David Fokos

David Fokos was born in 1960 in Baltimore, MD and currently lives in San Diego, CA.
Using an 85-year old 8×10 view camera, world-renowned artist David Fokos has been photographing the landscape for over 30 years. Often working 100 hours or more to craft a single image, his elegant black and white images have been lauded as masterpieces of minimalism. Represented by 14 galleries on three continents, Fokos’ work can be found in many museum, corporate, and private collections.
Of his work, Fokos says: “The images I make today are the result of decades of exploration and discovery in my quest to understand how we experience the world around us. My goal is to express the essence of my experience – evoking within the viewer the same emotions I felt when making the images. With my work, I’m not trying to show the viewer what these places look like, but rather what they feel like

Herbert Ritts

Herbert Ritts (August 13, 1952 – December 26, 2002) was an American fashion photographer who concentrated on black-and-white photography and portraits.
Ritts began his photographic career in the late 70’s and gained a reputation as a master of art and commercial photography. In addition to producing portraits and editorial fashion for Vogue, Vanity Fair, Interview and Rolling Stone, Ritts also created successful advertising campaigns for Calvin Klein, Chanel, Donna Karan, Gap, Gianfranco Ferré, Gianni Versace, Giorgio Armani, Levi’s, Pirelli, Polo Ralph Lauren, Valentino among others. Since 1988 he directed numerous influential and award winning music videos and commercials. His fine art photography has been the subject of exhibitions worldwide, with works residing in many significant public and private collections.
In his life and work, Herb Ritts was drawn to clean lines and strong forms. This graphic simplicity allowed his images to be read and felt instantaneously. They often challenged conventional notions of gender or race. Social history and fantasy were both captured and created by his memorable photographs of noted individuals in film, fashion, music, politics and society.
Ritts was committed to HIV/AIDS related causes, and contributed to many charitable organizations, among them amfAR, Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, Project Angel Food, Focus on AIDS, APLA, Best Buddies and Special Olympics . He was also a charter member on the Board of Directors for The Elton John Aids Foundation.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia

 

Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s photographs straddle truth and fiction by combining real people and places—but not necessarily people and places that naturally go together. The theatricality of his images is carefully constructed: he arranges the objects of each scene and devises precise lighting and framing for every project. His work is often described as cinematic, a description that diCorcia deplores. He insists that his pictures suggest rather than elucidate a full narrative. His brand of storytelling results in unstable, unfixed images that point in certain directions but never provide a definitive map.
His earliest work, from the late 1970s, featured his friends and family in scenes that evoke loneliness, contemplation, ennui, or, occasionally, humor. In Mario, diCorcia’s brother stares into an open refrigerator, his late-night mission to unearth a snack infused with inertia. The photograph couples an impression of complete stillness with the eerie, seemingly contradictory sense of witnessing a fleeting moment. Peter Galassi, former chief curator of MoMA’s Department of Photography, described the production of this image: “The subject was utterly ordinary but the photograph was carefully planned. The camera was on a tripod and the lighting was supplemented by an electronic flash hidden in the refrigerator and triggered at the moment of exposure. DiCorcia leveled the camera, adjusted and readjusted the lighting, made several Polaroid test shots and more than a few exposures, each aiming at the envisioned result.”1 DiCorcia’s acute attention to detail has become the hallmark of his process and has influenced a generation of photographers (including Katy Grannan, Justine Kurland, Alex Prager, and Alec Soth, among others) who work with controlled situations and semi-anonymous portrait subjects.
DiCorcia did not set out to become a photographer. While attending the University of Hartford, he studied with Jan Groover, who planted the idea that a photograph is not necessarily an artifact documenting a specific sliver of time; rather, a photograph should result from careful planning and orchestration. Early- and mid-20th-century photographers who also took this approach include Paul Outerbridge, Philippe Halsman, and Bill Brandt. During his graduate studies at Yale University diCorcia begin to classify himself as a photographer by first determining the kind of image-maker he did not want to be. Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Tod Papageorge—who rapidly shot many exposures in order to get to a few final images—attempted to capture the real world at a particular moment in time from a specific point of view. Their mid-20th-century work presented diCorcia with a strand of street photography to push against at exactly the same time that color processes began to be used outside of advertising and news photography. DiCorcia deliberately chose to print in color since it was an underutilized format in fine-art photography.
MoMA presented diCorcia’s first solo museum exhibition in 1993, featuring his series Hustlers, which was made in Los Angeles between 1990 and 1992. He photographed male prostitutes he approached on Santa Monica Boulevard, paying them whatever they typically charged for their services to instead pose in scenarios he had prepared for the photo sessions. The titles of these photographs, such as Eddie Anderson; 21 Years Old; Houston, Texas; $20, list only the facts. Yet by inserting their bodies into prepared scenes in hotel rooms or on the street, diCorcia made portraits that operate in tandem with—but do not exactly reproduce—the fantasy roles these men were usually conscripted to play.
Having worked outside on the Hustlers series, diCorcia delved further into street photography. As he explained, “The elements which call into question the normal relationship of appearance to truth in photography are, for most artists of my generation, tools to enrich the experience of work rather than ends in themselves.”2 Taking the work of Garry Winogrand in particular as a starting point, diCorcia reinvigorated the genre in the 1990s by freezing the ebb and flow of a city sidewalk in images such as Los Angeles and New York. By arranging flashes and stationing his camera at a precise location, he suspended slices of time in images that have the quiet stillness of Old Master paintings. For his series Streetwork (1993–97) and Heads (2000–01), he took thousands of photographs, of which he selected only a handful for inclusion. Unlike other practitioners of street photography, diCorcia never wanted his images to propagate a moral truth or instigate social change.

