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Claude Cahun
Claude Cahun

Claude Cahun

Country: France
Birth: 1894 | Death: † 1954

Claude Cahun (25 October 1894 - 8 December 1954), born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob, was a French Surrealist photographer, sculptor and writer.

Schwob adopted the pseudonym Claude Cahun in 1914 and is best known for their self-portraits, in which they assume a variety of personae.

Cahun's work was both political and personal, and often undermined traditional concepts of static gender roles. In their autobiography, Disavowals, they explained their rejection of gender, "Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me." This declaration is an important consideration when analysing Cahun's photography as they intentionally play with and subvert the viewers' understanding of gender. This quote, together with their unconventional appearance and their gender-ambiguous pseudonym, means that it is not infrequent to see the pronoun 'they' used nowadays in critical studies on Cahun. There is no evidence that they ever adopted 'they' as their preferred pronoun, but one should take into account the cultural and historical context behind this. Given that French pronouns were extremely binary and the use of gender neutral pronouns for nonbinary individuals wasn't common in the European interwar period, it isn't unreasonable to imagine Cahun would have used gender neutral pronouns had it not been for their environment. In any case, the use of the gender neutral pronouns in reference to Cahun is less of an attempt to apply contemporary norms to a historical figure, but rather a way for their gender to remain an open question in academia.

During WWII, Cahun was also active as a resistance worker and propagandist.

Source: Wikipedia

Selected Books on Available on Amazon
Claude Cahun: Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals)
Claude Cahun: Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals)
Claude Cahun
 

Selected Books

Claude Cahun: Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals)
Claude Cahun: Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals)
Claude Cahun

Inspiring Portfolios

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Abelardo Morell
Abelardo Morell
Cuba
1948
Abelardo (Abe) Morell (born 1948 in Havana, Cuba) is a Boston-based photographer. Morell and his family fled Cuba in 1962, moving to New York City. Morell earned a Bachelor of Arts from Bowdoin College in 1977, and a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University School of Art in 1981. He received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Bowdoin in 1997. Morell is well known in the photographic community for creating camera obscura images in various places around the world and photographing these. Morell was awarded the Cintas Foundation fellowship in 1992 and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1993. Morell is currently a professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art. He is represented by Bonni Benrubi Gallery, NYC. A documentary on elements of Morell's life and work, Shadow of the House, was released in 2007. Source: Wikipedia He has received a num­ber of awards and grants, which include a Cin­tas grant in 1992 a Guggen­heim fel­low­ship in 1994 a Rap­pa­port Prize in 2006 and an Alturas Foun­da­tion grant in 2009 to pho­to­graph the land­scape of West Texas. He was the recip­i­ent of the International Center of Photography 2011 Infin­ity award in Art. His work has been col­lected and shown in many gal­leries, insti­tu­tions and muse­ums, includ­ing the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hous­ton Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Victoria and Albert Museum and over sev­enty other muse­ums in the United States and abroad. A ret­ro­spec­tive of his work orga­nized jointly by the Art Insti­tute of Chicago, The J. Paul Getty Museum and the High Museum in Atlanta will be on view start­ing in the sum­mer of 2013. His pub­li­ca­tions include a pho­to­graphic illus­tra­tion of Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land (1998) by Dut­ton Children’s Books, A Cam­era in a Room (1995) by Smith­son­ian Press, A Book of Books (2002) and Cam­era Obscura (2004) by Bulfinch Press and Abelardo Morell (2005), pub­lished by Phaidon Press. Recent pub­li­ca­tions include a lim­ited edi­tion book by the Museum of Mod­ern Art in New York of his Cliché Verre images with a text by Oliver Sacks. He lives with his wife, Lisa McE­laney, a film­maker, and his chil­dren Brady and Laura in Brook­line, Massachusetts. Film­maker Allie Humenuk has made a film enti­tled Shadow of the House, an in-depth doc­u­men­tary about Morell’s work and expe­ri­ence as an artist. Source: www.abelardomorell.net
Edward Steichen
Edward Steichen
Luxembourg/United States
1879 | † 1973
