Masters of Photography

Gerda Taro by Fred Stein

Gerda Taro: Pioneering War Photographer

Gerda Taro: The forgotten photojournalist killed in action

By Alison Geefor BBC World Service

International Center of Photography Chronology

International Center of Photography Gallery

Magnum Photos

New York Times Slide Show

Biography from Wikipedia:

Gerta Pohorylle was born in 1910, in Stuttgart, into a middle-class Jewish Galician family. Pohorylle attended a Swiss boarding school.

In 1929 the family moved to Leipzig, just prior to the beginning of Nazi Germany. Taro opposed the Nazi Party, joining leftist groups. In 1933, she was arrested and detained for distributing anti-Nazi propaganda. Eventually, the entire Pohorylle household was forced to leave Nazi Germany toward different destinations. Taro would not see her family again.

Escaping the anti-Semitism of Hitler's Germany, Pohorylle moved to Paris in 1934. In 1935, she met the photojournalist Endre Friedmann, a Hungarian Jew, becoming his personal assistant and learning photography. They fell in love. Pohorylle began to work for Alliance Photo as a picture editor.

In 1936, Pohorylle received her first photojournalist credential. Then, she and Friedmann devised a plan. Both took news photographs, but these were sold as the work of the non-existent American photographer Robert Capa (after Frank Capra), which was a convenient name overcoming the increasing political intolerance prevailing in Europe and belonging in the lucrative American market. The secret did not last long, but Friedman kept the more commercial name "Capa" for his own name, while Pohorylle adopted the professional name of "Gerda Taro" after the Japanese artist Tarō Okamoto and Swedish actress Greta Garbo. The two worked together to cover the events surrounding the coming to power of the Popular Front in 1930s France.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out (1936), Gerda Taro travelled to Barcelona, Spain, to cover the events with Capa and David "Chim" Seymour. Taro acquired the nickname of La pequeña rubia ("The little blonde"). They covered the war together at northeastern Aragon and at the southern Córdoba. Always together under the common, bogus signature of Robert Capa, they were successful through many important publications (the Swiss Züricher Illustrierte, the French Vu). Their early war photos are distinguishable since Taro used a Rollei camera which rendered squared photographs while Capa produced rectangular Leica pictures. However, for some time in 1937 they produced similar 135 film pictures together under the label of Capa&Taro.

Subsequently, Taro attained some independence. She refused Capa's marriage proposal. Also, she became publicly related to the circle of anti fascist European intellectuals (Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell) who crusaded particularly for the Spanish Republic. The Ce Soir, a leftist newspaper of France, signed her for publishing Taro's works only. Then, she began to commercialize her production under the Photo Taro label. Regards, Life, Illustrated London News and Volks-Illustrierte were amongst those publications.

Reporting the Valencia bombing alone, Gerda Taro attained the photographs which are her most celebrated. Also, in July 1937, Taro's photographs were in demand by the international press when, alone, she was covering the Brunete region near Madrid for Ce Soir. Although the Nationalist propaganda claimed that the region was under its control, the Republican forces had in fact forced that faction out. Taro's camera was the only testimony of the actual situation.

During her coverage of the Republican army retreat at the Battle of Brunete, Taro hopped onto the footboard of a car that was carrying wounded soldiers when a Republican tank collided into its side. Taro suffered critical wounds and died the next day, July 26, 1937.

The circumstances of Taro's death have been questioned by British journalist Robin Stummer, writing in the New Statesman magazine. Stummer cited Willy Brandt, later Chancellor of West Germany, and a friend of Taro's during the Spanish Civil War, that she had been the victim of the Stalinist purge of Communists and Socialists in Spain not aligned to Moscow. However, Stummer provided no other evidence for this claim.

In an interview with the Spanish daily El País, a nephew of a Republican soldier at the Battle of Brunete explained that she had died in an accident. According to the eye-witness account, she had been run over by a reversing tank and she died from her wounds in El Goloso English hospital a few hours later.

Due to her political commitment, Taro had become an anti-fascist figure. On August 1, on what would have been her 27th birthday, the French Communist Party gave her a grand funeral in Paris, buried her at Père Lachaise Cemetery, and commissioned Alberto Giacometti to create a monument for her grave.

On 26 September 2007, the International Center of Photography opened the first major U.S. exhibition of Taro's photographs.

Jessie Tarbox Beals

"Newspaper photography as a vocation for women is somewhat of an innovation, but is one that offers great inducements in the way of interest as well as profit. If one is the possessor of health and strength, a good news instinct . . . a fair photographic outfit, and the ability to hustle, which is the most necessary qualification, one can be a news photographer."

Jessie Tarbox Beals
The Focus, St. Louis, Missouri, 1904

“Too many photographers try too hard. They try to lift photography into the realm of Art, because they have an inferiority complex about their Craft. You and I would see more interesting photography if they would stop worrying, and instead, apply horse-sense to the problem of recording the look and feel of their own era.”

Artnet Portfolio
Corbis Images
Ephemeral New York
Greenwich Village Business on Flickr
Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog
Luminous Lint
Minnesota Historical Society
New York Public Library Digial Gallery
Pinterest Portfolio
Shooting Film
Smiothsonian Institution

"Slum Children"

"David R. Francis Open St. Louis World's Fair"


"George Poage (1st African American to win an Olympic Medal"

"Olympic Medalist Leo "Bud" Goodwin, Charles M. Daniels, and E.J. Giannini"

"Virginia Myers"

"Louise Ellsworth"

"Edna St. Vincent Millay and her Husband"

"Abastenia St. Leger Eberle, Sculptor"

"Fifth Avenue"

"Patchin Place, Greenwich Village"

"Brooklyn Bridge"

Biography from the Library of Congress:

Jessie Tarbox Beals is known as America's first female news photographer because The Buffalo Inquirer and The Courier hired her as a staff photographer in 1902. Although rarely hired again as a staff photographer, her freelance news photographs and her tenacity and self-promotion set her apart in a competitive field through the 1920s. At a time when most women's roles were confined to the home and most women who ventured into photography maintained homelike portrait studios, Jessie called attention to her willingness to work outdoors and in situations generally thought too rough for a woman. She excelled in photographing such news worthy events as the 1904 world's fair as well as documentary photography of houses, gardens, Bohemian Greenwich Village, slums, and school children.1

The Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division has representative examples of Beals' work in several collections. Many of the magazines and newspapers where her images were originally published are available for study through the general collection and newspaper research centers. The bulk of Jessie's surviving papers and photographs are at Harvard University, the New-York Historical Society, and the American Museum of Natural History.

Jessie Tarbox was born Dec. 23, 1870, to machinist John Nathaniel Tarbox and his wife Marie Antoinette Bassett in Hamilton, Ontario. John's invention of a portable sewing machine enabled the family to live in a beautifully landscaped mansion until 1877 when the sewing machine patents expired. John then drank to excess, his family abandoned him, and his strong-willed wife supported the family on meager resources.

Jessie became a certified teacher at 17 and moved to Williamsburg, Mass., to live with her brother. She taught there and in Greenfield, Mass. She sketched gardens in her spare time but quickly realized that her artistic talents were disappointing.

In 1888, Jessie's life changed when she won a camera for selling a magazine subscription. "I began when I was a teacher in Massachusetts, with a small camera that cost me $1.75 for the whole outfit. In a week I had discarded it for a larger one and in five weeks that one had earned me $10."2

During the summers, Jessie offered students from nearby Smith College four portraits for a dollar, a source of a steady income. At a Chautauqua Assembly (an educational summer camp for adults) she made a conscious decision to concentrate on news photography. In 1893 she attended the Columbian Exposition in Chicago where the experience of making photographs and meeting other women photographers, including Frances Benjamin Johnston and Gertrude Käsebier, heightened her fascination with that occupation.

Jessie married Amherst graduate Alfred Tennyson Beals in 1897; she taught part time and did extra photography. In 1899 her photographs of the local prison were published in a newspaper. Although these images were uncredited, hundreds of photographs published in the future would bear her credit line.

Jessie Tarbox Beals ended her 12-year teaching career in 1900. That September, she received her first credit line from Vermont's Windham County Reformer, for photos made for a fair. These gave her the distinction of being one of the first published woman photojournalists. For more than a year, the Beals couple operated a door-to-door portrait and general photography service. When they ran out of money in 1901, they settled in Buffalo, N.Y., where they had a premature child who died.

In late November 1902, Jessie broke into full-time professional news photography. The editor of Buffalo's two local papers, The Buffalo Inquirer and The Courier, hired her and allowed her to freelance for out-of-town correspondents, as well. She got her first "exclusive" in 1903 and proved her ability to hustle when she perched atop a bookcase to make photos through a transom of a murder trial that had been proclaimed off-limits to news photographers. She used a 50 pound 8 x 10 format camera for her assignments. She took pride in her physical strength and agility and delighted in self-promotion.

Jessie made her first nationally recognized photographs when Sir Thomas Lipton, the inventor of the tea bag, stopped in Buffalo. Her portrait of Lipton was published in the national press.

In 1904, the Buffalo newspapers sent Jessie to the opening of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Mo., and Alfred went along to print her photographs. Other professional women photographers working at the fair included Frances Benjamin Johnston and Emme and Mamie Gerhard. As a latecomer, Jessie was denied an exhibition press pass, but, relying on her ability to hustle, she persuaded the exhibition office to grant her a permit to photograph at the fairgrounds before the exposition opened. Pass in hand, she ignored the limitations and photographed at every opportunity.3 She ultimately became the official photographer at the Fair for the New York Herald, Tribune, and Leslie's Weekly, three Buffalo newspapers, and all the local St. Louis papers, as well as the Fair's own publicity department. She climbed ladders and floated in hot air balloons to get her shots.

Jessie thought like a news photographer. Reversing the traditional newspaper approach, she often generated photographs for which a writer would be assigned later. She developed several story ideas at the Fair, such as similarities in the role of motherhood in different cultures, for which newspapers then wrote stories. She also anticipated the use of series of photos or picture stories with which U.S. magazines and newspapers of the 1930s would replace single images.4

Jessie created additional opportunities for herself by making pictures of dignitaries attending the Fair. She captured a photo of William Howard Taft outside the Philippine Building at the Fair. She interrupted President Theodore Roosevelt on his tour of the Fair to make his photograph and followed him throughout the day, making more than 30 photographs. Her aggressiveness paid off when she gained credentials as a member of his Presidential party and accompanied him to a reunion of the Rough Riders in San Antonio in March 1905.

Settling in New York City, Jessie was unable to secure work as a news staff photographer so she and her husband opened a studio. In the competitive New York portrait market, men still dominated professional photography but the American Art News commissioned two women--Jessie Tarbox Beals and Zaida Ben-Yúsuf--to make 17 portraits of prominent artists, which it published in 1905.5 This assignment won approval from critics who preferred her "straight" approach to that of better-known photographers Gertrude Käsebier and Alvin Langdon Coburn.6 The American Art series led to other jobs in major magazines about painters, sculptors, writers and actors.

Jessie maintained an art photography element in her repertoire by displaying images in "Exhibition of Photographs - The Work of Women Photographers" held at the Camera Club of Hartford, in Connecticut, in 1906; in the "Thirteenth Annual International Exhibition of Photography," organized by the Toronto Camera Club, Toronto, Canada, in 1921; and at the "Third National Salon of Pictorial Photography," organized by the prominent Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1922.

Early on, Jessie envisioned an international career for herself: "I want to free lance (sic) it around the world," she says. "England, Australia, New Zealand--they're all easy because the language is the same. I'm going to do them next. But I want to take in Europe and Japan, and China and India, too. This staying in one place is no good. I've got to load up my old camera and take another hike before long."7 Although she wound up concentrating on the United States, her interest in being on the road resulted in widely distributed publications including Outing, The Craftsman, American Homes and Gardens, Bit and Spur, Town and Country, Harper's Bazaar, The Christian Science Monitor, McClure's Magazine and The New York Times. The variety of publications also testifies to the difficulty women had establishing themselves and indicates Jessie's willingness to do whatever was necessary to succeed.

Jessie's marriage became a disappointment. She teamed up with a freelance writer, Harriet Rice, and taught herself to use flash powder to make photos at night. Through Rice, Jessie met the man who fathered her daughter, Nanette, who was born in 1911. Jessie and her husband doted on the child and raised her together even though their marriage grew increasingly strained, particularly when Nanette required hospitalizations for juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. In 1917, Jessie left her husband and opened a tearoom and art gallery in Greenwich Village.

Jessie spent three years in Greenwich Village making photographs that captured its Bohemian nature, and in 1920, with business booming after World War I, she moved to a large loft on Fourth Avenue.8 Like other women photographers of the time, she had to work freelance rather than on staff for a publication. Much of her work was for reform-oriented causes such as Greenwich [settlement] House documenting educational and arts programs for children. Some of her photographs were used in posters and books for Progressive education programs. Another example of her work is an album at the Library of Congress, which she made in 1925 when she photographed the McDowell Colony at Peterborough, New Hampshire, to help Marian McDowell advertise and raise funds for the arts program there.

Jessie relied heavily on friends for a sense of belonging. Her daughter lived principally with Alfred, attended boarding schools or was boarded out with friends. Jessie and Alfred never reconciled and were divorced in 1924. Jessie never remarried.

By 1928, when Jessie was 58, she could no longer maintain her frenzied pace. She switched to lighter cameras and flexible film. With her daughter, she went to California where wives of motion picture executives were eager to have their estates photographed by a celebrated New York photographer. This project soon ended with the stock market crash of 1929.

Jessie and her daughter returned to New York in the 1930s, where she had started 25 years earlier. She rented space in a darkroom and lived in a basement apartment, around the corner from her first New York studio. As a woman in her sixties, Jessie continued to photograph gardens and estates and win prizes, but she never regained her earlier level of success.9 She kept in touch with other photographers as shown in this special poem for her old colleague Frances Benjamin Johnston.

In late 1941, Jessie became bedridden. A lifetime of hustling for work had taken its toll and lavish living had left her destitute. She was admitted to the charity ward of Bellevue Hospital where she died on May 30, 1942 at 71. Alfred Beals, who lived nearby, did not attend her funeral.

Jessie's versatility helped make her one of the first female photojournalists, but by the end of her life she worried that it was exactly that willingness to work at any assignment she could get that contributed to her lack of cachet. She regretted her failure to specialize, become affiliated with a major institution, or achieve lasting financial success. Many of Jessie's negatives were lost or destroyed during her lifetime because she had nowhere to store them. Her work drifted into obscurity until photographer Alexander Alland gathered what he could and published a biography titled, Jessie Tarbox Beals: First Woman News Photographer, in 1978.

She deserves recognition for her pioneering role in news photography, the excellent quality of her photographs, her struggle to overcome gender-based career obstacles, and her life-long devotion to her career. Her courageous example encouraged other women to pursue photography.

Gleb Derujinsky; copyright Derujinsky

Gleb Derujinsky Web Site

Corbis Images

Derujinsky Around the World on YouTube

Derujinsky Who on Tumblr

Farewell, Renaissance man

Gleb Derujinsky on Facebook

Gleb Derujinsky on Flickr

Images from Harper's Bazaar, 1950 to 1968

"Baja Man"; copyright Derujinsky

"Baja Woman"; copyright Derujinsky

"Julie Harris"; copyright Derujinsky

"Emmett Kelly"; copyright Derujinsky

"Harry Belafonte"; copyright Derjinsky

"Sammy David, Jr."; copyright Derujinsky

"Duke Ellington and the Gang"; copyright Derujinsky

"Bride", Model: Ruth Neumann-Derujinsky; copyright Derujinsky

Model: Sandy Brown; copyright Derujinsky

Model: Ruth Neumann-Derujinsky; copyright Derujinsky

"Ruth, Victoria Harbor, 1958"; copyright Derujinsky

"Eggs"; copyright Derujinsky

"Pears"; copyright Derujinsky

"Gold Found Here"; copyright Derujinsky

"Goldfield Haunted Hotel, Navada"; copyright Derujinsky

"Navajo Chief"; copyright Derujinsky

"Cross"; copyright Derujinsky

Nova Scotia; copyright Derujinsky

"Pitch Fork and Church, Nova Scotia"; copyright Derujinsky

From "Hollywood People Project"; copyright Derujinsky

"Wayne Bench", copyright Derujinsky

"Balance", copyright Derujinsky

Special thanks to Andrea Derujinsky for allowing me to reproduce her father's photographs, here, on my blog. Without her kind cooperation and generosity this blog entry would not have been possible. No further use of these photographs is allowed without her permission. She can be contacted at: expectamiracle@hotmail.com

A Personal Observation:

I usually don’t make personal comments about the photographers highlighted here on my blog, but I feel compelled to make an exception in the case of Gleb Derujinsky. As a fashion photographer he was handpicked by Carmel Snow, the legendary editor of Harper’s Bazaar as one of a select group to photograph for the magazine. He may not have achieved the fame of Irving Penn or Richard Avedon, but his work is every bit as masterful. He had a unique talent. Whether it be as plebeian as a fish market or as majestic as the highest mountain tops, by juxtaposing fashion with a natural environment, he created a place of unrestrained imagination that complimented both. As his daughter, Andrea, point out, "Many fashion photographers were just that, fashion photographers. Gleb Derujinsky was a photographer who shot fashion."

This sense of adventure and ingenuity served him well later in life. To borrow from the title of one of my favorite photographs from his Ghost Town portfolio, he found gold after retiring from the glamorous world to be found on the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour, and Esquire. His work took a personal turn as he began to explore and photograph to satisfy his inquisitiveness. I have rarely seen as compelling a portrait as his Navajo chief, or as haunting an image as his study of a ghost town hotel lobby. This is a man in pursuit of art that made sense to him, and we are all the richer for this.

Biography written by Andrea Derujinsky, Gleb's daughter:

Welcome to the world of Derujinsky. This is a name once heard in aristocratic circles in Russia when Gleb Derujinsky Sr. and another even more famous relative of ours, composer Rimsky-Korsakov, were establishing themselves in the arts. Gleb Sr. was a sculptor, a contemporary and friend of Rodin. They both became prominent artists, and like Rodin, Gleb Derujinsky Sr’s. work is still shown in museums world wide.

Gleb Derujinsky, was named after his father. He inherited the family’s artistic genes and lived with the spirit of the brilliant renegade he was. At 6, he started shooting, developing and printing his own photos. By the age of ten, he built his own enlarger and by the time he was a teenager, he was the youngest member of the Camera Club of New York. There, he met some of the founding members of the prestigious group – Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz among them.

