Conscientious | Classic photographers

Barbara Crane

2010-07-08T18:02:55Z

A little while ago, I found a book containing an overview of Barbara Crane's work, and I was struck by the beauty of some of the portfolios. My favourite was shot in parks and on beaches in Chicago. You can find many more of her photos on this site or here - beautiful work!

Jacob Israel Avedon

2008-02-11T16:51:26Z

I remember a while ago, I was writing a post about my favourite classic portraits, and I wanted to include Richard Avedon's portraiture of his father - which I couldn't find online. I suppose the obvious did not occur to me, namely to look on the Richard Avedon website (in my defense, it appears as if the website has been expanded quite a bit since my prior visits). So it took Miguel's post to remind me of that work, and to tell me where to look.

]]> I am a fan of Avedon's work, even though I often find it too gimmicky - and watching him explain how he took portraits in a documentary reinforced my view. Needless to say, with magazines paying for many of the portraits it's not hard to see why he wanted something that would catch the eye with more than, well, "just" the portrait. After all, magazine readers - so I am being told - are a fickle bunch, and you only have a second or so to make them look at something. Be that as it may (or not), Avedon's portraits of his own father have always struck me as his strongest work, by a very, very wide margin. I think one can tell that for once, Avedon shied away from trying to add a gimmick - for which there could be a wide variety of good reasons - and presented the old man the way he saw him. Maybe it's that very inhibition to unleash the portrait pro that makes these photos so powerful and moving.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard

2008-02-04T22:27:40Z

"Born in Normal, Illinois, in 1925, [...] Meatyard attended Williams College as part of the Navy's V12 program in World War II. Following the war, he married, became a licensed optician, and moved to Lexington, Kentucky [..] When the first of his three children was born, Meatyard bought a camera to make pictures of the baby. Quickly, photography became a consuming interest. He joined the Lexington Camera Club, where he met Van Deren Coke, under whose encouragement he soon developed into a powerfully original photographer. [...] An eclectic and voracious reader, Meatyard became close friends with poets and writers, including Guy Davenport, Wendell Berry, Jonathan Williams, and the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Meatyard's work became well known and was exhibited widely within the United States and abroad. In 1972, he died of cancer, a week before his forty seventh birthday." (source; sample images here)

Milton Rogovin

2007-11-26T16:10:30Z

I recently saw a show of work by Milton Rogovin, and I was impressed by the power of his work. By today's standards his prints are tiny, but as I said before bigger is not necessarily better. Find another page with his work here.

Charles W. Cushman

2007-05-03T13:24:24Z

"Charles Weever Cushman, amateur photographer and Indiana University alumnus, bequeathed approximately 14,500 Kodachrome color slides to his alma mater. The photographs in this collection bridge a thirty-two year span from 1938 to 1969, during which time he extensively documented the United States as well as other countries." This, of course, being a treasure trove of early colour work, previously linked to by Christian - which I managed to miss nevertheless, so thanks, Jacob, for telling me about it!

Luigi Ghirri

2007-05-03T13:17:26Z

"Luigi Ghirri revolutionized Italian photography in the 1970s with his fresh color snap-shot style observations of Italian contemporary culture. His small delicately colored prints were conceived in series to create visual poems- gentle but direct. The small scale and modest demeanor of his prints belie their power. Much of the work anticipates the large scale contemporary work of photographers ranging from Miguel Rio Branco to Andreas Gursky." (source) See some more photos here.

John Hinde

2007-05-02T12:58:26Z

John Hinde was a colour photo pioneer. "Chances are you've never heard of him, but it's more than likely that you'll have seen some of his work. Hinde is a (mostly unsung) pioneer of colour photography; overlooked because he spent his time producing holiday postcards." (source, with very neat samples). He recently became somewhat more widely known because of the Butlin's Photographs (some of which you can see here). There appears to be a John Hinde website, but it won't load for me right now...

Lee Miller

2007-05-01T18:31:16Z

Regardless of whether there's more to the whole than just the parts, the plethora of things that can be said about Lee Miller indicate that her life was quite unusual. Sadly enough, it ended in depression and alcohol - with a neglected cache of 40,000 negatives and 500 prints in the attic, which werediscovered after her death by her only son. She was the first woman to appear in an ad for menstrual pads (in a photo taken by Edward Steichen) and model and lover of Man Ray, before she became a photographer herself, and not just "a" photographer, but one of the finest ones of her days. During World War II, she worked as a daring war photographer who took the famous photos of the dead concentration camp guard in Dachau and the dead mayor's daughter in (I believe Dresden), and she had her photo taken Hitler's bathtub in Munich. Find two long accounts of her life here and here, both well worth the read.