Edward Steichen (1879 - 1973) was born in Luxembourg, but immigrated to the United States, to Milwaukee, in 1880. In 1894, Steichen began a four-year lithography apprenticeship with the American Fine Art Company of Milwaukee. After hours, he would sketch and draw, and began to teach himself to paint. Having come across a camera shop near to his work, he bought his first camera, a secondhand Kodak box "detective" camera, in 1895. In 1900, as Steichen headed to Paris to study painting, he stopped in New York. By that time he was an aspiring painter and an accomplished photographer in the soft-focus, Pictorial style and he made a pilgrimage to the Camera Club of New York to show his work to Alfred Stieglitz, the leading tastemaker in American photography. Stieglitz, vice-president of the Camera Club and editor of its journal Camera Notes, was impressed by the young artist from Milwaukee and bought three of his photographs-a self-portrait and two moody, atmospheric woodland scenes printed in platinum-for the impressive sum of five dollars each. Elated, Steichen then boarded the ship for Europe. Once in France, Steichen quickly abandoned his painting studies and began to focus his energies on photography. He learned the technical intricacies of the gum bichromate process, popular among the members of the Photo-Club de Paris, and developed a reputation as a portraitist of noted artists, writers, and members of society. Arriving back in New York in 1902, Steichen rented a studio on the top floor of a brownstone at 291 Fifth Avenue and hung out his shingle; his work as a professional portrait photographer flourished. That same year, Stieglitz announced the formation of the Photo-Secession-the name he gave to the loose-knit group of photographers he exhibited, published, and promoted during the next decade and a half-and the publication of a new, still more lavish journal, Camera Work. Over the fifteen-year, fifty-issue run of Camera Work, no other artist would be featured as prominently as Steichen, who had sixty-five photographs and three paintings reproduced in fifteen issues, including a "Special Steichen Supplement" in April 1906 and an all-Steichen double issue in 1913. In 1906, Steichen determined "to get away from the lucrative but stultifying professional portrait business" and return to France with his family in hopes of resuscitating his idled painting career. It was a move with numerous consequences. For one, it positioned him to embrace the Autochrome, the process for making glass-plate color transparencies introduced by the Lumière brothers in 1907. Steichen-who had experimented with various methods such as gum bichromate to introduce color into his photographs-was enthralled by the technique. Steichen also made what he called his "first attempt at serious documentary reportage" in the summer of 1907, using a borrowed hand camera. Steichen returned to the U.S. in 1914. Serving in the US Army in World War I (and the US Navy in the Second World War), Steichen commanded significant units contributing to military photography. After World War I, during which he commanded the photographic division of the American Expeditionary Forces, he reverted to straight photography, gradually moving into editorial and fashion photography. His portraits of Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Gloria Swanson, and other celebrities appeared in Vogue and Vanity Fair in the 1920s and 1930s. From 1947-1962, Steichen served as the Director of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art.. Among other accomplishments, Steichen is appreciated for creating the 1955 exhibition, The Family of Man, at the Museum of Modern Art consisting of over 500 photographs. Steichen purchased a farm that he called Umpawaug in 1928, just outside West Redding, Connecticut, and lived there until his death. Source: Howard Greenberg Gallery
Sol Hill
Sol Hill
United States
1971
Sol Hill was born in Albuquerque, NM in 1971, to artist parents who founded the first contemporary art gallery in Santa Fe. His early memories were of being with his parents in their respective studios and of being in their gallery in Santa Fe. As a child the mysterious objects and paintings that pervaded the gallery intrigued him. Contemporary art works were prevalent both in the gallery and at home. Looking at those artworks felt like observing some secret alchemical language that Hill wished to learn. Growing up, Hill lived all across the United States, and in Jamaica and Germany. He majored in International Affairs and German at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR and at Maximilian Ludwig Universität in Munich, Germany. He also studied printmaking in college and then became deeply involved with photography while in Germany. He later returned to Santa Fe and founded Zen Stone Furnishings with his wife, a paper artist from Brazil. Together they designed and manufactured hand crafted home furnishings from stone, twigs, copper and handmade paper. After an intense medical crisis, Hill decided to dedicate himself to fine art. He went on to study photography at the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, where