Robert Hanley Willoughby

Bob Willoughby, whose photographs have transformed the images of Hollywood’s biggest stars, is a true pioneer of 20th century photography. He was the first “outside” photographer hired by the major studios to create photographs for the magazines, and was the link between the filmmakers and major magazines of the time, such as Life and Look. Born June 30th, 1927 in Los Angeles, his parents were divorced by the time he was born and he was raised by his mother. Bob was given an Argus C-3 camera for his twelfth birthday, providing the catalyst for what would become the key to his future. After high school, he studied cinema at night at the USC Cinema Department and design with Saul Bass at the Kahn Institute of Art. At the same time he apprenticed with a number of Hollywood photographers; Wallace Seawell, Paul Hesse, and Glenn Embree, gleaning technical and business know-how. His first magazine assignments were for Harper’s Bazaar in the early ’50s when famed art director Alexey Brodovitch became aware of his work. His career took off in 1954 when Warner Bros. asked him to photograph Judy Garland’s final scene on the set of A Star Is Born. His portrait of the freckle-faced star became his first Life cover. From then on his production was phenomenal. His images were in print literally every week for the next twenty years. As the first “special” he covered the making of over 100 films, including the 1960s movies The Graduate, My Fair Lady, Rosemary’s Baby and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. His body of work, documenting this historic era of filmmaking, is unsurpassed. He captured with wonderful perception the most famous actors and directors of the time on and off the set, in unguarded moments of repose, vulnerability and high drama. He had a unique ability to capture what was essential to each film. Sydney Pollack said in the introduction to Bob’s autobiography: “Sometimes a filmmaker gets a look at a photograph taken on his own set and sees the ‘soul’ of his film in one still photograph. It’s rare, but it happens. It happened to me in 1969, the first time I looked at the work of Bob Willoughby during the filming of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?.” Bob also had a remarkable understanding of the needs of each individual magazine; he could be shooting for seven different publications and know exactly what each one needed in terms of editorial content and design layout. While Willoughby is most famous as the great chronicler of Hollywood, before he began covering film production he had already made an astonishing series of images of jazz musicians. Willoughby had a huge appreciation of jazz both in its technical aspects and its ability to raise the roof in performance. He had a masterful feel for the character of the artists, and he was able to convey it even in the difficult lighting conditions of recording studios and stage. He was responsible for a number of technical innovations, including the silent blimp for 35mm still cameras, which became common on film sets. He was the only photographer working on films at the time to use radio-controlled cameras, allowing him unprecedented coverage in otherwise impossible situations, and he had special brackets built to hold his still cameras on or over the Panavision cameras. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Hollywood honored Willoughby with a major retrospective exhibition of his work. He was awarded the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Still Photography in New York in 2004.

Cass Bird

Cass Bird is a Brooklyn-based photographer who creates stunning fashion editorials, with a beguiling taste for that contemporary grit.
Cass Bird’s warm and intrepid depiction of her subjects provides insight into the gritty exuberance of contemporary love and life. Her photographs are featured regularly in magazines such as The New Yorker, Details, Dossier, Paper, and Rolling Stone, as well as in campaigns produced by Converse, Levi’s, Sony, and Nike. Cass made her directorial debut with a film for Sophomore, and then continued to go on to produce work for Levi’s, Lissy Trullie, The Raveonettes, and Sky Ferreira.
There is something different about Cass Bird’s pictures—you can feel it instantly—but it can be hard to put a finger on what exactly the difference is. It seems the subjects, often women, and often the most of-the-moment models or Hollywood stars, are simply responding differently to the taker of the photograph than they normally do. They seem not to be playing the sexpot in the conventional sense, and to be engaging instead in an interaction more playful, and perhaps more authentic. Look at enough of Bird’s pictures and you begin to realize what you are looking at is a female gaze, and how very rare this point of view is in celebrity portraiture.
So it makes perfect sense that Bird, who had dabbled in photography before attending Smith College, traces the origins of her sensibility to her days at that female-only, liberal-arts institution. “I think that’s really where it began for me,” Bird says. “It’s where I began understanding that aesthetics are secondary to curiosity and the individual expression of identity.”
Bird’s refreshing eye is regularly cast on fashion’s biggest stars — she has an ongoing and particularly dynamic collaboration with the model Daria Werbowy — but in the summers of 2009 and 2010, on her own time, she turned it on a group of young women less accustomed to posing in front of a camera. Bird cast these women, which included a couple of her interns as well as someone she met on the street, for their adaptable notions of femininity, and brought them to Sassafrass, Tennessee, to take the portraits which now make up her 2012 book, “Rewilding.”
“For me it’s a very modern way of expressing femininity,” Bird says of the pictures in the hardcover volume, which depict the group of androgynous-looking women climbing trees, forming human pyramids and just generally rollicking in their rural environment. “Whereas in the past to be masculine-presenting was interpreted as a rejection of femininity, I was able to see that femininity can be more inclusive than that.

