Sam Haskins

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Toni Schneiders

 

 

Toni Schneiders is one of Germany’s most important photographers after 1945.
Together with Peter Keetmann, Siegfried Lauterwasser, Wolfgang Reisewitz, Otto Steinert and Ludwig Windstoßer, he founded the group “fotoform” in 1949. This group was a loose organization of experimental photographers, who took up an outstanding position within the artistic photography in post-war Europe. Stylistically, the artists tied in with the photographic experiments of the ‚Neues Sehen’ of the 1920s, while formally and aesthetically trying to strike a new path after the cultural barbarianism of the Nazi period.
The stylistic movement of ‚subjective photography’, which the group developed – characterized by formal abstraction and its pictorial claim – is, from today’s point of view, the most important contribution to the renewal of photography in Germany after 1945. It is not the objective rendering of reality which ‚subjective photography’ strives for, but the pictorial analysis and personal interpretation through subjective pictorial ideas. The result is a formally conscious structural black and white photography with stressed graphic values.
As such, the group succeeded to break away from the conventional, traditional form of photography of the time in an outstanding manner.
Since the beginning of the 1950s, Schneiders worked as a freelance photographer, concentrating on a combination of form and content.
With his camera, he captured motifs from art, architecture, landscape and industry – in diverse emotional moods, whether melancholic, poetic or serene.
From the end of the fifties, Toni Schneiders’ photographs document his tireless journeys which led him to Ethiopia, diverse European countries, Japan and South East Asia. In these works, he kept hold of his curiosity for “these things out there”.
Schneiders received the culture award of the German Society for Photography in 1999, together with Siegfried Lauterwasser and Wolfgang Reiseweitz.

Albert Renger-Patzsch

Renger-Patzsch was born in Würzburg and began making photographs by age twelve. After military service in the First World War he studied chemistry at Dresden Technical College. In the early 1920s he worked as a press photographer for the Chicago Tribune before becoming a freelancer and, in 1925, publishing a book, The choir stalls of Cappenberg. He had his first museum exhibition in 1927.

A second book followed in 1928, Die Welt ist schön (The World is Beautiful). This, his best-known book, is a collection of one hundred of his photographs in which natural forms, industrial subjects and mass-produced objects are presented with the clarity of scientific illustrations. The book’s title was chosen by his publisher; Renger-Patzsch’s preferred title for the collection was Die Dinge (“Things”).

In its sharply focused and matter-of-fact style his work exemplifies the esthetic of The New Objectivity that flourished in the arts in Germany during the Weimar Republic. Like Edward Weston in the United States, Renger-Patzsch believed that the value of photography was in its ability to reproduce the texture of reality, and to represent the essence of an object] He wrote: “The secret of a good photograph—which, like a work of art, can have esthetic qualities—is its realism … Let us therefore leave art to artists and endeavor to create, with the means peculiar to photography and without borrowing from art, photographs which will last because of their photographic qualities.”

Ugo Mulas

Mulas began his studies in law in 1948 in Milan, but left to take art courses at the Brera Fine Arts Academy.[1] In 1954 he was asked to cover the Venice Biennale, his first professional assignment. He went on to photograph every Venice Biennale through 1972 and to document his work in an art book.

Mulas worked for a number of Italian magazines and did commercial work for advertising campaigns including clients such as Pirelli and Olivetti. In 1959 in Florence, Mulas discovered Veruschka who later became a well-known model and artist. While covering the Spoleto Festival in 1962, Mulas befriended sculptor Alexander Calder, who later became a major subject of Mulas’ photography and writings.

While photographing the 1964 Venice Biennale, Mulas met several American artists, art critics, and the art dealer Leo Castelli. This meeting led to his travel to New York City and his documentation of the Pop art scene. This trip to New York and Mulas’ resulting book and exhibits, New York, the New Art Scene became Mulas’ best known work. The exhibit included enlargements of Mulas’ contact sheets and environmental portraits of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Barnett Newman and Roy Lichtenstein.[2]

Mulas died in Milan following several years of serious illness.