he received an MFA in 2010. Hill travels regularly and often to Brazil to visit his wife’s family. Travel has powerfully affected his vision as an artist. Although Hill uses some of the latest digital photographic equipment and embraces digital photography, he finds that he is drawn to the kind of liberation found in embracing the mysterious and unfamiliar rather than that which is crisply defined and well known.About Token Feminine:The mannequin is a token feminine used to impart cultural conventions of the idealized female image In this body of work I examine mannequins in storefront windows as symbols of consumer culture. I see them as emblems upon which the desire and fantasy of sex and fashion are draped and from which complex valuations of body image are ingested. The mannequin is a token feminine presence used to impart cultural conventions of the idealized female image. I dissipate these literal mannequin pictures by interrupting the expected information and accepting the digital noise, which are undesirable artifacts produced by false exposure, inherent to the process of capturing digital images. This allows me to explore the nature of the boundary between the reverie of the token feminine and the reality of the commercial icon.About Urban Noise:I seek stillness within the modern day information overload through the act of unconventional street photography. Urban Noise combines an exploration of the aesthetic and conceptual value of digital noise in photography with a contemplative study of the contemporary urban environment. Digital noise is a reviled artifact inherent to digital imaging. I challenge the notion that this artifact is inherently worthless by using it to render photographs into contemporary visual tropes. It is my tool to address the digital nature of the contemporary world. Digital noise is false exposure produced by energies other than light, namely heat, electrical current and “cosmic noise.” Cosmic noise is the term for invisible wavelength energies comprised in part of man-made signals from our built and technological environment mixed with the electro magnetic energy produced by human bodies. The resulting noise from these interfering energies transforms my photographs. The contemporary urban environment is flooded with so much extraneous information that we necessarily turn most of it into background noise to survive. There is so much conflicting information competing for our attention that I am intrigued by how we sort out what is worthy of our attention, from meaningless background noise. I seek my own stillness within the overwhelming cacophony of modern day information overload through the act of unconventional street photography.
Bettina Rheims
Bettina Rheims
France
1952
Bettina Rheims, born Bettina Caroline Germaine Rheims is a French artist and photographer. She began her career with a series of images of striptease dancers and acrobats, and over the years she became one of the most notable persons behind the lens. "I adore flesh. I am a skin photographer," she says famously, and that perfectly explains her work. It is raw and erotic, frequently involving nudity and stuffed animals, and she achieves a visceral emotion that captivates the audience. Some of her most well-known pieces raise problems of gender, androgyny, and transsexuality. Although Bettina Rheims began with obscure and marginalized subjects, her later assignments included advertising campaigns for fashion and major brands like Chanel and Lancôme, as well as prominent international magazines. Madonna, Charlotte Rampling, Catherine Deneuve, Kylie Minogue, Claudia Schiffer, and many others were photographed by Rheims. And there's something indisputably human and true in every photograph she takes, perhaps too natural and personal. I have always believed that whether the work is my idea or a commission, it is personal work.... In the end, as my old master Helmut Newton used to say, there are only two kinds of pictures: the good ones and the bad ones. -- Bettina Rheims Bettina Rheims was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. She is the daughter of the French Academy's Maurice Rheims. She began her career as a photographer in 1978, at the age of 26, after working as a model, a journalist, and running an art gallery. Initially, she accomplished a lot of commissioned work, such as record covers for Jean-Jacques Goldman and celebrity portraits. She devoted herself entirely to photography beginning in 1980. She created a series of images of strippers and acrobats, which were presented in two personal exhibits in Paris in 1981, at the Centre Pompidou and the Galerie Texbraun. 