After serving in World War II, Derujinsky opened his own photography studio in New York City, where he became one of the most sought after fashion photographers of his time.

His was the era of European haute couture with fashion designers Balenciaga and Pierre Balmain at the top of their game and Yves-Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld just starting out. Gleb was handpicked by editor Carmel Snow of Harper’s Bazaar to be one of a select group of photographers who shot for the magazine. Derujinsky was a contemporary of and Irving Penn and Avedon often competing for plum assignments, convincing his editors Carmel Snow and Diana Vreeland to endorse his outlandish ideas and the expenditure of sending him Around The World to photograph beautiful models draped in expensive gowns juxtapose against the rough sands of a far off desert. Air travel was far from routine and nothing like this had ever been done before. Gleb Derujinsky was always ahead of this time.

His 18 year career at Harper's bazaar spanned from 1950-1968 and during that time produced some of the classic images of the era. To this day they stand the test of time. His wife Ruth Neumann and Carmen Dell'Orefice were two of his most brilliant Models among so many brilliant often unknown models of the day when models were living mannequins and photographers were named on the pages of editorials.

Handsome and brash, exciting and inspiring to work with, he was dubbed the White Russian. He worked extensively with top models Ruth Neumann and Carmen Dell'Orifice. They became a triumvirate of kindred spirits knowing that fashion was only part of the story Gleb “painted” through his photos. Gleb took Ruth Neumann on the trip around the world, to commemorate the inauguration of Pan Am’s Boeing 707 – a mountaintop in Turkey, the seaside harbors of China, the Nara Deer Park in Japan, Thailand, Spain, Greece. Gleb Derujinsky was a romantic. In 1958, Gleb’s brilliant photographs of the Paris Collections became a 25-page spread in Harper’s Bazaar.

Gleb saw things that other people didn't. He was never without a camera, and a jacket with lots of pockets for lenses and filters, and a silver aluminum case for other camera equipment.
Gleb Derujinsky lived life to its fullest. He was a husband and father, photographer, world traveler, award-winning cinematographer and commercial director, jewelry designer, musician, jazz buff, ski instructor, a racecar driver for Ferrari America, and one of the best sail-plane pilots in the country. He even designed and built carbon fiber bicycles for the U. S. Olympic team. He died as he lived, gone in the blink of an eye, the snap of a shutter.

Derujinsky also worked some of the prime ad campaigns for Dupont, Cadillac, Julius Garfinckel & co., and Revlon. He was a jazz enthusiast and on his own time shot some of the most talented musicians who ever lived, Count Basie, Lester young, Charlie Parker, Buddy De Franco, Sammy Davis Jr, and Harry Belafonte and Tony Award winning actress Julie Harris.

Throughout his life he continued to shoot and did various series of subjects, food still life's, Hollywood street people of the 70's, Disappearing Fences of America, his own children, Ghost Towns of the Wild West and mining towns. All of which are rich with history, and glamour in a way only Derujinsky could have shot them.

In 1974 Gleb moved to Durango Colorado where he took his hobby of jewelry making to the next level opening a studio Called One Of A Kind. There he made and designed jewelry for yet another 20 years or so of his life. He discovered the local flavor of Navaho Indians and many other tribes and began adding Indian inspired Jewelry to his fine line of gold designs. Every piece was designed one at a time and created completely from scratch. He cut his own stones and handcrafted bezels. He was as passionate about his jewelry designs as he had been as a photographer.

Lori Waselchuk by Philadelphia Photographer Colin Lenton

Lori Waselchuk Photography

Grace Before Dying Project
Them That Do Project

Blue Sky Gallery Portfolio

Columbia School of Social Work Interview

Grace Before Dying by Lori Waselchuk and Lawrence N. Powell

available on Amazon

F-Stop Magazine Interview

Grace Before Dying Video on Vimeo

Lori Waselchuk: Aaron Sisking Fellowship Winner on Lenscratch

Museum of Art and Peace Collection

Nieman Storyboard Interview

One One Thousand Portfolio

Open Society Foundation Portfolio

Pew Center for Arts & Heritage Portfolio

Photolucinda Portfolio

Press Street Interview

West Philadelphia Local: Them That Do Project

Felton Love, left, is one of Timothy Minor's "family members" in prison. Hospice patients are allowed to place six names on a visitation list. Love spends ten hours a day with Minor.

Hospice volunter George Brown places his hand lightly on Jimmie Burnett's chest for comfort and reassurance.

Felton Love, right, watches Timothy Minor closely in the hospital courtyard at Angola Prison. Love has volunteered to care for Minor, who is dying from a brain tumor. Minor has lost much of his muscle control. To enable Minor to sit up in his wheelchair, Love has wrapped him with bedsheets.

Hospice volunteer, Randolph Matthieu, far right, shows Paul Krolowitz, Carlo DeSalvo, Joseph Greco how to reduce swelling in their friend Richard Liggett. Liggett is a hospice patient diagnosed with lung and liver cancers.

In 'lock down" for disruptive behavior, hospice patient Terry Kendrick, 46, receives a visit from volunteer Warren Joseph.

Calvin Dumas, left, helps turn George Alexander in his bed. Alexander is a hospice patient dying of brain and lung cancers. Dumas and Alexander have been very close friends for the 30-plus years they have been incarcerated at Angola.

Mary Bloomer, a prison security guard, watches from the levee as prisoners form Field Line 15 from Wolf Dormitory at Camp C at Angola, Louisiana's maximum security prison.

Hospice volunteer Nolan James, left, and hospice patient, Kenny Mingo, right, lift Albert "Tut" Soublet from his wheelchair so he can go through a security checkpoint. Soublet is a palliative care hospice patient and he continues to live in the main prison.

Nola Fontenot, center, plays the omnichord and sings church songs for Jimmie Burnett as he sleeps. Fontenot, a retired prison chaplain, visits patients in the prison hospital ward once a week. Corrections officer Cadet King looks on.

Jimmie Burnett, left, laughs with his mother, Buerat Coleman, who is visiting him in his hospice room. Coleman, 75, has to travel five hours from Shreveport, LA to visit her son and the journey is difficult for her. But their visits lift Burnett's spirits.


Charnese Zanders, 12, visits her father, Van Morris, through a small window in the locked door of his hospital room. Zanders was reunited with her father through the Angola Prison hospice program. Morris, who is diagnosed with colon cancer, remains in lockdown because of a history of disruptive actions. Regardless, Angola Warden Burl Cain encourages his staff to facilitate family visitation.

Relatives of prisoner George Alexander sit in the front row at the memorial service held in honor of Alexander, who died at the age of 56. The Angola Prison Hospice program is responsible for planning memorial services for its patients in a chapel built especially for the hospice program.

Rosa Mary White, the aunt of prisoner George Alexander, sits next to Alexander's coffin during his burial ceremony at the Angola State Penitentiary cemetery.

Lloyd Bone, a prisoner at Louisiana's State Penitentiary, rides atop a horse driven hearse carrying the body of fellow prisoner George Alexander, who died at the age of 56. The hearse was hand built by prison carpenters.

**********

Special thanks to Lori Waselchuk for allowing me to reproduce her photographs, here, on my blog. Without her kind cooperation and generosity this blog entry would not have been possible. No further use of these photographs is allowed without her permission. She can be contacted at: http://loriwaselchuk.com/

Also, I want to thank Colin Lenton, the Philadelphia Photographer, for allowing me to use his portrait of Lori Waselchuk, here, on my blog.

**********

Lori Waselchuk Artist's Statement: Grace Before Dying:

A life sentence in Louisiana means life. More than 85% of the 5,100 inmates imprisoned at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola are expected to die there. Until the hospice program was created in 1998, most prisoners died alone. Their bodies were buried in shabby boxes in numbered graves at Point Lookout, the prison cemetery. Angola inmates have long feared dying in prison. But a certified and nationally recognized hospice program, initiated by Warden Burl Cain, has changed that.

Now, when a terminally ill inmate is too sick to live among the general prison population, he is transferred to the hospice ward. Here, inmate volunteers work closely with hospital and security staff to care for the patient. The volunteers, most of whom are serving life sentences themselves, try to keep him as comfortable as possible. Then, during the last days of the patient’s life, the hospice staff begins a 24-hour vigil. The volunteers go to great lengths to ensure that their fellow inmate does not die alone.

Hospice volunteers plan a memorial service and burial. The casket, made by prisoners, is taken from the prison to the cemetery in a beautiful handcrafted hearse, also made by prisoners. The hearse is drawn by two giant Percherons and is followed by a procession of friends and, sometimes, family members who sing and walk behind the hearse.

The hospice volunteers’ efforts to create a tone of reverence for the dying and the dead have touched the entire prison population. Prison officials say that the program has helped to transform one of the most violent prisons in the South into one of the least violent maximum-security institutions in the United States.

The hospice volunteers must go through a difficult process to bury their own regrets and fears, and unearth their capacity to love. "Grace Before Dying" looks at how, through hospice, inmates assert and affirm their humanity in an environment designed to isolate and punish. It reflects how grace offers hope that our lives need not be defined by our worst acts.

**********

Lori Waselchuk Biography:

Lori Waselchuk is a documentary photographer whose photographs have appeared in magazines and newspapers worldwide, including Newsweek, LIFE, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times. She has produced photographs for several international aid organizations including CARE, the UN World Food Program, Médecins Sans Frontières, and the Vaccine Fund. Her work is exhibited internationally and is part of many collections including the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Portland Museum of Art and the South African National Gallery.

Waselchuk’s first monograph, "Grace Before Dying" (Umbrage Editions, 2011), is a photographic documentary about a hospice program in the Louisiana State Penitentiary (LSP), where both the caregivers and the patients are serving long-term prison sentences. Waselchuk created two traveling exhibitions that have been shown at over 70 venues (including four prisons) in the United States since 2009.

Her current work, "Them That Do", is an ongoing portrait series and multimedia project about the Philadelphia block captains -- individuals who act as semi-official liaisons between residents and city government and who volunteer to build community and solve local problems.

Waselchuk is a recipient of the 2014 Leeway Foundation’s Transformation Award, the 2012 Pew Fellowship for the Arts, the Aaron Siskind Foundation’s 2009 Individual Photographer Fellowship, a 2008 Distribution Grant from the Documentary Photography Project of the Open Society Institute, the 2007 PhotoNOLA Review Prize, and the 2004 Southern African Gender and Media Award for Photojournalism. Waselchuk was also a nominee for the 2009 Santa Fe Prize for Photography, a ﬁnalist in the 2008 Aperture West Book Prize, and a ﬁnalist in the 2006 and 2008 Critical Mass Review.

**********

I want to thank Amie Potsic, Executive Director of the Main Line Art Center in Haverford, PA for introducing me to the work of Donald E. Camp, Lydia Panas, and Lori Waselchuk. They were recently featured in the "Humankind" exhibit at the center. Over the next three month I plan to feature their work, here, on my "Masters of Photography" blog.

Humankind

(Main Line Art Center, February 20 through March 20, 2014

Featuring the work of Donald E. Camp, Lydia Panas and Lori Waselchuk

Curated by Amie Potsic

Curator's Statement:

Humankind presents works that uniquely address the human condition through qualities and genres inherent to the photographic tradition: social responsibility, portraiture, and the photo essay. This exhibition celebrates in depth projects that creatively engage the world of contemporary photography while deepening connections to the history of the photographic medium.

Each artist approaches their subject matter – the human face, family, and hospice -- with respect and curiosity as they harness photography’s innate talent for storytelling, confrontation, and communication.

With his forceful, yet intimate images of the human face, Donald E. Camp’s work encourages audiences to explore the dignity and nobility that can be found in each of us. Camp’s inventive photographic prints seek to contrast broadly held stereotypes and acknowledge the struggle against ignorance and intolerance as a universal one. Lydia Panas invites the viewer to look beyond the family relationships depicted in her photographs and to explore the deeper, universal questions of how we feel. Her photographs portray families of all forms in verdant landscapes while also giving subtle clues to that which lies beneath the surface in all of us. Lori Waselchuk’s photographs powerfully illuminate the ways in which our humanity percolates through the dark and light moments of our lives. Exemplified by the prison hospice program she documented, her work is emotional, interactive, and storytelling, and strives to nurture empathy in the viewer, despite our diversity.

By engaging in long-term, in-depth photographic series that give voice to the personal and universal, these artists powerfully remind us of what it means to be human, compassionate, and connected.

Lydia Panas

Personal Web Site:

Lydia Panas Photographs
Limited Book and Print Edition of "The Mark of Abel"

Gallery Representation:

Schneider Gallery

On Line Portfolios:

Flack Photo Portfolio
Gordon/Potts Gallery
Photo-Eye Gallery
Print Center Exhibit

Books:

"The Mark of Abel" available on Amazon
"The Mark of Abel" available at Photo-Eye Bookstore

Reviews of "The Mark of Abel":

GUP Magazine

Hyperallergic Forum, "The Sore Subject of Family Dynamics" by Alissa Guzman

VASA Journal of Images and Culture written by Natalya

Interview:

Journal of Images and Culture interview with Moria De Zen

Articles:

Lenscratch
Six One Zero Magazine, "The Fundamental Artist" by Marc Londo

Loupe, Journal of the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University

"Tony and Maddie"

"Tatiana"

"A Suspended Moment"

"Asha and Oksana W"

"Vickie and Antonio, Veronica and Sabine"

"It's a Matter of Perspective, Mr. President"

"Aimee Lubczanski and Her Sister"

"Invincible"

"Laura"

"Sisters"

"The Eisenhauer Brothers"

Special thanks to Lydia Panas for allowing me to reproduce her photographs, here, on my blog. Without her kind cooperation and generosity this blog entry would not have been possible. No further use of these photographs is allowed without her permission. She can be contacted at: http://www.lydiapanas.com/

"The Mark of Abel" Artist's Statement:

Our earliest relationships factor considerably, in determining whom we turn out to be.

For three years in hot weather and cold, I invited families to stand before my lens. I asked them not because I knew what to expect, but because I was curious to see what would happen.

These groups and occasional individuals, stood graciously before me as I watched the series unfold. Nothing in the series was deliberate or planned. The images do not represent individuals so much as they explore the questions of how we see ourselves and what we feel.

In these pictures of family relationships, it is the details that matter most. Although they portray engaging people, verdant landscapes and beautiful light, it is the small things in the images that provide us with clues to understand the subtle nature of the work.

The photographs ask that we look deeper than the surface for what lies underneath; that complex part of our own personalities we often don't see.

Artist's Statement:

Since 2005 I have been investigating relationships through portraiture. In my most well know series titled "The Mark of Abel" (2005 – 2008), I explored family relationships. I watched how families arranged themselves and then began to shoot with my view camera. The pictures ask that we look deeper than the surface for what lies underneath; that complex part of our own personalities that we often do not see.

As I continue to make portraits, my focus has turned toward understanding my own relationship to the model through the photographic process. Making a portrait allows me to stare, to describe and to represent an interaction. My photographs are about uncertainty in relationships. Many of my images speak to issues of connections and trust. Often the faces are vague and uncommitted, proposing a precarious intimacy.

When I make a portrait, I watch to see something I recognize. Often it is a feeling left over from my past. It may be something I long for, or something that helps me connect. Making a portrait helps satisfy my curiosity and re-create what I did not understand in my early years, a reality hidden from me that I was desperate to understand, a record of my own fragile history. In the words of Richard Avedon, “For a moment, it becomes possible to understand each other perfectly.”

I want to describe some kind of truth – both beautiful and sad – of who we are, how we feel, and how we project these emotional states. I want to describe the hope that resides within this exposure.

Lydia Panas Biography:

Lydia Panas’ photographs have been exhibited internationally and are held in major public collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Brooklyn Museum; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; MoMA Shanghai, and the Allentown Art Museum among others.

She has won numerous awards and honors including First Prize for the Singular Image Award at CENTER, Santa Fe in 2009. She was one of nine artists selected by Houston Fotofest curators for the International Discoveries Exhibit in 2007, and twice selected for the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize Exhibition. Most recently her work was honored by the Print Center in Philadelphia for their 100^thAnniversary Celebration. She was a nominee for Prix Pictet 2013. Lydia was twice included in the top fifty for the Critical Mass Book Awards. She has received a Puffin Foundation Grant, a John Anson Kittredge Educational Grant and six grants from the PA Council on the Arts, among others.

Lydia’s work has been exhibited in museums, galleries and festivals around the world. Recent venues include the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, the Phillips Collection and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the Allentown Art Museum.

Lydia’s photographs have been featured in The New York Times Magazine, Photo District News, Popular Photography, San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Wall Street Journal Blog, GEO Science, and many others.

She has been invited to lecture at the International Center of Photography, Houston Center for Photography, The Print Center in Philadelphia, and the Athens House of Photography in Athens, Greece. Lydia has taught at numerous institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, Maine Media Workshops, Vermont College MFA Program, Muhlenberg, Moravian and Lafayette College, and Kutztown University among others.

Lydia has degrees from Boston College, School of Visual Arts, New York University / International Center of Photography and a Whitney Museum Independent Study Fellowship.

Her first monograph The Mark of Abel was released by Kehrer Verlag and named one of Photo District News’ Books of 2012 as well as a best coffee table book by the Daily Beast.

Humankind

(Main Line Art Center, February 20 through March 20, 2014

Featuring the work of Donald E. Camp, Lydia Panas and Lori Waselchuk

Curated by Amie Potsic

Josef Sudek

Alan Klotz Gallery Portfolio

Art Gallery of Ontario Exhibition: The Legacy of a Deeper Vision

Artnet Portfolio

Books Available on Amazon

Canadian Art Feature Article

Pbase Portfolio

Phlearn Portfolio

Photography Now: The Photographs of Josef Sudek

UTATA Tribal Photography: Sunday Salon with Greg Fallis

YouTube Video: Josef Sudek, the Legacy of a Deeper Vision

From Josef Sudek by Charles Sawyer [Originally published in "Creative Camera", April 1980, Number 190]

Prologue:

Josef Sudek was born in 1896 in Kolin on the Labe in Bohemia. As a boy he learned the trade of bookbinding. He was drafted into the Hungarian Army in 1915 and served on the Italian Front until he was wounded in the right arm. Infection set in and eventually surgeons removed his arm at the shoulder. During his convalescence in an Army Hospital, he began photographing his fellow inmates. After his discharge, Sudek studied photography for two years in a school for graphic art in Prague. Between a disability pension and intermitment work as a commercial photographer, Sudek made a living. In 1933, he held his first one-man show in the Krasnajizba salon. Since 1947, he has published eight books. In the early 1950's, Sudek acquired an 1894 Kodak Panorama camera whose spring-drive sweeping lens makes a negative 10 cm x 30 cm. He employed this exotic format to make a stunning series of cityscapes of Prague, published in 1959.