Ed van der Elsken

2007-05-01T13:22:24Z

When I saw this photo for the first time, I stopped what I was doing (I think I was actually walking somewhere in Amsterdam) and I stared at it for what must have been a long time. It's a photo by Ed van der Elsken, a Dutch photojournalist. Most of his work is in b/w, but look at the colour work! I wanted to link to his work earlier, and since I'll be focusing on early unknown colour photography this week, now is the time.
(updated entry - thanks, Pim!)

PS: I got an email saying that the link to Ed van der Elsken's doesn't work right. I can't reproduce the problem here, it works fine for me; but another way to get to the images is to use the museum's main site and then to use the "Search" function.

Evelyn Hofer

2007-04-30T13:11:37Z

"Generations of photographers are indebted to [Evelyn] Hofer. For many years, her absolute technical proficiency attracted a constant stream of young photographers wishing to gain experience with her or work as her assistants. As a result, Hofer trained countless young practitioners and is a household name in the world of professional photography. This has made her 'the most famous unknown photographer in America', as one professional photo-journal put it in 1987." (source) See more photos here, here, and here.

Ruth Bernhard, Influential Photographer Of Nudes, Dies At 101

2006-12-22T03:51:23Z

"Ruth Bernhard, who photographed nude models in graceful compositions evoking sand dunes and sculpted shapes, died Monday. She was 101." - full story

William Gedney

2006-12-06T19:09:52Z

"From the mid 1950s through the early 1980s, William Gedney (1932-1989) photographed throughout the United States, in India, and in Europe. From the commerce of the street outside his Brooklyn apartment to the daily chores of unemployed coal miners, from the indolent lifestyle of hippies in Haight-Ashbury to the sacred rituals of Hindu worshippers, Gedney was able to record the lives of others with remarkable clarity and poignancy. These photographs, along with his notebooks and writings, illuminate the rare vision of an intensely private man who, as a writer and photographer, was able to reveal the lives of others with striking sensitivity." - The collection of work is nothing but amazing (and the sheer number of photos is quite overwhelming).

Arnold Newman dies at age 88

2006-06-08T15:19:42Z

"Arnold Newman, whose portraits of artists like Igor Stravinsky and Pablo Picasso aimed to capture their souls, not just their faces, died on Tuesday [6 June] at age 88 at a New York hospital" (source)

Tata Ronkholz

2006-05-03T16:05:18Z

Tata Rankholz was a first-generation Becher student, and it is quite hard to find links. There are a few pages with text, all in German; I'll spare you those. So enjoy the Trinkhallen, and also check out this page.
(updated entry)

Disfarmer (Mike Meyers)

2006-03-02T18:17:17Z

"The eccentric photographer known as Disfarmer (1884-1959) seemed to be a man determined to shroud himself in mystery. Born Mike Meyers, the sixth of seven children in a German immigrant family, Disfarmer rejected the Arkansas farming world and the family in which he was raised. [...] Disfarmer built a studio on Main Street and became a full-time photographer. Using commercially available glass plates, Disfarmer photographed his subjects in direct north light creating a unique and compelling intimacy. He was so obsessed with obtaining the correct lighting that his lighting adjustments for a sitting were said to take sometimes more than an hour."

]]> I've always had a little bit of a weird feeling about the way this photographer's work was being presented, and it got a bit worse after I read this: "The present historical reclamation project began in February 2004 [...] a dedicated team of historically-minded locals was quickly trained and mobilized; ultimately they combed every dirt road in Celburne County in search of Disfarmer originals. From the outset, an integral part of the project was educating an initially skeptical rural community that their albums of old family photos were likely to contain objects of significant artistic and cultural value that could - and indeed should - be brought to the attention of a wider audience" (from "Afterword, Disfarmer Rediscovered" by Michael P. Mattis in Disfarmer: The Vintage Prints)

A "reclamation project"? Wow, none of the meaning of the word "reclamation" make this look good (and let's not ignore the fact that the photos were intended to be used for what they were used before they were "reclaimed" - the actual reclamation would be to get the photos from the collectors and give them back to the families that owned them). Educating "an initially skeptical rural community"?

I don't know what it is, but my thoughts keep coming back to descriptions of European settlers, trading valuable goods from North America's Natives in exchange for glass beads.
(updated post)