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At the close of his presidential campaign in 1995, Jacques Chirac allowed Rheims to work behind the scenes on a series of images depicting the last moments of the election. Following the election, the French Republic's Presidency commissioned Bettina Rheims to create the official picture of Jacques Chirac. According to Libération, she intended to give the President "the easygoing look of the great heroes in westerns." The decade ended with the publishing of the book I.N.R.I. and its accompanying exhibition in 1999. I.N.R.I. constructs a philosophical debate on the history of the crucifixion through images of episodes from Christ's life, from the Annunciation to the Ascension, once again connecting the gaze of Rheims with the writing of Serge Bramly. Bettina Rheims advocated "modern illustrations, following the advent of photography, cinema, and advertising imagery, as if Jesus were to return today." The release of this work was highly contentious in France. 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Bettina Rheims collaborated with Serge Bramly again at the end of the 2000s, and Rose, c'est Paris was shown at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in 2010. Bettina Rheims and Serge Bramly crafted a fictional thread from autobiographical parts for the photographic story. In this piece, Paris plays "the role of the muse more than the subject, and [appears] in an almost allegorical manner through the figures weaved into a story." A young woman we'll call B. is hunting for Rose, her twin sister who she thinks has vanished. Rose, c'est Paris is presented as a "great mysterious series," a genre beloved by surrealists, and is divided into thirteen episodes in which we discover, among other things, an unusual or obscure Paris that is voluntarily timeless." Exhibited in 2012 in Düsseldorf, the Gender Studies series pursues the questioning of gender representation. The device linking image and sound (by Frédéric Sanchez) presents 27 sound portraits of young men and women who responded to a request the photographer posted on Facebook. The photos are accompanied by interview clips and have featured in several exhibitions and a book. Rheims has also worked on advertising campaigns for fashion and big brands, such as Chanel and Lancôme, as well as taking portraits of famous women for international magazines. Rheims says that she has been inspired by Diane Arbus and Helmut Newton as well as by the work of early painters.
Helen Levitt
Helen Levitt
United States
1913 | † 2009
Helen Levitt was an American photographer and cinematographer. She was particularly noted for her street photography around New York City. David Levi Strauss described her as "the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time." Helen Levitt was most well known and celebrated for her work taking pictures of children playing in the streets. She also focused her work in areas of Harlem and the Lower East side with the subjects of her work many of which were minorities. There is a constant motif of children playing games in her work. She stepped away from the normal practice set by other established photographers at the time by giving a journalistic depiction of suffering. She instead chose to show the world from the perspective of her children by taking pictures of their chalk art. She usually positions the camera and styles the photo in a way that gives the focus of her photography power. Her choice to display children playing in the street and explore street photography fights against what was going on at the time. Legislation being passed in New York at the time was limiting many of the working classes' access to these public spaces. Laws were passed that directly targeted these communities in an attempt to control them. New bans on noise targeted working-class and minority communities. There was a movement to also try to keep children from playing on the street believing it is unsafe for them out there. Instead encouraging safe new areas that were usually built more in upper and middle-class areas. Helen Levitt instead exploring the narrative of those who lived in these areas and played in these streets was a way further to empower the subjects of her photos. Levitt was born in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of May (Kane), and Sam Levitt. Her father and maternal grandparents were Russian Jewish immigrants. She went to New Utrecht High School but dropped out in 1931. She began taking photography when she was eighteen and in 1931 she learned how to develop photos in the darkroom when she began working for J. Florian Mitchell, a commercial portrait photographer in the Bronx. She also attended many classes and events hosted by Manhattan Film and Photography League. This was also around the time she was exposed to the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson at the Julien Levy Gallery, who she was also able to meet through the league. His work became a major influence for her photography as it inspired her to change from her current more journalistic and commercial approach to photography to a more personal one. In 1936, she purchased a Leica camera (a 35 mm range-finder camera). In While teaching art classes to children in 1937 for the New York City's Federal Art Project, Levitt became intrigued with the