Nights on Beyoglu, Timurtas Onan

‘Nights on Beyoglu’ is an epic work by Timurtas Onan. In his hands, the subject assumes a timeless expression of the human condition while being located now, in lstanbul in Beyoglu and at night. Timurtas is an artist in the great tradition of art. This is a complete and complex work like a l7th century triptych and, as always, he treats his subject with a sensitive understanding, respect and affection, mixed, at times, with humour. He is never, ever cynical. These images of life, taken after dark and until] dawn when the people of this human theatre return to their homes -lodgings, llats, rooms or card- board patches on the street, have a vividness that carries us to the heart of life in this vibrant part of contemporary Istanbul. The work sings to the colours. sounds and images of the street and the often marginal people he touches with his camera. He uses this as a painter would use his brush and palet and I am reminded of Heronimous Bosch, Goya or Toulouse- Lautrec. We see the street vendors of many sorts, the old men, the lovers, the disposessed and others seeking the distractions of the night; the lights of the shops and the cacophony of sounds from Classical music tumbling out of a shop to those other sounds belonging to the street. Here in its exaggerated forms is humanity found in its many colours; passing images in the life of this ancient city.

Francesc Català-Roca

Se formó con su padre, Pere Català Pic, uno de los principales representantes de la vanguardia fotográfica catalana. Aún niño, su familia se trasladó a vivir a Barcelona, de modo que ahí se inició como profesional de la fotografía, primero con su padre y después, en 1948, como profesional independiente. Trabajó de reportero fotográfico de actualidad en revistas como Destino y Revista. Interesado también en el cine, en 1952 hizo el documental sobre la Sagrada Familia Piedras Vivas (desaparecido), que fue galardonado ese mismo año con el primer premio del Festival de Ancona (Italia). Su participación en publicaciones de temática documental también comenzó con esta obra de Gaudí. Es el caso de La Sagrada Família (Barcelona, 1952), con texto de Cèsar Martinell. Posteriormente publicó Gaudí dissenyador (Blume, Barcelona, 1978) y Gaudí (Polígrafa, Barcelona, 1983), con texto de Ignasi de Solà-Morales.
Francesc Català-Roca recibió diversos premios y distinciones a lo largo de su carrera profesional. En 1988, su ciudad natal celebró la exposición Gaudí (Institut d’Estudis Vallencs, Valls), donde sus imágenes reflejaron un personal modo de ver la obra del arquitecto.

 

Albert Levy

Photos

Istanbul city of light and shadows, Timurtaş Onan

Timurtas Onan was born and brought up in Istanbul. Becoming involved in photography in 1980 he has worked as a professional photographer for the past 25 years.

Through this period he has participated in, organised and attended many photographic events, taking part in and holding exhibitions of his work both at home in Turkey and abroad and also acting as a jury member for national and international photographic competitions.

His work has involved international photographic projects, the creation of documentary films on socially relevant issues and he is particularly well known for his distinctive projects on Istanbul. His work as an artist can be seen in many public and private collections in Turkey and abroad. At the present time he is holding photo workshops; curating various exhibitions, and working on new photographic projects.

Hugues Hardy

Home

Tošo Dabac

Tošo Dabac was a Croatian photographer of international renown.
Although his work was often exhibited and prized abroad, Dabac spent nearly his entire working career in Zagreb.
While he worked on many different kinds of publications throughout his career, he is primarily notable for his black-and-white photographs of Zagreb street life during the Great Depression era.

Tony Marciante

Photos

Roger Mayne

 

The reason for photographing poor streets is that I love them. Empty, the streets have their own kind of beauty, a kind of decaying splendor and always great atmosphere – whether romantic on a hazy winter day, or listless when the summer is hot; sometimes it is forbidding; or it may be warm and friendly on a sunny spring weekend when the street is swarming with children playing, or adults walking through or standing gossiping. I remember my excitement when I turned the corner into Southam Street, a street I have since returned to again and again. Home

James Jowers

James Jowers was an American street photographer.
Jowers began receiving training in photography and darkroom techniques while serving in the United States Army. While working the night shift as a porter at St. Luke’s Hospital, he would spend his free time during the day roaming the streets of his Lower East Side neighborhood and the rest of Manhattan, capturing a gritty, funny, and idiosyncratic view of the city.

France portfolio, Fred Stein

Fred Stein was born on July 3, 1909 in Dresden, Germany. As a teenager he was deeply interested in politics and became an early anti-Nazi activist. The threat of Fascism grew more and more dangerous and after the SS began making inquiries about him, Stein fled to Paris in 1933. IIn the midst of upheaval, gathering war, and personal penury, Stein began taking photographs. He was a pioneer of the small, hand-held camera, and with the Leica which he and his wife had purchased as a joint wedding present, he went into the streets to photograph scenes of life in Paris. He saw hope and beauty where most people would only see despair. He also became acquainted with and photographed some of the leading personalities of Europe. He worked unobtrusively and quickly, valuing the freedom to capture the telling moment that reveals the subject in its own light, not as incidental material for photographic interpretation. He preferred natural or minimal lighting, and avoided elaborate setups as well as dramatic effects. He did not retouch or manipulate the negative. Having a deep commitment to social equality and a concern for his fellow man, he became a member of the Photo League. Though portraits were his main income-generating work and he photographed many people on commission, he generally worked without assignment, shooting people and scenes that interested him. He would then offer his work to publishers and photo editors of magazines, newspapers, and books. Stein died in 1967 at the age of 58. His portraits and reportage had appeared in newspapers, magazines, and books throughout the world.