Sudek's work first appeared in America in 1974 when the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, gave him a retrospective exhibition. The same year Light Gallery in New York City showed an exhibition of his photographs. On his 80th birthday in April, 1976, the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague inaugurated a comprehensive retrospective exhibition of Sudek's work which later appeared at the Photographer's Gallery, London.

In spite of his disability, Sudek always used large format cameras and from the 1940's on he made only contact prints. He worked without assistants in the open air in city and countryside. His hunched figure supporting a huge wooden tripod was a familiar sight in Prague. Although he never married and was rather shy, he was not a recluse and was renowned for his weekly soirees for listening to classical music from his vast record collection. Sudek died quietly and without suffering or illness in mid-September 1976 in Prague.

Sudek, The Man And His Work:

Josef Sudek was born in 1896 in the industrial town of Kolin on the River Labe in Bohemia. Czechoslavakia then existed only in the imagination of a few visionary artists, particularly writers, and of some political activists. Emperor Franz Josef reigned on the Hapsburg throne and Bohemia was a Kingdom in the Austro- Hungarian Empire. Josef's father was a house painter and he apprenticed his son to a bookbinder; a fellow worker introduced the young man to photography. In 1915 he was drafted and assigned to a unit on the Italian front. After slightly less than a year in the line, he was wounded in the right arm. The wound was not serious, but gangrene set in; a long struggle ensued and finally Sudek's arm was removed at the shoulder. For three years, he was a patient in a veteran's hospital; it was there, during his recuperation, that he first began photographing in earnest.

The years from his leaving the veteran's hospital around 1920 until 1926 were restless years for Sudek. He could not take up his trade of bookbinding. He was offered an office job but turned it down. After settling in Prague, he cast about for a new lot. He considered taking up the life of a small merchant but had no taste for it. To keep body and soul together, he took photographs for small commissions. He joined the Amateur Photography Club and struck up a friendship with Jaromir Funke, a well-educated, vocal, young photographer with advanced aesthetic theories concerning photography. In 1922, Sudek enrolled in the School of Graphic Arts in Prague and received an old-school, formal education in photography. Two main subjects occupied his attention with his camera: his former fellow-patients, the invalids in the veteran's hospital, and the reconstruction of St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague then in progress. Occasionally he returned to his native Kolin to photograph the leisure life in the parks of the city. Still, he was unsettled, apparently not yet reconciled to his loss. And he was contentious. Together with his friend Funke, he was expelled from the Photography Club for his impatient opposition to those who stood firmly by the then entrenched techniques of painterly affectations. The two upstarts gathered other like-minded photographers and formed the avant-garde Czech Photographic Society in 1924, devoted to the integrity ot the negative and freedom from the painters' tradition. Although Funke was the same age as Sudek, he had already studied law, medicine and philosophy. Sudek admired his superior education and intellectual capacities, and their discussions often led to ambitious projects.

In 1926, Sudek suffered a life crisis brought on when he accepted an invitation from his friends in the Czech Philharmonic to join them on tour initaly. His description of the odyssey is reproduced by Bullaty (page 27). It runs as follows:

"When the musicians ot the Czech Philharmonic told me: 'Josef come with us, we are going to Italy to play music,' I told myself, 'fool that you are, you were there and you did not enjoy that beautiful country when you served as a soldier for the Emperor's Army.' And so went with them on this unusual excursion. In Milan, we had a lot of applause and acclaim and we travelled down the Italian boot untill we came to that place -- I had to disappear in the middle of the concert; in the dark I got lost, but I had to search. Far outside the city toward dawn, in the fields bathed by the morning dew, finally I found the place. But my arm wasn't there - only the poor peasant farmhouse was still standing in its place. They had bought me into it that day when I was shot in the right arm. They could never put it together again, and for years I was going from hospital to hospital, and had to give up my bookbinding trade. The Philharmonic people apparently even made the police look for me but I somehow could not get myself to return from this country. I turned up in Prague some two months later. They didn't reproach me, but from that time on, I never went anywhere, anymore and I never will. What would I be looking for when I didn't find what I wanted to find?"

From Sudek's sketchy account of his crisis in 1926, we get a picture of a restless and troubled man accepting a casual invitation that leads him near the very spot where years before his hope for a normal life had been shattered. Leaving his friends, in mid-concert he wanders somnabulent until near dawn he comes to the exact place where, nearly ten years before, his life was forever changed. Unable to abandon hope of recovering his lost arm, he stays two months in that place, cut off from his friends and his world in Prague. Finally, his mourning complete, reconciled, but permanently estranged, he returns to Prague, where he immerses himself in his art.

The interpretation of Sudek's life offered in the previous paragraph seems to me reflected in his photography and borne out in his life style. His photos from 1920 until the year of his crisis are markedly different, both in style and content, from those following. In the series from the veteran's hospital taken in the early 1920's, his former fellow-invalids are seen as ghostly silhouettes shrouded in clouds of light -- lost souls suspended in Limbo. In the photos of Sunday pleasure-seekers in his native Kolin from the same period, the people are seen from 6 distance, through soft focus, in social clusters, usually with their backs to the camera, suggesting the closure of the ordinary social world to outsiders. His extended study of the reconstruction of St. Vitus begun in 1924, two years before his crisis, and completed in 1928, with the publication of his first book, can all too easily be taken as a metaphor for his personal struggle to reconstruct his own life.

After 1926, Sudek began to find his own personal style and come into his full powers as an artist. Gone is the haze of soft focus, and gone too, are the people -- even most of his cityscapes show deserted streets. He turned his attention to the city of Prague with devotion and dedication that are rare even among the most committed artists. He succeeded to capture both the grandeur and the unpretentiousness of that lovely city. Yet, lovely as it still looks, through his lens it is empty. As if to compensate for the absence of the human factor in its customary place, Sudek personified the inanimate. The woods of Bohemia and Moravia projected on his view-screen were inhabitated by "sleeping giants", as he called them, huge dead trees that watched over the landscape like statues out of Easter Island. In his playful moods, Sudek toyed with masks and statuary heads, showing them as lovers, as grotesqueries, or even as gods. He found intimacy hard to achieve -- perhaps because it was painful -- not just in his interpersonal life but even under his viewing cloth. Its substitute came easily with inanimate objects. "I love the life of objects," he told one interviewer. "When the children go to bed, the objects come to life. I like to tell stories about the life of inanimate objects." He devoted endless hours to photographing special objects in various settings, particularly objects given to him by friends. He often called these photos "remembrances" of this or that person. It appears as if his personal rapport with the inanimate things he photographed so lovingly began as an alternative to real intimacy with other persons and evolved into a means to bridge the gap that stood between him and the others.

As he came to his artistic maturity, immersion in work and devotion to a high standard of craftsmanship became the dominant motifs of Sudek's life. In 1940, he saw a 30 x 40 cm photograph of a statue from Chartres, which, he recognized, was not an enlargement but one made by the contact process. The print so impressed him for its rendering of the stone material that he vowed thereafter always to make contact prints. He said it was less the fineness of details he craved in contact prints, than their tonal variation. From then on he lugged view cameras as large as the 30 x 40 cm format (roughly 12 x 16 inches) around the steep streets of the Hradcany and Mala Strana sections of Prague, working with one hand, cradling the camera in his lap to make adjustments, using his teeth when his hand was insufficient.

No photographer, save possibly Atget, was so devoted to the task of portraying a city, and with such stunning results, as Sudek. He couldn't have had a better subject than Prague; not even Atget was so lucky with Paris. Prague is, to many, the jewel of Europe. In the days when Europe from Paris to St. Petersburg was still one cultural continuum, Prague was considered the heart of the continent. The city was Mozart's second home after Vienna (the Czechs seemed to him to have appreciated him more than his fellow Viennese), and it also was Kafka's native city. Somehow the two blend, as do the massive buildings of the city of Gothic, Rennaissance, and Baroque architecture. (The modern buildings, especially housing estates, are mercifully placed on the outskirts of the city). Two features dominate the city: Charles Bridge, the footbridge spanning the Vltava, lined with statues depicting the history of Christianity and the Czechs, and Hradcany Castle, a sprawling fortress enclosing several courtyards, the traditional residence of Czech kings, as well as St. Vitus Cathedral. Charles Bridge dates from the 14th century and Hradcany's earliest construction dates from the 12th century. The castle, which is on the crest of a steep ridge rising from the west bank of the Vltava, dominates the profile of the city seen from the east bank of the river. In all, Sudek compiled seven books of Prague photographs. He left the streets only toward the very end, when old age added to his handicap and made moving around the city with his camera a titanic struggle. In the Prologue to her book (p. 14), Sonja Bultaty tells an anecdote about helping Sudek photograph Prague. It portrays the special relationship between him and the city.

"I remember one time, in one of the Romanesque halls, deep below the spires of the cathedral [St. Vitus] - it was dark as in catacombs - with just a small window below street level inside the massive medieval walls. We setup the tripod and camera and then sat down on the floor and talked. Suddenly Sudek was up like lightening. A ray of sun had entered the darkness and both of us were waving cloths to raise mountains of dust 'to see the light,' as Sudek said. Obviously he had known that the sun would reach here perhaps two or three times a year and he was waiting for it."

His workman-like attitude applied not only to the purely technical side of things but to the aesthetics of his camera work as well. Nowhere does this show so clearly as in his panoramic photos. The unusual format with its extreme proportions of 1 x 3 and the special distortions caused by the sweeping lens are extremely demanding, like the constraints of a sonnet. Yet like any set of artistic constraints, the peculiar requirements of the panoramic photo offer opportunities not found elsewhere. Sudek never tired of exploring the possibilities of the photographic sonnets he could make with his antique mechanism whose shutter speeds were marked simply "fast" and "slow". With it he gave us a geodesic feeling for the country-side which far surpasses anything we get from isolated views, and in Prague itself he showed how the River Vltava is an integral part of the city and how the labyrinthian quality of the city is offset by its broad open spaces. He was never short of resourceful ways of using the panoramic format. Before the horizontal panorama had yieided all its secrets, Sudek turned the camera on its side and gave us vertical panoramas!

The systematic approach, and the dogged aesthetic experimentation of Sudek are akin to the working habits of Cezanne. But these alone are insufficient to make great art or even good art. On the contrary, if these are all one sees in a work, then the cumulative burdern of so much plain labor would be unbearable. Sudek's devotion to work may have integrated his shattered life but it could not have offered him the spiritual redemption he was seeking; only his aesthetic quest could bring this. It is the struggle for spiritual redemption through his aesthectic quest that gives Sudek's best photographs their true power. Two qualities characterize his best work: a rich diversity of light values in the low end of the tonal scale, and the representation of light as a substance occupying its own space. The former, the diversity of light values, requires very delicate treatment of the materials, especially the negative, but also the paper (Sudek used silver halide papers in the main). The latter, the portrayal of light as substance, is a more original trait then his tonal palette, which one sees in occasional prints of other photographers. Flaubert once expressed an ambition to write a book which would have no subject, "a book dependent on nothing external ... held together by the strength of its style." Photographers have sometimes expressed parallel aspirations to make light itself the subject of their photographs, leaving the banal, material world behind. Both ideals are, of course, unobtainable, but nonetheless they may be worth pursuing. (Artists, in their pursuit of the unobtainable, are not so likely to be called pathological as others, of us, though recent developments in ihe philosophy of science tend to view the scientist's quest for truth as equally quixotic). Sudek has come closer than any other photographer to catching this illusive goal. His devices for this effect are simple and highly poetic: the dust he raised in a frenzy when the light was just right, a gossamer curtain draped over a chair back, the mist from a garden sprinkler, even the ambient moisture in the atmosphere when the air is near dew point. The eye is usually accustomed to seeing not light but the surfaces it defines; when light is reflected from amorphous materials, however, perception of materiality shifts to light itself. Sudek looked for such materials everywhere. And then he usually balanced the ethereal luminescence with the contra-bass of his deep shadow tonalities. The effect is enchanting, and strongly conveys the human element which is the true content of his photographs. For, throughout all his photography, there is one dominant mood, one consistent viewpoint, and one overriding philosophy. The mood is melancholy and the point of view is romanticism. And overriding all this is a philosphic detachment, an attitude he shares with Spinoza. The attitude of detachment that characterizes Sudek's art accounts for both its strength and weakness: the strength which lies in the ideal of utter tranquility and the weakness which is found in the paucity of human intimacy. Some commentators find Sudek's photos mysterious but I think this is a mistake: the air of mystery vanishes once we see in Sudek's photography a person's private salvation from despair.

Donald E. Camp

Art Blog Radio Interview

"Dust Shaped Hearts" on Amazon

Exhibition at Ursinus College

Gallery 339 Portfolio

"The Printmaker -- John Dowell", 2012

"The Women Who Paints -- Alice Oh", 2012

"The Man Who Sews -- Collin Louis", 2008

"The Drawer -- Earnest Brown", 2008

"John Daniels", 2008

"Women Who Cooks -- Lea Chase", 2008

"The Sculptor -- Winifred Lutz", 2012

"Women Who Finds Word's Meaning -- Nzadi Keita", 2012

"Silver Cowboy -- Jacob Gassenberger", 2008

"A Good Son -- Teller", 2012

Special thanks to Donald E. Camp for allowing me to reproduce his photographs, here, on my blog. Without his kind cooperation and generosity this blog entry would not have been possible. No further use of these photographs is allowed without his permission.

PROCESS STATEMENT EARTH PIGMENT AND CASEIN MONO-PRINTS

My materials are:

Light sensitizes casein (milk glue)
Natural dry earth pigments
Archival rag paper

My subject is:

The human face

In my working process, the image, casein and pigment become paper, the paper becomes pigment, casein and image in an attempt to bring the materials together and make them one. I work intently on each print and generally make one unique print for each subject.

In photography the print is the thing that communicates with the viewer. I researched light sensitive processes and modified a late nineteenth century casein and pigment process. I settled on this form because it is more archival than the standard rare metal process of silver gelatin print. The linking of earth and milk to make images also parallels my observation of the natural aspect of photography. In reality, basic photography is biological, not mechanical and it’s the biological link that I use as metaphor in my images. The chosen form when combined with the human face is meant to evoke a visual reference to the “Blues.” Both the musical form and my visual form are meant to be a cry of sadness and joyous celebration.

I seek to contrast broadly held public views that narrow a face into stereotype. I attempt, as an artist, to produce prints that encourage viewers to explore the dignity and nobility that can be found in the human face.

EXPERIENCE

2012 - Present

Ursinus College - Professor Emeritus

2000 - 2011

Ursinus College - Artist in residence / assistant professor

1990 - 1992

Assistant professor Tyler School of Art, Temple University

1972 - 1981

Philadelphia Evening & Sunday Bulletin / Staff photographer

EDUCATION

1990

Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia PA

1989

Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, MFA

1987

Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, BFA

1972 - 81

Staff photographer, The Evening and Sunday Bulletin

SELECTED AWARDS AND HONORS

2009

4th Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Fellowship
Honickman Foundation Grant
Pew Gap Grant

1994

John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship
National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship
Pew Charitable Trust Foundation Fellowship
3rd Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Fellowship

1993

Pew Regional Visiting Artists Fellowship for the American Academy in Rome

1991

Pennsylvania Visual Artist Fellow

1988

American Artist Oral History Smithsonian Institute

1987

Future Faculty Fellowship, Tyler School of Art,

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2013

Austin College, Dennis Gallery [ Dust Shaped Hearts]

2013

Austin College, Dennis Gallery [The Theory and Art of Magic]

2012

The Episcopal Cathedral of Philadelphia [ Earth & Dust ]

2011

Berman Museum, Collegeville, Pa.

2010

Hagedorn Foundation Gallery Atlanta, Ga. [Atlanta Black Arts Festival]

2008

Delaware Center for Contemporary Art Museum. Wilmington Delaware

2007

Gallery 339. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

2006

Philadelphia International Airport

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2012

After Henry Tanner: African American Artists since 1940

1999

Biographies- Philadelphia Narratives, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA

1996

Dust Shaped Hearts, University of Michigan Museum of Art

1995

Noyes Museum, Brigantine, NJ

1995

Dust Shaped Hearts, University of N. Carolina at Charlotte, NC

1995

Dust Shaped Hearts, Swarthmore College, List Gallery

1990

Gallery One, Western Maryland University, MD

Selections of African-American Works From the Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Philadelphia, PA

Art Now, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA

1989

Works from the Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1

1986 - 89

Philadelphia Photographers International, Tianjin, China;

1989

Temple University Center City Gallery, Philadelphia, PA

Humankind

(Main Line Art Center, February 20 through March 20, 2014

Featuring the work of Donald E. Camp, Lydia Panas and Lori Waselchuk

Curated by Amie Potsic

Curator's Statement:

Humankind presents works that uniquely address the human condition through qualities and genres inherent to the photographic tradition: social responsibility, portraiture, and the photo essay. This exhibition celebrates in depth projects that creatively engage the world of contemporary photography while deepening connections to the history of the photographic medium.

Each artist approaches their subject matter – the human face, family, and hospice -- with respect and curiosity as they harness photography’s innate talent for storytelling, confrontation, and communication.

With his forceful, yet intimate images of the human face, Donald E. Camp’s work encourages audiences to explore the dignity and nobility that can be found in each of us. Camp’s inventive photographic prints seek to contrast broadly held stereotypes and acknowledge the struggle against ignorance and intolerance as a universal one. Lydia Panas invites the viewer to look beyond the family relationships depicted in her photographs and to explore the deeper, universal questions of how we feel. Her photographs portray families of all forms in verdant landscapes while also giving subtle clues to that which lies beneath the surface in all of us. Lori Waselchuk’s photographs powerfully illuminate the ways in which our humanity percolates through the dark and light moments of our lives. Exemplified by the prison hospice program she documented, her work is emotional, interactive, and storytelling, and strives to nurture empathy in the viewer, despite our diversity.

By engaging in long-term, in-depth photographic series that give voice to the personal and universal, these artists powerfully remind us of what it means to be human, compassionate, and connected.

Leonard Freed by Michael Auer, 1987

"Photography is like life... What does it all mean? I don't know - but you get an impression, a feeling.... An impression of walking through the street, walking through the park, walking through life. I'm very suspicious of people who say they know what it means."

". . .a good photograph must have the element of good design: Everything within the photograph has to be essential. It's never like a painting where you can have it perfect. It shouldn't be absolutely perfect. That would kill it."