Don Hudson

I was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1950 and have lived in the area my entire life. In 1972 I decided to act on my love of photography and enrolled in art school. During my two years there I studied the language, both the history and the history-in-making, honed my technical skills, and most importantly, began an association with like-minded souls playing the game of photography. For 40 years, through peaks and valleys of activity, my playing of the game has been about my personal relationship with how the camera describes the appearance of truth in a photograph. You will have to look at the photographs for further explanation. I consider myself a thoughtful, and proudly amateur photographer. A book of my photographs from the last century, From The Archives, has recently been published in France.

Don Hudson

I was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1950 and have lived in the area my entire life. In 1972 I decided to act on my love of photography and enrolled in art school. During my two years there I studied the language, both the history and the history-in-making, honed my technical skills, and most importantly, began an association with like-minded souls playing the game of photography. For 40 years, through peaks and valleys of activity, my playing of the game has been about my personal relationship with how the camera describes the appearance of truth in a photograph. You will have to look at the photographs for further explanation. I consider myself a thoughtful, and proudly amateur photographer. A book of my photographs from the last century, From The Archives, has recently been published in France.

Don Hudson

Alice & Peter Gowland

Alice and Peter photographed beautiful women in the glamour and pin-up style for over sixty years. In fact, the New York Times named him “America’s No. 1 Pin-up Photographer.”

While best known for beautiful “pin-ups,” they also photographed children, numerous celebrities and the historic southern California beach lifestyle they lived. Many of the celebities they photographed were also their friends – Jayne Mansfield, Jonathan Winters, Muhammad Ali and Raquel Welch are among the people they captured on film.

Peter was sent to Germany as a photographer during WWII. His work during the war are a sublime contrast to the pin-ups he was known for. In addition, the Gowland team sold over 1000 magazine covers and photographed for Playboy and countless advertising campaigns. With their expertise, Peter and Alice traveled the world giving lectures on photography and wrote over 35 books and guides related to portrait and glamour photography.

Discontent with the cameras available, Peter branched out. He invented and sold 21 different kinds of cameras, the most popular being the Gowlandflex twin lens 4 x 5 still used by many professionals.

Peter was born into the Hollywood life, the son of English character actor Gibson Gowland and actress Sylvia Andrew. As a young man he spent many years on the sets working as a double and background actor. It was there that he first observed glamour lighting, which was the foundation for his future career.

​From 1942-1945, Peter worked as an engineering cinematographer for North American Aviation, while he and Alice spent evenings and weekends taking portraits, speculative advertising photographs and creating “how to make” articles. In 1945 he was sent to Germany with the Air Force, where he was in charge of the photo lab at Furstenfeldbruck. During WWII, because pin-ups became popular with the Armed Forces, Alice sold some of their beach pin-ups as magazine covers while Peter was in the service.

After Peter was discharged in 1946, Peter and Alice built their first studio home in West LA with the help of a G.I. loan. In 1954 they moved into their Rustic Canyon home, designed by William F. Overpeck. The nearby beach became their perennial stomping ground. In its day, this State Beach was a vibrant gathering place teaming with life. They made many dear friends, and the photographs they took, from the mid-40s through the late-70s, bring to life the excitement and camaraderie of a time gone by.

