Enrico Natali

Enrico Natali was born in Utica, New York and raised in the town of Carthage at the edge of the Adirondack Mountains. In 1951 he entered the United States Coast Guard Academy, where he developed an interest in photography. Leaving the academy in 1954 he moved to New York and began working as an apprentice to photographer Anton Bruehl. In 1960, Natali began photographing in New York’s subways, taking black and white candid shots of people on the trains and waiting in the underground stations. Echoing the photographs of Walker Evans, who covertly photographed New York subway riders in the late 1930s, and anticipating the work of artists like Bruce Davidson, who made his first lengthy color series in the New York subway in the early 1980s, Natali’s photographs contribute to a growing body of photographs that look closely at the subway as a crucial site of modern urban life.
The Subway photographs were Natali’s first major series, and according to the artist they prompted him to adopt photography as a vocation and to take America, broadly considered, as the central subject of his work. In the following years Natali lived in different parts of the United States, working either as a freelance or a commercial studio photographer. in 1971, Natali had also started a new series, American Landscapes, supported by a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. The following year he published the book New American People, which collects selections of the photographs he had taken in these various locations. In the mid-1970s Natali stopped making photographs entirely and in 1980 he purchased land in Los Padres National Forest in California, relocating there with his wife and children. In 1990 he and his wife founded a Zen meditation center, which is still in operation today. Natali began to take photographs again in 2001, working in color and using a digital camera.

Albert Levy

Albert Levy

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Tom Zimberoff

Tom Zimberoff was born in Los Angeles, a child of the Fifties. He was raised there and in Las Vegas, Nevada. As proficient with a clarinet as with a camera, he succumbed to the lure of photography while studying music at the USC School of Performing Arts. “Portrait photography,” he says, “is a predatory sport. I stalk my prey like a big-game hunter, look for a good clean shot, and try to avoid unnecessary wounds. Then I hang their heads on a wall to admire like trophies.”

Having begun his career in rock ‘n roll photography, touring with The Jackson-5, Stevie Wonder, The Rolling Stones, and Stephen Stills among others, he moved over to television and motion picture stills for advertising. After that he embarked on a career in photojournalism, spending several years in, among many other places, Central America working for Time and other magazines as a member of the Sygma Photo Agency and, later, Gamma-Liaison. His photographs have appeared on the covers of Time, Fortune, Money, People, and numerous other magazines.

Zimberoff portraits are found in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Israel Museum in Tel Aviv, the Corcoran Gallery Of Art in Washington, DC, the Oakland Museum in California, the Los Angeles Public Library, the Los Angeles County Museum Of Art, the Canton Art Institute in Ohio, the Performing Arts Library & Museum in San Francisco, as well as several corporate collections and university libraries. His first two portrait subjects were Marx and Lennon — that’s Groucho and John, of course.

Annie Flanagan

Annie is a freelance photographer, journalist and educator. Their work primarily focuses on gender, sexuality, identity and trauma in the United States. Annie received a Master of Science from S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication at Syracuse University.

Keith Carter

Keith Carter is an internationally respected author, educator, and workshop leader. He has published 13 books of his expressive images. Thirteen monographs of his work have been published, as well as two documentary films: Keith Carter: The Artist Series, Ted Forbes and A Certain Alchemy, Anthropy Arts. A fifty-year retrospective book was released fall of 2019 from University of Texas Press. In addition, he has been described as a “Poet of the Ordinary” by the Los Angeles Times (1994) and received the Texas Medal of Arts in 2009.

His work has been featured on the nationally televised program CBS Sunday Morning and he is the recipient of the Lange-Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Mr. Carter’s work is included in numerous private and public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the George Eastman House, and the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University. 

 

Tony Marciante

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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.

Benedict J. Fernández

Benedict Joseph Fernandez III (April 5, 1936 – January 31, 2021) was an American educator and journalistic and documentary street photographer. He is noted for photographing the protest movements of the 1960s, particularly those of the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement. Home

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.