Ed Ross

The wet plate, aka collodion, photographic process dates from 1851, having been invented by Frederick Scott Archer, an English sculptor. Archer did not seek a patent on his process, and in fact “died in extreme poverty.” An obituary described him as “a very inconspicuous gentleman, in poor health.”
There are two “types” of wet plate photography — ambrotype and tintype. An ambrotype, which was described by Archer, is based on glass, and a tintype is based on metal.
All of the images on this site are tintypes — a piece of blackened aluminum over which the image is created in silver, and over which a varnish is placed to protect the fragile image from physical harm (eg, scratches) and tarnishing (changes to the silver due to exposure to chemicals found in the environment).
I’ve used three cameras, a half-plate box-style camera (made by Ty Guillory), an 8×10 bellows-style camera (made by Black Art Woodcraft), and a 16×20 Chamonix. I use “period” lenses, , i.e., from 1850 to 1900, manufactured by Dallmeyer, Voigtlander, and Ross.

Sam Abell

I learned photography from my father, a teacher, at our home in Sylvania, Ohio.
After graduating from the University of Kentucky I worked for National Geographic as a contract and staff photographer for thirty-three years.
In 1990, my work was the subject of a one-person exhibition and monograph titled Stay This Moment at the International Center of Photography in New York City.
Since then I have published four additional collections of work: Seeing Gardens; Sam Abell: The Photographic Life; The Life of a Photograph and Sam Abell Library.
In addition, I maintain a career as a writer, teacher, and lecturer on photography.

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Robert Hanley Willoughby

Bob Willoughby, whose photographs have transformed the images of Hollywood’s biggest stars, is a true pioneer of 20th century photography. He was the first “outside” photographer hired by the major studios to create photographs for the magazines, and was the link between the filmmakers and major magazines of the time, such as Life and Look. Born June 30th, 1927 in Los Angeles, his parents were divorced by the time he was born and he was raised by his mother. Bob was given an Argus C-3 camera for his twelfth birthday, providing the catalyst for what would become the key to his future. After high school, he studied cinema at night at the USC Cinema Department and design with Saul Bass at the Kahn Institute of Art. At the same time he apprenticed with a number of Hollywood photographers; Wallace Seawell, Paul Hesse, and Glenn Embree, gleaning technical and business know-how. His first magazine assignments were for Harper’s Bazaar in the early ’50s when famed art director Alexey Brodovitch became aware of his work. His career took off in 1954 when Warner Bros. asked him to photograph Judy Garland’s final scene on the set of A Star Is Born. His portrait of the freckle-faced star became his first Life cover. From then on his production was phenomenal. His images were in print literally every week for the next twenty years. As the first “special” he covered the making of over 100 films, including the 1960s movies The Graduate, My Fair Lady, Rosemary’s Baby and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. His body of work, documenting this historic era of filmmaking, is unsurpassed. He captured with wonderful perception the most famous actors and directors of the time on and off the set, in unguarded moments of repose, vulnerability and high drama. He had a unique ability to capture what was essential to each film. Sydney Pollack said in the introduction to Bob’s autobiography: “Sometimes a filmmaker gets a look at a photograph taken on his own set and sees the ‘soul’ of his film in one still photograph. It’s rare, but it happens. It happened to me in 1969, the first time I looked at the work of Bob Willoughby during the filming of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?.” Bob also had a remarkable understanding of the needs of each individual magazine; he could be shooting for seven different publications and know exactly what each one needed in terms of editorial content and design layout.
While Willoughby is most famous as the great chronicler of Hollywood, before he began covering film production he had already made an astonishing series of images of jazz musicians. Willoughby had a huge appreciation of jazz both in its technical aspects and its ability to raise the roof in performance. He had a masterful feel for the character of the artists, and he was able to convey it even in the difficult lighting conditions of recording studios and stage. He was responsible for a number of technical innovations, including the silent blimp for 35mm still cameras, which became common on film sets. He was the only photographer working on films at the time to use radio-controlled cameras, allowing him unprecedented coverage in otherwise impossible situations, and he had special brackets built to hold his still cameras on or over the Panavision cameras. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Hollywood honored Willoughby with a major retrospective exhibition of his work. He was awarded the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Still Photography in New York in 2004.

