Posts tagged 1900s
Ansel Adams
Ansel Adams

Ansel Easton Adams was known for his black and white photographs of the California's Yosemite Valley. Adams was also the author of numerous books about photography, including his trilogy of technical instruction manuals (The Camera, The Negative, and The Print). He co-founded the photographic association Group f/64 along with other masters like Edward Weston, Willard Van Dyke, Imogen Cunningham and others. He invented the zone system, a technique which allows photographers to translate the light they see into specific densities on negatives and paper, thus giving them better control over finished photographs. Adams also pioneered the idea of visualization (which he often called 'previsualization', though he later acknowledged that term to be a redundancy) of the finished print based upon the measured light values in the scene being photographed.

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AKim KirbyMale, Photographer, 1900s, American Photographers, Ansel Adams, Group f/64, Summer in Carmel
Berenice Abbott
Berenice Abbott

Berenice Abbott left the American Midwest in 1918 to study in New York City, Paris, and Berlin. In Paris she became an assistant to Man Ray and Eugène Atget. In 1925 she set up her own studio and made portraits of Parisian artists, writers, collectors and expatriates. She retrieved and catalogued Atget's prints and negatives after his death. In the 1930s she photographed New York's neighborhoods for the WPA Federal Art Project, documenting its changing architecture; many of the photographs were published in Changing New York (1939).

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AKim Kirbyweston galleryFemale, Photographer, 1900s, American Photographers, Berenice Abbott
Morley Baer
Morley Baer

After briefly considering a career in journalism, Morley Baer began his artistic career as a landscape and architectural photographer. Having seen an Edward Weston exhibition in Chicago, Baer’s mind was made up; he was California-bound to pursue photography and to meet Weston himself. Following naval service during WWII, Baer returned to Carmel once again, where Weston was still living. A close friendship was formed between the two photographers over these years. Baer’s work elicits a kind of intimate pleasure, evoking in many a sense of familiarity with what may often be an unknown land. Morley Baer represents a generation of photographers whose aesthetic interest in the landscape was inseparable from their love of the land itself.

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BKim KirbyMale, Photographer, 1900s, American Photographers, Morley Baer
John Baldessari
John Baldessari

John Anthony Baldessari is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lives and works in Santa Monica, California. Initially a painter, Baldessari began to incorporate texts and photography into his canvases in the mid-1960s. In 1970 he began working in printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture and photography. He has created thousands of works that demonstrate - and, in many cases, combine - the narrative potential of images and the associative power of language within the boundaries of the work of art. His art has been featured in more than 200 solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe.

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BKim KirbyMale, Photographer, 1900s, American Photographers, John Baldessari
Jeffrey Becom
Jeffrey Becom

In his photography, Jeffrey Becom combines an architect’s love of geometry, pattern and texture with a painter’s sensitivity to color, light, and composition. He spent a decade creating his series of photographs on the Mediterranean, collected in the book Mediterranean Color with Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Paul Goldberger. Becom then began photographing throughout Mexico and Central America, documenting the traditions of the living Maya in his book Maya Color. Having recently voyaged to India, Becom’s latest work depicts the beauty and power of the colorful traditions of Indian architecture. His extraordinarily vivid images are also a testimony to his eye for form and composition. His photographs are represented in public and private collections throughout the world.

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BKim KirbyMale, 1900s, 2000s, American Photographers, Jeffrey Becom
Ruth Bernhard
Ruth Bernhard

In a career spanning more than seven decades, Ruth Bernhard has created an imposing body of work. Distinguished by their exquisite use of light, her images have been internationally recognized and acclaimed by her peers. Radiant still-life studies and nude forms reflect her passionate search for the universal connection of all things. Said by Ansel Adams to be the finest photographer of the nude, Bernhard is associated with the history of Northern California's wealth of eminent photographers, among them Adams, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and Dorothea Lange. Bernhard's work has been exhibited and included in the permanent collections of major museums and universities in the United States, Europe, Japan, and Mexico, and has been published worldwide.

