Russell Lee

The Russell Lee Collection

John Gutmann

I photographed the popular culture of the United States differently from American photographers. I saw the enormous vitality of the country. I didn’t see it as suffering. The urban photographers here took pictures that showed the negative side of the Depression, but my pictures show the almost bizarre, exotic qualities of the country. . . . I was seeing America with an outsider’s eyes – the automobiles, the speed, the freedom, the graffiti. . .

Luther Gerlach

Photographer Luther Gerlach works in a variety of historical photographic processes, highlighting the role of constraints in creative production and the hand-made, tactile connection between the artist and his work. Known for nude portraits and urban scenes of downtown LA in his early career, more recently Gerlach has pioneered the re-emergence of plein air wet plate collodion landscapes. His work distills detailed images of the natural world, particularly the trees, seaweeds, and grasses of Southern California, to emphasize pure light and line, endowing his images with a subtly abstract quality.

Luther Gerlach was born in Blayne, Minnesota in 1960. He apprenticed with Brett Weston in Carmel and Hawaii in the 1980’s, before learning the wet plate process which he still works in today. Gerlach has led lectures and demonstrations at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles since 2001. He has exhibited at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Ventura Museum of Art, the Schaknow Museum of Fine Art, Miami, the Denver Art Museum, and The Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe. Selected permanent collections include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Michael G. Wilson Centre for Photography, among others.

The artist lives and works in Ventura, California.

William Claxton

Willam Claxton earned his reputation with his moody black and white portraits of leading jazzmen of the 1950s and 1960s such as Duke Ellington or Charlie Parker and by believing that photography was ‘jazz for the eye’. Often accompanying musicians during their tours, the American photographer captured them at work should it be a meditative Chet Baker whose face reflects in his piano or a powerful Dinah Washington confronting her mic. Yet what William Claxton succeeded in the most was in representing jazz musicians in other settings than their sweaty and frantic New York clubs; choosing outdoor sunny sceneries and laid-back outfits that gave an innovative freshness to their depictions. He often said he had succeeded in celebrity photography by promising not to portray his subjects in a negative way and by finding common tastes such as Steve Mc Queen’s passion for sports car. Should it be that trust that enabled him to capture an over made-up aging Gloria Swanson or the stress of an agitated Judy Garland: no negative portrayals but clearly harsh realities.

Ruth Orkin

Ruth Orkin was an award-winning photojournalist and filmmaker. Orkin was the only child of Mary Ruby, a silent-film actress, and Samuel Orkin, a manufacturer of toy boats called Orkin Craft. She grew up in Hollywood in the heyday of the 1920s and 1930s. At the age of 10, she received her first camera, a 39 cent Univex. She began by photographing her friends and teachers at school. At 17 years old she took a monumental bicycle trip across the United States from Los Angeles to New York City to see the 1939 World’s Fair, and she photographed along the way.

Orkin moved to New York in 1943, where she worked as a nightclub photographer and shot baby pictures by day to buy her first professional camera. She worked for all the major magazines in 1940s, and also went to Tanglewood during the summers to shoot rehearsals. She ended up with many of the worlds’ greatest musicians of the time including Leonard Bernstein, Isaac Stern, Aaron Copland, Jascha Heifitz, Serge Koussevitzky and many others.
In 1951, LIFE magazine sent her to Israel with the Israeli Philharmonic. Orkin then went to Italy, and it was in Florence where she met Nina Lee Craig, an art student and fellow American, who became the subject of “American Girl in Italy.” The photograph was part of a series originally titled “Don’t Be Afraid to Travel Alone” about what they encountered as women traveling alone in Europe after the war.

On her return to New York, Orkin married the photographer and filmmaker Morris Engel. Together they produced two feature films, including the classic “Little Fugitive” which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1953. From their New York apartment overlooking Central Park, Orkin photographed marathons, parades, concerts, demonstrations, and the beauty of the changing seasons. These photographs were the subject of two widely acclaimed books, “A World Through My Window” and “More Pictures From My Window.” After a long struggle with cancer, Orkin passed away in her apartment, surrounded by her wonderful legacy of photographs with the view of Central Park outside her window.

Peter Basch

 

Peter Basch (1921 – 2004) was an American photographer. Basch was born in Berlin, Germany, the only child of Felix Basch and Grete Basch-Freund, both prominent theater and film personalities of the German-speaking world.