Eva Rubinstein

 

Rubinstein was born in Buenos Aires where her mother, the ballerina Nela Młynarska, was accompanying her father, the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, on a concert tour of South America.
She was raised in Paris where she began to train as a ballet dancer at the age of five. In 1939, at the beginning of World War II, the family moved to the United States where Eva Rubinstein received American citizenship in 1946. She attended Scripps College in Claremont, California, and studied drama at the University of California, Los Angeles.
From 1953, she worked as a dancer and actress in New York, appearing in the original production of “The Diary of Anne Frank.”. In 1956, she married William Sloane Coffin and gave birth to three children, Amy, Alexander and David. The marriage ended in divorce in 1968.
In 1967, Rubinstein became seriously interested in photography, benefitting from workshops with Lisette Model and Diane Arbus. In addition to her work as a photojournalist, she has taken more intimate photographs of people, including nudes, and of (often empty) interiors. In an interview with Frank Horvat, she explained she had always shown great respect for the people she photographed, never wishing to intrude.
She has also led workshops at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan (1972) and at Manhattanville College, among many other venues in the US and Europe. Purchase, New York, (1974-1975).

Alfred Stieglitz

 

ALFRED STIEGLITZ was most influential in establishing photography as an art form in the United States. He pursued this cause by editing and publishing magazines, organizing photographers, operating galleries and crafting his own creative photographic images many of which were printed in photogravure. He promoted the photogravure process as an original means of photographic printmaking.
Stieglitz secured hands-on experience with photogravure and used it extensively for his work and the images of fellow pictorialists around the turn of the twentieth century. He initially worked at the Photochrome Engraving Company, in New York, where he gained intimate knowledge of photogravure and other printing processes. In 1897, he issued Picturesque Bits of New York and Other Studies, a portfolio of his own large-format gravures, for which he personally made the film positives for plate making. At this time he marketed his individual photogravures as collectible, original works of art, numbering, signing and printing them in limited editions.
Stieglitz used the photogravure process for most of the illustrations in his groundbreaking periodicals, Camera Notes (1897-1903) and Camera Work (1903-1917). The photogravures in these journals, all personally approved by Stieglitz, enabled a larger audience for once to experience the artful qualities of photography. He was so confident of the quality of these gravures that he occasionally sent them to be displayed at international exhibitions of artistic photographs.
Stieglitz’s own work passed through three distinct phases. He began as a naturalist photographer sensitively portraying rural lifestyles. He then became a pictorialist, creating impressionistic pictures through soft-focus effects. Finally, he turned modern, embracing abstraction, photographic detail, and realistic tones

Roger Ballen

One of the most influential and important photographic artists of the 21st century, Roger Ballen’s photographs span over forty years. His strange and extreme works confront the viewer and challenge them to come with him on a journey into their own minds as he explores the deeper recesses of his own.

Roger Ballen was born in New York in 1950 but for over 30 years he has lived and worked in South Africa. His work as a geologist took him out into the countryside and led him to take up his camera and explore the hidden world of small South African towns. At first he explored the empty streets in the glare of the midday sun but, once he had made the step of knocking on people’s doors, he discovered a world inside these houses which was to have a profound effect on his work. These interiors with their distinctive collections of objects and the occupants within these closed worlds took his unique vision on a path from social critique to the creation of metaphors for the inner mind. After 1994 he no longer looked to the countryside for his subject matter finding it closer to home in Johannesburg.