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BKim KirbyGerman, Female, 1900s, Nude, California Photographers, California photography, Ruth Bernhard
Édouard Boubat
Édouard Boubat

Boubat was born in Montmartre, Paris. He studied typography and graphic arts at the École Estienne and worked for a printing company before becoming a photographer. In 1943 he was subjected to service du travail obligatoire, forced labour of French people in Nazi Germany, and witnessed the horrors of World War II. He took his first photograph after the war in 1946 and was awarded the Kodak Prize the following year. He travelled the world for the French magazine Réalités, where his colleague was Jean-Philippe Charbonnier, and later worked as a freelance photographer. French poet Jacques Prévert called him a "peace correspondent" as he was humanist, apolitical and photographed uplifting subjects. His son Bernard Boubat is also a photographer.

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BKim KirbyFrench, Male, 1900s, Édouard Boubat
Bill Brandt
Bill Brandt

Having apprenticed to Man Ray, Brandt originally began his career working as a photojournalist on assignment. His photography was a singular and idiosyncratic mixture of straight reportage with a consistent, if subtle, streak of strangeness - the legacy of surrealism. He would eventually turn from “straight” photography, so dominant in the post-war culture of the time, towards abstracted images in which figures were distorted or wide-angle lenses used. Highly respected for the intensity and power of his images, Brandt is considered one of the preeminent photographers to have emerged in England.

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BKim KirbyMale, Photographer, Photojournalist, 1900s, British Photographers, Bill Brandt
Manuel Álvarez Bravo
Manuel Álvarez Bravo

Manuel Alvarez Bravo was one of the founders of modern photography and considered the main representative of Latin American photography in the 20th century. His work extends from the late 1920s to the 1990s. Álvarez Bravo was born in downtown Mexico City on February 4, 1902. He left school at the age of twelve in order to begin making a contribution to his family’s finances after his father's death. He worked at a textile factory for a time, and later at the National General Treasury.

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BKim KirbyMexican, Male, 1900s, Manuel Álvarez Bravo
Wynn Bullock
Wynn Bullock

Wynn Bullock began his photographic career at the age of 42 studying at the Art Center School in Los Angeles, California. A lifelong friend of Edward Weston, his work and influence thrived in Bullock's photographs and in 1968, he became a trustee and chairman of the exhibition committee during the formative years of Friends of Photography in Carmel, California. Bullock is recognized as an American master photographer of the 20th Century. His work is included in over 90 major museum collections around the world including The Museum of Modern Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Hallmark Collection of Photography and The Center for Creative Photography which holds the archives of Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, Frederick Sommer and Aaron Siskind.

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BKim KirbyMale, 1900s, American Photographers, Wynn Bullock, Summer in Carmel
Linda Butler
Linda Butler

Since 1985 Linda Butler has worked as an independent art-photographer and is known for her explorations of other cultures. Her most recent book, Yangtze Remembered: The River Beneath the Lake, is an historical document of the Three Gorges Dam project in China. During a three-year period (from 2000 – 2003) Butler made eight trips to China. She captured the complexity of the Three Gorges Project and the beauty of the Yangtze before life was changed forever by the dam. Through her photographs we see common people, architectural interiors and dramatic landscapes. We watch the destruction of the old way of life and the construction of the new in before-and-after photographs of the river and its shores. Published by Stanford University Press (©2004), Yangtze Remembered explores the historical and environmental context of the dam through 109 photographs and 55 pages of text. Butler’s other books include Italy: In the Shadow of Time (Rizzoli International ©1998), Rural Japan: Radiance of the Ordinary (Smithsonian Institution Press ©1992), and Inner Light: The Shaker Legacy (Knopf ©1985).

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BKim KirbyFemale, 1900s, 2000s, American Photographers, Linda Butler
Harry Callahan
Harry Callahan

Harry Callahan was an American photographer born in Detroit. Self-taught, he began taking pictures in 1938 as a hobby and, inspired by the work of Ansel Adams, began to produce professional-quality photographs in the 1940s. His mature work is said to mingle the precision of Americans like Adams with the experimentalism of Europeans like Lázló Moholy-Nagy. His black-and-white city streetscapes and rural landscapes combine the commonplace with the starkly abstract, exploring contrasts of sunlight and shadow, tone and texture, static buildings and hurried passersby, while his many lovingly distinctive portraits of his wife and daughter are extremely personal and intimate. He sometimes used multiple exposures, and experimented with color slide film in the 1940s, again making color images from 1977 on. An influential figure in modern photography, he taught at Chicago's Institute of Design (1946-61) and the Rhode Island School of Design (1961-77).

