collections including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC), Museum of Fine Arts (Houston) and the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House.

Statement
“I want to make images that have open, narrative qualities, enough to suggest ideas about human limits. I want there to be a combination of the past juxtaposed with the modern. I use nature to symbolize the search, saving a tree, watering the earth. In this fabricated world, strange clouds of smog float by; there are holes in the sky. These mythic images mirror our world, where nature is domesticated, controlled, and destroyed.”

Through his photographs, Lartigue was a youthful witness to these events. In a larger sense, Lartigue provided a vivid, candid portrait of life during the pre-war Belle Époque in France - on its boulevards and country lanes, joyfully at play, parading its latest fashions, and fearlessly launching itself into the skies.

Jacques-Henri Lartigue (1894-1986) created an impressive body of photographs throughout his lifetime; however he, he took many of his most famous pictures during his childhood. Forty of these extraordinary photographs and stereographs are the focus of this exhibition. Since Lartigue’s “discovery” in 1964 and his first major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, this is the first time that such a large group of Lartigue’s childhood photographs has been the focus of an exhibition in the United States.

Together, these photographs offer an exuberant portrait of a remarkable child artist. Lartigue’s talents developed quickly after he received his first camera for his seventh birthday. After this, it seems, he was rarely without a camera, and he immediately began experimenting with this exciting new medium. Lartigue used his camera to document the idyllic moments of family and friends at leisure and play. But he was also fascinated by the activities of inventors, scientists and dare-devils of every kind, who were busily creating the thrilling technologies (especially the airplane and automobile) that would revolutionize life in the twentieth century.

An unfailingly curious amateur, he tried out all the available techniques, tirelessly recording the fleeting moments and meticulously arranging his several thousand images in large albums. However, it would seem that photography was not his true vocation. In 1915 he attended the Académie Jullian: painting was to remain his professional activity and from 1922 onwards he exhibited in the salons of Paris and southern France.

His acquaintances in the world of the arts included Sacha Guitry and Yvonne Printemps, Kees van Dongen, Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, while his passion for movies saw him work as still photographer with Jacques Feyder, Abel Gance, Robert Bresson, François Truffaut and Federico Fellini.

Although Lartigue occasionally sold his pictures to the press and exhibited at the Galerie d’Orsay alongside Brassaï, Man Ray and Doisneau, his reputation as a photographer was not truly established until he was 69, with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the publication of a portfolio in Life. He now added his father’s first name to his own surname, becoming Jacques Henri Lartigue. Worldwide fame came three years later with his first book, The Family Album, followed in 1970, by Diary of a Century, conceived by Richard Avedon. In 1975 he had his first French retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. For the rest of his life, Lartigue was busy answering commissions from fashion and decoration magazines.

more work +

The Czech photographer Frantisek Drtikol (1883-1961) began his career when Prague Symbolism and “Art Nouveau” still held sway. The influence of these movements is evident in his early nude photographs, which convey a sense of alienation in their painterly quality. In the twenties and early thirties Drtikol reshaped the genre of classical nude photography by synthesizing into a new aesthetic aspects from silent film, avantgarde art, expressive dance and Art Deco design.

After his student years in the artistically fertile Munich of the turn of the century, after his apprenticeship and military service, he opened his own photographic studio in Prague, which became one of the most successful in Europe of the twenties. That his fame later suffered an almost total eclipse is only partly explained by the historical circumstances of the time, for in the early thirties Drtikol gave up photography, sold his studio, valuable glass pates and negatives, to devote himself to painting and mysticism in the seclusion of a hermit’s life.

He is especially known for his characteristically epic photographs, often nudes and portraits.In 1919 he created a studio on the fourth floor of one of Prague’s remarkable buildings, a Baroque corner house at 9 Vodi?kova, now demolished. Eventually, he gave up photographing models completely. Instead he began using paper cut-outs in a period he called “photopurism”. These photographs resembled silhouettes of the human form. Later he gave up photography and concentrated on painting.