Chico Albuquerque

 

Natural de Fortaleza, Ceará, Francisco Afonso Albuquerque nasceu em 25 de abril de 1917. Faleceu em 26 de dezembro de 2000. Iniciou a carreira de fotógrafo aos 15 anos na Aba Film, empresa fundada por seu pai. Em 1934 profissionalizou-se como retratista. Transferiu-se para São Paulo em 1947, lá permanecendo até 1975, quando retornou a Fortaleza. Participou de mostras nacionais e internacionais, colecionando grande número de premiações
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André Kertész

André Kertész was born in Budapest in 1894 and studied at the Academy of Commerce until he bought his first camera in 1912. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I, and in 1925 had one of his photographs published on the cover of Erdekes Ujsay. That same year, he moved to Paris, where he did freelance work for many European publications, including Vu, Le Matin, Frankfurter Illustrierte, Die Photographie, La Nazione Firenze, and The Times of London. He bought his first 35-millimeter camera, a Leica, in 1928, and his innovative work with it on the streets of Paris was extremely influential. In 1936, he came to the United States, and began freelancing for Collier’s, Harper’s Bazaar, and House & Garden, among other mass-circulation magazines. Eventually, and until 1962, he worked under contract to Condé Nast. Between 1963 and his death, his independently produced photographs became more widely accessible, and Kertész became one of the most respected photographers in America. His work was the subject of many publications and exhibitions, including solo exhibitions at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and at the Museum of Modern Art, and a major retrospective, Of Paris and New York, at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among his many honors and awards were a Guggenheim Fellowship and admission to the French Legion of Honor.
Kertész’s work had widespread and diverse effects on many photographers, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and Brassaï, who counted him as a mentor during the late 1920s and early 1930s. His personal work in the 1960s and 1970s inspired countless other contemporary photographers. Kertész combined a photojournalistic interest in movement and gesture with a formalist concern for abstract shapes; hence his work has historical significance in all areas of postwar photography.

 

Erwin Blumenfeld

Erwin Blumenfeld proved himself to be one of photography’s greatest pioneers during his 35-year-long career, breaking new ground in formal experimentation, developing innovative concepts through his fashion shoots, and enjoying unprecedented commercial success as a result.

Blumenfeld’s entry into photography was somewhat serendipitous: in the early 1930s, while running a leather shop in Amsterdam, he uncovered a fully equipped darkroom behind a boarded-up door in a storeroom, allegedly left behind by a previous tenant.

So he began experimenting, eventually forging a path for himself as a portrait photographer and displaying his photos in the shop’s windows. His earliest creations – collages and satirical pieces created in the Dadaist tradition to channel his anti-war sentiment – are a fascinating insight into his work.

As his practice evolved, Blumenfeld continued to reject photography’s formal limitations, playing instead with double and triple exposures, solarisation and high-contrast printing to achieve his uncompromising artistic vision.

As Blumenfeld turned from art to fashion photography – he made his debut in Vogue with the help of fashion royalty Cecil Beaton in 1944, and his dynamic concepts and exaltation of women made him a favourite among the most influential fashion magazines of the day – these progressive techniques only continued.

Michael Wolgensinger

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Bill Eppridge

Bill Eppridge chronicled the 1960s for Life magazine with a series of memorable images, including one of presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy as he lay mortally wounded. Eppridge spent eight years with Life, covering many of seminal events, including the civil rights movement, the Vietnam war, the Beatles’ arrival in the US and Woodstock.

His most searing images came from his coverage of Kennedy’s campaign to win the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination. He followed the candidate across the country, and on 5 June, after Kennedy had won the California primary he addressed a crowd of supporters in the early morning hours at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

Eppridge was about 12 feet behind Kennedy when he heard gunfire, and saw Kennedy lying on his back, his arms outstretched. “I was suddenly realised that what I was seeing there was an icon, almost. It was almost like a crucifixion.”It was 25 years later, when he was preparing the first of two books about Kennedy, before Eppridge could bear to look at his contact sheets.

He was born in Buenos Aires, where his American father was a chemical engineer with DuPont. He returned with his family to the US as a child and began taking photographs in high school. After graduating in 1960 from the University of Missouri. He went on a nine-month trip around the world for National Geographic, then freelanced before joining Life.

One of his first assignments was to spend six days with the Beatles on their first trip to the US in February 1964. A collection of his photographs of the time, most of them never before seen, will be published next year in The Beatles: Six Days That Changed the World.

Eppridge was an expert in equipment, lighting and other technical elements, but a greater talent may have been the way he immersed himself in a story and earned the confidence of his subjects. In the summer of 1964, he approached the family of James Chaney, one of three civil rights workers killed by white supremacists in Mississippi. He attended Chaney’s funeral, taking a picture of the tear-stained face of his younger brother as he leaned close to his mother.

One of Eppridge’s most remarkable stories came in 1965, when he and Life reporter James Mills spent more than two months with a married pair of heroin addicts on New York’s Upper West Side. The story was the inspiration for the 1971 film The Panic in Needle Park, starring Al Pacino.

