Famous Photographers

Veronica Valadez

1. Jacques Henri Lartigue-
Lartigue began taking photography when he was 6 years old. His subject matter consisted of the people in his life and the many activities he performed. Although he took pictures throughout his life, Lartigue focused more on his paintings. It wasn’t until Charles Rado of the Rapho agency discovered him that Lartigue had his firsts exhibition. Soon he had a photo spread in Life and received work from fashion magazines. He also worked with film makers and took pictures of famous celebrities.

2. James Nachtwey-
As a young man Nachtwey was moved by imagery from the Vietnam war and the American civil rights movement. Inspired, Nachtwey fell in love with photography. He worked as a newspaper photographer in New Mexico and New York. His first overseas assignment was in Northern Ireland documenting civil strife. As a war photographer Nachtwey has dedicated his life to documenting conflict and social issues.

3. Weegee-
Weegee, named after the phonetic rendering of Ouija, was a news photographer who documented life in New York City. He is best known for his shocking photographs of crime scenes. Weegee was the only newspaper reporter in 1938 that was allowed to have a portable police band shortwave radio. He even kept a complete dark room in his trunk and beat the authorities to the scene.

4. Joel Peter Witkin-
Witkin claims that his sensibility occurred after witnessing a car accident in which a little girl was decapitated.
“The accident involved 3 cars, all with families in them. Some how in the confusion I was no longer holding my mother’s hand. At the place where I stood at the curb, I could see something rolling from one of the overturned cars. It stopped at the curb where I stood. It was the head of a little girl”
His difficult family life, surrealism, and Baroque art influenced him. He deals with death, corpses, and outsiders (transsexuals, dwarfs, etc) in his photos. Witkin also scratches his negatives and bleaches them.

5. George Platt Lynes-
Lynes became interested in photography not as a career but as a hobby. However he became close friends iwht several artists including critic and art dealer Julien Levy. Levy exhibited his photos in his gallery in New York. As a result Lynes received several commissions from fashion magazines. By the 1940s he began to lose interest in commercial photography and focused more on homoerotic imagery. Lynes took nude photos of his friends and performers. He also worked with Dr. Alfred Kinsey and his institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction.

6. Anna Atkins-
Atkin’s father, John George Children was a scientist and chaired the Royal Society. From the group Atkins and her father received their first lessons on photogenic drawing from William Henry Fox Talbot. Another friend of Atkins and her father, Sir John Herschel invented the cyanotype photographic process. Atkins used the process to solve the problem of recording details of scientific specimens. She published several books including cyanotypes for British and Foreign Flowering Plants and Ferns in 1854.

7. Jock Sturges-
Sturges is an American photographer who is known for his nude pictures of adolescents. Many critics claimed his work is child pornography disguised as art. In 1990 FBI agents confiscated his equipment and accused him of creating child pornography. Artists were furious and publicly defended Sturges. The investigation was ended a year later and eventually received most of his equipment back.

8. Edward Steichen-
Steichen first established himself as a fine art painter by the 20th century. He helped create the Little Galleries of the Photo Secession with Alfred Stieglitz in 1905. During World War I Steichen commanded the photographic division of the American Expeditionary Forces but gradually moved to fashion photography. However when the U.S. became involved in WWII he served as a Director of the Naval Photographic Institute. The Fighting Lady a war documentary he created, won an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1945. Once the war ended Steichen became the Director of Photography at the New York Museum of Modern Art.

9. Hans Bellmer-
Bellmer created his first doll project to oppose the Nazi party by declaring he would not make art work to support Germany. The doll’s mutated forms and strange poses were directed at the Nazi’s obsession with creating the perfect race. In his art work Bellmer often sexualized dolls of young girls. In 1934 he published a book that contained sketches of his work. His projects were eventually declared “degenerate” by the Nazis and he was forced to flee the country. When the war ended Bellmer gave up doll making and focused on creating erotic drawings, paintings, and photographs.

10. Barbara Kruger-
Kruger attended Parsons School of Design with Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel. Israel was a graphic designer and art director for Harper’s Bazaar who introduced Kruger to photographers and fashion magazine subcultures. She worked as a designer for Mademoiselle magazine after a year at Parsons. A lot of Kruger’s graphic works consist of black and white photographs over laid with print. Much of the statements made in her works criticize sexism and misogyny.
“Kruger’s works are direct and evoke an immediate response. Usually her style involves the cropping of a magazine or newspaper image enlarged in black and white. The enlargement of the image is done as crudely as possible to monumental proportions. A message is stenciled on the image, usually in while letters against a background of red. The text and image are unrelated in an effort to create anxiety by the audience that plays on the fears of society”

11. Lorna Simpson-
Simpson started as a documentary street photographer in New York. In the 1980s she began to explore ethnic and social divisions in her studio. She is known for combining text and cropped photographers of men and women. The text in her works often imply underlying racism found in American Society.

12. Doris Ulmann-
Ulmann dedicated her life to documenting the rural people of the South. Her work also includes portraits of writers and artists. When asked about her subjects Ulmann stated the men and women in her work must have “a face that has the marks of having lived intensely” which a younger person usually lacks.

13. Eugene Atget-
Atget began selling his photographs to painters as a means of income. HE was commissioned to preserve and record landmarks in Paris by Bureaus and the Carnavalet Museum. Atget’s photos are often wispy and blurred because of his long exposures which required working in the early hours of the day to avoid pedestrians. In addition to his dream like portryl of Paris Atget avoided being a perfectionist.

14. Walker Evans-
Evans is known for his photos in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The book contains stories and photos of poor white families in the south during the Great Depression. Evans would also secretly place a camera inside of his coat to take pictures of people on the subway. Evans rarely spent time in the dark room and usually wrote instructions on the printing procedure.

15. Lee Miller-
Miller was Man Ray’s assistant, lover and muse. While in Paris she established her own photographic studio and often took over Man Ray’s fashion assignment so he could work on his paintings. Many of the pictures credited to Man Ray were actually taken by Miller. She was a participant of the surrealist movement.

16. Dorothea Lange-
Lange brought the troubles of the poor to the rest of the public. Sharecroppers, farm families, and migrant workers were her subjects in her work. Her pictures were often distributed to newspapers freely and became icons of the Depression. Her photograph titled “Migrant Mother” is her most famous and well known work.

17. Diane Arbus-
Arbus’ portraits include social outcasts such as dwarfs, giants, transvestites, and prostitutes usually in unconventional poses and settings. She experimented with the use of flashes in broad daylight to highlight the subject and separate them from the background.

18. Margaret Bourke-White-
White was the first western photographer allowed in the Soviet Union and hired to be the first female photojournalist for Life. White photographed people during the Great Depression and collaborated to produce a book on the conditions in the South during the Depression.

19. William Eggleston-
Eggleston finds beauty in the most ordinary subject matter. He will take pictures of signs, dirty coke bottles, torn posters, and even discarded air conditioners.
“The extraordinary, compelling, honest, beautiful, and unsparing photographs all have to do with the quality of our lives in the ongoing world: they succeed in showing us the grain of the present, like the cross section of a tree…they focus on the mundane world. But no subject is fuller of implications than the mundane world!” wrote Mark Holburn on Eggleston’s work.

20. Man Ray-
Man Ray art not only includes photography but painting, sculpture, and collage. He received several assignments from famous magazines such as Vogue, Vu, Bazaar and Vanity Fair. He was an active member of the Dada art movement and thought of photography as a “medium of artistic expression when used for more than reproduction.