Even so, Drtikol’s talent as a photographer of portraits is just one part of the reason why his work is so celebrated today. His artistic photographs were more daring: pushing the boundaries of the avant garde, first, by concentrating on more and more expressive nudes, then, eventually, eliminating the live model entirely. Drtikol embraced coming geometric ideals of the Art Deco movement, and began using cut-outs and softness of lighting or contrast to create dream-like compositions. Compositions that - at times - seemed to express different modes of being, even, different planes.
But, the human form remained central - at first - the human expression, the human face. From portraits to the first nudes returning his gaze; Drtikol wrote:

“The eye is a great, beautiful chapter. And one that you never finish reading. I find that its range of expression keeps expanding, depending on how the sharpness of my own eye improves and how my empathy for other people deepens. The glint of an eye… A model once came to me: a gaunt, plain face, a thin body, but uncommonly pretty eyes - large and sad. I would have liked to place those eyes somewhere in a void, so they could live a completely separate life, so they could live through their sad beauty.”
One of the genuine pleasures in seeing a retrospective of Drtikol’s work, then, is the comparison between the real and the abstract side by side: prints of live models, posing coyly for the camera, in juxtaposition with bodies in motion: fleeting, elongated shapes that one realises with a jolt are just shapes stretched across an unreal span of space - a shadow caught in a sliver of light.

more work +
(more…)

One of the great ironies of globalization is that as people become more connected to technology–email, cell phones, Ipods–they often become less connected to one another.

This growing rift in the social fabric has been duly noted by Croatia’s Stanko Abadzic, whose deeply humanistic photographs resonate with wistful regard for a time when people were in tune with each other spiritually and emotionally rather than electronically. This accounts for the seemingly “old- fashioned” aesthetic of his images, many of which, with their geometric composition, sensual atmosphere and telling detail, look as if they could have been made in the 1940s or earlier.

The slightly surreal “Legs, Opatija,” for example, which playfully skirts the border between reality and fantasy, would not look out of place among the work of the pioneering French photojournalists Abadzic admires. A shared affinity for the likes of Andre Kertesz and Willy Ronis notwithstanding, Abadzic’s photographs convey a very contemporary message.

“The faster we live, the less emotion is left in the world. The slower we live, the deeper we feel the world around us,” he says. “I am not against globalization in general, but I am against the physical and spiritual uniformity of cities and towns dominated by multinational corporations. Globalization turns us into passive consumers. It is not interested in our creativity or our individuality. We lose our happiness when we lose our sense of identity.”

Having been compelled to change countries several times during his life while striving to preserve his spiritual identity helps explain the sense of connection Abadzic celebrates in photographs like “A Circle.” Taken during a troubled transitional period in Berlin, the image elegantly evokes a spirit of closeness and cooperation. Yet the modernist juxtaposition of shadow and light–Abadzic’s trademark–balances the mood and prevents the image from tipping over into sentimentality.

more work +

more work +

(more…)

Hippolyte Arnoux (1860 - c. 1890) was a French photographer and publisher. During the 1860s, he documented the excavation of the Suez Canal and published the resulting photographs as Album du Canal de Suez. At the same time, he occasionally worked with the Port Said photographic studio, Adelphoi Zangaki. In the late 1860s, Arnoux was a partner of Antonio Beato.

Few details of his life are known beyond what can be deduced from his photographs. Like the Zangaki brothers, with whom he at one time worked, he was based in Port Said, and was therefore well-placed to document the building of the Suez Canal, the work for which he is perhaps best remembered. He also produced views of the ancient monuments of Egypt (the Sphinx, the Pyramid), as well as the important buildings of Cairo (the Tombs of the Caliphs, the Citadel) and local types (the Arabian Knife Grinder, the Water Carrier, the Arabian Barber). It is thought that he also took photographs in Aden, Jerusalem, Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia, though he is known to have approached at least one other photographer in the Middle East with a view to exchanging negatives.

Louise was a photographer, known primarily for her work for Harper’s Bazaar with fashion editor Diana Vreeland.

Born to Norwegian parents, Dahl-Wolfe was known for taking photographs outdoors, with natural light in distant locations from South America to Africa in what became known as “environmental” fashion photography. She married sculptor Meyer Wolfe, who constructed the backgrounds of many of her photos.

She preferred portraiture to fashion photography. Notable portraits include: Mae West, Cecil Beaton, Eudora Welty, W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Orson Welles, Carson McCullers, Edward Hopper, Colette and Josephine Baker. She is known for having “discovered” a teenage Lauren Bacall. She was a great influence on photographers Irving Penn and Richard Avedon. One of her assistants was Milton H. Greene.

more work +

more work +

“I believe that the camera is a medium of light, that one actually paints with light. In using the spotlights with reflecting lights, I could control the quality of the forms revealed to build a composition. Photography, to my mind, is not a fine art. It is splendid for recording a period of time, but it has definite limitations, and the photographer certainly hasn’t the freedom of the painter. One can work with taste and emotion and create an exciting arrangement of significant form, a meaningful photograph, but a painter has the advantage of putting something in the picture that isn’t there or taking something out that is there. I think this makes painting a more creative medium.” — Louise Dahl-Wolf, 1984
(more…)

Philip-Lorca diCorcia (b. 1951, Hartford, Conn.) studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and received his MFA in Photography from Yale University in 1979.