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Connie Imboden

 

Connie Imboden’s photographs are in the permanent collections of many museums including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Baltimore Museum of Art, The National Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Bibliotheque Nationales in Paris, France, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany and many other public and private collections throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

Throughout the years, Imboden has shown her photographs in an extensive range of group and solo shows at galleries and museums within the United States, South America, Europe, and most recently China.

In 1993, Connie Imboden won the Silver Medal in Switzerland’s “Schonste Bucher Aus Aller Welt (Most Beautiful Book in the World)” Award for her first book of images entitled “Out of Darkness”. Her most recent book, “Reflections, 25 Years of Photography”, features photos from 1983 to 2009 charting Imboden’s artistic journey and offering new insights into her work and vision.

She teaches photography at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where her experience as a photographer began, as well as many workshops around the world.

Imboden is also the president of the board of governors of the William G. Baker Jr. Memorial Fund. The Baker Fund focuses its grant making exclusively to Arts and Culture and in 2008 initiated the Baker Artists Awards, an innovative online process offering significant prizes to emerging and established artists of any discipline.

Jeremy Mann

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Jane Evelyn Atwood

 

 

 

 

 

 

Born in New York and living in Paris since 1971, Jane Evelyn Atwood is one of the world’s leading photojournalists. In 1976, Atwood bought her first camera and began taking pictures of a group of street prostitutes in Paris. It was partly on the strength of these photographs that Atwood received the first W. Eugene Smith Award, in 1980, for another story she had just started work on: blind children. Prior to this, she had never published a photo.
In the ensuing years, Atwood has pursued a number of carefully chosen projects-among them an 18-month reportage of one regiment of the Foreign Legion, following the soldiers to Beirut and Chad; a four-and-a-half-month story on the first person with AIDS in France to allow himself to be photographed for publication in the press (Atwood stayed with him until his death); and a four-year study of landmine victims that took her to Cambodia, Angola, Kosovo, Mozambique and Afghanistan-always with the same personal and passionate approach.
Jane Evelyn Atwood’s work reflects a deep involvement with her subjects over long periods of time. Fascinated by people and by the idea of exclusion, she has managed to penetrate worlds that most of us do not know, or choose to ignore. She limits her stories to those which truly compel her, devoting to each subject the time necessary-in some cases, years-to explore it in depth. In 1989 she started to photograph incarcerated women, eventually managing to gain access to some of the world’s worst penitentiaries and jails, including death row. This monumental ten-year undertaking- encompassing forty prisons in nine countries of Europe and Eastern Europe, and the United States-remains the definitive photographic work on women in prison to date. It was published as a book in both English and French in 2000 and continues to be exhibited internationally. (see Books; Exhibitions)
Atwood’s particularity as a photographer lies in her in-depth approach, but she has also covered such news events as the Kobe earthquake of 1995, the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001, and the Democratic National Convention in 2004.
Jane Evelyn Atwood describes her method of work as “obsessive”. She does not move on to a new subject until she feels she has completely understood the one at hand and her own relation to it, and until she believes that her pictures reflect this understanding.

Jack Birns

Jack Birns (1919–2008) was an American photographer. He was well known in photographic circles as an award-winning foreign correspondent for Life magazine, and in the commercial diving world as President of BIRNS Incorporated.
In 1946 Birns moved to Los Angeles, California, and free-lanced as a magazine photographer for a year, during which time he set a record for free-lancers working for LIFE: 30 pages and a cover in 6-months’ work. LIFE hired Birns to cover the Civil war in China and during 1947 he set another record for LIFE staff photographers for pictures and pages, as he captured on film a vast country undergoing fundamental changes, and a society characterized by poverty, petty crime, homelessness and military rule. During this time, Birns was paired with journalist Roy Rowan. This energetic war coverage (China, Burma, India, Philippines, and Malaysia) won for Birns a coveted recognition from the prestigious Overseas Press Club of America. For the first time in its history the OPC established a special award for photographers to honor Birns’s work, and the award was given to Birns by General George C. Marshall, chief of staff during WWII and, later, Secretary of State.