transitory chalk drawings that were part of the New York children's street culture of the time. She began to photograph these chalk drawings, as well as the children who made them for her own creative assignment with the Federal Art Project. were ultimately published in 1987 as In The Street: chalk drawings and messages, New York City 1938–1948. She continued taking more street photographs mainly in East Harlem but also in the Garment District and on the Lower East Side, all in Manhattan. During the 1930s to 1940s, the lack of air conditioning meant people were outside more, which invested her in street photography. Her work was first published in Fortune magazine's July 1939 issue. The new photography section of the Museum of Modern Art, New York included Levitt's work in its inaugural exhibition in July 1939. In 1941, she visted Mexico City with author James Agee and took photos of the area. In 1943, Nancy Newhall curated her first solo exhibition Helen Levitt: Photographs of Children. In 1959 and 1960, she received two grants from the Guggenheim Foundation for her pioneering work in color photography. In 1965 she published her first major collection, A Way of Seeing. Much of her work in color from 1959 to 1960 was stolen in a 1970 burglary of her East 12th Street apartment. The remaining photos, and others taken in the following years, can be seen in the 2005 book Slide Show: The Color Photographs of Helen Levitt. A second solo exhibit, Projects: Helen Levitt in Color, was held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1974. Her next major shows were in the 1960s; Amanda Hopkinson suggests that this second wave of recognition was related to the feminist rediscovery of women's creative achievements. In 1976, she was a Photography Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts. Levitt lived in New York City and remained active as a photographer for nearly 70 years. However, she expressed lament at the change of New York City scenery: "I go where there's a lot of activity. Children used to be outside. Now the streets are empty. People are indoors looking at television or something." She had to give up making her own prints in the 1990s due to sciatica, which also made standing and carrying her Leica difficult, causing her to switch to a small, automatic Contax. She was born with Ménière's syndrome, an inner-ear disorder that caused her to "[feel] wobbly all [her] life." She also had a near-fatal case of pneumonia in the 1950s. Levitt lived a personal and quiet life. She seldom gave interviews and was generally very introverted. She never married, living alone with her yellow tabby Blinky. Levitt died in her sleep on March 29, 2009, at the age of 95.Source: Wikipedia
Roberto Cavazzuti
Roberto Cavazzuti
Italy
1965
Roberto Cavazzuti is an Italian visual artist whose practice is rooted in photography. Strongly influenced by the world of cinema—drawing inspiration from Kubrick, Wenders, and Kitano—his work moves fluidly between abstraction and still life. Working primarily under the pseudonym RedRumStudio, he showcases his vision through international platforms such as Saatchi Art and ArtMajeur. Awarded Photographer of the Week - Week 41, 2025
Dora Maar
Dora Maar
France
1907 | † 1997
Henriette Theodora Markovitch, also known as Dora Maar, was a French photographer, painter, and poet who lived from November 22, 1907 until July 16, 1997. Dora Maar had an important role in the life of the famed artist Pablo Picasso, serving as his love partner. Picasso featured her in various paintings, including Portrait of Dora Maar and Dora Maar au Chat. She was the only daughter of Croatian architect Josip Marković, also known as Joseph Markovitch, who studied at Zagreb and Vienna before arriving in Paris in 1896. Her mother was Louise-Julie Voisin (1877–1942), a Cognac native raised in the Catholic religion. The family moved to Buenos Aires in 1910, where the father earned many commissions, including one for Austria-Hungary's embassy. Despite his success, he was "the only architect who did not make a fortune in Buenos Aires." Nonetheless, his accomplishments were recognized, and Emperor Francis Joseph I awarded him a decoration. In 1926, the family went back to Paris. Under the alias Dora Maar, she studied at the Central Union of Decorative Arts and the School of Photography. She also registered at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian, both of which provide equal instruction to men and women. Dora Maar actively engaged in André Lhote's workshop, where she met Henri Cartier-Bresson. During her time at the École des Beaux-Arts, Maar encountered the fellow female surrealist Jacqueline Lamba. Reflecting on their connection, Maar expressed, "I was closely linked with Jacqueline. She asked me, 'where are those famous surrealists?' and I told her about cafe de la Place Blanche." Subsequently, Jacqueline started frequenting the café, eventually leading to her meeting André Breton, whom she would later marry. Dora Maar left the workshop