DiCorcia is often acknowledged as one of the most influential photographers of his generation, and his work is frequently shown alongside that of his peers in exhibitions addressing our cultural zeitgeist. At the beginning of his career in the late 1970s, diCorcia situated his friends and family within fictional interior tableaus. He later shifted his attention outward, photographing strangers in urban spaces — Berlin, Calcutta, Hollywood, New York, Rome, Tokyo — and infused the pictures with supplementary lighting to achieve a sense of heightened drama. Each of his series, “Hustlers,” “Streetwork,” “Heads,” “A Storybook Life,” and “Lucky Thirteen,” can be considered progressive explorations of diCorcia’s formal and conceptual fields of interest.

DiCorcia received his first solo show in 1985 and has been featured in one-person exhibitions worldwide, including those at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre National de la Photographie, Paris; the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Art Space Ginza, Toyko; and the Sprengel Museum, Hannover. Exhibited in group shows throughout the United States and Europe since 1977, diCorcia’s work was included in the traveling exhibition “Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort,” organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1991), prior to being given a solo show there (“Philip-Lorca diCorcia: Strangers,” 1993). His work was featured in the 1997 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and in “Cruel and Tender” at the Tate Modern, London (2003), and has also been exhibited in Essen, Salamanca, and Stockholm. DiCorcia’s work was included in “Fashioning Fiction in Photography Since 1990” (2004) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His most recent series was seen in the Carnegie Museum of Art’s 54th Carnegie International exhibition in Pittsburgh.

DiCorcia has received numerous awards and honors throughout his career, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2001, diCorcia won the Infinity Award for Applied Photography from the International Center of Photography in New York.

DiCorcia’s work can be found in myriad public and private art collections both here and abroad, such as the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museo Nacional Centro de Art Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn.

DiCorcia lives and works in New York City.

more work +

Greg Girard, based in Shanghai, is a Canadian photographer recording the changes taking place in China and across Asia for leading editorial and corporate clients.

Between 1987 and 1997 he established himself as a photographer based in Hong Kong, represented by Contact Press Images (NY), from where he photographed on assignment across Asia. In 1993 he published the book “City of Darkness”, a document of the final years of the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong, in collaboration with Ian Lambot.

In 2002 he launched the picture agency documentCHINA, in collaboration with Fritz Hoffmann, an online archive specializing in contemporary photography from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Editorial Clients:
Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Businessweek, Forbes, Elle, Figaro, Paris Match, Stern, Der Spiegel, NY Times Magazine, and other magazines and newspapers worldwide.

website +

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cavendish, Vermont, 1981 - After eight years of exile from his beloved Russia, the reclusive Nobel-prize winning author and historian told me that the air was free in America when I asked him what he like about his adopted country.

on Alexandr Solzhenitsyn +

Harry Benson was born in Glasgow, Scotland. He started his career as a wedding photographer, but went on to become a renowned photo-journalist.

more work by Harry Benson +

Hollywood photography by Harry +

Photojournalism is the worst it’s ever been. Nobody is doing anything. Today all the photographers are making setup shots, where you go in to shoot someone with a couple of assistants and a few stylists. Everyone does it. I do it. It’s the ValueJet of photojournalism -stuck in the mud. In the end, those kinds of portraits mean nothing. They don’t convey any information. The idea in that kind of photography is to make a picture the subject will like. That’s not journalism. -Harry Benson, On the question: Is Photojournalism dead? (september/october 1996), “American Photo”

ON THE ROAD WITH HARRY BENSON

Photojournalism is the worst it’s ever been. Nobody is doing anything. Today all the photographers are making setup shots, where you go in to shoot someone with a couple of assistants and a few stylists. Everyone does it. I do it. It’s the ValueJet of photojournalism -stuck in the mud. In the end, those kinds of portraits mean nothing. They don’t convey any information. The idea in that kind of photography is to make a picture the subject will like. That’s not journalism. -Harry Benson, On the question: Is Photojournalism dead? (september/october 1996), “American Photo”

ON THE ROAD WITH HARRY BENSON

He was just steps from Bobby Kennedy the night the senator was shot, steps from Coretta Scott King at her husband’s funeral, steps from Richard Nixon the day the president resigned in disgrace. He was on hand for the Freedom March through Mississippi, the Watts riots, the I.R.A. hunger strikes, the fall of Czechoslovakia and Romania and the Berlin Wall. He was invited by Jackie Kennedy to shoot her daughter Caroline’s wedding (to Edwin Schlossberg), invited into Michael Jackson’s bedroom (to take baby pictures of Jackson’s son Prince), invited into Elizabeth Taylor’s hospital suite (to photograph the star, bald as a tulip bulb, after brain surgery).