Jules Aarons

Aarons’s photographs are notable for their liveliness, informality, and emotional warmth. He excelled at street photography: casual documentary images of urban life. “My basic approach to street portraits was to avoid intruding on the scene,’. He began taking photographs while an undergraduate at the City College of New York.

“I knew that the dynamics of people whose social relationships involved their neighbors and the streets could be a source of creativity,”.

He gravitated to Boston’s old West End, before urban renewal demolished much of the neighborhood, and then to the North End. He visited with his camera, a double-lens Rolleiflex, on late afternoons and weekends.

“In 1947, I began to take black-and-white photographs with the aim to document Boston, its streets and its people, while also developing my own style. I resolved to capture the day-to-day life experiences of the people, avoiding scenes of poverty.”

Among photographers who influenced him were Sid Grossman, with whom he briefly studied, Lisette Model, and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Home

Arnold Genthe

Born in Germany to a family of scholars, Genthe was a recent Ph.D. in classical philology when he came to the United States in 1895 to work for two years as a tutor. On his days off, he walked the streets of Chinatown in San Francisco, where he began to photograph. After publishing some of these images in local magazines, Genthe decided to open his own studio, specializing in portraits of prominent locals and visiting celebrities. Genthe’s work and studio were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and resulting fire–save for the Chinatown images that had been stored in a bank vault. He published those early images in the 1909 book Pictures of Old Chinatown. After the fire, Genthe re-established his studio in San Francisco and in 1908 spent six months photographing in Japan. In 1911 he moved to New York, where he continued to work as a successful portrait and pioneering dance photographer. With New York as his new home base, Genthe also traveled and photographed throughout Europe and the United States

Mario Cravo Neto

Hijo del escultor Mário Cravo Júnior. Realizó estudios de fotografía en Berlín y en 1966 regresó a Brasil entrando como ayudante de Fulvio Roiter.​ Vivió en Nueva York entre 1968 y 1970, donde estudió en la Art Student League con el escultor Jack Krueger.​ Participó en la Bienal Internacional de São Paulo en 1971, 1973, 1975, 1977 y 1983 y recibió diversos premios nacionales de fotografía. En 1975 trabajó como director de fotografía en la película titulada A Lenda de Ubirajara del director André Luis Oliveira.4
Su obra hace referencias a su ciudad natal y se encuentra en las colecciones de diversos museos como el Museo de Arte Moderno de Nueva York, el Museo de Arte Moderno de Río de Janeiro, el Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía de Madrid y el Museo Stedelijk de Ámsterdam. En ella emplea con frecuencia la técnica de la fotografía en blanco y negro y cuenta con reportajes sobre la religión del candomblé.​ Una exposición retrospectiva de su obra, llamada Mitos y Ritos, se realizó en Madrid en 2015, incluyendo algunos de sus vídeos.
Colaboró con las revistas Popular Photography y Cámara 35 y publicó once libros, entre ellos A cidade de Bahia en 1980. Ese año fue reconocido como “Mejor Fotógrafo del Año” por la Sociedad de Críticos fotográficos de Brasil.​
Murió a causa de un cáncer de piel.

Ferenc Berko

Berko is one of the leading names in color photography – a field which he helped to pioneer in 1948/49 when other professionals were still skeptical about the advantages of color…Berko’s early abstractions of nature strike the beholder as a novel experience.

 

 

Thierry Clech

 

 

Home

Louis Faurer

Louis Faurer (1916-2001) was born to immigrant parents from the Russian/Polish border and spent his early years in South Philadelphia. After graduating from the South Philadelphia High School for Boys in 1934, he spent a few summers as caricature artist in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Inscriptions of all sorts fascinated him, and he began studying at Philadelphia’s School of Commercial Art and Lettering in 1937. He also worked freelance–painting advertising signs and lettering posters. That same year, Faurer purchased his first camera, a used 35mm Kodak Vollenda. Shortly thereafter, he won a prize in a weekly photo contest of the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger. Faurer never attended classes in photography, except for a brief course he took in the military (from 1941-1945, he was a civilian photographer for U.S. Army Signal Corps, Philadelphia).
In the late 1940s, Faurer and several of his colleagues from Philadelphia opened studios in New York. Like many photographers of his generation, Faurer sought employment working for magazines, but unlike his photojournalist peers, who pursued careers at such publications as Life magazine, he gravitated toward fashion photography. In 1947, Lillian Bassman, the first art director of the short-lived Junior Bazaar (later incorporated into Harper’s Bazaar), invited him to join the magazine’s staff. The new magazine also hired Robert Frank, a recent immigrant from Switzerland, and the two immediately struck up a friendship that would last for fifty years.
Faurer was a key member of the New York School of street photographers active from the 1930s to the 1950s. A loosely defined group that included Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, and William Klein, the New York School chose city life as its subject, preferred 35mm cameras, and rejected traditional documentary styles.
During the 1950s, he began to focus more on his professional assignments than on his own personal street photography, working steadily for magazines such as Glamour, Charm, and Seventeen, Vogue and Mademoiselle. He created most of his fashion photographs in the studio.
In 1968, Faurer moved to London and then to Paris to escape trouble with the Internal Revenue Service and conflict with his wife. He returned to street photography in Paris, but his photographs from this period lack the clarity of vision that marks his work from the 1930s through the early 1950s. When he returned from Europe in 1974, he tried to resume photographing the streets of New York, but both he and the city had changed. In the fall of 1984, as he was exiting a bus, Faurer was struck by a car. This serious injury effectively ended his career as a photographer. He died in 2001 in New York.