Bruce Silverstein Gallery Portfolio
Clark Gallery Portfolio
Contact: Leonard Freed on YouTube
Denver Post Photo Blog: Leonard Freed's Photographs of the March on Washington
Lee Gallery Portfolio
Leica Gallery: Leonard Freed, The Italians
Leonard Freed Jews of Amsterdam Photography on YouTube
Leonard Freed Page on Facebook
Magnum Photos Portfolio
Museum of Modern Art Collection
New York Times Lens: The Photographer and His Printer, Partners in Art and Love
Selection of Leonard Freed Books on Amazon
The Red List: Leonard Freed Portfolio
Time Lightbox: Behind New York City's "Police Work"

The Italians:

"Farm Women, Bay of Naples", Naples 1958

"Fish", Naples 1958

"Bride", Naples 1958

"St. Peter's Square", Rome 2000

"Sicilian Nobleman at Home", Trapani 1975

"Priests, Snowball Fight", Vatican 1958

"Jewelry Store", Rome 1958

"Soldiers", Florence 1958

"Boy with Donkies", Sicily 1974

Israel:

"Religious Jews at Home in Mea Shearim", Jerusalem 1967

"Hassidic Jews Celebrating", Jerusalem 1972

"A Bedouin Boy with His Sister", Negev Desert 1967

United States:

"Jewish Hassidic Wedding", 1954

"Hassidic Boys in Classroom" 1954

"Flag, Republican Convention", Dallas 1984

"Men, Triangle in Synagogue", Brooklyn 1954

"Harlem Father", New York City 1963

"Wall Street", New York City 1956

A Jazz Funeral for a Musician Who Died", New Orleans 1963

Special thanks to Brigitte Freed and Elke Susannah Freed for allowing me to reproduce Leonard Freed's photographs, here, on my blog. Without their kind cooperation and generosity this blog entry would not have been possible. No further use of these photographs is allowed without their permission.

Biography (Source: Brill Gallery):

Leonard Freed was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1929 to a working class family of radical Jews from Eastern Europe. Freed took trips to Europe and North Africa in the early 50s and thought he wanted to become a painter. He studied in Alexei Brodovitch’s design laboratory. Eventually Freed was intrigued by photography and how it could tell stories and explore life. Edward Steichen, then Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art learned of Freed’s work and told him that he was one of the three best young photographers he had seen. Steichen advised Freed to remain an amateur and bought three of Freed’s photos for the Museum.

In the early 60s Freed was living in the Netherlands when the photographs of the Civil Rights Movement in European newspapers compelled him to return to the United States. Freed was struck at what he saw as images of blacks in America that were often in the form of caricature. Freed set to create a body of work that refuted those caricatures and emphasized the individuality of his subjects. His subtle and thoughtful images comment on the unfairness of enforced segregation and provide context for some of the meaningful events that took place in America in the 1950s and 60s. Freed became famous with his involvement with the Civil Rights Movement as he offered photos of Harlem Streets, early images of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the publication of his book Black in White America in 1968.

In 1972 Leonard Freed joined the highly regarded group of Magnum photographers with whom he remained active until his death. He has worked on international assignments for the major international press including: Life, Look, Paris Match, Die Zeist, Der Spiegel, London Sunday Times Magazine, New York Times Magazine, GEO, L’Express, Fortune, etc.

Photography became Freed’s way of exploring complex issues such as societal violence and racial discrimination. In 1980 his book Police Work made statements about police brutality in words and pictures. Through photography Freed confronted the Ku Klux Klan, German Society, and his own Jewish roots through numerous exhibits, books and films. More than 10 books have been published on Freed’s work and several are for sale at the Brill Gallery. Freed’s photos are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, Stedelijk Museum, Smithsonian, Getty Museum, Jewish Museum, High Museum, etc. and various university, corporate and individual collections. Major exhibits of Freed's photographs will take place at the Muse'e de l 'Elyse'e in Lausanne, Switzerland and at the Leica Gallery in NYC in 2007.

**Obituary (Souce: Amanda Hopkinson, The Guardian, December 6, 2006):**

The name of the American Leonard Freed, who has died aged 77, became synonymous with that of the "concerned photographer". In the wake of the second world war, photojournalism became increasingly involved with human rights and, in Freed's case, with civil rights in his homeland. As a documentarist of the situation of African-Americans, he always had an eye for the unexpected and upbeat, often in the grimmest of circumstances.

He followed the years of struggle against segregation and discrimination by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), photographing Martin Luther King Jr and his great march across the US from Alabama to Washington; equally, his image of children playing around a water hydrant in New York became an icon, along with those of daily life in that city, still effectively segregated by ghettoisation in the 1950s and 60s.

Freed spent years photographing behind the scenes with the police department in the 1970s; when his famous resulting exhibition, The Spectre of Violence, was shown at London's Photographers' Gallery in 1973 it was as though the viewers were coming upon the actual scene of a murder. They entered the gallery through black curtains, and a flash went off as they found a corpse at the bottom of a stairwell; the surrounding scenes were mounted on hardboard backing, dramatically involving the audience in a lifesized restaging.

Stylistically, this series was in the arresting, flashlit tradition of an earlier New York photographer, Weegee (Arthur Fellig). But 1972 was also the year in which Freed joined Magnum, the Paris-based photo agency founded in 1948 by Bob Capa, George Rodger, "Chim" Seymour and Henri Cartier-Bresson. It was to be a lifelong relationship, for Magnum photographers have always adhered to their own humanistic precepts and social awarenesses.

Preferring - like most of his fellow Magnum members - to work in black and white, and using available light, Freed contributed to the key picture magazines of the postwar period, including Life, Look, Fortune, Libération, L'Express, GEO, Paris-Match, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel and the Sunday Times magazine. He also shot four films for Dutch, Belgium and Japanese television, including The Negro in America (1968) and Joey Goes to Wigstock (1992).

Born into a humble Jewish family of East European extraction in Brooklyn, Freed originally wanted to become an artist. He attended the New School and studied with the legendary art director of Harper's Bazaar, Alexey Brodovitch - and it was in Brodovitch's "design laboratory" that Freed discovered his true vocation. As soon as he finished his studies, he took off for two years, hitch-hiking through Europe and north Africa. This led in 1959 to his first book, Joden von Amsterdam (Jews of Amsterdam), a first one-man photo exhibition, at Hilversum in the Netherlands, and his decision to become a full-time freelancer shortly afterwards.

The interest in the Jewish diaspora and in Israel became a revisited theme for Freed. In 1965 he published Deutsche Juden Heute (German Jews Today), and in 1967 and 1973 he covered the six-day and Yom Kippur wars in the Middle East. There followed Black and White in America (1968); Seltsame Spiele (Strange Games, together with Shinkichi Tajiri, 1970); Made in Germany (1970); Police Work (1980; expanded as New York Police, 1990); and a major retrospective work, Leonard Freed: Photographies 1954-1990 (1991).

Exhibitions accompanied and alternated with the books and films. These ranged from What is Man?, shown at the Benedictine convent at Cockfosters, north London, to Native Americans, a group show at the state capitol building in Albany, New York. The former was cast in the mould of The Family of Man, Edward Steichen's travelling exhibition which intended to demonstrate, less than a decade after the second world war, that "People are people the world over: everywhere different and everywhere the same." Perhaps What is Man was Freed's response to Steichen, who, as director of the Museum of Modern Art, had first told Freed that he was one of the three best emerging photographers he had met. Purchasing three images for his prestigious collection there, Steichen warned Freed that the other two had "turned commercial" and that he should either remain an amateur or "preferably, become a truck driver".

Clearly, Freed chose neither option, determining instead to turn his vocation into a career. At the 1967 opening of the Concerned Photographer exhibition, curated by Cornell Capa and in which he showed with five of his peers, he announced: "Suddenly, I feel as if I belong to a tradition. To see life, see the world, be witness to great events, peer into the faces of the poor, the mad, to understand the shadows of the jungle, hidden things, to see, to rejoice in seeing, to be spiritually enriched." It was a journey that took him to document Asian immigrants in Newcastle and oil workers in the North Sea, travellers in eastern Europe and Hassidic communities and black people in New York slums - always pursuing content and context over form and subjectivity.

Sue Davies, founder director of London's Photographers' Gallery, has informal memories of how Freed spent time in London in the early 1970s - "in my family album I have a picture he took at a wedding reception of my husband John waving a chicken leg in the air."

Jimmy Fox, picture editor at Magnum's Paris office, recalls the small, dark, crinkle-haired man with big glasses thus: "During 38 years Leonard Freed was always polite, efficient, cooperative and smiling. He was open to other opinions and had a great interest in human behaviour, without being malicious or self-appropriating. The description 'Concerned photographer' fitted him like a glove."

Freed himself claimed that "Photography is still in its infancy ... challenging in that [it leaves] one free to be original." But, in truth, he and his Magnum colleagues are among those who brought the medium to maturity. He is survived by his wife, Brigitte Klueck, whom he married in 1958, and daughter Elke.

Leonard Freed, photographer, born October 23, 1929; died November 30, 2006

Louis Stettner

Louis Stettner
Louis Stettner Books on Amazon
Louis Stettner on Facebook

Art Net
Bonni Benrubi Gallery
Peter Fetterman Gallery
Jackson Fine Art Gallery
Paris Voice Article: "Louis Stettner, Black & White and No Regrets"
The Red List
YouTube Interview, 2013
YouTube: Louis Stettner, Fotógrafo


"Brooklyn Bridge" - 1986

"Girl Playing in Light Circles" - 1958

"Commuters, Evening Train" - 1958

"Subway Series" - 1946

"Lower Second Avenue, New York" - 1954

"Entrance to Central Waiting Hall" - 1958

"Janet, Athens New York" - 1998

"Pigalle" - 1949

"Spiritual America, Midtown Manhattan" - 1998

"The Great White Way, Times Square at Night" - 1954

"Sailor, Times Square" - 1951

"Place Saint Augustin" - 1993

"Scambia" - 1991

"World Trade Center" - 1978

Special thanks to Louis Stettner for allowing me to reproduce his photographs, here, on my blog. Without his kind cooperation and generosity this blog entry would not have been possible. No further use of these photographs is allowed without his permission.

Biography (Source: Wikipedia, Janet Stettner, and Louis Stettner's web site):

Louis Stettner was born on November 7, 1922, in Brooklyn, New York where he was raised as one of four children. His father was a cabinet maker and Louis learned the trade when young, using the money to support his growing love of photography. He was given a box camera as a child and his love affair with photography began. His family went on trips to Manhattan and visited museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art where he began his love of art.

At 18, in 1940, Stettner enlisted in the army and became a combat photographer in the Pacific. Back from the war he joined the Photo League in New York. Stettner visited Paris in 1946 and, in 1947, moved there. From 1947 to 1949 he studied at the "Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques" in Paris and received a Bachelor of Arts in Photography & Cinema. He went back and forth between New York and Paris for almost two decades and finally settled permanently in Saint-Ouen, near Paris, in 1990. Stettner still frequently returns to New York.

Stettner's professional work in Paris began with capturing life in the post-war recovery. He captured the everyday lives of his subjects. In the tradition of the Photo League, he wanted to investigate the bonds that connected people regardless of class. In 1947 he was asked by the same Photo League to organize an exhibition of French photographers in New York. He gathered the works of some of the greatest photographers of the era, including Doisneau, Brassaï, Boubat, Izis, and Ronis. The show was a big success and was largely reviewed in the annual issue of U.S. Camera. Stettner had begun a series of regular meetings with Brassaï who was a great mentor and had significant influence on his work. In 1949, Stettner had his first exhibition at the “Salon des Indépendants" at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

In 1951 his work was included in the famous Subjektive Fotografie exhibition in Germany. During the 1950s he free-lanced for Time, Life, Fortune, and Du (Germany). While in Paris he reconnected with Paul Strand who had also left New York because of political intolerance of the McCarthy era -- Strand had been a founder of the Photo League that would be blacklisted then banned during those years.

In the 1970s Stettner spent more time in New York City where he taught at Brooklyn College, Queens College, and Cooper Union.

In his own work, Stettner focused on documenting the lives of the working class in both Paris and New York. He has photographed Paris and New York for over 60 years, capturing the changes in the people and culture of both cities. Stettner has documented the cultural evolution of Paris and New York, making his archive of thousands of images an important resource. Few photographers have such an extensive archive of both cities.

He felt and still believes that the cities belong to the people that live there, not the tourists and visitors. His upbringing caused him to take great care in capturing the simple human dignity of the working class. Additionally, his paintings and sculptures tend to be abstract and in sharp contrast to his clear, vivid photographic images.

Now in his 90s, he continues to photograph with great energy. Stettner also spends significant time sculpting and painting, as well as mixing his work and “painting” on some of his photographic images.

"Luna Park"

"Newark Station"

"Washington Square"


"Locomotive and Perisphere"

"30 Rockefeller Plaza"

"Southeast from the RCA Building"

"Opening of the Empire State Building"

"Times Square at Night"

"Rockefeller Plaza at Night"

"RCA Building at Night"

Clamp Art Portfolio
Lee Gallery Portfolio
Museum of the City of New York Collection
"Mystic City: Photographs of New York by Samuel H. Gottscho, 1925-1940"
Print Collection Portfolio
YouTube Video

Biography (from Wikipedia):

Samuel Gottscho was born in Brooklyn, New York. He acquired his first camera in 1896 and took his first photograph at Coney Island. From 1896 to 1920 he photographed part-time, specializing in houses and gardens, as he particularly enjoyed nature, rural life, and landscapes.

After attending several architectural photograph exhibitions, Gottscho decided to perfect and improve his own work and sought out several architects and landscape architects. After twenty-three years as a traveling lace and fabric salesman, Gottscho became a professional commercial photographer at the age of 50. His son-in-law William Schleisner joined Gottscho in his business in 1935. During this time his photographs appeared in and on the covers of American Architect and Architecture, Architectural Record. His portraits and architectural photography regularly appeared in articles in the New York Times. His photographs of private homes in the New York and Connecticut suburbs often appeared in home decoration magazines. From the early 1940s to the late 1960s, he was a regular contributor to the Times of illustrated articles on wildflowers.

Gottscho believed he created some of his best work at the age of 70. In 1967, his botanical work won him the New York Botanical Garden's Distinguished Service Medal. He died in Jamaica, Queens, New York.

Approximately 29,000 of his images are held in the Gottscho-Schleisner collection at the U. S. Library of Congress. Additionally, over 40,000 are held by the Museum of the City of New York, where an exhibition of his work titled "The Mythic City: Photographs of New York by Samuel H. Gottscho, 1925-1940," opened in November 2005. A third major archive of his work is held by Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University.

Eliot Elisofon

Books by Eliot Elisofon on Amzaon
Life Photographers

Meet the Real "Most Interesting Man in the World"
NPR, The Picture Show

Smithsonian Spotlight: Memories of a Father
"To Help the World See" Retrospective,
Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the
Leeds Gallery, University of Texas at Austin

To me, photography has been a challenge; to produce images that are meaningful but not dogmatic, to be artistic but not arty. It has served me as a vehicle to pay tribute to other arts: to photograph the sculpture of Africa and the temples of Egypt and India. It has also permitted me to experiment with color, a method developed principally in my own time, and to participate in its liberation from crass quasi-reality. Finally, photography has enriched my life. It has enabled me to travel … to almost every corner of the globe, using my camera as a magic carpet to see and study the meaning and beauty of civilizations and environments besides my own.
Eliot Elisofon
Popular Photography, 1962

Leslie County, Kentucky, 1949

"Leslie County, Kentucky, 1949

"Street Car Named Desire", 1947

"Waiting to Perform", 1950


Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, 1951

"Marcel Duchamp Descends Staircase", 1952

Empire State Building, 1953

"Young Girl in Swimming Pool, Mexico", 1945

"Signs in Kyoto, Japan", 1961

"Douglas A-20 Bombers, Tunisia", 1943

"Airplane Wreckage, Tunisian Desert", 1943

Biography: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center,
University of Texas at Austin

Photographer, artist, art collector, author, and filmmaker Eliot Elisofon was born Meyer Eliot Elicofon, the son of immigrants Sarah and Samuel Elicofon, in New York City on April 17, 1911. As a teenager, he became interested in both photography and painting. Elisofon graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in 1929, and at that time he dropped his first name and changed the spelling of his surname. For the next few years he worked at the New York State Workmen's Compensation Bureau while attending Fordham University at night, ultimately receiving a B.S. in 1933. Meanwhile, he continued to pursue his interest in photography, and in 1935 Elisofon, Marty Bauman, and Al Weiner opened a commercial photography studio, August and Company. As a commercial photographer, Elisofon expanded from product advertising photoraphs to fashion photography assignments for magazines such as Mademoiselle and Vogue. He was a member of the Photo League, serving as its president for a time, and he developed a strong interest in photography as social documentary. Elisofon's photographs documenting New York street scenes were exhibited in 1937 at the Pennsylvania Museum of Art in Philadelphia and at the Julian Levy Gallery in New York. In 1938, his work was exhibited at the East River Gallery and at the New School for Social Research, where he worked as an instructor. After showing his portfolio to LIFE magazine in 1937, Elisofon began receiving assignments from that magazine and others and decided to devote his career to photojournalism. He left the studio in 1938 to work as a freelance magazine photographer, producing mainly travel and glamour photographs which were published in such magazines as Fortune and Scribner's, as well as Mademoiselle, Vogue, and Glamour. For LIFE, he also produced photographic essays on a variety of subjects, ranging from military exercises to refugees to coal miners, from actresses and plays to social clubs. Elisofon also worked as a staff photographer for the Museum of Modern Art in 1939 and became skilled at photographing works of art.
	Elisofon joined the LIFE staff in 1942 as a war photographer-correspondent, and during the remainder of World War II he traveled to the North African front, to Sweden and Finland, and to Hawaii and Wake Island. In the post-war years, he began working on geographical photo essays in the United States and around the world. He eventually developed a special interest in Africa and became a collector of African art and an expert in that area. As a member of the Peabody Museum of Salem's 1956 expedition to the South Pacific, led by William A. Robinson, Elisofon photographed the voyage and collected artifacts from the South Sea Islands as the expedition traced the Polynesian migration route. He was appointed a Research Fellow in Primitive Art at Harvard University in 1958, and he was a member of the Harvard Peabody Museum's 1961 expedition to film tribal life in New Guinea. Elisofon remained a staff photographer for LIFE from 1942 to 1964 and then, although he also pursued freelance and commercial work, he continued to work for LIFE on a contract basis until the magazine suspended publication at the end of 1972. During those three decades, Elisofon traveled more than a million miles on six continents, covering assignments on places, art, architecture, celebrities, food, and social subjects. He continued to do freelance work for Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic, Horizon, and other magazines until his death in 1973.
	Elisofon was known for his experiments with color control, and he worked as a color consultant on the films Moulin Rouge, Bell, Book and Candle, and The Greatest Story Ever Told, among others. In 1965, he directed the prologue of the film Khartoum and a portion of Man Builds for National Educational Television. Elisofon was director of creative production for the ABC documentary Africa in 1967, and in 1972 he wrote, produced, and directed a four-hour television series for Group W (Westinghouse Broadcasting Company) titled Black African Heritage.
	Besides collecting tribal art and sculpture, other interests Elisofon pursued were cooking and painting, and he was able to take advantage of his worldwide travel as a photographer to develop all of these simultaneously. His photographs, watercolor paintings, and objects from his personal collection of tribal art have been exhibited throughout the United States and other countries.
	Elisofon frequently lectured on a variety of subjects at museums, colleges, and clubs around the country; topics included photography, African art, and his travels. He also wrote numerous articles and essays as well as several books, including the cookbook Food Is a Four-Letter Word (1948); The Sculpture of Africa (1958); Color Photography (1961); The Nile (1964); Java Diary (1969); and Erotic Spirituality (1971). He wrote and illustrated three of a series of Crowell-Collier's children's books showing a week in the lives of children in other countries. Elisofon contributed photographs to Joseph Campbell's edition of Heinrich Zimmer's The Art of Indian Asia (1955) and Arthur Knight's The Hollywood Style (1969), among others, and he also provided illustrations for publications by Time-Life Books, including a "Foods of the World" cookbook series.
	Elisofon was married twice, first to Mavis Lyons (married July 1, 1941, divorced 1946) and later to Joan Spear (married July 15, 1950, divorced 1965), with whom he had two daughters, Elin (b. 1952) and Jill (b. 1953). Throughout his life, Elisofon maintained a primary residence in New York City and a secondary one on the island of Vinalhaven, Maine. Elisofon died in New York City on April 7, 1973, as a result of a massive cerebral hemorrhage.
	Elisofon was a founding trustee of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Art in 1964 and at the time of his death was a curatorial associate. He bequeathed to that museum not only his collection of African art, but also his photographs, transparencies, and film footage of Africa and its art. Before his death Elisofon had also donated pieces of his African and Pacific art collection to that museum, the Museum of Primitive Art in New York, the Peabody Museum of Salem, Massachusetts, and to many other institutions.