Flip through the new book Harry Benson: Fifty Years in Pictures (Abrams) and one gets the eerie impression that for half a century he has been nothing less than photojournalism’s Zelig–the man who happens to materialize, with a camera, whenever history envelops the high and mighty. He covered every president since Eisenhower, the first US casualty in Bosnia, firefights in Kosovo, the pall of smoke above the Twin Towers’ wreckage on September 11, 2001. Before there was a 24-hour news cycle, before there was a CNN or a FOX, there was The Fox, a lone lensman from Scotland with a hungry eye trained upon the world’s public prey.

hb02b.jpg

“[I remember Harry] when the Beatles first came to this country [in 1964],” recalls photographer Bill Eppridge, in a passage from John Loengard’s What They Saw, an exhaustive oral history of the exploits of LIFE magazine’s staff photographers. “I [was in the press pool] at J.F.K. [airport, and] introduced myself to the photographer next to me. He was Eddie Adams from the Associated Press. I said, ‘If you had your choice, what position would you like to have?’ We both agreed we would want to be right behind the Beatles as they came out of the plane, looking down, across them, over this whole huge mob.

“The plane pulls up to the ramp,” Eppridge continues, “and the door opens. A Pan Am stewardess comes off, and out come the four Beatles. Then this character comes out right behind them, and he starts posing them. Eddie and I looked at each other and said, ‘Who is that?’ We had no idea. It was Harry Benson’s first trip to the United States. It’s been going on like that for years. Every time you’d know what the best spot is, who shows up in that spot? Harry Benson.” In fact, Harry’s images of Beatle George Harrison, who succumbed to cancer on November 30, appear in the tribute sections of the new issues of Rolling Stone, Time and Newsweek.

Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to travel the world with Harry Benson. On assignment for LIFE and VANITY FAIR, we have covered conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Poland and Oman, terrorism in Kuwait, Israel and the West Bank. We’ve wrangled exclusives with our share of notables (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Bill Clinton), scoundrels (CIA double-agent Aldrich Ames, terror-cleric Omar Abdul Rahman) and embattled patriots (TWA hostage Peter Hill, Iran-contra pin-up Oliver North). We’ve gone from the Beatles’ London archives to Michael Jackson’s Neverland, from drug dens in Brooklyn to the Milwaukee Brewers’ dressing room, from a shock trauma unit in Baltimore to the smoldering ruins of Ground Zero. Now, as his stunning new book gets rivulets of ink and accolade, it’s time to pull back the first-class curtain. Along with all those frequent-flier miles, I have managed to accumulate a primer of sorts–a collection of wise, brogue-borne pearls that might be called Harry Benson’s Rules of the Road.

RULE # 1: Never to get too comfortable on a story. No matter how bleak things seem, they can always get worse.

(more…)

Larry Burrows was a photographer best known for his pictures of the American involvement in the Vietnam War.

Burrows was born in London in 1926. He left school at age 16 and took a job in Life magazine’s London bureau. Burrows printed photographs for Life. Some accounts blame Burrows for melting photographer Robert Capa’s D-Day pictures in the drying cabinet.

Burrows went on to become a photographer and he photographed the war in Vietnam from 1962 until his death in 1971. Burrows died in a helicopter crash with fellow photojournalists Henri Huet, Kent Potter and Keisaburo Shimamoto. In 2002, Burrows’ posthumous book Vietnam was awarded the Prix Nadar award.

Burrows’ last assignment +

POW Network +

LIFE Magazine tribute +

Heroin Addict, The Ninth Floor

Jessica is a graduate of the International Center of Photography’s Program in Documentary Photography and Photojournalism. Her work has appeared in Aperture, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Time, Fortune, New York Magazine and Fader. For her work on heroin addicts in the Flatiron district she was awarded the F Award for Concerned Photography from Forma and Fabrica, the Inge Morath Award from Magnum, the Marty Forsher Fellowship for Documentary Photography from PDN and was awarded the Joror’s Choice Award for the Project Competition from the Santa Fe Center for Photography. Prior to pursuing documentary photography Jessica worked as a public school teacher in Brooklyn, New York. Jessica is based in Brooklyn an is currently working on her first book.