and traveled alone from Paris to Barcelona and then to London. In London, she took images portraying the effects of the economic crisis that followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929 in the United States. She returned to Paris and, with the help of her father, opened another factory at 29 rue d'Astorg in the 8th arrondissement. In 1935, she met Pablo Picasso and became his companion and muse. She photographed the last phases of Picasso's colossal masterpiece, Guernica, in his workshop at the Grands Augustins. She also acted as a model for his artwork Monument à Apollinaire, which pays respect to the late poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Maar's earliest known images were from the early 1920s, when she used a Rolleiflex camera on a cargo ship destined for the Cape Verde Islands. In the early 1930s, she opened a photographic studio on rue Campagne-Première in conjunction with Pierre Kefer, a photographer and designer best known for his work on Jean Epstein's 1928 film The Fall of the House of Usher. Maar and Kefer worked together at the studio, largely on commercial photography for ads and fashion magazines. During this time, her father gave financial assistance as she faced the obstacles of establishing herself and earning a living. The studio rose to prominence, displaying fashion, advertising, and nude photography, and achieved tremendous success. Within the studio, Maar crossed paths with the photographer Brassaï, with whom she shared the darkroom. Brassaï once remarked on her "bright eyes and an attentive gaze, a disturbing stare at times." Dora Maar's work in commercial and fashion photography was heavily influenced by Surrealism, as evidenced by her extensive use of mirrors and harsh play with shadows. She felt that art should transmit the essence of reality by connecting with intuitions or ideas, rather than simply copying the visual qualities of nature. Notably, Dora Maar met Louis-Victor Emmanuel Sougez, a photographer who worked in advertising, archeology, and as the artistic director of the daily L'Illustration. She saw Sougez as a mentor during this time. In 1932, she had an affair with filmmaker Louis Chavance. Dora Maar joined the "October group," which formed around Jacques Prévert and Max Morise following their expulsion from surrealism. Her first publication was in the magazine Art et Métiers Graphiques in 1932, and she had her first solo show at the Galerie Vanderberg in Paris. The gelatin silver pieces from Dora Maar's surrealist era remain highly coveted by enthusiasts, especially works like Portrait of Ubu (1936), located at 29 rue d'Astorg. These black and white compositions include collages, photomontages, and superimpositions. The photograph features the central character from Alfred Jarry's renowned series of plays, Ubu Roi. Initially showcased at the Exposition Surréaliste d'objets at the Galerie Charles Ratton in Paris and later at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, the piece gained notable acclaim. Additionally, Dora Maar participated in Participates in Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art in New York during the same year. During her surrealist phase, Dora Maar found resonance with the political ideologies of the left, leading her to actively engage in political activities. Following the fascist demonstrations on February 6, 1934, in Paris, she, along with René Lefeuvre and Jacques Soustelle, supported by Simone Weil and Georges Bataille, signed the tract "Appeal to the Struggle," initiated by André Breton. Much of her artistic output during this period was strongly influenced by the leftist politics of the time, often portraying individuals thrust into poverty by the Great Depression. Dora Maar was involved in various leftist groups, including the "Masses," an ultra-leftist association where she first encountered Georges Bataille, as well as the Union of Intellectuals Against Fascism, an anti-fascist organization. She also participated in a radical collective of left-wing actors and writers known as October. She actively engaged in various Surrealist circles, frequently joining demonstrations, convocations, and café discussions. Dora Maar was a signatory of numerous manifestos, among them "When Surrealists were Right," penned in August 1935, addressing the Congress of Paris that had convened in March of the same year. In 1935, she captured a photograph of the fashion illustrator and designer Christian Bérard. Described by writer and critic Michael Kimmelman as "wry and mischievous, with only his head perceived above the fountain, as if he were John the Baptist on a silver platter." During the 1980s, Dora Maar created several photograms. Her final years were spent in her apartment on Rue de Savoie, located on the Left Bank of Paris. She passed away on July 16, 1997, at the age of 89. She was laid to rest in the Bois-Tardieu cemetery in Clamart. Posthumously, her experiments with photograms and darkroom photography were discovered.