Laurie Simmons

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Kenneth Josephson

Kenneth Josephson is recognized as an early and influential practitioner of Conceptual photography. His black and white images famously layer pictures within pictures, focusing on the act of picture-making, offering playful commentary on photographic truth and illusion, and using the photograph itself to question the veracity of the medium.
Josephson earned a BFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1957, where he studied under Minor White. In 1960, he earned an MS from the Institute of Design of the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, where he was strongly influenced by Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. Josephson was a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1967 -1997), and a founding member of the Society for Photographic Education. He is the receipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship (1972), and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships (1975 and 1979). His work is in the collections worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian, Washington D.C.; the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Bibliotheque National, Paris; and Fotografiska Museet, Stockholm.

Richard Tuschman

RICHARD TUSCHMAN began experimenting with digital imaging in the early 1990’s, developing a style that synthesized his interests in photography, painting and assemblage. He has been exhibited widely, both in the US and internationally. Accolades and awards include Prix de la Photographie Paris (Gold Medal, People’s Choice), Critical Mass Top 50, International Kontinent Awards (1st Place, Fine Art Projects) and Center Project Launch Juror’s Award (chosen by Roger Watson, Fox Talbot Museum) among others. His photographs have been published on numerous online magazines/journals including Slate, LensCulture, LensScratch and Huffington Post. In 2016 he was named a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Photography. He currently lives and works in New York and Europe.

Morris Brown

I’m Trey Maurice born Morris Brown III, a street photographer based in New Orleans, LA. The first time I took the experience was on a filmmaking open house visit to New York City in the summer of 2010. I leisurely just shot buildings but I couldn’t help the obvious of so many people on the streets. People there were more interesting to shoot and it was then that I found the addiction.
In 2011, I took most of the year off to focus on my busy postal job at time before being laid off, and since then I have been shooting more consistently. My plans before then was to direct films and documentaries but with the high cost of film production, I chose to put it on hold for a while. I realized then I could tell stories with street photography more cheaply and quickly without completely abandoning my love for both arts. Recently I’ve decided to make an online appearance and hope to meet as many people on and offline with the passion. »

Rachel Woolf

I am a Denver-based independent visual journalist.

My fascination in photography began with a disposable Walgreens camera in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Now, I specialize in documentary photography, videography and portraiture. My work aims to intimately show aspects of humanity intersecting with economic and social issues.

Some of my clients include The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, US News and World Report, Bloomberg, Education Week, ESPN Magazine and Getty Images. I graduated from Ithaca College with a B.A. degree in Documentary Studies, attended the Eddie Adams Workshop XXVII in 2014 and the Missouri Photo Workshop in 2015.

My work placed 2nd in the National Press Photographers Association’s Best of Photojournalism Contemporary Issues Story competition and received “Best of Show” in the Michigan Press Photographers Association competition.

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Virna Haffer

Virna Haffer was a gifted and innovative photographer who made lasting contributions to photography in the Northwest and nationally. She was a self-taught photographer raised in the utopian community of Home Colony, Washington who began exhibiting her work professionally in the 1920s both independently and as a member of the Seattle Camera Club. She went on to show her work extensively in American and European photographic salons and museum exhibitions earning an international reputation. Her body of work includes pictorialist and surrealist images from the 1920s and 1930s, documentary and straight photography from the 1930s and 1940s, and experimental work with photograms and other non-film photographic processes starting in the 1950s. Her book Making Photograms: The Creative Process of Painting with Light, published in 1969, still serves as a reference manual for contemporary artists interested in this process.

Image of Structure, Joshua Sarinana

My aim is to distill the architecture of Frank Gehry’s Stata Center – at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – to an emotional response of an isolated structure. As I conducted research across the street – where I studied how the brain encodes emotional associations to contextual cues – I became more and more drawn to this architectural work. In the three-month leadup to defending my thesis I worked hundred-hour weeks. The energy I poured into my PhD led to solitude, insomnia, and an overwhelming sense of doom, which nearly caused a physical and mental collapse. I saw the Stata Center almost every single day and for over 10 years I took photos of it, learning how to view it ever more clearly apropos my internal state. With this interaction I connected to this deconstructed architecture, while at the same time, undergoing psychological dissociation.

In my photographic work I seek to create a distinct – often dire – reality. This ominous quality of this series also speaks to the power of the buildings looming strength. I am not looking to have the viewer feel how I feel or see how I see, but to use it as a projective test to identify internal conflict that they may not have been aware of prior to viewing this work. The tension of being elevated and grounded by Gehry’s work, has for me, created a tense and silent drama that unfolds into surreal observation and removes it from the architectural context into the photographic space as a separate art object.

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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.

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.