In 1933 the family came to New York due to fears of rising anti-Jewish sentiment and laws in Germany. The family had US citizenship because Felix’s father, Arthur Basch, was a wine trader who lived in San Francisco. After moving back to Germany, Arthur Basch kept his American citizenship, and passed it to his children and, thence, to his grandchildren.

When the Basch family arrived in New York in 1933, they opened a restaurant on Central Park South in the Navarro Hotel. The restaurant, Gretel’s Viennese, became a hangout for the Austrian expatriate community. Peter Basch had his first job there as a waiter. While in New York, Basch attended the De Witt Clinton High School. The family moved to Los Angeles to assist in Basch’s father’s career, during which time Basch went to school in England. Upon returning to the United States, Basch joined the Army. He was mobilized in the US Army Air Forces’ First Motion Picture Unit, where he worked as a script boy.

After the war, he started attending UCLA, but his mother asked him to join her back in New York. His parents had decided that Basch should be a photographer, and they obtained a photography studio for their son.

For over twenty years, Peter Basch’s had a successful career as a magazine photographer. He was known for his images of celebrities, artists, dancers, actors, starlets, and glamour-girls in America and Europe. His photos appeared in many major magazines such as Life, Look and Playboy.

Chip Foreli

This really isn’t about me – it’s about you. It’s about what you need when it comes to photography.

You need compelling photographs – photographs than can stand on their own and turn heads. You need a photographer that listens to your needs, delivers that and more. You also need someone that puts people at ease, allows them to be themselves so that when they’re photographed the result is genuine, unposed and unique. You need a photographer who finds saavy solutions to challenges and makes subjects, be they bolt, bottle or brain surgeon, compelling. And the last thing you need are surprises that cost you money.

These are the needs of advertising and marketing professionals who I have worked with through my years of passionate practicing of professional photography. I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to work on projects ranging from meticulously lit studio still lifes of cosmetics and pharmaceuticals to spending weeks on offshore drilling platforms creating fine art industrial images for the energy industry. I love it all.

If this is what you need I would welcome the opportunity to work with you.

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México 1933, Paul Strand

Paul Strand, photographer whose work influenced the emphasis on sharp-focused, objective images in 20th-century American photography.

When he was 17 years old, Strand began to study photography with Lewis W. Hine, who was later noted for his photographs of industrial workers and immigrants. At Hine’s urging, Strand began to frequent “291,” the gallery begun by Alfred Stieglitz, the leader of the Photo-Secession group. There, Strand met Stieglitz and was exposed to the avant-garde paintings of Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, and Georges Braque that were on display in the gallery. These works inspired him to emphasize abstract form and pattern in his photographs, such as Shadow Pattern, New York and Wall Street (both 1915). In one of the boldest photographs of the period, White Fence (1916), Strand deliberately destroyed perspective to build a powerful composition from tonal planes and rhythmic pattern.

Strand rejected the then-popular style of Pictorialism, which emulated the effects of painting in photographs by manipulating negatives and prints, in favour of achieving the minute detail and rich, subtle tonal range afforded by the use of large-format cameras. He relied on strictly photographic methods, realizing that the camera’s objectivity is at once its limitation and its chief asset. The purity and directness of Strand’s depictions of natural forms and architecture presaged the work of other American photographers who sought to express abstract formal values through the unadorned photographic image. Strand’s objective photographs of urban subjects were published by Stieglitz in the last two issues of his influential magazine Camera Work and were given a show at “291.” Much of the work in that show featured everyday objects, such as bowls and furniture, which were sharply lit and shot at such close range that they verge on seeming abstract.

After serving in World War I, Strand collaborated with the painter and photographer Charles Sheeler on the documentary film Mannahatta. While working as a freelance movie cameraman, he devoted his free time to still photography, capturing the beauty of natural forms through dramatic close-ups in Colorado (1926) and Maine (1927–28). In his photographs of the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec (1929) and of New Mexico (1930), he achieved a new understanding of landscape, revealing a deep awareness of what he called “the spirit of place.”

In the 1930s, Strand became increasingly concerned with addressing social issues, and so he switched his focus from photography to motion pictures as a means to reach a greater audience and to tell a clearer story. Appointed chief photographer and cinematographer by the Mexican government in 1933, he made the motion picture Redes (“The Wave”) about Mexican fishermen. He returned to the United States and worked as a cameraman for the director Pare Lorentz on the government-sponsored documentary film The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936). In 1937 Strand formed Frontier Films to make documentaries with social and political content. Of the nonprofit company’s seven films, Strand photographed only Native Land (1942).