Dan Winters
Dan Winters
United States
1962
Dan Winters (b. October 21, 1962) is an American photojournalist, illustrator, filmmaker and writer. He was born in Ventura County, California on October 21, 1962. He first studied photography and the darkroom process starting in 1971 while a member of his local 4-H club. In 1979, while still a high school senior, he began working full time in the motion picture special effects industry in the area of miniature construction and design. He went on to study photography at Moorpark College, in California. After receiving an associates arts degree there, he entered the documentary studies program at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany, focusing mainly on narrative photojournalism. In 1986, he began his career in photography as a photojournalist in his home town in Ventura County, at the Thousand Oaks News Chronicle. After winning several local awards for his work, he moved to New York City, where magazine assignments came rapidly. In 1991, he moved to Los Angeles and married Kathryn Fouts, who became his photo rep and studio manager. In 1993, his son Dylan was born in Los Angeles. In 2000, while maintaining a home in LA, he moved to Austin, Texas. There he set up a studio outside Austin in a historic building built in 1903, that had originally served as a general store, gas station and post office for nearly 100 years before he arrived. Known for the broad range of subject matter he is able to interpret, he is widely recognized for his iconic celebrity portraiture, his scientific photography, his photojournalistic stories and more recently his drawings and illustrations. He has created portraits of luminaries such as Bono, Neil Young, Barack Obama, Tupac Shakur, the Dalai Lama, Stephen Hawking, Leonardo DiCaprio, Helen Mirren, Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet, Angelina Jolie, Sandra Bullock, Brad Pitt, Steven Spielberg and Al Gore. He has won over one hundred national and international awards from American Photography, Communication Arts, The Society of Publication Designers, Photo District News, The Art Directors Club of New York and Life, among others. In 1998, he was awarded the prestigious Alfred Eisenstadt Award for Magazine Photography. In 2003, he won a 1st place World Press Photo Award in the portrait category. In 2003, he was also honored by Kodak as a photo "Icon" in their biographical "Legends" series. In addition to regular assignments for magazines such as Esquire, GQ, Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, New York, Texas Monthly, Wired, Fortune, Discover, Audubon Magazine, Details, Premiere, W, Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, Life, Newsweek, Time, Vibe and many other national and international publications, his clients for print and advertising include Nike, Microsoft, IBM, LG, Hewlett-Packard, Sony, Bose, Saturn, Sega, Fila, Cobra, ABC, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Dreamworks, Columbia TriStar and Twentieth Century Fox. Regular music clients include RCA, A&M, Sony BMG, Interscope, Warner Bros., Elektra Records and Epitaph. His work has appeared in four solo exhibitions in galleries in New York and Los Angeles. A book of his work entitled "Dan Winters: Periodical Photographs" was published in 2009 by Aperture. In addition, he has photos in permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery (United States), the Museum of Fine Art Houston, The Whitliff Collection at Texas State University and the Harry Ransom Center for Photography in Austin, Texas.[6]He currently has a solo exhibition at the Telfair Museum/Jepson Center in Savannah, GA entitled Dan Winters's AMERICA: Icons and Ingenuity. A catalogue was published to accompany the exhibition. His book Last Launch which chronicles the final launches of Discovery, Endeavour and Atlantis in 2011, signaling the end of an era in space travel, will be released October 22, 2012 by UT Press and available in bookstores everywhere. He currently lives in Austin, Los Angeles and Savannah, Georgia with his wife and son. Source: wikipedia
Walker Evans
Walker Evans
United States
1903 | † 1975
Walker Evans was an American photographer best known for documenting the effects of the Great Depression for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The large-format, 8x10-inch camera was used extensively by Evans during the FSA period. As a photographer, he aspired to create images that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent". Many of his works are in museum permanent collections, and he has had retrospectives at places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art or George Eastman House. Walker Evans was born into a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, to Jessie (née Crane) and Walker. His father worked as an ad executive. He grew up in Toledo, Chicago, and New York City. In 1922, he graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He attended Williams College for a year, studying French literature and spending most of his time in the library, before dropping out. In 1926, he returned to the United States to join the edgy literary and art crowd in New York City after spending a year in Paris. Among his friends were John Cheever, Hart Crane, and Lincoln Kirstein. From 1927 to 1929, he worked as a stockbroker's clerk on Wall Street. Evans began photographing in 1928, while living in Ossining, New York. In 1930, he