Self Portrait, 1896

Biography and Photographs from The Cultural Landscape Foundation (Published in honor of Sam Watters' book, Gardens for a Beautiful America 1895 - 1935: Photographs by Frances Benjamin Johnson)
Clio Visualizing History Biography and Photographs
Frances Benjamin Johnson Facts and Photographs from Your Dictionary
Luminous-Lint Portfolio
The Photographic Legacy of Frances Benjamin Johnson by Maria Elizabeth Ausherman

Alice Roosevelt Wedding Portrait, 1906

Rose Putzel, 1910


Ethel Reed: American Graphic Artist, 1896

Susan B. Anthony, ca. 1890


Helen Hay Whitney: American Poet, Writer, Racehorse Owner, Socialite, and Philanthropist

Eadweard Muybridge: Photographer, ca. 1890

Charles Follen McKim: Architect, ca. 1890

Benjamin Harrison: 23rd President of the United States and Family

Theodore Roosevelt's Children at Roll Call Inspection at White House, Archie at Left and Quentin at Right, ca. 1901

The Last Photograph Ever Taken of President McKinley Before He Was Fatally Wounded, Buffalo, N.Y., September 6, 1901

Mammouth Cave, Kentucky, 1891

A Crack with the Blacksmith, ca. 1900

George Washington Carver and Coworkers, Tuskegee Institute, 1902

Laboratory Class, Tuskegee Institute, 1902

Mechanical Drawing Class, Hampton Institute, 1899

Girls Art Class, Eastern High School, Washington, D.C., 1899

Native American Children Going to School, 1899

Schoolgirls Doing Calisthenics, 1899

Two Girls from a Washington, D.C. School Visit to the Library of Congress, 1899

Isadora Duncan's Dance Students

Biography from Wikipedia:

The only surviving child of wealthy and well connected parents, she was born in Grafton, West Virginia, raised in Washington, D.C., and studied at the Académie Julian in Paris and the Washington Students League following her graduation from Notre Dame of Maryland Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies in 1883 (now known as Notre Dame of Maryland University). An independent and strong-willed young woman, she wrote articles for periodicals before finding her creative outlet through photography after she was given her first camera by George Eastman, a close friend of the family, and inventor of the new, lighter, Eastman Kodak cameras. She received training in photography and dark-room techniques from Thomas Smillie, the first photographer at the United States Museum, today The Smithsonian.

She took portraits of friends, family and local figures before working as a freelance photographer and touring Europe in the 1890s, using her connection to Smillie to visit prominent photographers and gather items for the museum's collections. She gained further practical experience in her craft by working for the newly formed Eastman Kodak company in Washington, D.C., forwarding film for development and advising customers when cameras needed repairs. In 1894 she opened her own photographic studio in Washington, D.C., on V Street between 13th and 14th Streets, and at the time was the only woman photographer in the city. She took portraits of many famous contemporaries including Susan B. Anthony, Mark Twain and Booker T. Washington. Well connected among elite society, she was commissioned by magazines to do "celebrity" portraits, such as Alice Roosvelt's wedding portrait, and was dubbed the "Photographer to the American court." She photographed Admiral Dewey on the deck of the USS Olympia, the Roosevelt children playing with their pet pony at the White House and the gardens of Edith Wharton's famous villa near Paris.

Her mother, Frances Antoinette Johnston, had been a congressional journalist and dramatic critic for the Baltimore Sun and her daughter built on her familiarity with the Washington political scene by becoming official White House photographer for the Harrison, Cleveland, McKinley, "TR" Roosevelt, and Taft presidential administrations.

Johnston also photographed the famous American heiress and literary salon socialite Natalie Barney in Paris but perhaps her most famous work is her self-portrait of the liberated "New Woman", petticoats showing and beer stein in hand (see above). Johnston was a constant advocate for the role of women in the burgeoning art of photography. The Ladies' Home Journal published Johnston's article "What a Woman Can Do With a Camera" in 1897 and she co-curated (with Zaida Ben-Yusuf) an exhibition of photographs by twenty-eight women photographers at the 1900 Exposition Universelle, which afterwards travelled to Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and Washington, DC. She traveled widely in her thirties, taking a wide range of documentary and artistic photographs of coal miners, iron workers, women in New England's mills and sailors being tattooed on board ship as well as her society commissions. While in England she photographed the stage actress Mary Anderson, who was a friend of her mother.

In 1899, she gained further notability when she was commissioned by Hollis Burke Frissell to photograph the buildings and students of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Virginia in order to show its success. This series, documenting the ordinary life of the school, remains as some of her most telling work. It was displayed at the Exposé nègre of the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900.

She photographed events such as world's fairs and peace-treaty signings and took the last portrait of President William McKinley, at the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 just before his assassination. With her partner, Mattie Edwards Hewitt, a successful freelance home and garden photographer in her own right, she opened a studio in New York in 1913 and moved in with her mother and aunt. She lectured at New York University on business for women and they produced a series of studies of New York architecture through the 1920s. In early 1920 her mother passed away in New York.

In the 1920s she became increasingly interested in photographing architecture, motivated by a desire to document buildings and gardens which were falling into disrepair or about to be redeveloped and lost. Her photographs remain an important resource for modern architects, historians and conservationists. She exhibited a series of 247 photographs of Fredericksburg, Virginia, from the decaying mansions of the rich to the shacks of the poor, in 1928. The exhibition was entitled Pictorial Survey--Old Fredericksburg, Virginia--Old Falmouth and Nearby Places and described as "A Series of Photographic Studies of the Architecture of the Region Dating by Tradition from Colonial Times to Circa 1830" as "An Historical Record and to Preserve Something of the Atmosphere of An Old Virginia Town."

Publicity from the display prompted the University of Virginia to hire her to document its buildings and the state of North Carolina to record its architectural history. Louisiana hired Johnston to document its huge inventory of rapidly deteriorating plantations and she was given a grant in 1933 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York to document Virginia's early architecture. This led to a series of grants and photographs of eight other southern states, all of which were given to the Library of Congress for public use. Johnston was named an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects for her work in preserving old and endangered buildings and her collections have been purchased by institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Although her relentless traveling was curtailed by petrol rationing in the Second World War the tireless Johnston continued to photograph. Johnston acquired a home in the French Quarter of New Orleans in 1940, retiring there in 1945, where she died in 1952 at the age of eighty-eight.


"Self Portrait", 2009

Brian H. Peterson: Word + Image
"A Collector's Eye"
The Blossoming of World: Essays and Images by Brian H. Peterson
"The Cities, the Towns, the Crowds"
"Connecting With the Light: The Photography of Brian Peterson
"Form Radiating Life"
"Masterpieces of Photography from the Merrill Lynch Collection (James A. Michener Art Museum)

Santa Bannon Fine Art Gallery
"The Smile at the Heart of Things"
Water Elemental Crafts & Fine Art

From "Trees, Stones, Water and Light" Series

"Vatican", 1979

From "Forrest Light" Series

From "Interior Light"Series

From "Portraits, Helen"

From "Rock Forms" Series

From "Earth Forms" Series

From "Life Forms" Series

From "Sea of Light" Series

"I Sing the Body" Series:

"My camera has usually been pointed outward, at trees, water, rocks—blades of grass—fire—people I care about—and light. Always, light. In the fall of 2006 I began to feel the urge to look in the other direction, toward myself. At the time I thought it was because I was in my fifties, and aging was no longer a far-off possibility; it was something I’d begun to live with every day. I needed to turn my gaze inward, to explore my complex relationship with my body—what it looks like and how I feel about it. . . .

My own explorations of self took an unexpected turn when, in the spring of 2007, I learned that some of those signs of aging I’d been experiencing were something else: the early symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease. Suddenly my body no longer seemed steady and dependable, and I had to come to terms with an uncertain and terrifying future, as well as be open to the strange gifts and revelations that come with this disease. It was natural to try to express some of those feelings in my pictures as well. Oddly enough, the images made before and after the diagnosis were not that different. This made me wonder about my decision to focus on my body at a time when the disease was just beginning to show itself, but I was not, on the surface at least, aware of it. Maybe I sensed that something was wrong. I guess I’ll never know."

Special thanks to Brian H. Peterson for allowing me to reproduce his photographs, here, on my blog. Without his kind cooperation and generosity this blog entry would not have been possible. No further use of these photographs is allowed without his permission.

Biography from Santa Bannon Fine Art Gallery:

Brian H. Peterson has more than 35 years experience as a curator, critic, artist, and arts administrator in the Philadelphia area. As a practicing artist, Peterson has had more than 30 solo exhibitions of his photographs since 1980 at galleries and museums throughout the country. His work is in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Amon Carter Museum, the Library of Congress, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Denver Art Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Berman Museum of Art, the Dayton Art Institute, the State Museum of Pennsylvania, the Danforth Museum of Art, the Michener Art Museum, and the Free Library of Philadelphia. His exhibition at the Berman Museum of Art, Only Connect: A Conversation about Image and Word (January 21—March 9, 2014), draws on both his forty-year career as a photographer and excerpts from his two published memoirs.

Peterson was the Gerry and Marguerite Lenfest Chief Curator at the Michener Art Museum (1990-2013), where he both managed the exhibition program and curated numerous historic and contemporary exhibitions with a wide range of subject matter and genres. He was the editor and principal author of the major 2002 publication Pennsylvania Impressionism (copublished by the Michener and the University of Pennsylvania Press), and also organized the retrospective exhibitions The Cities, The Towns, The Crowds: The Paintings of Robert Spencer (2004) and Form Radiating Life: The Paintings of Charles Rosen (2006), both accompanied by monographs copublished by the Michener and Penn Press. His recent exhibitions include The Painterly Voice: Bucks County’s Fertile Ground (2011-12) and Making Magic: Beauty in Word and image (2012). His memoir The Smile at the Heart of Things: Essays and Life Stories (2010), was copublished by the Michener and Tell Me Press, New Haven, Connecticut, and reviewed in USA Today, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Trenton Times, and numerous other publications and blogs; his most recent book, The Blossoming of the World: Essays and Images, (2011), also was published by Tell Me Press.

Peterson was a member of the Museums Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts in 2003, and has served on the Visual Arts Advisory Panel of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He served as a board member of the Curators Committee of the American Alliance of Museums, and co-authored A Code of Ethics for Curators (2009) for that organization, and in 2002 founded and organized an ongoing national competition promoting excellence in exhibition writing. He received two Fellowships for Visual Arts Criticism from the PA Council on the Arts, and his critical writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, American Arts Quarterly, The Photo Review, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. He was the Founder and Project Director of the Photography Sesquicentennial Project, the Philadelphia-area’s major cooperative celebration of the 150th anniversary of the birth of photography funded principally by The Pew Charitable Trusts (1988-1990). He taught photography for more than twelve years, at the University of Delaware, the Tyler School of Art, and Swarthmore College, and received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Delaware (1985), and a Bachelor of Arts (in music composition) from the University of Pennsylvania (1981).

Carl Moon

Artnet Auction Results

Carl Moon Photography

Cowan's Auctions

Libary of Congress

Luminous Lint

"Navajo Boy", 1907

"Navajo Maid"

"Haz-Pah, Navajo Maid"

"The Wolf (Ma-Itso)", 1904

"Chick-A-Ponaqie Havasupa (Billy Burro)"

"Vicente, Chief of Navajos", 1905

"Corn Song", 1907

"Sandomingo Peddler", c. 1906

"Peace Pipe"

"Little Maid of the Desert", 1904

"Loti, Laguna Pueblo"

"Chief Gray Hawk, Taos", c. 1910

Biograpy from "Best of the West 2012: Carl Moon, Photographer with a Native Heart" by Dana Joseph for "Cowboys & Indians, the Premier Magazine of the West":

The face of the handsome youth in the famous Navajo Boy (see "Navajo Boy" photograph above) image is familiar. The photographer who immortalized him in Western culture is not.

Born in 1879 in Wilmington, Ohio, Carl (originally Karl) Everton Moon loved reading stories about Native Americans as a boy. He followed his Western aspirations to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he set up a studio in 1904 and began photographing, painting, and traveling among Pueblo tribe members he befriended.

“Photographing the American Indian in his natural state was the principal aim of Carl Moon,” wrote Tom Driebe, author of In Search of the Wild Indian: Photographs & Life Works by Carl and Grace Moon. “He tried to show the Indian as he lived before civilization hampered his freedom ... and changed his picturesque customs and mode of dress.” Moon knew he was working against the clock of forced acculturation. “About the only thing we have thus far overlooked taking from the Indian,” he wrote, “is his right to perform his religious rites with their accompanying dances in his own way.”

In 1907 Moon moved to Arizona and for seven years gathered paintings and photographs for the Fred Harvey Company at the Grand Canyon; there, he also served as the official photographer for the Santa Fe Railroad and studied painting with visiting artists, including Thomas Moran, Louis Akin, and Frank Sauerwein. Moon married artist Grace Purdie in 1911, and the two traveled the Southwest documenting Native culture. In 1914, the couple settled in Pasadena, California, and embarked on a series of 22 illustrated children’s books about American Indians.

In 1923, Moon approached railroad magnate and art collector Henry E. Huntington with the proposition of selling 300 photographic prints and 24 oil paintings, “an addition that Moon felt would ‘give the student of the future the true coloring of the Indian and his surroundings,’ ” says Jennifer A. Watts, curator of photographs at The Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

Moon died in 1948 in San Francisco; his art lives on at The Huntington, where the collection is being arranged, described, and digitized. “The Moon photographs are not only an important visual resource for scholars and students of tribal peoples at the turn of the 20th century,” Watts says, “but sensitive, beautifully rendered portraits that reveal the artist’s deep admiration for the peoples he photographed.”

I am most grateful to "Cowboys & Indians" magazine for their generous permission
allowing me to reproduce Dana Joseph's article on my blog. The magazine sponsores

an annual photography contest. Click here to see last year's winners.

George Burke and Lou Warneke

Pat Malone, Hack Wilson, Dan Taylor, "Gabby" Hartnett,, ca. 1930

Lou Gehrig, ca 1930

Ray Pepper, ca. 1932

Lefty Gomez

"Honus" Wagner, 1940

Bill Dickey, 1939

Jimmy Fox

Joe Dimagio, 1936

Babe Ruth, 1935

George Burke Biography from Cycleback.com -- The Center for Artifact Studies:

The Chicago photographer was active from the turn of the 20th century through the 1940s. He shot many of the images used to make the 1933-19355 Goudey baseball cards and was an official photographer for the Chicago Cubs, White Sox and NFL’s Bears. Most of his single player photographs on the market were made in the 1930s and have the distinct Goudey-style posed images. His photographs from this era are easy to authenticate. The backs will have his name and 807 Belmont Ave/Chicago address stamped in ink. The backs usually have typed information at the top, typically the player’s name and a cataloging number. They usually measure about 8" x 10” or postcard size and often have silvering. A few of these circa 1930s photos are reprints of earlier images, often made from his own turn of the century negatives or those of others photographers like Charles Conlon. These reprints are often of good quality and, as made in the 1930s, can fetch good prices if depicting someone like Ty Cobb or Walter Johnson.

Burke’s photographs are relatively plentiful and inexpensive compared to those of Charles Conlon. His photographs are of consistently high quality, with sharp focus and lush sepia-tinged tones. Burke is a case where even the collector with an average budget can buy a quality original photograph by a great photographer.

For years after his Burke’s death, his longtime business partner George Brace reprinted Burke photographs. These reprints usually have Brace’s stamp. The reprinted images are typically light in tone, on bright white paper and without the typically lush, sepia tinged tones of Burke’s originals. As Brace himself was a prominent baseball photographer and owned the exclusive rights to Burke’s negatives, these reprints are collectable, just not worth the same as Burke’s originals.

Original 8” x 10” photos shot by George Brace are also on the market, usually of 1950s - 60s baseball players and with his stamp on back. His originals are relatively plentiful but collectable.