Over the past thirty five years his distinctive style of photography has evolved using a simple square format in stark and beautiful black and white. In the earlier works in the exhibition his connection to the tradition of documentary photography is clear but through the 1990s he developed a style he describes as ‘documentary fiction’. After 2000 the people he first discovered and documented living on the margins of South African society increasingly became a cast of actors working with Ballen in the series’ Outland (2000, revised in 2015) and Shadow Chamber (2005) collaborating to create powerful psychodramas.

The line between fantasy and reality in his subsequent series’ Boarding House (2009) and Asylum of the Birds (2014) became increasingly blurred and in these series he employed drawings, painting, collage and sculptural techniques to create elaborate sets. There was an absence of people altogether, replaced by photographs of individuals now used as props, by doll or dummy parts or where people did appear it was as disembodied hands, feet and mouths poking disturbingly through walls and pieces of rag. The often improvised scenarios were now completed by the unpredictable behaviour of animals whose ambiguous behaviour became crucial to the overall meaning of the photographs. In this phase Ballen invented a new hybrid aesthetic, but one still rooted firmly in black and white photography.

In his artistic practice Ballen has increasingly been won over by the possibilities of integrating photography and drawing. He has expanded his repertoire and extended his visual language. By integrating drawing into his photographic and video works, the artist has not only made a lasting contribution to the field of art, but equally has made a powerful commentary about the human condition and its creative potential.

His contribution has not been limited to stills photography and Ballen has been the creator of a number of acclaimed and exhibited short films that dovetail with his photographic series’. The collaborative film I Fink You Freeky, created for the cult band Die Antwoord in 2012, has garnered over 125-million hits on YouTube. He has taken his work into the realms of sculpture and installation, at Paris’ Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (2017), Australia’s Sydney College of the Arts (2016) and at the Serlachius Museum in Finland (2015) is to name but a few. The spectacular installation at Les Rencontres d’Arles 2017, “House of the Ballenesque” was voted as one of the best exhibitions for 2017. In 2018 at the Wiesbaden Biennale, Germany, another installation “Roger Ballen’s Bazaar/Bizarre” was created in an abandoned shopping centre.

Ballen’s series, The Theatre of Apparitions (2016), is inspired by the sight of these hand-drawn carvings on blacked-out windows in an abandoned women’s prison.

Ballen started to experiment using different spray paints on glass and then ‘drawing on’ or removing the paint with a sharp object to let natural light through. The results have been likened prehistoric cave-paintings: the black, dimensionless spaces on the glass are canvases onto which Ballen has carved his thoughts and emotions. He also released a related animated film, Theatre of Apparitions, which has been nominated for various awards.

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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.

Wingate Paine

 

 

 

Born in 1915, Wingate Paine was a member of a Mayflower New England family with ties to law, banking, and the ministry. He broke from those traditions and became a Marine captain, connoisseur of French wine, devotee of Hatha Yoga, and finally a gifted photographer.
Paine was one of the hottest advertising photographers in New York in the 1960s, commanding fees bested only by Avedon and Penn. He was the photographer of the iconic Volkswagen Beetle ads, considered a touchstone of modernist print advertising.
In the mid-1960s Paine set aside his successful advertising career to devote himself to his magnum opus, Mirror of Venus, which he described as a “confirmation of my feelings toward beauty and beautiful women.” In Mirror of Venus, Wingate Paine created an icon of the 1960’s Sexual Revolution. Though innocent by today’s standards, Paine’s photography pushed the limits of what was considered acceptable art photography. The book illustrated playful, strong, modern women posing in flagrante delicto for an enamored photographer. With the help of his wife, Natalie Paine, who directed a major New York modeling agency, Paine enlisted three remarkable models as collaborators: Sandy, Carla, and Scarlett. Printed in ten editions and four languages, Mirror of Venus gave the world a glimpse into a private realm that was at once elegant, earthy, sexy, and pure.
After finishing Mirror of Venus and overseeing its many editions, Paine retired from photography. He became a spiritual teacher, authoring two books: Tilling the Soul (1984) and The Book of Surrender (1987). He passed away in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1987.

 

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.