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Emmet Gowin

 

 

Emmet Gowin is an American photographer known for his broad range of subjects, including moths, his wife, and landscapes. “There are things in your life that only you will see, stories that only you will hear. If you don’t tell them or write them down, if you don’t make the picture, these things will not be seen, these things will not be heard,” he has said. Born on December 22, 1941 in Danville, VA, he studied at the Richmond Professional Institute and received his MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1967. Studying under Harry Callahan at RISD, Gowin adopted his professor’s penchant of using his wife as a model for photographs. By the 1980s, the artist’s work had expanded to include aerial photography of derelict industrial factories, damaged agricultural fields, and nuclear plants, in different locations around the world. These works hint at Gowin’s fascination with finding beauty in areas devastated by manmade and natural disasters. He currently lives and works in Newtown, PA. Today, the photographer’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.

 

 

 

The Loneliest Highway, William Mark Sommer

The empty stretch of road goes on for miles, nothing but the occasional sign or the passerby as the pavement beneath my tires breathes the melody of past motorists. The Loneliest Highway is my lyrical journey across Nevada finding solace in the emptiness along the Lincoln Highway in the wake of the Covid-19 Pandemic. This melancholy song is driven by the feelings of isolation that conveys the essence of the stay at home orders and the loneliness that came in seclusion afterward. Through these discoveries in loneliness along the road I was able to develop catharsis of the moment and empowerment to show this current time. Along this lonely road the lines move like a day in wait as I pass through the forgotten towns that align the highway, nothing to be said or heard but the whispers of what came before and a hope in betterment of tomorrow.

William Mark Sommer (b. 1990) is a film photographer residing in Sacramento, California. Mark has earned his BFA in Photography from Arizona State University and he has exhibited over the United States and Internationally. In 2020, Mark was chosen by Alex Prager for Life Framer’s “Open Call” First Place Award. Mark also has self-published 10 zines and has been featured in publications like Stay Wild, Float, Aint Bad, Booooooom, Analog Mag, MonoVisons, The Modern-Day Explorer, among others.
Within Mark’s series he utilizes a long-term documentary mode of storytelling to explore themes of human nature, preservation and empathy. He photographs to further his understanding of a diversity of human experiences, exploring what we hold dear and how our actions shape our
environments. He looks for his work to challenge stereotypes by showing the unseen and giving a voice to the misunderstood.
Growing up in the small-bypassed town of Loomis, California, Mark was shaped by the culture of the Lincoln Highway. Experiencing this culture gave him a deep admiration towards small town America and its the history along the fading highways. Following these experiences and admirations has taken him all over the Western United States and brought him a closer understanding with complexities of American culture by seeing history in person and understanding its progressive nature in forgetting the past.

George Krause

George Krause was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1937 and received his training at the Philadelphia College of Art.
Krause’s photographs are in major museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In 1993 he was honored as the Texas Artist of the Year.
He retired in 1999 from the University of Houston where in 1975 he created the photography program and now lives in Wimberley, Texas.

Langston Bowen

Langston Bowen is a creative based in New England focused on emotive storytelling through captivating imagery.
A fan of film since a young age, Langston aims to capture the essence of the moment within a frame like a movie still. With an eye for detail, his passion shines through when he looks through the camera from the shutter click to his meticulous editing and knack for dreamy and whimsical color palettes.
Langston is persistently creating a world of his own, one that only he has been gifted the ability to see.

 

 

Debbie Fleming 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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Sheila Metzner

Sheila Metzner’s unique photographic style has positioned her as a contemporary master in the worlds of fine art, fashion, portraiture, still life and landscape photography.

Born in Brooklyn, she attended Pratt Institute, where she majored in Visual Communications, and was then hired by Doyle Dane Bernbach advertising agency as its first female art director. She took pictures all the while, amassing them slowly over the next thirteen years, while raising five children. One of these photographs was included in a famous and controversial exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art – Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960 – and became the dark horse hit of the exhibition. Gallery shows and commercial clients soon followed. Her first commercial client was Valentino, followed by Elizabeth Arden, Perry Ellis, Shiseido, Fendi, Saks Fifth Avenue, Paloma Picasso, Victoria’s Secret, Revlon, and in recent years Levi’s, Ralph Lauren, Club Monaco, Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus.