 

Naoki Fujihara

Naoki Fujihara is an award-winning fine art photographer in Japan. His works aim at not only expressing the beauty and dynamism of architectures, but he also expresses his values or his visions with photography.

Russell Lee

Russell Werner Lee (July 21, 1903 – August 28, 1986)
Russell Werner Lee was born in Ottawa, Illinois on July 21, 1903. He attended Culver Military Academy in Indiana and graduated from Lehigh University in 1925 with a degree in engineering.
Lee began his career as a chemical engineer but grew dissatisfied after four years in manufacturing. Encouraged by his first wife, artist Doris Emrick, Lee began to paint. The Lees left the Midwest for San Francisco, where Doris wanted to study. They arrived just before the 1929 crash of the stock market and the onset of the Depression and immediately became engaged in the thriving art community there. From San Francisco, the Lees next moved to the New York art colony of Woodstock, where they lived in the summers from 1931 to 1936, spending their winters in New York City. In 1935 Lee began to experiment with a camera as an aid to his painting and soon gave up painting in favor of photography. He and Doris went to Europe, where she studied art and he traveled, observing life in Eastern Europe, Germany, and the Soviet Union.
In 1935 Lee began to photograph miners and record conditions in Pennsylvania coalmines. His growing interest in social issues and his affinity for photography as a means of recording social conditions brought him in contact with other visual artists, among them Pare Lorentz and Ben Shahn, whose work he admired. He heard that Shahn was involved with the documentation program of the Historic Division of the Resettlement Administration, later renamed the Farm Security Administration, and decided to seek a job there. His first assignment for Roy Stryker was to photograph the Jersey Homesteads housing project in 1936. When Carl Mydans left the agency, Stryker offered Lee a full-time job.
Russell Lee’s photographic work continues to be associated with the documentary tradition and the work of the Farm Security Administration under the direction of Roy Stryker. As part of the team that also included Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein and Walker Evans, Lee’s primary task was to document rural communities with the goal of making urban Americans aware of the plight of tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and migrant workers stricken by drought and the Great Depression. Stryker assigned Lee to cover the Midwest and the West Coast, where he typically stayed on the road much longer than expected. Lee made some of his better-known early photographs in rural Iowa in 1936. He traveled throughout Texas and New Mexico between 1939 and 1940. Lee and his first wife grew apart during this time and divorced in 1938. During the 1940’s, Lee’s distinctive work appeared in hundreds of newspapers and popular journals including Life, Look, Fortune, U.S. Camera, and Survey Graphic.
Shortly after the U.S. entered Word War II, the Historical Division transferred to the jurisdiction of the Office of War Information. Lee left the FSA group and joined the Air Transport Command as a captain in January of 1943, assigned to take aerial surveillance photographs as well as documenting local conditions on the ground. When the war ended, Russell Lee resigned his commission and in 1947 he and his second wife Jean Smith moved to Austin, Texas. From 1965 to 1973 he taught photography at the University of Texas. Although Lee often traveled as a free-lance photographer on assignment for magazines, corporations, the federal government, and the University, Austin remained his home and Texas a major focus of his work until his death in 1986.

Robert Doisneau

Robert Doisneau was one of France’s most popular and prolific reportage photographers. He was known for his modest, playful, and ironic images of amusing juxtapositions, mingling social classes, and eccentrics in contemporary Paris streets and cafes. Influenced by the work of Kertesz, Atget, and Cartier-Bresson, in over twenty books Doisneau has presented a charming vision of human frailty and life as a series of quiet, incongruous moments.
The marvels of daily life are so exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.” Robert Doisneau.

Doisneau’s work gives unusual prominence and dignity to childrens street culture; returning again and again to the theme of children at play in the city, unfettered by parents. His work treats their play with seriousness and respect. In his honor, and owing to this, there are several Ecole Primaire (Primary Schools) named after him. An example is at Veretz (Indre et Loire).

Robert Doisneau is one of France’s best known photographers, for his street photography and the many playful images in everyday French life. His photographs over the course of several decades provide people with a great record of French life. He has published over twenty books with realistic and charming pictures of personal moments in the lives of individuals

LINK

Yuko Azuma