After World War II, unhappy with the political situation in the United States, Strand moved to France and worked throughout Europe. From then on, much of his work focused on issues of community life. In his later years he produced a number of photographic books in which he could mimic the effects of film by laying out a narrative sequence of images, often accompanied by text.

John Vachon

Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, John Vachon received a bachelor’s degree in English literature from St. Thomas College at age twenty, followed by further studies at the Catholic University of America (1935–36). After being hired as an assistant messenger with the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1937, Vachon quickly developed his own photographic skills. He became a member of the FSA’s regular photographic staff and produced memorable documentary series in the Plains states. After moving to New York, Vachon in 1947 became a member of the Photo League, contributing numerous book reviews to the newsletter Photo Notes and participating in the 1948 exhibition This Is the Photo League. After working for many years as a staff photographer at Look magazine, Vachon became a visiting professor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1974.

The New Promised Land, Stan Raucher

Stan Raucher was born and raised in Minnesota during the age of black and white television, Life magazine photo documentaries, and the publication of The Family of Man. His photographs have been published in LensWork #117, LensWork #97, Adore Noir, Slate, Lenscratch, Black & White Magazine, The Daily Mail, The Independent, Featureshoot, F-Stop Magazine, Camera Arts, and Datum Seiten der Zeit. His prints have been shown in 20 solo exhibits, included in over 60 juried group shows, and exhibited in the Blue Sky Gallery viewing drawers in 2012, 2014 and 2015. They are in the permanent collections at the Lishui Museum of Photography and the University of Washington Hall Health Center, and held by private collectors.

Stan was a 2015 Px3 Competition Bronze Award Winner, a 2014 PhotoWorld finalist, and a 2014 Havana Times Photo Contest winner. He also was a 2012 CDS/Honickman First Book Prize finalist and a Critical Mass finalist in 2012 and 2013. He received the 2013 Black & White Magazine Excellence Award, the 2013 Grand Prix de la Decouverte International Fine Art Photography Juror Award of Merit, the 2011 Black & White Magazine Merit Award, and First Place in the 2010 NYPH Capture Brooklyn Exhibition. Stan resides in Seattle, Washington, and he is currently working on several photography projects around the world.

Holy Week in Guatemala, Stan Raucher

I’m intrigued by observing ordinary people going about their daily activities in public spaces in countries and cultures around the world. Glimpses of the human condition emerge as individuals interact with one another and their surroundings. An expressive gesture, a telling glance, a concealed mood or hidden emotion may suddenly materialize and then vanish in a split-second. Such ephemeral events are often overlooked or quickly forgotten. My photographs capture these fleeting moments as evocative, richly-layered images that invite the viewer to generate their own personal narratives. At a time when fewer of the images that we see on a routine basis are honest representations of real life, my candid photography opens a window to the world that actually surrounds us here and now.

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Daniella Midenge

Strong women, accentuated by their beauty and sensuality, are the hallmark of fashion photographer Daniella Midenge. Her pictures evoke intimacy and passion, beyond the outer shell. Black-and-white or color, her photos have an incredible power of expression that draws the eye of men and women alike. Her unique style still shows the influence of photographers like Peter Lindbergh and Herb Ritts. As a woman and a model herself, Daniella Midenge is at home both behind and in front of the camera, directing, producing, doing hair and make-up, retouching—all of which she does herself. It’s no wonder she is reluctant to let others handle the processing of her photographs. Growing up in a creative family, her love of images, faces, shapes, and exotic places combined with her work as an oil painting restorer—all contributed to the many twists and turns on Midenge’s path to photography. After her first contact with a camera, she never looked back.

Daniella Midenge is a self-taught photographer and an enthusiast of contrasts. Her first magazine cover was for Marie Claire, shot in New York 2010, starring top models Candice Swanepoel and Behati Prinsloo. Other illustrious magazines in her portfolio include Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and ELLE. Her client base continues to expand with commissions from major companies like H&M and Swarovski.

Andrés Serrano

 

I’ve never called myself a photographer. I studied painting and sculpture and see myself as an artist with a camera. I learned everything I know about art from Marcel Duchamp who taught me that anything, including a photograph, could be a work of art. –Andres Serrano

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.