published three photographs (Brooklyn Bridge) in Hart Crane's poetry collection The Bridge. Dock-worker, Havana, Cuba, 1932© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art After spending a year in Paris in 1926, Walker Evans returned to the United States to join the edgy literary and art crowd in New York City. John Cheever, Hart Crane, and Lincoln Kirstein were among his friends. He was a clerk for a stockbroker firm in Wall street from 1927 to 1929. Evans took up photography in 1928 around the time he was living in Ossining, New York. In 1930, he published three photographs (Brooklyn Bridge) in the poetry book The Bridge by Hart Crane. Lincoln Kirstein sponsored a photo series of Victorian houses in the Boston area in 1931. In 1933, he photographed the revolt against dictator Gerardo Machado in Cuba for the publisher of Carleton Beals' then-upcoming book, The Crime of Cuba. Evans briefly met Ernest Hemingway in Cuba.  With the camera, it’s all or nothing. You either get what you’re after at once, or what you do has to be worthless. -- Walker Evans Evans began a two-month photographic campaign for the Resettlement Administration (RA) in West Virginia and Pennsylvania in 1935. From October to December, he continued to photograph for the RA and, later, the Farm Security Administration (FSA), primarily in the South. While still working for the FSA, he and writerJames Agee were sent on assignment to Hale County, Alabama, by Fortune magazine for a story that the magazine later decided not to run. Allie Mae Burroughs, 1935 or 1936© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a groundbreaking book published in 1941, featured Evans' photographs and Agee's text detailing the duo's stay with three white tenant families in southern Alabama during the Great Depression. Its detailed account of three farming families paints a heartbreaking picture of rural poverty. In her 1980 book Diana & Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography, critic Janet Malcolm noted a similarity to the Beals' book, pointing out the contradiction between Agee's prose and the quiet, magisterial beauty of Evans' photographs of sharecroppers. The three families, led by Bud Fields, Floyd Burroughs, and Frank Tingle, lived in the Hale County town of Akron, Alabama, and the landowners told them that Evans and Agee were "Soviet agents," though Allie Mae Burroughs, Floyd's wife, later recalled her dismissing that information. Evans' photographs of the families immortalized their misery and poverty during the Great Depression. For its 75th anniversary issue, Fortune returned to Hale County and the descendants of the three families in September 2005. When Evans and Agee visited the Burroughs family, Charles Burroughs, who was four years old at the time, was "still angry" at them for not even sending the family a copy of the book; Floyd Burroughs' son was also reportedly angry because the family was "cast in a light that they couldn't do any better, that they were doomed, ignorant." The secret of photography is, the camera takes on the character and personality of the handler. -- Walker Evans Walker Evans remained with the FSA until 1938. An exhibition, Walker Evans: American Photographs was on display at Museum of Modern Art in New York that year. This was the museum's first exhibition devoted solely to the work of a single photographer. The catalogue also included an essay by Lincoln Kirstein, whom Evans had met in his early days in New York. Evans took his first photographs in the New York subway in 1938, with a camera hidden in his coat. Many are Called was a book that collected these stories in 1966. Evans collaborated with and mentored Helen Levitt in 1938 and 1939. Evans, like such other photographers as Henri Cartier-Bresson, rarely spent time in the darkroom creating prints from his own negatives. He only loosely supervised the printing of most of his photographs, sometimes only attaching handwritten notes to negatives with printing instructions. Evans was an avid reader and writer who joined Time Magazine's staff in 1945. He then worked as an editor at Fortune magazine until 1965. That same year, he joined the faculty of the Yale University School of Art as a photography professor. Evans completed a black and white portfolio of Brown Brothers Harriman's offices and partners for publication in Partners in Banking, which was published in 1968 to commemorate the private bank's 150th anniversary. He also shot a long series with the then-new Polaroid SX-70 camera in 1973 and 1974, after age and poor health made it difficult for him to work with elaborate equipment. In 1971, the Museum of Modern Art held another exhibition of his work, simply titled Walker Evans. Walker Evans died in 1975 at his home in Lyme, Connecticut. The Estate of Walker Evans donated its holdings to New York City's The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1994. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the sole owner of all Walker Evans works of art in all media. The only exception is a group of about 1,000 negatives in the Library of Congress collection that were created for the Resettlement Administration (RA) / Farm Security Administration (FSA). Evans's RA / FSA works are free to use. Evans was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame in 2000. Images: © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
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