Jessica Dimmick website +

The photo of the ‘Marlboro Man’ in Fallujah became a symbol of the Iraq conflict when it ran in newspapers across America in 2004. Los Angeles Times photo by Luis Sinco via Associated Press.

mediastorm +

more +

Diana Walker grew up in Washington, D.C., and began covering the White House as a freelance photographer for newspapers and magazines in the mid-1970s. She started working for Time magazine and eventually photographed White House life from the Ford to Clinton administrations. In 1992, Walker and Time were granted occasional behind-the-scenes access to life in the White House; this special relationship lasted through the last day of the Clinton administration.

more work +

Why is hemispheric dominance important and what does it have to do with photography? According to what we know about the brain through psychology and neuroscience, the right side of the brain is used for imagination, perception of symbols and images, philosophical thinking, spatial perception and emotion. The left side of the brain is detail-oriented, uses logic, words, language and facts, comprehends order, perceives patterns and is reality-based. Hemispheric dominance accounts for differences in the way we perceive the outer world as well as our inner world of perceptions, and even determines the innate talents we possess. An engineer more likely than not is a left-brain-dominant individual. A poet, on the other hand, may predictably be viewing the world from the right side of the brain.

We photographers are lucky to have high demands for engagement of both sides of our brains. Visual images are the domain of the right side of the brain, but the technical knowledge it takes to operate a camera is left-brain stuff. The way the brain works affects the way the photographer perceives, evaluates, composes, manipulates and captures an image. Beyond the creation of the image in print, the viewer is just as responsible for the way the resulting photograph is seen. In other words, not only is the technical or artistic skill possessed by the photographer responsible for the resulting image, but another whole dimension is added by how the viewer sees it. There are at least three levels of reality working here: the physical object, the unique perception and technical skill of the photographer, and the unique perception by the viewer. For this reason, photography is known as a highly subjective medium.

I found an interesting post on Photo.net by amateur photographer Albert Smith called “No words: Right-Brain / Left-Brain Photography” that gives examples of right- vs. left-brain photographs. Right-brain-dominant photographers produce images from instinct, he says, and for left brainers, precision is everything. You can see the difference illustrated by the two photos on either side of this paragraph. The photo above of Halloween in San Francisco’s Castro District by Sal Ortega is a spontaneous, symbolic, unstudied shot of a fleeting moment with almost palpable emotional content. It is definitely a right-brain image. Below, Albert Smith’s photo of a Korean couple walking across a bridge has a cool, silent, studied, and precise quality to it, and suggests a concentrated left-brained evaluation before he calmly released the shutter of his Nikon FE-2 using a 35mm Nikkor lens at just the right moment. Click on both the photos for a discussion of right-brain, left-brain photography.

see the test for right brain left brain here  +

We can begin to understand how two people can perceive the exact same thing in an entirely different way. Put 10 people in a room and show them the same image, and likely there will be as many differing opinions about the image as there are participants. Truly remarkable achievements result when a photographic work is created from and speaks to both sides of the brain because it can fully and powerfully engage the viewer. This may be true in all things and is what it means to capture hearts and minds, given that the “heart” refers to the irrational, more emotional right hemisphere in brain function and the “mind” refers to the more rational, analytical left. This is not to say that great, phenomenal work cannot be created from only one perspective – in fact, some of the greatest of all may be one, to the exclusion of the other. The fact that most of us flip-flop back and forth between the two and that in fact we can control to a degree that shift means that we may all have the potential to expand our perception and engagement and even perceptual balance with the visual world.

This next item is just for fun, and to lead you to think about a related subject near and dear to visual, neuro, and perceptual sciences: optical illusions. The following optical illusion is entirely different from the illusion of the direction of the spinning lady, though it is also animated and requires some concentration on the part of the viewer. The short video that will appear by clicking on the image plays for a little over two minutes. The viewer is instructed to stare at the center of the image until the clip is finished, and then to look away at anything, such as the table beside your computer. The result is named in the title, “Natural Hallucinogen.” And, it is. It is also a fun and interesting way to discover yet more mysteries of the brain. Click to see video.

