Posts Tagged ‘documentary’

Photographer of the week 06: Avedon

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3 Commentsby   |  09.29.11  |  photographer of the week

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

Photographer of the week 05: Salgado

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4 Commentsby   |  09.26.11  |  photographer of the week

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