 

Suzanne Stein

For New York-based photographer, Suzanne Stein, street and documentary photography is all about stark realism. The idea of framing a moment exactly as she saw it, regardless of how hard it is to look at, is what drives her art.
“City is a reflection of a complex place – it’s part street, part documentary,” Suzanne tells us. “I shoot moments that I feel form narratives and sometimes these little stories are hard to look at. Sometimes we all walk past and sometimes that’s not right.
“I also shoot people I meet on the street periodically, whenever I run into them over long periods. They change each time. They grow up, they blossom, and sometimes they deteriorate. That’s the city I see every day.”
Suzanne aims to offer a genuine window into life on the streets, using different techniques to illustrate the harshness, chaos, warmth, and beauty of the urban environment. “I shoot everyone and believe that absolutely nothing should be left out of street photography image creation, no matter how hard to look at or understand,” reveals Suzanne. “City is a harsh place, but also a warm place depending on who’s occupying a patch of pavement at any given moment. I use various ideas, techniques, and visual storytelling methods, sometimes it’s lighthearted and sometimes it’s bittersweet. Whatever it may be, it’s all part of the mosaic.”

Louis Stettner

Louis Stettner ( born in 1922 ) is a celebrated American photographer whose work includes iconic images of Paris and New York. He was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York but moved to Paris in the 1950s, where he now lives permanently with his family.
Louis has photographed Paris and New York for over 60 years, capturing the changes in the people, culture, and architecture of both cities. Using both black and white and color images, his work documents fleeting moments in the life of the cities, moments that often cannot be recaptured. Stettner has documented the architectural and cultural evolution of Paris and New York, making his archive of thousands of images an important resource. Few photographers have such an extensive archive of both cities, one that includes historic images of each city’s most celebrated landmarks and the daily lives of its citizens.
His work has an unforced naturalistic quality to it, as he sought to capture the ordinary, every day lives of his subjects. He was particularly interested in documenting the lives of the working class in each city and he demonstrates much sensitivity in this endeavor, photographing them with great dignity. A limited amount of his work is devoted to still life and landscape images. Additionally, his paintings and sculptures tend to be abstract and in sharp contrast to his clear, vivid photographic images.
As a teenager and young man, Stettner was a regular visitor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to explore its photographic prints collection. His first camera was a wooden view camera and today he still shoots with film rather than moving to digital images. Stettner studied and taught at the Photo League until he went to Paris after the Second World War. He received his Bachelor of Arts, Photography & Cinema I.D.H.E.C. at Paris University. Throughout his life, he has gotten to know and work with many great photographers. Stettner visited Stieglitz’s gallery – An American Place – but was too scared to speak to him. After sending Stieglitz photographs, Stieglitz sent him a handwritten letter of thanks which Stettner cherished. A little later, Stettner visited Paul Strand, who supported his artistic endeavors and encouraged him to continue photography. Later in Paris the two men became friends.
Now in his 80s, he continues to photograph with great energy. Stettner also spends significant time sculpting and painting, as well as mixing his work and “painting” on some of his photographic images.

http://www.loustettner.com

The faces of the Native American, Craig Varjabedian

The faces of the Native American people I photograph reveal a profound sense of the sacred. The people in these photographs are descendants of those I first encountered in images by the great photographer Edward Curtis that I admired in a photo history class I attended long ago. I remember being deeply moved by what I saw projected on the screen that day. Curtis’s photographs reveal something awesome (in its truest sense)—something that is majestic and universally human and beyond words. I believe there is a flow of energy in the great photographer’s images that brings them into the present and in turn makes them timeless. It is that sense of awe, dignity and connection to the past that I want to bring to light in the photographs I make.

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.