Joy Goldkind

Joy Goldkind currently resides in St. James, NY. She graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology, NYC in 1963. She has exhibited in numerous venues across the country and internationally including a solo exhibition at the Museo Nationale Della Fotographia in Italy, where a permanent collection of her work is now held. Joy’s photographs have graced the covers of international publications and magazines such as Silver Shotz and Eyemazing. Her work has also been featured in B&W Magazine, Photolife, Zoom Magazine, Color and View Camera Magazine

Metro, Stan Raucher

The B Train at 42nd St, Manhattan

Line 4 near Les Halles, Paris

Line 1 near People’s Square, Shanghai

Tren Ligero near La Noria, Mexico City

Line 2 at Montesanto, Naples

Metro 1 near Swietokrzyska, Warsaw

Blue Line at Noida City Center, Delhi

Brighton Beach Station, Brooklyn

Line 8 near Aculco, Mexico City

Metro 3 Deák Ferenc Tér Station, Budapest

Atlantic Ave MTA Station, Brooklyn

Line 2 near Lujiazui, Shanghai

Line 2 at Klabin, São Paulo

Belleville Metro Station, Paris

I’m intrigued by observing ordinary people going about their daily activities in public spaces in countries and cultures around the world. Glimpses of the human condition emerge as individuals interact with one another and their surroundings. An expressive gesture, a telling glance, a concealed mood or hidden emotion may suddenly materialize and then vanish in a split-second. Such ephemeral events are often overlooked or quickly forgotten. My photographs capture these fleeting moments as evocative, richly-layered images that invite the viewer to generate their own personal narratives. At a time when fewer of the images that we see on a routine basis are honest representations of real life, my candid photography opens a window to the world that actually surrounds us here and now.

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Chris Suspect

The son of a diplomat, Chris Suspect was born in the Philippines in 1968. He is a street and documentary photographer hailing from the Washington, DC area. He specializes in capturing absurd and profound moments in the quotidian. His street photography work has been recognized internationally and has been exhibited in Miami, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Romania, Georgia and the United Kingdom. His documentary work on the underground music scene in Washington, D.C., was published as a book, Suspect Device, by Empty Stretch in 2014 and was a featured exhibit at the Kolga Tblisi Photo Festival 2015 in Tblisi, Georgia. This same project was also featured in the Leica Galerie at Photokina 2014 in Koln, Germany. The work is currently held in the Leica Galerie Archives.

In the last year, Suspect won the StreetFoto San Francisco competition for street series, FotoWeek DC’s competition for Photographer’s Choice series, and Exposed DC’s annual photography competition. He was also a finalist in the Miami Street Photography Festival Miami Photo Series. In previous years he was shortlisted for the International Street Photography Awards (UK) and named the winner of the Washington City Paper’s 2014 Photography Contest. Previously Suspect served as a judge for the Miami Street Photography festival during Miami Art Basel (2013), he won Photo District News’ “The Scene” contest for music photography (2013) and received an honorable mention in the Chicago Photographic Society’s first annual street photography contest (2013).

Suspect’s work has been featured in the Huffington Post, Photo District News, LFI Magazine and on the Leica Camera Blog. He also has published photographs in the Washington Post, Washington City Paper, CNN, The Atlantic, Forbes and many other media outlets in the US, Germany, Canada and Brazil.

Dennis Cox

Dennis Cox is an award winning travel photographer who has photographed in over 100 countries on all seven continents. He markets his stock photography from his own agency, ChinaStock/WorldViews, as well as through Alamy, Getty Images, ImageBrief, and other outlets worldwide.

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Ibarionex Perello

 

Ibarionex Perello is a photographer, writer, educator and host of The Candid Frame Photography podcast. He has over 25 years of experience in the photographic industry.

In his role as host and producer of The Candid Frame, he provides frank, insightful interviews with some of the industry’s top established and emerging photographers. The popular show has featured guests including Jay Maisel, Joel Meyerowitz, Pete Turner, Lynn Goldsmith and Gerd Ludwig and enjoys a following among photo enthusiasts from all over the world. The weekly program is consistently ranked among the top programs of its type.

Ibarionex is also the author of 5 books including: Chasing the Light: Improving Your Photography Using Available Light, 5D Mark III From Snapshot to Great Shots, and Adobe Master Class: Photoshop. He is also the co-author of Visual Stories: Behind the Len with Vincent Laforet and Road to Seeing with Dan Winters.

His photographs and articles have appeared in numerous publications and websites including Digital Photo Pro, Outdoor Photographer, Rangefinder, Shutterbug, Popular Photography, DP Review and Scott Kelby’s Light It magazines.

He an adjunct professor at the Art Center College of Design as well as an instructor at the online photography school, Better Photo.

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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