Louise Rosskam and her husband, Edwin, by Charles
E. Rokin, late 1945 or early 1946

Image Sampler from The Library of Congress Women Photojournalists Project

Interview with Louise Rosskam under the auspices of the

Monmouth County Library Headquarters

Louise Rosskam on Shorpy

"Peaks and Valleys on a Small Island" by David Gonzales for the New York Times

Promotion for "Re-viewing Documentary: The Photographic Life of Louise Rosskam" exhibition hosted by the American University Museum

"General Store, Lincoln, VT", 1940

"Sunbathing on the Commons, Vergennes, VT", 1940

"Canning Beans in Farm Kitchen near
Briston, VT", 1940

"Step Children, Washington, D.C.", 1942
(early Kodachrome)

"Air Raid Warden"
(early Kodachrome)

"Children's Army, Washington, D.C.", 1942
(early Kodachrome)

"On the Home Front"

"Children in Doorway at the Barney
Neighborhood Settlement"

From Rosskam's book
"Picturing Puerto Rico under the American Flag"

Biography from The Library of Congress Women Photojournalists Project:

Louise Rosskam (1910-2003) is one of the elusive pioneers of what has been called the golden age of documentary photography. Louise's story provides rare insight into the delicate balance women of her generation had to maintain between the domestic roles for which they were trained and the working world in which they labored. She produced meaningful images but opted to define her professional life largely in terms of her husband, Edwin (1903-1985). Working with him for nearly four decades, Louise photographed for newspapers, magazines, government agencies, corporations, political parties and service projects.

The Library of Congress has more than 150 photographs by Louise Rosskam in the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, in sets of photographs sponsored by the Standard Oil Company, and in a small group of images acquired from the photographer herself in 1999. See the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?q=louise+rosskam&sp=1&st=gallery

Early Life:

Leah Louise Rosenbaum was born in 1910 to a prosperous, assimilated Hungarian Jewish family in Philadelphia, but she herself never participated in organized religion. She worked her way through the University of Pennsylvania after her family lost its money during the Great Depression. She majored in science, one of the few courses then open to women. She encountered difficulty obtaining work as a microbiologist because of her gender and her religious background. A self-described rebel, Louise joined leftist circles in Greenwich Village and the burgeoning practice of socially concerned photography to which Edwin Rosskam introduced her. Louise adopted the documentary impulse of the era but recognized its limitations to bring about social change.

The Rosskams married in 1936 and began their life in photography in the rotogravure section of the Philadelphia Record. The newspaper would hire only Edwin so he listed Louise's wages as "gas and oil" in his expense account. Restless after a year, in November 1937 the Rosskams tried an assignment for the one-year old Life magazine. They went to the unincorporated territory of Puerto Rico to cover the trial of a Puerto Rican nationalist who had led an independence movement that erupted into The Ponce Massacre. Their story was dropped but on their short visit, they committed themselves to return to address humanitarian situations they observed there.

In 1938 the Rosskams began creating documentary picture books, a popular New Deal phenomenon, which coincided with the shift from modernist art photography to socially concerned photography. The Rosskams produced San Francisco: West Coast Metropolis (1939). Although Edwin acknowledged Louise for doing "all of the dirty work," only his name appears on the title pages of that and their next book. For Washington Nerve Center (1939), they relied heavily on images from the Farm Security Administration (FSA). During their research, they came to know Roy Stryker, director of the project.

New Deal Work:

In 1939 when Stryker asked Edwin to reorganize the FSA file, the Rosskams welcomed the steady income. Hearing Stryker brief his staff photographers enabled Louise to see the "unseeable" and to confront harsh realities in her own backyard near N Street S.W. in Washington, D.C. For instance, her photographs of a mock wedding sponsored by a settlement house document that only white children could participate in the cultural events designed to teach etiquette and proper behavior to the lower classes and recent immigrants.

Edwin's job security allowed Louise to freelance. She made custom photo books about the children of wealthy families and portraits of business and government leaders, some of which appeared in The New York Times. Her portrayal of notable figures for the "Interesting People" section of American Magazine stands out. She recalled, "I developed a technique of using three flash bulbs for a portrait, which froze the faces. They were horrible. But [the magazine editors] loved them."

Seeking to balance her uniquely urban experience, Rosskam ventured to New England in July 1940 to record Vermont's towns and countryside. Stryker commandeered these and subsequent photos for the FSA file. Photos of her Washington neighborhood (in color, using film provided to FSA/OWI photographers by Kodak) include Shulman's corner store, one of the few places where races could mix.

Rosskam deepened her racial education by participating in creating Richard Wright's and Edwin Rosskam's 1941 photo book Twelve Million Black Voices, a history of black experience in the United States. Louise helped search the FSA file for relevant photographs, and, like Edwin, defied the racial prejudices of the day by working with a black professional man in the segregated southern city Washington, D.C.

After the United States entered World War II in December 1942, Louise and Edwin prepared a Victory Garden series in May 1943, showing Americans growing their own vegetables because farmers had gone off to war.

Corporate Work:

In autumn 1943, the Rosskams joined Stryker at Standard Oil Company of New Jersey to tell the human story of oil in America. They felt uncomfortable working for a corporation but the opportunity to travel, the freedom on their assignments, and the generous salaries they earned seduced them. An added incentive was that Louise was on the payroll with the status of photographer, equal to her husband.

The Rosskams' most memorable experience on the Standard Oil project was documenting life on towboats and barges along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. They produced Towboat River (1948), an ambitious photo book that was greeted with rave reviews.

Picturing Puerto Rico:
Even before Towboat River was published, the couple departed for Puerto Rico where Edwin headed a photographic survey of the island along the lines of the FSA study of the mainland and Louise worked as a photographer for the project. Although they signed their pictures "The Rosskams," Louise was aware of what each of them contributed. Her microbiology training reinforced her emphasis on the crucial small moments in life. She noted that Edwin had big cameras and big ideas. In a 1979 interview, Louise said her smaller Rolleiflex enabled her to make eye contact with her subjects because a photographer can hold that type of camera at waist-level.

For the Puerto Rico Office of Information, Louise photographed laborers on coffee plantations, on tobacco farms, and in sugar cane fields. She documented the political activities of Luis Muñoz Marín, whose progressive Popular Democratic Party platform for "land reform, literacy, and the amelioration of poverty" was one she and Edwin agreed with. They developed close professional bonds with Muñoz Marín. With enormous regret, they left Puerto Rico in 1953 because their ties with him as governor drew criticism from political opponents.

Photography and Education:

Like many women photographers, Louise specialized in photographs of children. To support her family in the 1950s and 1960s, Louise taught science at the local school and provided photographs for the catalog of a company that made creative toys from natural products.

In 1967-68 the Rosskams immersed themselves in the New Jersey Migrant Program. Their photographs for the Cranbury Migrant School focus on efforts to break the migrant cycle for the southern black and Puerto Rican children who attended the schools.

Last Images:

Louise Rosskam's projects ceased temporarily in the late 1970s when Edwin began his struggle with lung cancer. After his death in 1985, she felt drawn to nature studies: waterscapes, a lone bird, an abandoned farm house--images that helped her grieve.

Her last major project--photographs from 1986 to 1990 showing dilapidated barns on abandoned farms in central New Jersey--marked another turning point in her artistic development. She approached the pictures as metaphors for her own profound loss, as well passionate eulogies to open spaces, farming as a way of life, and fields converted to housing developments and shopping malls.

Even after she was housebound, she continued to tell her story through photographs. She produced a photographically illustrated cookbook for her children that showed which bowls and pots she used for each recipe so they could relive the family's nurturing experiences after her death.

Final Thoughts:

In her last years, Louise began to value the uniqueness of her life's work. She started writing to institutions like the Library of Congress to correct misattributions. She wished to be written into the history of women photojournalists--women who, despite their increased opportunities brought on by the New Deal and the War, had to break from society's deeply engrained gender biases in order to produce some of the most eloquent pictures of the classic documentary tradition. And, when acknowledgment for her work came, Louise still felt ambivalent about changing public perception of her husband's photographic prowess at the expense of her own ego.

"Jack Welpott at the Arles Railway Station, France",
by Bill Jay, 1981

"Photography is a holding together of opposites: Light and dark, beautiful and ugly, sublime and banal, concious and unconcious. I am still struck by the power of photography to strip away the bark of the mind and reveal the visceral workings underneath."

"Portrait photography is an experience between two human beings, an experience shared with the viewer through the resulting photograph. If the moment was charged with feeling the image can be personal and revealing.": Women&OtherVisions by Judy Dater, Jack Welpott , ISBN: 0871001020

"Part of the fascination that photography holds is its ability to unlock secrets kept even from ourselves. Like dreams, the photograph can uncork a heady bouquet of recognition which can escape into the cognitive world. Sometimes the aroma is sharp; sometimes dry. This "shock of recognition" can be, at times, unsettling – it can also be sublime. The expressive portrait can do these things.": Women&OtherVisions by Judy Dater, Jack Welpott , ISBN: 0871001020

"...to make a photograph as honestly as one can generates an artifact that bears witness to one’s personal truth."

Jack Welpott Photography

Barry Singer Gallery Portfolio

Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona Libraries: Collection

Center for Photographic Arts: Interview

Luminous Lint Portfolio

Pix Channel "What Makes Photographys Click" Interview

Smith Anderson North Gallery Portfolio

"To Jack Welpott, Whats's Outside is a Clue to Inside" by Abigail Foerstner for the Chicago Tribune

University of Virgina Collection

Books by Jack Welpott:

Driving to Stony Lonesome: Jack Welpott's Indiana Photographs, 1936-1959

The Halide Conversion

Women and Other Visions

I am most grateful to Jan Welpott and the Jack Welpott Legacy Trust for allowing me to
feature Mr. Welpott's work here on my blog

"Carnival Woman":
Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

"Imogene Cunningham":
Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

"Kathleen Kelly", 1972:
Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

"Geneviev", 1961:
Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

"The Rag Picker", ca. 1950:
Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

"Aaron Siskind", 1973:
Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

"Theresa Chua":
Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

"Near Sacramento":
Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

"Convent Wall":
Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

"Lincoln Park, San Francisco":
Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

"White Sands":
Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

"Voo Doo Doll":
Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

"Woman of the 50's":
Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

"Old Roses", 2002:
Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

"Farmer Twins, Stineville, Indiana":
Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

Biography from Jack Welpott Photography by Darwin Marable*:

Internationally known photographer and educator, Jack Welpott was born in Kansas City, Kansas on April 27, 1923, but grew up in Bloomington, Indiana. After high school he enrolled in Indiana University, but was drafted into the U.S. Army Air Force in 1943. He served in the South Pacific as a radio intercept operator until 1946. After WW II, he returned to Indiana University on the G.I. Bill where he earned an M.F.A degree studying with Henry Holmes Smith. Jack and Jerry Uelsmann were the first M.F.A. graduates while Van Deren Coke was also a graduate student. During these years, he became acquainted with Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Minor White all of whom were established photographers and pioneers in American photographic education.

Jack was hired in 1959 by John Gutmann, to teach photography within the Art Department at San Francisco State College, now San Francisco State University. He taught there for the next thirty-three years. When he arrived in San Francisco the Beat Generation was winding down in North Beach, however, he took advantage of the local poetry, jazz, art and culture. He also played jazz piano, which became a lifelong avocation. Years later he said, “When I’m working behind a camera, I feel like I’m trying to achieve something like a jazz musician does.” He also soon became associated with the local photographic community which included Ansel Adams, Ruth Bernard, Oliver Gagliani and Dorothea Lange.

At that time there were almost no photography courses or graduate programs offered at the university level anywhere in the United States. Jack pioneered in creating both photography courses and a graduate program. He also taught one of the first history of photography courses at the college/university level. While providing a solid basis in photographic technique, Jack always encouraged an appreciation of the master photographers. Also, he integrated the ideas of Carl G. Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst, into the reading of photographs, especially dreams, symbolism and the unconscious mind. Jack’s educational goal was to determine the needs of the student, provide constructive criticism and help them develop their own vision. A number of his students have become major contributors to photography: Judy Dater, Leland Rice, John Spence Weir, Michael Bishop, Harvey Himelfarb, and Catherine Wagner among numerous others.

In 1968, with Jack’s support, a number of his students formed the Visual Dialogue Foundation to promote their photographs by producing a portfolio, creating exhibitions, and, in general, publicizing their photographs as fine art. The Museum and Fine Arts Galleries in American had not yet accepted photography as a fine art. Although mindful of Group f64, a number of the members continued to work in the tradition of Group f64, while others began to experiment with photography. VDF became the vortex of San Francisco’s photographic community and established a bridge with Robert Heinecken, another pioneer at the University of California at Los Angeles, who was pushing the parameters of traditional American photography.

In a time of increasing specialization in photography, Jack was unique in that his work was both diverse and unexpected. Formal problems were always of major concern to him. His nudes were erotic and sensual interpretations of the female figure and his best known work. They can also easily mislead the viewer, because he was also interested in integrating subject and technique. Sensitivity to light and composition, especially spatial relations, were always major concerns. His interest in 19th century French painting, especially Henri Matisse, affected his vision. He was also an outstanding portrait photographer and his fragmented landscapes are visual poems which parallel some of the best in landscape photography.

Jack also liked to create new challenges for himself. During 1980 and 1981, he began exploring San Francisco’s cityscape when he photographed the financial district resulting in some unique, and, at times, critical views of the world of business. Known for his black and white photographs, during the 1980′s he photographed in fragments and in color, but always with restraint. And in the 1990′s, Jack combined a photogram of a projected seed pod with pen and ink drawing and hand coloring. In graduate school he studied painting and photography and also taught drawing. With an interest in Abstract Expressionism, he wanted to create a photograph in that genre.

Regarding the creation of a photograph, Jack revealed a mystical side when he stated, “There is the physical sensation of light penetrating everything. The world becomes luminous. Sometimes, one can see a wider, more brilliant, more significant, more detailed world than is apparent to others.”

Jack was a member of the Friends of Photography, Carmel, California and served on the Board of Trustees from 1973-1976. He was also a member of the Society for Photographic Education. In 1973 he was a recipient of the Medal of Arles, France, and in 1979 received a National Endowment for the Arts Grant.

His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Getty Museum, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum, New York; International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson; University of New Mexico, Albuquerque; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris and the Australian National Gallery among others.

*Darwin Marable was graduated from the University of New Mexico with a Ph.D. in the history of photography. He lectures at the University of California Berkeley Extension and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. His writings have been published in Afterimage, Artweek, Black & White Magazine, Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography, History of Photography, Lenswork, Photo Metro and The World & I (Washington, D.C. Times).

William Carrick in his Studio

The Daily Mail

Environmental Graffiti

Luminous Lint

The Museum Syndicate

National Galleries of Scotland

The Scottish Field Magazine

"The Beggar"

"Village Children"

"Horse and Carriage"

"Policeman"

"Chimney Sweep"

"Peasant Women"

"Potato Boy"

"Woodsman"

"Boatman, Volga River"

"Mother and Daughter"

"Peasant"

"Young Woman"

Biography from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia:

William Carrick (1827 - 1878) was a Scottish-Russian artist and photographer. The son of a timber merchant, Andrew Carrick (died 1860), and Jessie née Lauder, he was born in Edinburgh on December 23, 1827. Only a few weeks old, the Carrick family took William with them to the port of Kronstadt Gulf of Finland. Andrew had been trading with this port for some time, and the family would stay there for 16 years.

In 1844, the family moved to St Petersburg, where William became a student at the St Petersburg Academy of Arts, studying architecture under the renowned Alexander Brullov. By 1853, he had completed his studies there and moved to Rome to undertake further studies. Although his family's business collapsed during the Crimean War, in 1856, William Carrick returned to St Petersburg to become a photographer. However, in the summer of the following year he departed for Edinburgh to gain more experience of photography. There he met the photographic technician John MacGregor.

In October, he returned to Russia, taking MacGregor with him in the aim of establishing a business and career. He opened a studio (or atelier) at 19 Malaya Morskaya Street, St Petersburg, making MacGregor his assistant. Carrick quickly made a name for himself capturing pictures of Russian life and pioneering Russian ethnographic photography, obtaining the patronage of Grand Duke Konstantine Nicholaievich of Russia, who presented him with a diamond ring in 1862. In 1865, Count Mihaly Zichy hired Carrick to take pictures of his watercolors, in order to resell them as prints. Carrick did similar business with other artists, Ivan Kramskoi, Viktor Vasnetsov, and Nikolai Ge; after his death in 1879 many of these were published in his Album of Russian Artists.

Carrick and MacGregor made several rural expeditions, including in 1871 a month long trip to Simbirsk province. He amassed a large collection of photographs depicting the lives of Russian and Mordovian peasants. In 1872 his colleague MacGregor died, leaving Carrick in despair. Despite this, Carrick continued his work. In 1876, he became photographer of the Academy of Arts, obtaining a studio in the Academy for his photography. An exhibition of his works was held in the Russian capital in 1869, followed by exhibitions at London (1876) and Paris (1878), all to great acclaim.

Carrick died of pneumonia, at St Petersburg, on November 11, 1878. William Carrick was noted in Russia for his height, which was 6 foot and 4 inches. He had married once, to one Aleksandra Grigorievna Markelova (1832–1916), fathering by her two sons, Dmitry and Valery, whilst adopting her son Grigory from an earlier marriage. He trained Grigory as a photographer, while Valery went on to become a famous caricaturist. His wife Aleksandra, nicknamed Sashura, was a liberal and a nihilist, and for a time the only female journalist at the Peterburskie Vedomosti ("St Petersburg Times").

Photo Credit: Arnée Carofano

Ray Carofano Photography

"Broken Dreams" portfolio is published in "LensWork" No. 104, January - February, 2013

"Two Arrows, Arizona", 2004

"Airstream, Mojave Desert, CA", 2003

"Graveyard, Trona, CA", 1994

"Cosmos Buds"

"Cosmos #1"

"Lotus, Santa Barbara", 2004

"Machado Lake #14"

"Fire & Tree, Santa Barbara, CA", 2010

"Cuyamaca Fire #1, San Diego County, CA" 2003

"Point Fermin, San Pedro, CA", 2010

"Opera House, Havana Cuba", 2002

"Oil Tank, Taft, CA", 1997

I am most grateful to Ray Carofano for allowing me to
feature his work here on my blog.