After Kennedy’s assassination, Eppridge retreated from the world of politics and conflict. Helater worked for Time and Sports Illustrated.

Dmitri Baltermants

Dmitri Baltermants (1912-1990) was born in Warsaw, Poland, which at that time was part of the Russian Empire. His father, Grigory Stolovitski, was an officer in the Imperial Russian Army, while his mother came from a family of Polish intellectuals. Dmitri’s parents divorced when he was three years old. Shortly after the divorce, his mother married a lawyer, Nikolai Baltermants, who adopted Dmitri and gave him the Baltermants name. World War I claimed the life of Dmitri’s father and drove the Baltermants family out of Poland to Moscow (1915). Dmitri spent his childhood amidst civic dissolution, revolution, civil war, and a drastic reorganization of state, property and society. He lived with his mother, who was fluent in several European languages and worked as a typist, in a cramped communal apartment. After leaving secondary school, Dmitri had odd jobs, including rendering architectural drawings, working as a cinema mechanic, and being an apprentice printer at the Izvestia Printing House, where he developed interest in photography. The printing house sent him to study mathematics at the Moscow State University. After the graduation in1939 Dmitri was assigned to teach mathematics at the Military Academy, where he received a rank of captain. A few months later, Izvestia (the Communist Party newspaper) sent him to Western Ukraine to cover the Soviet invasion of Poland, although no photographic material survived, Baltermants’ future was determined, it was the beginning of a long career in photojournalism.

During World War II, Baltermants covered major battles (including the one in Stalingrad) for Izvestia and for the Red Army newspaper Na Razgrom Vraga. He fought and photographed in Ukraine, Poland, and Germany, reaching Berlin in 1945. He was wounded twice. Many of his most famous images (like Attack, Grief, On the Roads of War) were published only after the war (in the 1960s). Nevertheless, Baltermants emerged from the war with the reputation as one of the brilliant young war photographers. He started working for Ogonyok, popular illustrated magazine, and through his work the Baltermants name became quite well known. He traveled across the Soviet Union as well as abroad. He photographed Mao Tsetung during Khrushchev’s visit to China and Fidel Castro when he traveled to Cuba (and the United States) with Brezhnev. During the course of his career, Baltermants photographed every Soviet leader from Stalin to Gorbachev.

Baltermants considered himself an expert in staged photography, he enjoyed ‘playing with negatives,’ adding details to photographs from other stills (e.g. Grief, in which threatening, black clouds in the background were superimposed from another negative). His perfect compositions, expert use of color gained him praise from both the authorities and Soviet public. His first personal exhibition abroad was in London in 1964 (the same year he became Ogonyok’spicture editor) and in New York in 1965. As his prestige in the world of photography grew over the years, he served as the president of the photography department at the Society of Friendship with Foreign Nations and represented the Soviet Union at various international photo events.  In June 1990, Baltermants became ill from a kidney infection and died a week later. He had a commemorative exhibition at International Center of Photography in New York in 1992.

Marchevca Bogdan

Born in Hunedoara town, Romania. Street photographer, urban observer, portrait, landscape and and fine art photography are the main ingredients of my photography

Wolfgang Tillmans

Central to Tillmans’ career has been an extended flirtation with banality, pursued not merely for its own sake, in a spirit of slacker irony, but with the deep, philosophical conviction that no aspect of the social, physical or political world is devoid of meaning or unworthy of investigation. If individual images occasionally fall flat out of context . . . it needn’t detract from virtue of the pursuit and the value of such a holisitic perspective.” In other words, if one thing matters, everything matters.

Holly Myers

René Groebli

Réne Groebli was born in Zurich, Switzerland. In the 1940s he studied under the noted photographer, Hans Finsler. In 1949 he secured his place among European post-war artists with his iconic portfolio Magic of the Rail. By the early 1950s, Groebli was working as a photographer for Life, Picture Post and other international magazines and participated in the first Subjektive Fototgraphie exhibition in Saarbrüken. In 1955, he was included in the Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. In subsequent years, the artist opened a studio for industrial and advertising photography, and continued his personal work through the present day. In 1999, the Zurich Kunsthaus Art Museum showed a retrospective of his photographs from the years 1946 to 1996. Groebli currently resides in Switzerland.

Fabienne Collard

I’m a young belgian photographer.
In a few words, I just love telling stories in squares. Mood is very precious in my pictures. I took my pictures with a Fuji x100, an holga and sometimes with my phone.
Winner of Ilford B&W award in 2013, I was also published in several photo magazines.