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CKim KirbyMale, 1900s, American Photographers, Harry Callahan
Paul Caponigro
Paul Caponigro

Paul Caponigro is one of America's most significant master photographers. Born in Boston in 1932, he began photographing as a youth at thirteen. He has subsequently sustained an artistic career spanning over forty years, which began in earnest in 1951 and involved studies with Minor White and Benjamen Chinn. Caponigro's first one-man show at the George Eastman house took place in 1958. Since that time he has been widely exhibited throughout the United States and Europe. Two Guggenheim Fellowships and three NEA grants have been awarded to Caponigro over the course of his photographic career in recognition of his singularly masterful and uncompromising artistry. His work forms a visual bridge between the material world of physical forms and the living spirit behind them.

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CKim KirbyMale, 1900s, American Photographers, Paul Caponigro
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson was persuaded by Robert Capa to call himself a photojournalist rather than an artist or a Surrealist for his first New York show. Best known for his concept of the "decisive moment" in photography. At its best this leads to a dynamic image but easily becomes - even occasionally in the hands of the master himself - a formal stasis. Cartier-Bresson is the recipient of an extraordinary number of prizes, awards and honorary doctorates including the Overseas Press Club of America Award (1948, 1954, 1960, 1964), The A.S.M.P. Award (1953), the Prix de la Société Française de Photographie (1959), the Culture Prize, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie (1975). Capa also persuaded Cartier-Bresson to become one of the founders of Magnum.

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CKim KirbyFrench, Male, 1900s, Henri Cartier-Bresson
Mark Citret
Mark Citret

Mark Citret has always been intrigued by the everyday wonders of the visual world. The sense of expansive awareness that for Citret is a prerequisite to photography enables him to capture the small everyday flashes of insight that come when we are open to them and often go before we can fully grasp or appreciate them. Sights that most of us tend not to notice—a weathered phone book, an empty bulletin board, a twisted chain link fence—seem full of meaning, made spectacular and somehow poignant through his eye. Citret’s images are a sort of meditation in seeing; though they rarely contain human forms, they are powerful testaments to the relationship between human presence and transitory nature. Fascinated from his earliest work with the delicate nuances possible in black and white, his work with vellum paper allows him to convey the ideas of softer ranges in his work. Luminous and warm, the vellums heighten the sense of everyday epiphany found in his images.

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CKim KirbyMale, 1900s, American Photographers, Mark Citret
Imogen Cunningham
Imogen Cunningham

Imogen Cunningham occupies a singular position in the history of American art of the twentieth century. For over half the history of photography, she explored- with innovation and a new perspective- all the major traditions associated with the medium as fine art. She has been most widely acclaimed for the photographs made during the 1920s and 1930s, particularly close-up images of plants and nudes. She also made portraits which are now considered classics in photography, including images of Alfred Stieglitz, Spencer Tracy, and Martha Graham. She was a founding member of the West Coast-based Group f.64, which championed an un-manipulated, direct approach with the camera, or “straight” photography. Her photographs are represented in major collections and museums around the world. The Weston Gallery represents the Imogen Cunningham Trust and have vintage, modern as well as posthumous prints available.

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CKim KirbyFemale, 1900s, American Photographers, Imogen Cunningham, Group f/64
Group f/64
Group f/64

Group f/64 was a group founded by seven 20th-century San Francisco Bay Area photographers who shared a common photographic style characterized by sharply focused and carefully framed images seen through a particularly Western (U.S.) viewpoint. In part, they formed in opposition to the pictorial photographic style that had dominated much of the early 20th century, but moreover, they wanted to promote a new modernist aesthetic that was based on precisely exposed images of natural forms and found objects.

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GKim KirbyAmerican Photographers, California photography, Male, Female, 1900s, Sonya Noskowiak
André Kertész
André Kertész

André Kertész is one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century. In a career that spanned more than seventy years, he made some of the most deceptively simple yet compelling photographs ever created. Working intuitively, he sought to capture the poetry of modern urban life, revealing its quiet incidents and odd, occasionally comic, even bizarre juxtapositions. Combining an amateur’s love for the personal and immediate with a modernist’s sense of form, he created a purely photographic idiom that celebrated a direct observation of everyday life. A major retrospective of his work is traveling this year from the National Portrait Gallery to the Los Angeles County Museum and on to the International Center of Photography.