Recognize the changing illusions, directions of spin, and subjective perceptions before our very eyes and try to engage our hearts and minds in all we do. May we recognize half-brained enterprises, tolerate them when necessary or beneficial, and may we use both sides of our brains in the appropriate ways.

Adams was born to Edward and Adelaide Adams on June 12, 1933, in New Kensington, Pennsylvania. He developed his interest in photography while still a teenager, and served on the photography staff of his high school newspaper. He also worked as a wedding and portrait photographer. After graduating from high school, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, where he spent three years as a combat photographer during the Korean War. After leaving the Marines, Adams joined the staff of The Evening Bulletin in Philadelphia, where he worked from 1958 until 1962, at which time he became a photographer for the Associated Press (AP).

(September 20, 2004) — Eddie Adams, who won a Pulitzer prize for his 1968 image of the summary execution of a Vietcong guerrilla in a Saigon street, died Sunday morning September 19 at his Manhattan home and studio. He was 71. His family was with him when he died, said Jessica Stuart, a producer for The Eddie Adams Workshop, and funeral services will be private. Stuart also said that plans are being made for a memorial service late October; details for the memorial will be announced shortly.

Diagnosed in May with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), otherwise known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, Adams spent his final months collecting and organizing his photographs, sitting at a PowerBook in his studio writing, visiting at his Bathhouse Studio with friends and photojournalists who came to show their support, and making plans for the Eddie Adams “Barnstorm” annual workshop to continue after his death.

“The upcoming workshop will go on as planned, that’s what Eddie wanted,” Stuart said Monday. The Columbus Day-weekend event will be the 17th year for the popular seminar held at his farm near Jeffersonville in upstate New York.

“We have lost Eddie, and we have lost a good one,” said Hal Buell, former photography director for the Associated Press and author of the book Moments: Pulitzer Prize Winning Photographs. “He is remembered by most as the photographer who made that ‘great photo that helped end the Vietnam War. … You know, the one where a guy shoots another guy.’ Well, he did make that picture, but Eddie Adams was no one-trick pony. He also had a great feel for the photographic narrative. Five of his pictures on a single subject told you more than five pictures’ worth; the total was always greater than the sum of the parts.

“Eddie’s main strength was that he had no agenda, no angle save that of doing first class photojournalism … honest photojournalism, straightforward and to the point,” Buell said, remembering the more than four decades that he and Adams worked together. “I first met Eddie when I returned from a stint of duty for AP in Asia. He was newly hired to work in the New York bureau. Eddie’s talent was immediately obvious. He had a way of taking an idea an editor would suggest and building upon it, making it more than an idea or a suggestion. He made it a picture.”

(more…)

Imogen Cunningham and Twinka, 1974

Judy Dater’s use of the camera as an instrument to penetrate core psychologies has long since gained her international notoriety. Intensely personal and compelling, her provocative photographs capture the rawness beneath the surface aspects of her subjects.

Throughout a career that spans 40 years, technical diversity has been a staple. She has worked with Polaroid 20×20, digital cameras, and Adobe Photoshop to exhibit a wide range of looks, from collages to multi-pane treatments to pictures within pictures.

Her early photographs were created during a period of unfolding American feminism, when women displaying male frontal nudity was shocking and when a woman’s approach to herself was complicated by social stereotypes. It was a time when women artists ceased censoring their own bodies, freeing their natural eroticism from male-defined pornography.

Dater’s uninhibited portrayals of the female body broke through women’s acculturated and socially constructed dissatisfaction with self. They were in sync, at the time, with the mythic body rituals of early femi-nist performance. In fact, she viewed photography as a type of performance, manipulating props and composition in the construction of a narrative.

Her provocative portraits lie in a median between Annie Leibovitz’s evocations of social trappings and Diane Arbus’ straightforward piercing of society’s substrata. Dater examines how we define ourselves through social roles, bringing out her subjects’ personalities by the dress and environments in which they are posed.

Her women not only break through identity fixations, but art barriers as well. By subverting the Victorian idealization of woman’s passive vulnerability, her subjects are a far cry from paradigms of refinement and passivity. . .personified, for example, by the mythic dreamy images of Julia Magaret Cameron. Nor, as historically presented, glorified bodies for male fantasies. They are, rather, sophisticated beings, soulful, idiosyncratic and comfortable with their sexuality. The partially nude Maggie, for instance, gazes directly into the camera, insolent in her presumptive freedom. Her modernist forthrightness undermines stereotypical ideals of womanliness.

(more…)