Archive for ‘Photographer of the Week’

Annie Leibovitz
Another favorite photographer, for her versatile, daring and crafty style. I was able to see her exhibition: A Photographer’s Life, and many of her original prints in Paris a couple of years ago.

I have one of her books (American Music) in my office in case you’d like to look at. Follow this link for some images from the series.

Now we start looking at more contemporary photographers. Dan Winters is one of my favorite commercial/editorial photographers. I had a chance to meet him while attending a workshop in Hunt, TX a few years ago. Really a great guy, and an excellent eye for “light composition.” He is now based in Austin.

Diane Arbus was an American photographer and writer noted for black-and-white square photographs of “deviant and marginal people.” Her found street portraits besides documenting the social, are very intriguing, depicting people of various classes, and backgrounds. (click on image to see more of her works)

Also, read this article from LOMOGRAPHY website.

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.

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!

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.

From photographer Abelardo Morell—same author of A Book of Books—a gallery of hauntingly beautiful pictures excerpted from his new book, Camera Obscura, where we discover how much of the world can fit through a pinhole.

Our “Photographer of the Week 01” goes to Henry Talbot, as we investigated the early developments of photography this week.

English photographer, inventor and scientist. He was educated at Harrow School and the University of Cambridge and was an outstanding scholar and a formidable mathematician. His scientific interest in nature and natural phenomena, including botany and horticulture, was complemented by studies of Assyriology, etymology and the Classics.

Click on image to see more.

Homework:
Read Talbot’s Pencil of Nature (PDF) for discussion Tuesday.