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KKim KirbyHungarian, Male, 1900s, André Kertész
Bob Kolbrener
Bob Kolbrener

Bob Kolbrener's subjects, from landscapes to portraits, from symbols of man encroaching on nature to humorous signage, are all carefully and thoughtfully executed. A show with Brett Weston in Los Angeles over 35 years ago launched his work. Since then, it has been exhibited throughout the United States as well as in Austria, China, Indonesia and Japan. With photographs in numerous private and corporate collections, including Texaco, Polaroid, Southwestern Bell and A. G. Edwards, his images are also in collections at institutions such as the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Monterey Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art and Washington University. Kolbrener began conducting workshops with Ansel Adams at Yosemite. In the past four decades since, he has continued teaching at other workshop venues in addition to serving as a guest lecturer at a number of universities and museums.

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KKim KirbyMale, 1900s, 2000s, American Photographers, Bob Kolbrener
Paul Kozal
Paul Kozal

Paul Kozal is a self taught photographer, has been devoting his life to the exploration of fine art photography since 1989. Using black and white film he creates toned and hand-tinted gelatin-silver prints. Carefully masking significant portions of a print, Kozal selectively tones in selenium to render a rich purple-brown color or with sepia that produces a warmer tone. Often, he will apply both tones, in separate sections to the same photograph or hand-color with pencils and watercolors. Kozal also works in color printing Fuji Crystal Archive and Kodak Metallic prints. His subject matter consists mostly of landscapes of the Southwest and California.

His photographs have been selected for many prestigious national and international juried exhibitions and won many awards. He is represented in several galleries throughout the United States. His photographs are in numerous public and private collections including Tokyo Photographic Culture Center, Cantor Center for the Arts and the Monterey Museum of Fine Art.

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KKim KirbyMale, 1900s, 2000s, American Photographers, Paul Kozal
Clarence John Laughlin
Clarence John Laughlin

Laughlin worked in New Orleans and found inspiration in the city’s faded grandeur. He developed what he termed as his own “visual poetry” by borrowing elements from modern photography—such as strong compositions and highly glossy printing techniques—and imbuing his images with mysterious symbolism. Here, Laughlin stages a tableau of enigmatic richness: a woman in black stands amid broken mirror shards and crumbling walls, holding a wood frame out of which stares the decapitated head of a sculpture. The blurred movement of the woman’s veil emphasizes the scene’s surreal, ghostly quality. ~ The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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LKim KirbyMale, 1900s, American Photographers, Clarence John Laughlin
Roman Loranc
Roman Loranc

Roman Loranc was born in Bielsko-Biala, Poland, in 1956 and immigrated to the United States in 1981. Moving to California in 1984 rekindled his feeling for landscape photography, and since settling in the Central Valley, Loranc has increasingly turned to subjects close to home: the delicate wetlands beneath the Pacific Flyway, the stirring and primeval contours of the Diablo Range, and the sinuous courses and radiant surfaces of once mighty rivers. Loranc’s work marks a return to landscape photography as intimate encounter with land and psyche. His work has been exhibitied in many public and private galleries was featured in the best-selling anthology Highway 99: A Literary Journey through California's Great Central Valley.

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LKim KirbyPolish, 1900s, 2000s, Roman Loranc
Robert Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe is known for his elegantly expressive black-and-white studies of male and female nudes, flowers, and celebrity portraits. He credited sculpture as an influence on his work and used traditional techniques of direct lighting and sharp focus to produce sleekly ravishing effects and gleaming surfaces. His photographs include homoerotic images, often glamorized and disturbing, which made him a controversial figure. Soon after his death from AIDS, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., canceled a traveling retrospective of his work in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid a debate in Congress over public funding by the National Endowment for the Arts of works deemed “objectionable” by fundamentalist religious groups and political conservatives.

