Archive for September, 2011

Richard Avedon
Born in New York on may 15, 1923 of russian-jewish immigrant parents. He attended Dewitt Clinton high school in the Bronx, but never completed an academic education. In 1940, at age 17, Avedon dropped out of high school and joined the Merchant Marine’s photographic section, taking personnel identification photos. Later, he went on several missions to photograph shipwrecks. Upon his return in 1944, he found a job as a photographer in a department store. Initially, Avedon made his living primarily through work in advertising. As a staff photographer for Harper’s bazaar and later for Vogue, Avedon became well known for his stylistically innovative fashion work, often set in vivid and surprising locales.

“if a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it’s as though I’ve neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up.” he said in 1970.

http://www.richardavedon.com/

Look at his portraits under: Archive

Sebastiao Salgado
Brazilian, born 1944

After a somewhat itinerant childhood, Salgado initially trained as an economist, earning a master’s degree in economics from the University of São Paulo in Brazil. He began work as an economist for the International Coffee Organization, often traveling to Africa on missions for the World Bank, when he first started seriously taking photographs. He chose to abandon a career as an economist and switched to photography in 1973, working initially on news assignments before veering more towards documentary-type work. Salgado initially worked with the Paris based agency Gamma, but in 1979 he joined the international cooperative of photographers Magnum Photos. He left Magnum in 1994 and formed his own agency, Amazonas Images, in Paris to represent his work. He is particularly noted for his documentary photography of workers in less developed nations. Longtime gallery director Hal Gould considers Salgado to be the most important photographer of the early 21st century, and gave him his first show in the United States.

http://photography-now.net/sebastiao_salgado/portfolio1.html

Walker Evans

American born.

Although primarily a photographer of environments rather than people, Evans’ social concerns brought him face to face with the victims of the Depression. He tried to capture their stoicism in unflinchingly direct portraits. He believed with Baudelaire that the artist’s task was to face head-on the harshest realities and to report them to the larger world, as he said:

“The real thing that I am talking about has purity and a certain severity, rigor, or simplicity, directness, clarity, and it is without artistic pretension in a self-conscious sense of the world.”

From Shorpy website: one of the best places for archival photos. Great images and excellent sizes.

And eventually, from Photography Now: with its usual beautiful site/presentation. Make sure to browse his entire works displayed in this site. Walker Evans’s contributions to photographic documentation is spectacular!

Bernd & Hilla Becher

Bernd and Hilla Becher were a German photographer team and a married couple, best- known for their collection of industrial building images examining the similarities and differences in structure and appearance.

Bernd (1931 – 2007) and Hilla (b. 1934) Becher first met at the Düsseldorf Academy. Both were studying painting at the time and in 1961, the two were married. They first collaborated on photographing and documenting the disappearing German industrial architecture in 1959, and had their first Gallery exhibition in 1963 at the Galerie Ruth Nohl in Siegen. They were fascinated by the similar shapes in which certain buildings were designed. In addition, they were intrigued by the fact that so many of these industrial buildings seemed to have been built with a great deal of attention toward design. Together, the Bechers went out with a large format camera and photographed these buildings from a number of different angles, but always with a straightforward “objective” point of view. The images of structures with similar functions were then displayed side by side to invite viewers to compare their forms and designs. These structures included barns, water towers, storage silos, and warehouses.

The Bechers also photographed outside of Germany, including buildings from the United States and other areas of Europe. Bernd taught at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and influenced students that later made a name for themselves in the photography industry. Former students of Bernd’s included Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, and Candida Höfer.

Paul Strand

Versatile American photographer who helped establish photography as an art form. His works ranged from wide photographic genres such as street photography to portraiture. Paul Strand had a long and productive career with the camera. His pictorialist studies of the 1910s, followed by the coolly seductive machine photographs of the 1920s, like the contemporary work of Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped define the canon of early American modernism and set its premium on the elegant print.