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.

BKim KirbyMay 31, 2019German, Female, 1900s, Nude, California Photographers, California photography, Ruth Bernhard

Sparky Campanella

Sparky Campanella is a Los Angeles based self-taught photographer who switched careers in 2001 from software marketing to fine-art photography. His figurative works are typically conceptual and abstract, with a minimal aesthetic. Sparky grew up in Pittsburgh and has been photographing almost as long as he’s been walking. He has shown his work in group exhibitions nationally including Center for Photography at Woodstock, Woodstock; Umbrella Arts, NYC; The Print Center, Philadelphia; Texas Photographic Arts, San Antonio; SF Camerawork, San Francisco; Gallery 825, Los Angeles; and Irvine Fine Arts Center, Irvine. He holds an undergraduate degree from Duke University and a graduate degree from Stanford University. He has been an instructor at the Harvey Milk Institute in San Francisco and at Prescott College in Arizona. He has been awarded residencies at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and Anderson Ranch in Colorado.

CKim KirbyMay 31, 2019Male, 2000s, California Photographers, American Photographers, Sparky Campanella

Mariana Cook

CKim KirbyMay 31, 2019Female, 1900s, 2000s, American Photographers, California photography, California Photographers, Mariana Cook

Rolfe Horn

HKim KirbyMay 31, 2019American Photographers, Male, 2000s, California Photographers, Rolfe Horn, Summer in Carmel

Pirkle Jones

Pirkle Jones lived in California from the mid-1940s on, photographing the state and its inhabitants with understanding and sympathy. In 1946, when Ansel Adams started the first-ever department of photography in an art school (at what is now the San Francisco Art Institute), Jones was one of the first students, and he returned later to teach classes of his own. Jones grew up in the rural Midwest on a family farm, and when he moved to California his great interests at first were the qualities of San Francisco itself: its moody fog, brilliant sun, tiny houses, and steep perspectives.

Carleton Watkins

Carleton Watkins’ position as a preeminent photographer of the American West is undisputed. He is considered by many to be the greatest American photographer of the nineteenth century. During his career of some fifty years, Watkins traveled the western US, making thousands of remarkable, historically important images. From breathtaking pictures of Yosemite, the Pacific Coast, and the scenery along the Columbia River, to the vast Sierra Nevada, these images provide an unparalleled visual record of the West. Watkin’s artistic vision was both refined and evocative. It is in large part due to the persuasive power of Watkin’s mammoth plate images of Yosemite that the area was set aside as a National Park.

Robert Weingarten

Born in New York City in 1941, Robert Weingarten moved to Los Angeles in the early 1980s. His photographs have been exhibited widely, and are included in numerous collections, including the George Eastman House, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Polin Museum of Art, Warsaw, Poland and Whitney Museum of American Art. He has received numerous awards in photography as well as held many solo and group exhibitions worldwide. He has produced a number of books and has appeared in multiple publications. Robert Weingarten currently lives in Malibu, California.

Jack Welpott

Internationally known photographer and educator, Jack Welpott was born in Kansas City, Kansas on April 27, 1923, but grew up in Bloomington, Indiana. After high school he enrolled in Indiana University, but was drafted into the U.S. Army Air Force in 1943. He served in the South Pacific as a radio intercept operator until 1946. After WW II, he returned to Indiana University on the G.I. Bill where he earned an M.F.A degree studying with Henry Holmes Smith. Jack and Jerry Uelsmann were the first M.F.A. graduates while Van Deren Coke was also a graduate student. During these years, he became acquainted with Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Minor White all of whom were established photographers and pioneers in American photographic education.

Brett Weston

Brett Weston may be said to be the first successful artistic heir in the history of photography. The son of Edward Weston, Brett was taught the basics of photography by his father at the young age of fourteen, and set out on his own from that point on. At sixteen he had his first one-man show, and received international recognition at eighteen when a score of his photographs were displayed in the legendary “Film und Foto” exhibition of 1929 in Stuttgart. By the age of twenty, his photographs were on view in major shows in the US, Europe, and Japan. Since then, Weston’s photographs have been featured in hundreds of exhibitions around the world, and are staples in the collections of leading museums and galleries including the Getty Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago, George Eastman House, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Amon Carter Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum among others. Concerned with the elemental mass of forms, he is known for his great abstractions; he is also generally acknowledged as one of the finest printers in the medium.

Cara Weston

Cara Weston was born and raised in Carmel, California, the daughter of photographer Cole Weston and Helen Prosser Weston and granddaughter to the world-renowned photographer Edward Weston and Flora Chandler Weston. Living in the photographic world all her life, in the 1970s, she worked for and with her father Cole Weston, and with her uncle, Brett Weston as an assistant and model. She also spent a short time assisting black and white photographer Rod Dresser. Cara initially photographed using only black and white film, she has broken with family tradition and has embraced digital photography. She also worked in the medium of stained glass for many years. Cara inherited another Weston family passion, sailing, which she did extensively, making trips to Hawaii, Costa Rica, the Channel Islands and Baja, Mexico. Cara's most personal and rewarding years have been raising her two daughters and being a mother. She strongly feels this is her greatest accomplishment in life and can't imagine anything else ever being as rewarding. Cara currently lives in Big Sur, California.

Cole Weston

Cole Weston first began working in color in 1947, when Eastman Kodak sent a quantity of their new film, Kodachrome, to his father, Edward Weston. He gave up black-and-white photography in his own personal endeavors almost immediately, and soon became one of photography’s finest colorists. His images are known for their unusual beauty, emotional impact, and exuberant use of color. Having simultaneously done his own creative work while printing from his father’s negatives, according to Edward’s wishes, for over thirty years, Cole turned his energies predominantly toward making his own photography in 1988, working across the American West, in Europe, and with the female nude. His work has been featured in more than sixty exhibitions worldwide and is in the collections of museums throughout the US and Europe.

Edward Weston

Edward Weston, an American photographer was born in Highland Park, Illinois. Weston began to make photographs in Chicago parks in 1902, and his works were first exhibited in 1903 at the Art Institute of Chicago. Three years later he moved to California and opened a portrait studio in a Los Angeles suburb. The Western landscape soon became his principal subject matter. In the 1930s, Weston and several other photographers, including Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and Willard van Dyke, formed the f/64 group, which greatly influenced the aesthetics of American photography. In 1937, Weston received the first Guggenheim Fellowship awarded to a photographer, which freed him from earning a living as a portraitist. The works for which he is famous–sharp, stark, brilliantly printed images of sand dunes, nudes, vegetables, rock formations, trees, cacti, shells, water, and human faces are among the finest of 20th-century photographs; their influence on modern art remains inestimable.

Max Yavno

Social documentary photographer Max Yavno (1911-1985) identified the odd charm that constitutes the identity of a place and people. Born in New York, Yavno was a social worker from 1932-1936; this background clearly informed his photographic career. His humanistic sensibility is revealed in his work, which includes street photographs made in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Yavno is best known for his depictions of these great American cities and the cultural and social detail of their inhabitants, many of which distinctively reflect their era.

YKim KirbyMay 31, 2019Male, Photographer, California Photographers, American Photographers, Max Yavno