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Martin Chamberlain

I am a photographer based in London, UK. Many of the images on this website have featured in exhibitions around the world, including Australia, Nepal, Qatar, Austria, Italy, Czech Republic, Luxemburg and the UK. They have also featured in numerous magazines and books on travel photography.

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Debbie Caffery

Caffery has been making photographs of the people and culture of her native Louisiana for over 30 years. Past projects include documentation of sugarcane field and mill workers, alligator hunting, and family portraits in Louisiana, as well as photographs of rural Mexico and Portugal. She will soon publish a new book documenting prostitution in Mexico. Caffery’s work has been included in solo exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, Cleveland Museum of Art, Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography, and the Gitterman Gallery, New York.

She has received numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2005), the first Lou Stoumen Prize (1996), and the Louisiana Governor’s Art Award (1990). Her work is included in the permanent collections of many museums, including the Smithsonian Institution, Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Caffery has published several highly praised books, including Polly, The Shadows, and Carry Me Home.

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Nicolás Muller

 

Frank Eugene

Frank Eugene Smith, who was later known by his artist name Frank Eugene and who adopted German citizenship in 1906, was born in New York in 1865. After a first training at the City College, Eugene began to study painting in New York in 1884 and switched to the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich in 1886. During his years of study Eugene began to be interested in the new media of photography and studied further autodidactically. As soon as 1889 Eugene had his first one-man show at the Camera-Club’ in New York, which was founded by Alfred Stieglitz. After his graduation Eugene returned to New York in 1894 and worked for some years as a stage designer and portrait painter, specialising in portraying well-known theatre-actors. Since 1900 he lived in Germany again and got envolved with artistic photography, was admitted to the Linked ring’ in London and founded – together with Stieglitz and Edward Steichen – the American photographer’s society Photo-Session’. Between 1904 and 1910 Eugene’s works were published as heliographs in the advanced photography journal Camera Work’ and became internationally known. Eugene orientated himself in his photographs at painting, following the romanticising style of art photography: Eugene’s treatment of the negatives with opaque colours and etching needle led to his wanted pictorial and graphic effects and with his favoured techniques like platinum print and the rubber-bichrome.technique, he achieved the modern blur of his positives. Since 1907 Eugene began his educational work at the Lehr-und Versuchsanstalt für Fotographie in Munich, which he continued at his chair for artistic photography at the Königliche Akademie für Grafische Künste in Leipzig in 1913. In 1907 Eugene organised a meeting between Stieglitz, Steichen and Heinrich Kühn and brought forward the assimilation of German art photographers to American guidelines. Frank Eugene died in Munich in 1936.

Fernando Lemos

 

Fernando Lemos is a painter, graphic artist and photographer from Portugal.

Early in his career, in 1960 , Fernando Lemos, photographer from Portugal, is participating in intellectual resistance movement against the dictatorship of Salazar. His Production is experimental, close to the experimental nature inspired by work of Man Ray.

He came in Brazil and lived in the Pension Maua , in Rio de Janeiro, where he photographs writers and artists. In 1953 , some of his photos are display at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo – MAM / SP [ Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo ] and the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro – MAM / RJ [ Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro ] . His works resemble those of modern Brazilian photographers of the late 1940s, related to Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante [Photo Film Club Bandeirante] .

Fernando Lemos still working with construction techniques and organization of space , as in Luz Teimosa [ Stubborn Light ] , 1951/1952 , where the light is revealed in lines that intersect , in a subtle way , an atmosphere confined . The brief period during which he devoted himself more intensely to photography ends shortly after his arrival in Brazil. He began to work with drawing and painting and produces non- figurative works . He first uses shapes cut out the background , often close to graphic signs in compositions mainly structured by line , as in Símbolos [ Symbols ] , 1967. In other works , he uses geometry as an expressive form , and also creates organic forms evoking symbols. It also explores the luminosity of watercolor.

Fernando Lemos also works with visual communication and graphic planning, and as an illustrator for several publications. With Décio Pignatari (1927) , he led the design studio Maitiry in São Paulo. His design work is still not well known

Max Dupain

Max Dupain was Australia’s most respected and influential black & white photographer of the 20th century. His images capture a long gone era in which Australian society was vastly different from what it is now. With his documentary eye his images exude quality and demonstrate Dupain’s mastership of light and form.

Dupain was considered the pioneer of modernism in Australian photography, an approach that departed from the sentimentality of soft focused, nostalgic imagery to the simplified world of light contrasts, sharp focus, varying angles and creative compositions.