Feature by Nell Campbell from the Fall, 2004, issue of "Photographer's Forum":

On a warm Southern California winter day my friend, photographer, and fellow bookaholic, Tom Moore, and I drive south from Santa Barbara to visit and interview Ray Carofano. Ray and his wife, Arnee, live and work in a former Crocker Bank building on Seventh Street in San Pedro, California. San Pedro is a harbor and fishing town located south of LAX off the 405, as we say here in southern California. Probably one of the few if not the last California coastal town that hasn't been totally gentrified. Seventh Street is a somewhat funky and interesting street of art galleries and shops. A nostalgic reminder of the way Southern California coastal towns were thirty years ago before inflated real estate values forced out local businesses. The night deposit drop on the front of the building tells us that we are in the right place. We soon learn that Ray now uses the night deposit drop for film pickup and delivery. The photo lab driver has a key that allows him to retrieve and return the film. The former bank which the Carofanos purchased six years ago serves as their home, studio, darkroom, and as an art gallery, Studio 478. Ray and Arnee are very active in the San Pedro art community, particpating in First Thursday when the galleries have open houses in the evening. According to a recent newspaper article in Random Lengths by Taso Papadakis, Studio 478's opening night parties are legendary for their good exhibitions, live music, and warm atmosphere provided by the host and hostess, Ray and Arnee.

Ray and Arne have been together for about thirteen years. Arne is a painter, SX-70 photographer, former TWA flight attendant, and an active participant in their combined artistic lives. Arnee is responsible for the digital post-production on the commercial shoots. Ray is a commercial and fine art photographer who readily acknowledges Arne's contribution to the success of his career. Ray says that, Arnee is one of the best things that happened to me in my life. She supports my work and what I do. She takes care of all the paperwork in dealing with galleries, consignment forms, where prints are and where they are going. Which allows me time to be creative. There was a period of time in the eighties when I did very little personal work. I was shooting commercially everyday and there wasn't much time for personal projects. When I met Arnee, she was looking at my personal work and said what is this about? How come you are not doing this anymore? At that point, I asked myself that question and started to get back into shooting for myself.

Ray grew up, an only child, in Connecticut, north of Camden in Mount Carmel. As an only child Ray said, that he had periods of loneliness and that he would create diversions, building forts and tree houses, fishing, and exploring the woods. Woods where he once was lost and which he describes as mysterious. Carol McCusker in her text for Carofano's exhibit, terra phantasma, at the Museum of Photographic Arts quotes Carofano, Today, sometimes when I'm working in a wooded area, I relive that experience, and when looking through the viewfinder, I try to isolate things to get that feeling of a strange and mysterious landscape...which allows the viewer to sense what I feel.

Carofano is almost entirely a self-taught photographer. He attended Connecticut State and took one photography class at the Pierre School in New Haven, Connecticut. It was in the sixties when Carofano started getting serious about art. He was going in to New York City almost every weekend to visit the museums especially the Whitney and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

1967 was a seminal year for Carofano. He was starting to photograph seriously and as many of his generation did he moved to California. Ray says that he had long hair (he now wears his gray hair in a short braid) but that he didn't dress like a hippie. He did photograph a love-in at Elysian Fields in Griffith Park. In 1968, he returned to Connecticut for a year before returning to California for good. Ray worked at the Riviera Camera store located on Pacific Coast Highway in Redondo Beach. At that time, manufacturers of camera equipment offered sales people deep discounts on their products as a sales incentive. Ray was able to purchase a Nikon at ten percent below dealer's cost. The store owner helped Ray by displaying his photographs in the store and by introducing him to the owner of an advertising agency which specialized in real estate. One of his first jobs was in Santa Barbara photographing an ocean front property slated for luxury condominiums. Ray's job was to photograph oceanscapes at the site. As Carofano's work increased for the advertising agency he reduced his hours at the camera store. Ray was working out of his house in Torrance. His next step was to convert the garage into a shooting area. When he out grew the garage, he rented an industrial space in Gardena for twenty years, until moving to San Pedro. Carofano's commercial speciality was product photography. He has shot everything from automobiles to computers. Through his early product photography for All-Trade, a manufacturer of hand-tools, he became known for tool photography and has shot for Makita. Carofano is still very much involved in commercial work. He says that, commercial work really pays the bills and allows him to pursue his personal work.Ó Ray says, I didn't even plan on becoming a commercial photographer. I had this fantasy that I could make a living back in the sixties selling my own personal prints. That fantasy came to a screeching halt with a pregnant wife. When Ray's first wife was pregnant, there were very few or maybe no photographers who were able to make a living selling prints of their personal work. In December of 1970, I saw Ansel Adams' Moonrise Over Hernandez for sale for one hundred and seventy-five dollars at the Focus Gallery in San Francisco. I think that even Ansel Adams, who was and probably still is the most widely known photographer in the United States, wasn't able to make a living from print sales until late in his career. Carofano's personal work does sell very well as evidenced by thirty print sales at his 2003 solo exhibit at the Couturier Gallery in Los Angeles. He is aslo represented by the Staton-Greenberg Gallery in Santa Barbara.

Around 1994, after thinking about Arnee's questions about his personal work, Ray made a conscious decision to devote more time to his personal work. When we visited Carofano in February, he was preparing for an exhibition, Ray Carofano/Ten Years, to be held at El Camino College Art Gallery in Torrance. The exhibit consisted of one hundred prints covering the time period 1994-2004. Carofano has a large body of work organized into seven (at this time) series. The titles of the series and the year that Carofano began some of them are, Abstracts (early 1990's), Landscapes (1994), High Tension (1994), Faces of San Pedro (1998), Cuba, Desert, and the Mojave Series (2003). All of Carofano's personal work is shot in black and white. He still primarily shoots film for his personal work but has digital equipment for commercial jobs. He makes his own prints in the darkroom but also prints some images digitally. For the El Camino exhibition, he made thirty-three 8x10 silver gelatin prints of the series, Faces of San Pedro. The black and white silver gelatin prints are split-toned with sepia and selenium. The 8x10's were then scanned and printed digitally as 22x28 inch prints on the Epson 9600 printer. These prints were exhibited in a large grid for the recent El Camino College show.

The Faces of San Pedro series has two distinctions from the other six series. This series is the only one with people as the subject and the only series that was shot in the studio. Carofano shot the portraits with a Mamiya RB67 and strobe lighting. Faces is a portrait series of local San Pedro residents whose faces reflect their hard lives. Carofano met and became friends with some of the subjects in a San Pedro bar that is a meeting place for the artistic community. In the Random Lengths article, Carofano is quoted as saying that, ' Most of the sessions were late at night sometimes two or three after the bars had closed. I think the fact that my subjects and I had a few drinks made for more casual shooting.

Bill Kouwenhoven, the editor of photo metro magazine, wrote about the Faces of San Pedro series in a brochure for Carofano's 2003 exhibition, Personal Alchemies, at the Couturier Gallery in Los Angeles. Kouwenhoven writes: "The Faces of Pedro is a huge investment in time and energy on the part of the photographer and his subjects. San Pedro was always a tough town, and the collapse of the fishing fleet and closing of the canneries have left a deep void on those living there that the expansion of the Port of Los Angeles has yet to fill. In a way, it seems a town that Steinbeck or Chandler would have written about: hard, proud, mule stubborn, and hard pressed by the outside world." As Carofano tells it..."The faces tell a story, a sort of history about San Pedro like nothing else I have photographed."...Carofano's portraits are haunted by the haggard visages and dark shadings that speak of those moving through long nights looking for something that was, and might never be again. They are portraits of characters, not caricatures. Carofano transcends the risk of letting the images fall into cliches, and that is very hard to do.

The High Tension series begun in 1994 which Carofano continues to work on when he finds a film worthy subject is one of my personal favorites. Using his selective vision and creative darkroom techniques Carofano makes luminous abstract images from a subject that one usually thinks of as a blight on the landscape. Karen Sinsheimer, Curator of Photography at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, has written about this series: Delicate yet strong with design dictated by function, these man-made structures become architectural abstractions of near beauty. On his website (www.carofano.com) Ray writes about his landscape work, "...seldom interested in the overall landscape. It's the bits and pieces that make up the landscape that is of interest to me."

Approximately four years ago, Carofano began experimenting with the plastic Holga camera. If you google the Holga camera on the web, you will get 33,100 results. Out of these thousands of possibilities, I was able to learn that the Holga is made in China and production began in 1982. One of the attributes of the Holga is that the lens is plastic which makes an image that is sharp in the center while the sharpness falls off on the corners. It is this quality that appeals to photographers interested in altering the reality of their images. The Holga is an unintentional successor to the Diana which was another Chinese -made plastic camera popular with artists in the 1970's. As a little sidenote, I googled the Diana camera and got 752,000 possibilities. The Holga costs approximately sixteen dollars and is available in camera stores and on the web. The Holga only has one shutter speed and that is 1/100 of a second. It has two aperture settings, f8 and f11. It uses 120 size film and can be formatted as a 6x6 centimeter or as a 6x4.5 centimeter image. Carofano owns six Holgas. Multiple Holgas allow him to use different films at the same time. Because of the single shutter speed Carofano will use a tripod in low-light situations and trip the shutter repeatedly, sometimes as many as sixteen times, in order to build up exposure. Neutral density filters are helpful to cut exposure when working in bright sunlight. Ray also owns a couple of Holgas that have been modified to allow the shutter to remain open, like a B setting, for time exposures.

Carofano's most recent work, The Mojave Series, was shot exclusively with the Holga. On a November 2003 trip to Montana, Ray took his new digital camera, a Mamiya 645, a Leica, and the six Holgas. He says, "...it was too confusing. When your eye sees something, you have to make this decision of which camera to use. On the last four trips to the Mojave, I only took the Holgas. Then, I started seeing that way. After the trip to Montana, I found myself in the computer room, spending hours and hours working on an image, trying to make an image from an eight thousand dollar camera look like an image from a sixteen dollar camera."

With the new Mojave Series, Carofano tones his prints with selenium for permanence. Then, he tints his prints with tea, a combination of Lipton Tea and Berg's Organic Yellow Dye. He experimented for over a year and a half to achieve the best results. In the beginning he ran into problems with staining and unevenness. He discovered that a metal tea pot was one of the problems and he switched to glass, which helped and then he started using distilled water. Tinting, as opposed to toning, affects the whole image not just the silver parts as in toning. Carofano is very open and generous with his technical knowledge. He has taught workshops about his techniques and feels that even using the same techniques photographers see differently and will not come up with identical images.

Carofano is a master printer and over many years of experimentation has developed many sophisticated burning, dodging, and flashing techniques which give his prints their luminous other worldly quality.

He works with two Beseler enlargers. He uses the second enlarger to burn the edges of the print with pieces of plexiglass. This diffusion and burning process gives him the bleeding black effect in his prints. At one time, Carofano was flashing his prints with a 2000 watt second power pack after the print was fully developed and fully stopped but before being moved to the fix. The strobe head was about three feet above the print. He would blast the print four times. This technique gave the print a kind of peach color. If one was to flash the print in the fix, it would become solarized. A four hundred dollar Metrolux II timer which Carofano uses to program nine time sequences allows him to keep track of his complicated print manipulations. My friend, Tom, found it ironic that Ray uses a four hundred dollar timer to make prints from a sixteen dollar camera. The Holga with its soft focus and light leaks has freed Carofano from some of his complicated darkroom manipulations.

We ended our visit to San Pedro with a late lunch with Ray, Arnee, and an artist friend of theirs, Ron Linden. Ron teaches at Long Beach City College and Los Angeles Harbor College. Ron is part of the Carofanos' circle of artist friends and had come to help Ray hang the upcoming show at Studio 478. We ate at UtroÕs, a restaurant overlooking the main channel of the Los Angeles Harbor. We could see the huge cranes that are used to load and unload container ships. Ron or Ray told us that a good crane operator could move one hundred containers in an hour. We talked about art, politics, life in San Pedro, and the possibility of returning for a First Thursday evening.

On the way home Tom and I stopped at Hennessey and Ingalls, an art and architecture bookstore in Santa Monica to satisfy our photography book yearnings. Tom bought a book of Harry Callahan photographs. I bought a book of photographs all taken in 1968 by Magnum photographers, 1968-Magnum Throughout The World, which seemed appropriate considering that both Carofano and I had photographed events of the sixties in our early days.

Irene Kung

Chiaroscuro Contemporary Art, Santa Fe

Forma Galleria, Milan

Valentina Bonomo Gallery, Rome

"Guggenheim Museum", 2010

"House of Parliment", 2009

"Madona del Soccorso, Villa Jovis", 2012

"Tower Eiffel", 2010

"Edificio Barolo, Buenos Aires", 2008

"Flat Iron Building, New York City", 2008

"Willow Tree", 2012

"Airport Beijing", 2012

"Albero Neve", 2010

"Nuvole III", 2011

"Condor", 2006

"Mosque of Muhammad Ali, Ciro", 2010

I am most grateful to Irene Kung for allowing me to
feature her work here on my blog.

Irene Kung interviewed by Ludovico Pratesi on the occasion of her photo exhibition at Pescheria Museum of Contemporary Art in Pesaro:

L.P.: When you look over a city you intend to photograph, what criteria guide your eye?

I.K.: First of all I walk around the city without taking pictures. Walking, I feel the atmosphere of the city, I walk around the monuments, I observe the light. Usually there’s a moment when I get to feel the atmosphere of the city and its monuments. That is my starting point. Later on I decide at what time the light helps me to portray a monument the way I perceive it.

L.P.: What are the reasons behind your choice of subjects?

I.K.: The choice of subject is essential. A monument, a sculpture, the sea. Everything that surrounds us can inspire a pause for reflection, for meditation.

L.P.: Each monument is interpreted in a metaphysical sense, as if suspended in mid air or in an artificial space. Why do you eliminate the ambient context?

I.K.: I don’t intend to portray reality. What is important is the state of mind, the thought. When the photo was taken there were people running around the monument, there was motion everywhere. In my work movement and noise disappear into the dark. Everybody is on the run and I stop still.

L.P.: What are the concepts you aim to emphasize in your images?

I.K. Silence and immobility. To stop and see, feel, think and dream. I aim to respond to people’s inner being at this time when our world is rushing towards decline. The void. Unfilled space, the darkness around the subject is more important than the subject itself. Today there is too much of everything around us, and I concentrate on elimination and the creation of voids. Empty space offers the chance of giving time a dimension.

Time out. Wasting time as a response to the capitalist dictum that time is money. The speed of communications may overwhelm us, so we are obliged to be on guard.

The dream. The dream-like aspect of my work is not accidental. Working by intuition I approach the mysterious and essential content of the subject. Daydreaming makes it possible for us to see what’s behind things. We can’t think if we can’t imagine.

Nietzsche considered the dream as an essential part of experience, giving it the same importance as being awake. He compared day-dream thought to the thinking of the human kind when they were just starting out.

L.P.: Do you think these images might represent the noble soul of this city, beyond space and time?

I.K.: My quest is focused on the truth in the deepest sense of the meaning. A concept which I cannot express through images unless they reflect a reality, surrounding it with an aura of mystery, of suspension in time and space. I think the artist should give the audience what the audience doesn’t have, and therefore the duty of a contemporary artist is to convey an intimate and positive message that can make people dream.

Says Hölderlin: “ Where the risk grows, there also grows what saves you”. Paraphrasing it, we can say that where the negative reality grows, there also grows the dream that saves you.

Lady Clementina Hawarden

Biography from the Victoria and Albert Museum

Luminous Lint Portfolio

Selection from the Victoria and Albert Museum Collection

Selection of Photographs from "The Telegraph"

Themes and Styles from the Victoria and Albert Museum

Working Methods from the Victoria and Albert Museum

"Untitled", 1861

"Agnes and Lionel", ca. 1862

"Clementina Maude and Florence Elizabeth", ca. 1864

"At the Window", 1864

"Agnes Elphinstone", ca.1861

Biography from artdaily.com:

Born Clementina Elphinstone Fleeming in Dunbartonshire in 1822, she was the third of five children of a British father, Admiral Charles Elphinstone Fleeming (1774-1840), and a Spanish mother, Catalina Paulina Alessandro (1800-1880). In 1845 she married Cornwallis Maude, an Officer in the Life Guards. In 1856 Maude's father, Viscount Hawarden, died and his title, and considerable wealth, passed to Cornwallis.

The surviving photographs suggest that Clementina, now Lady Hawarden, began to take photographs on the Hawarden's Irish estate at Dundrum, Co. Tipperary, from late 1857. Many of these were taken with a stereoscopic camera, and the present collection contains several Dundrum images which are one of the pair that comprise a stereoscopic image.

In 1859 the family also acquired a new London home at 5 Princes Gardens (much of the square survives as built, but No. 5 has gone). From 1862 onwards Lady Hawarden used the entire first floor of the property as a studio, within which she kept a few props, many of which have come to be synonymous with her work: gossamer curtains, a Mark Haworth-Booth offered Virginia Dodier the opportunity to make a freestanding mirror, a small chest of drawers and the iconic 'empire star' wallpaper, as seen in several of these photographs. The superior aspect of the studio can also go some way to account for Hawarden's sophisticated, subtle and pioneering use of natural light in her images.

It was also here that Lady Hawarden focused upon taking photographs of her eldest daughters, Isabella Grace, Clementina, and Florence Elizabeth, whom she would often dress up in costume tableau. The girls were frequently shot - often in romantic and sensual poses - in pairs, or, if alone, with a mirror or with their back to the camera. Hawarden's photographic exploration of identity, otherness, the doppelgänger and female sexuality, as expressed in the vast majority of these photographs, was incredibly progressive when considered in relation to her contemporaries, most notably Julia Margaret Cameron. As Graham Ovenden comments in Clementina Lady Hawarden (1974), "Clementina Hawarden struck out into areas and depicted moods unknown to the art photographers of her age. Her vision of languidly tranquil ladies carefully dressed and posed in a symbolist light is at opposite poles from Mrs Cameron's images...her work...constitutes a unique document within nineteenth-century photography."

She exhibited, and won silver medals, in the 1863 and 1864 exhibitions of the Photographic Society, and was admired by both Oscar Rejlander, and Lewis Carroll who acquired five images which went into the Gernsheim Collection and are now in Texas. In 1865 Lady Hawarden died, and although her loss was regretted in the photographic journals, her work was soon forgotten.

A major retrospective of Lady Hawarden's life and work can be found in Virginia Dodier's book, "Lady Hawarden: Studies from Life, 1857-1864".