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MKim KirbyMale, LGBT, 1900s, American Photographers, Robert Mapplethorpe
Tina Modotti
Tina Modotti

Tina Modotti’s photographs blend formal rigor with social awareness. The Italian-born artist immigrated to the United States when she was 16. She acted in plays and silent films, and worked as an artist’s model during her first years in the country. In 1920 she met photographer Edward Weston, who mentored her and was a great influence on her subsequent work. By 1921 they had become lovers, and in 1923 they moved together to Mexico City, which had become a cosmopolitan center in the interwar years. There, cultural and political expatriates like Weston and Modotti, Sergei Eisenstein, and Leon Trotsky moved in bohemian circles with Mexican intellectuals and artists such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Modotti and Weston opened a portrait studio in the city.

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MKim KirbyItalian, Female, 1900s, Tina Modotti
Abelardo Morell
Abelardo Morell

Abelardo Morell was born in Havana, Cuba in 1948. He immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1962. Morell received his undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College and his MFA from The Yale University School of Art. He has received an honorary degree from Bowdoin College in 1997 and from Lesley University in 2014.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 Art Museum in New York, The Chicago Art Institute, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Houston Museum of Art, The Boston Museum of Fine Art, The Victoria & 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 Getty in Los Angeles and The High Museum in Atlanta closed in May 2014 after a year of travel.

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MKim KirbyCuban, Abelardo Morell, Male, 1900s, 2000s
Wright Morris
Wright Morris

Wright Morris was a renowned writer and effective photographer. Pairing photographs with his own writing, Morris pioneered a new tradition of “photo-texts” in the 1940s that proved highly influential to future photographers. Devoid of figures, his photographs depict everyday objects and atmosphere. Morris’s poetic images exist in a fictional narrative, but reference documentary style.

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MKim KirbyMale, 1900s, American Photographers
William Neill
William Neill

William Neill, a resident of the Yosemite National Park area since 1977, is a landscape photographer concerned with conveying the deep, spiritual beauty he sees and feels in Nature. Neill's award-winning photography has been widely published in books, magazines, calendars, posters, and his limited-edition prints have been collected and exhibited in museums and galleries nationally, including the Museum of Fine Art Boston, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, The Vernon Collection, and The Polaroid Collection. Neill received a BA degree in Environmental Conservation at the University of Colorado. In 1995, Neill received the Sierra Club's Ansel Adams Award for conservation photography.

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NKim KirbyMale, American Photographers, William Neill, 2000s, 1900s
Manuello Paganelli
Manuello Paganelli

Manuello Paganelli grew up in Santo Domingo, Italy and Puerto Rico. After a mentorship with Ansel Adams, he worked as a photojournalist at the Chattanooga Times. In 1989, he began to explore Cuba, its land, its people, and its complex relationship with the USA. In 1995, he had his first solo photo show of his work on Cuba and that same year earned him a fellowship grant. The Washington Post wrote "Manuello Paganelli's Cuban photographs are a brilliant window on a land and people too long hidden from North American eyes. Working in the tradition of Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, Paganelli brings an artist's eyes and a native son's sensibility to his superb photographs."

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PKim KirbyItalian, Puerto Rican, Male, 1900s, 2000s, Manuello Paganelli
Diane Rosenblum
Diane Rosenblum

Diane Rosenblum’s heavily blurred and color infused photographs of plants and flowers range from nearly representational to almost entirely abstract. Made with experimental camera techniques, these images reach towards the numinous. They are a hazy dream memory or a future vision of a world of light and color. They explore a state of being like that induced through meditation, giving the sensation of being in a garden or remembering a garden. These lush photographs function to calm the mind and instill quiet sense of tranquility and elation.

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RKim KirbyFemale, American Photographers, Diane Rosenblum, 1900s, 2000s
Edward Steichen
Edward Steichen

Edward Steichen is one of the most influential figures in 20th century photography, as well as the history of photography from its inception on. By his early twenties, Steichen was winning the praise of Alfred Stieglitz in New York as well as Auguste Rodin in Paris, both of whom went on to become close friends, for his brooding tonalist landscapes and brilliant psychological studies. The preferred portraitist of both the American and the European elite during his earlier career, and an acknowledged master of the Pictorialist style, Steichen denounced Pictorialism following WWI in favor of “straight” photography. He is also known for his fashion and advertising photography. Curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for over fifteen years, he was responsible for many important exhibitions, including The Family of Man.

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SKim KirbyMale, 1900s, American Photographers, Edward Steichen