Born Clementina Elphinstone Fleeming in Dunbartonshire in 1822, she was the third of five children of a British father, Admiral Charles Elphinstone Fleeming (1774-1840), and a Spanish mother, Catalina Paulina Alessandro (1800-1880). In 1845 she married Cornwallis Maude, an Officer in the Life Guards. In 1856 Maude's father, Viscount Hawarden, died and his title, and considerable wealth, passed to Cornwallis. The surviving photographs suggest that Clementina, now Lady Hawarden, began to take photographs on the Hawarden's Irish estate at Dundrum, Co. Tipperary, from late 1857. Many of these were taken with a stereoscopic camera, and the present collection contains several Dundrum images which are one of the pair that comprise a stereoscopic image. In 1859 the family also acquired a new London home at 5 Princes Gardens (much of the square survives as built, but No. 5 has gone). From 1862 onwards Lady Hawarden used the entire first floor of the property as a studio, within which she kept a few props, many of which have come to be synonymous with her work: gossamer curtains, a Mark Haworth-Booth offered Virginia Dodier the opportunity to make a freestanding mirror, a small chest of drawers and the iconic 'empire star' wallpaper, as seen in several of these photographs. The superior aspect of the studio can also go some way to account for Hawarden's sophisticated, subtle and pioneering use of natural light in her images. It was also here that Lady Hawarden focused upon taking photographs of her eldest daughters, Isabella Grace, Clementina, and Florence Elizabeth, whom she would often dress up in costume tableau. The girls were frequently shot - often in romantic and sensual poses - in pairs, or, if alone, with a mirror or with their back to the camera. Hawarden's photographic exploration of identity, otherness, the doppelgänger and female sexuality, as expressed in the vast majority of these photographs, was incredibly progressive when considered in relation to her contemporaries, most notably Julia Margaret Cameron. As Graham Ovenden comments in Clementina Lady Hawarden (1974), "Clementina Hawarden struck out into areas and depicted moods unknown to the art photographers of her age. Her vision of languidly tranquil ladies carefully dressed and posed in a symbolist light is at opposite poles from Mrs Cameron's images...her work...constitutes a unique document within nineteenth-century photography." She exhibited, and won silver medals, in the 1863 and 1864 exhibitions of the Photographic Society, and was admired by both Oscar Rejlander, and Lewis Carroll who acquired five images which went into the Gernsheim Collection and are now in Texas. In 1865 Lady Hawarden died, and although her loss was regretted in the photographic journals, her work was soon forgotten.

More Information: http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=60585#.UYFHeEonlqN[/url]
Copyright © artdaily.org

Nickolas Muray

Nickolas Muray Archive
Nickolas Muray (Augusto Mariante) on You Tube

Nickolas Muray Color Print Collection at The George Eastman House

Nickolas Muray Collection at The George Eastman House

Nickolas Muray Collection on "Looking for Mabel Normand"

Nickolas Muray Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Nickolas Muray Collection at MoMA

Nickolas Muray Papers: Smithsonian Archives of American Art

Nickolas Muray: Portrait of a Photographer at The Pera Museum

Nickolas Muray Portfolio at the Beckett Fine Art Gallery

NPR -- the Picture Show: Color Sells: Nickolas Muray Food Photography


"Marilyn Monroe"

"Langston Hughes"

"Babe Ruth"

"Gretta Garbo"

"Gloria Swanson"

"Doris Covarrubias"

"Doris Kenyon"

"Andres Segovia"

"Frida on Bench"

"Frida and Diego with Hat"

"Frida Painting 'The Two Fridas'"

"People Gathered Around Dodge in Showroom"

"Magician Revealing Costumed Girl Carried on a Shelf"

"McCall's Styles & Beauty Cover: Shoes"

I am most grateful to Mimi Muray Levitt of the Nickolas Muray Archive for allowing me to
feature her father's work here on my blog.

The following biography is to be found on the Nickolas Muray Archive Web Site. It is abridged and adapted from Salomon Grimberg's excellent book, "I Will Never Forget You", which tells of the friendship and love shared between Frida Kahlo and Nickolas Muray:

"Nickolas Muray was ‘a man for all seasons.’ When he emigrated from his native Hungary to the United States, at twenty-one years of age, he brought with him the belief he would make an indelible contribution. At the time of his death, he seems to have photographed everyone and everything, from presidents to pea soup. Most Americans were familiar with his photographs, if not their creator. Despite talent, personal charm, handsome looks, and boundless creative powers, he managed to live a self-effacing life. He was internationally renowned as a champion fencer; he was a pilot, and a lover of women. The most famous of his lovers was Mexican artist Frida Kahlo with whom he lived an affair that lasted ten years. During that time, he photographed her more than any other person outside his immediate family.

Nickolas Muray was born Miklos Mandl on Febuary 15, 1892 in Szeged, Hungary. Although his name appears in the Book of Birth Registration of the Jewish Community, he was not given a Jewish name. Two years later, his father Samu, who worked as a postal employee, moved the family to Budapest in search of better educational and economic opportunities. His parents favored Miklos over the other children, as he was the most intelligent and unusually handsome, with an engaging personality. Not only did he have a temper, but he was strong-willed, rebellious, and unwilling to accept ‘no’ for an answer. Repeatedly humiliated by rampant anti-Semitism, he resented being denied, for being Jewish, opportunities given other boys. He decided as a boy that he would one day see the world, and never be confined to the limitations imposed upon him by an unfair society.

In August of 1913, armed with $25, a fifty-word Esperanto dictionary, and an unrelenting determination, twenty-one-year-old Miklos Murai arrived at Ellis Island, where he became Nickolas Muray. He immediately found work in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, at Stockinger Printing Co, doing engraving and color separation. He signed up for English night classes, eager to leave behind any trace of his accent, and he proclaimed himself an atheist.

In 1920, a friend suggested Nick open his own studio. Nick moved to a 2-room apartment at 129 MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, where he lived in one room and worked in the other. Forced to economize at first, Nick kept all the lights out, except for one bulb. When a client rang the doorbell, he would turn on all the lights. Fortunately, Nick did not have to wait long for his big break. The art director for Harper’s Bazaar commissioned Nick to photograph Florence Reed, who was starring on Broadway.

Overnight, his evocative, soft focus style of portrait photography became a sensation. He was soon photographing everybody that was anybody: actors, dancers, film stars, politicians, and writers. As he grew more successful, he held Wednesday night soirees in the studio for friends and acquaintances to meet, eat, and drink – many brought flasks, as it was prohibition time. It was not unusual for Martha Graham, Langston Hughes, Helen Hayes, Paul Robeson, Gertrude Vanderbilt, Eugene O’Neill, or even Jean Cocteau to make an appearance.

In 1923 Nick met artist Miguel Covarrubias, whose friendship would change Nick’s life. Nick and Miguel contributed to many of the same publications, and became the best of friends. Nick visited Miguel in his native Mexico in 1931. On that trip, Nick met Frida Kahlo, who was married to Diego Rivera. Nick and Frida’s first meeting was certainly serendipitous as Frida was supposed to have been with Diego in San Francisco.

Over the next ten years, Nick and Frida carried on a love affair in which they traveled to see one another in Mexico and New York. Their love affair is richly documented, both in their correspondence to one another, and by Nick’s iconic portraits of Frida. But despite their mutual passion, Nick eventually came to see that Frida would always stay true to Diego. He moved on with his life in New York, but a part of him would always be in love with Frida.

Following the stock market crash, Nick shifted his major focus to advertisement photography. In 1931 Nick pioneered the first illustration from a color photograph to be published in an American mass-publication magazine, a swimming pool advertisement in Ladies’ Home Journal featuring seventeen live models wear beach wear in Miami. Even charging $1,000 for a color page, he couldn’t fill the incoming orders fast enough. Soon he also had a contract with Time to do color covers for the magazine. In this period, Nick became one of the leading practicioners of color photography.

Throughout his life, Nick practiced fencing at the highest levels. Even while maintaining his place at the cutting edge of his profession, he found time to train and compete. He was the U.S. Saber Champion in 1928 and 29, and he represented the US in the 1928 and 1932 Olympics.

Nickolas Muray died while fencing in New York City, in 1965. At the time of his death, he had won over sixty fencing medals, and was hailed as “One of the twenty greatest fencers in American History.""

From January 24 through April 21, 2013, the Pera Museum in Istanbul, Turkey hosted "Nickolas Muray, Portrait of a Photographer", a retrospective of his work. It was curated by Salomon Grimberg in collaboration with the Nickolas Muray Photo Archives and the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film.

The following is from Mr. Muray's essay "On the Portrait" in the catalog. It was originally published in John Wallace Gillies, "Principles of Pictorial Photography" (New York: Falk Publishing Company, 1923), pp. 41-43:

On his use of a soft focus lens:

"I favor the soft focus lens because personally I am well satisfied in obtaining a pleasing, general effect as opposed to representing a subject in all its minutest detail. . . . I want my impression of people as seen through my own eyes at a reasonable distance and not through a magnifying glass. Nor do I desire to see them through a haze. Therefore, I don't strive for fuzziness of dimness in a picture. The soft focus lens -- yes, but used intelligently."

On his use of short exposure times:

"With a short exposure a fleeting glance, a twinkly of the eye, or a momentary mood is caught and this tells us more of a sitter than ten or twenty seconds of concentrated staring and tense muscles. With a short exposure one doesn't assume a natural expression; one has it in spite of oneself."

On his use of the retouching pencil:

"Modifying a negative to my mind is . . .absolutely essential when the camera gives me an overthrutful and erroneous representation of the subject."

Also in the catalog is Mr. Muray's essay "Photographing People in Color", which first appeared in "The Complete Photographer", no. 1. June 20, 1943, pp. 63-67, copyright 1943, National Educational Alliance, Inc. Mr. Muray wrote:

"Complementary colors, judiciously used, will enhance a color print. . . .Colors can express personality, and the colors your choose to emphasize should be in keeping with the personality before the camera."

"Perhaps it will help to consider every picture as consisting of two main parts: subject matter and background. These are almost equally important, particularly in color photography."

George Hurrell

George Hurrell, Master of Hollywood Glamour Photography

(Official web site of The George Hurrell Estate)

Andrew Weiss Gallery Portfolio

Books by George Hurrell on Amazon

Hurrell Estate Collection

George Hurrell, Laguna to Hollywood Exhibit at the Laguna Art Museum

George Hurrell: Legends of Light documentary directed by Carl Colby on You Tube

George Hurell: the Master of the Hollywood Still by Lucy Davies for The Telegraph

Holden Luntz Gallery Portfolio

HurrellPhotos.com

Starlight and Shadow by Virginia Postrel for The Atlantic

Ramon Navarro

Pancho Barnes

Dorothy Jordan

Greta Garbo

Jean Harlow

Carole Lombard

Billy Haines

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

Gypsy Rose Lee

Irene Homer

Dorothy Sebastian

Katherine Hepburn

Loretta Young

Paulette Goddard

The Estate of George Hurrell owns the copyright to all photographs posted above. I am most grateful to the Estate of George Hurrell and GeorgeHurrell.com for allowing me to repost them here.

The George Hurrell Story from George Hurrell, Master of Hollywood Glamour Photography (Official web site of The George Hurrell Estate):

George Edward Hurrell was born on June 1, 1904 in Cincinnati, Ohio. His father, Edward, was born there too, of English and Irish parents. His paternal grandfather had come from Essex, England where the family had been successful shoe manufacturers for several centuries. Hurrell’s mother, Anna Mary Eble was born in Germany, but had moved with her family to Cincinatti as a child.

Hurrell came from a large Catholic family and had four brothers and a sister. His youngest brother, Randy, studied to become a priest, but quit the seminary about one month before taking his vows. His sister, Elizabeth, went to a nunnery and almost took her vows but decided not to, eventually marrying and raising a family. An alter boy during his youth, upon reflecting on what his own career path might be, a young George Hurrell initially signed up at the Quigley Seminary in Chicago to become a priest, but decided to go to art school instead. He said, “As long as I can remember I wanted to be an artist. As a boy, I was drawing all the time, in school and out. Art was my favorite class in high school.” Following graduation from high school, that summer he enrolled at the Chicago Art Institute, and later took night school classes at the Academy of Fine Arts studying painting.

Hurrell became acquainted with the camera while in art school, because students typically photographed various indoor and outdoor scenes to use as reference while painting. Also, serious art students made sure they had a ready inventory of photographic images that they wanted to paint, so that they could use these as reference during the cold winter months when it snowed.

Then, one spring day in 1925, while still attending the Art Institute, Hurrell heard that famed landscape painter, Edgar Alwyn Payne, an alum of the Art Institute, would be giving a lecture at the school. Mr. Payne was passing through town on his way back home to his wife and family in Laguna Beach after having spent some time lecturing on the East Coast. Hurrell attended the lecture, and afterwards Payne viewed the student’s work. Payne was particularly impressed with Hurrells’ experimental painting style, and also liked a recently completed landscape painting. Payne told him, “If you plan to be a serious artist, you should come back with me to Laguna Beach and paint. This is where it is all happening.” Since Hurrell wanted to be a fine artist, he eagerly accepted the opportunity.

Payne and Hurrell set out for Laguna Beach by car, arriving just in time for Hurrell to celebrate his 21st birthday on June 1, 1925.

Hurrell had brought with him from Chicago a second hand view camera so that he could photograph various potential scenes during the warm spring and summer months. But of course, unlike Chicago, it never snowed in Laguna Beach, and so, at least initially, the camera stayed stored away in the closet at the hillside beach shack. Hurrell quickly settled into the western life style, enjoying the Mediterranean climate, spending his time going to the beach, fishing, and, of course, painting. He also managed to find time to experiment with his camera.

Hurrell, always very practical, had discovered soon after his arrival in the seaside community that taking pictures of local artists and the social scene paid much more readily than painting. But he still continued to paint.

For Christmas dinner in 1925, Hurrell was the guest of the Payne family at the home of William A. Griffith, another prominent Laguna Beach plein air painter. Payne was founder of the Laguna Beach Art Association and William A. Griffith was the President of the Association, and it was now time to introduce Hurrell to all the major artists in the community. However, the most important person he met that evening was not a famous or influential painter, but a major character, three years his senior, by the name of Florence Leontine Lowe Barnes.

Florence was a large good-hearted woman with a big smile and hearty laugh. She was extremely intelligent, could hold her own in any conversation with ‘the guys’ and shared Hurrell’s passion for fishing. She also was a treasure trove for off-color jokes and witty observations. She was all this and married to a prominent Pasadena Episcopal minister. The two became fast friends.

Florence had money — big money – having been born into one of the wealthiest families in America. In addition to her estate in Pasadena, Florence also owned a large estate on 40 acres along the cliffs in Laguna Beach. There she installed the first fresh water swimming pool in Laguna Beach over looking the ocean.

George Hurrell was a frequent pool-side guest at her home in Laguna Beach, and they also found time to sneak off and get some fishing in. Whenever they went fishing, they had a bet going who would catch the biggest fish of the day. Florence always set the bet, “Whoever loses has to cook the fish.” Florence was quite competitive and she hated to cook, and so George’s cooking and barbecuing skills greatly improved and became legendary in the seaside community.

Florence loved to host parties at her home in Laguna Beach, and party she did. She had her friends over from Hollywood -- Ramon Novarro among them. In fact, Ramon Novarro was her best friend. At the time, Novarro was the most famous and the highest paid movie star in the world.

As her marriage to the Pasadena Episcopal minister was no longer working, Florence decided to take a trip alone to see the lost city of Machu Pichu in Peru and have time to herself so that she could “just think things through.” Unfortunately, the ship she impulsively boarded in San Pedro turned out to be a gun runner for Mexican revolutionaries. Although initially quite excited about the prospect of a new adventure, she reconsidered and decided to jump ship in San Blas, Mexico, and spent the next seven months roaming through Mexico. When she returned to Laguna Beach, she had a new nickname: Pancho. No longer Florence Leontine Barnes, she was now known as Pancho Barnes -- a name, by the way, she kept through three more marriages.

In 1928 Pancho decided that she wanted to learn how to fly an airplane. She had heard that Orville Wright (of the famous Wright Brothers) was the person who reviewed and signed all application requests. But Orville had a reputation for trying to discourage women to fly. He didn’t like woman driving cars either. Evidently, Orville was worried that if a woman crashed a plane, the publicity could harm the new aviation industry. Pancho did not like the prospect of rejection merely based on gender, so she decided to play a joke on Orville. Along with the written application -- which never inquired as to gender -- applicants had to submit a photo. The photo was later glued onto the license, if Orville signed off. Pancho remembered that her artist friend and painter, George Hurrell, owned a camera. She had seen some of his photos, and thought that his photographic skills were even more impressive than his painting talents. So she asked Hurrell to take her picture for her pilot’s application. For the application photo she dressed up like a man – smoking a cigarette, dirty fingernails and all!

Hurrell felt bad making his good friend Pancho appear so unkempt for the pilot’s license application, and so he insisted on taking some “proper” photos of her. He took several photos of her at her home in Laguna Beach, posed against the back of her favorite chair. He made her look beautiful. And she was not your classic beauty at all. Naturally, she loved them.

Orville signed the application and off she went. She soloed after just a few hours of instruction.

By the way, Pancho later went on to be the first female stunt pilot in Hollywood, Lockheed’s first female test pilot, founded one of the first unions in Hollywood, and set numerous speed records in her Travel Air Mystery Ship airplane whose engine was specially tuned by her best flying buddy and friend, Howard Hughes. Many historians have commented that Pancho was one of the most skilled pilots of the Golden Age of Flight -- regardless of gender. She later re-invented herself in the 1940’s and 1950’s as the owner and hostess of the famous Happy Bottom Riding Club, which was a dude ranch, restaurant and hotel on what is now the site of Edwards Air Force Base. Most people remember Pancho from the film and book, The Right Stuff. In that book and subsequent film of the same name, she was the owner of the restaurant/bar where all the pilots like Chuck Yeager hung out. She always thought that it would be Chuck Yeager who would break the sound barrier, and she was correct. In fact, the achievement was famously celebrated at the Happy Bottom Riding Club.

In 1929, Pancho’s best friend was Ramon Novarro -- who was the biggest movie star at MGM, and also the most famous silent movie star in the world. Novarro, who was of Mexican heritage, was worried that he might not make the transition to sound film because of his slight accent. However, he had a wonderful operatic voice, and so -- to hedge his bets -- he decided that he could always reinvent himself as an opera star in Europe. But he needed some publicity photos to accomplish this. The danger was that if word leaked back to MGM that he was nervous about his career, his new salary negotiations could be jeopardized. So, he could not use any of the usual Hollywood photographers in town -- or anywhere else for that matter.

Pancho had an idea. “Why not use her friend, George Hurrell, to take the photos!” At the time, Hurrell was totally unknown. Besides, Pancho loved the glamorous photos that Hurrell had taken of her, and secretly believed that his destiny was in photography. And so, at Pancho’s urging, Ramon Novarro had a series of photographs taken by George Hurrell.

Ramon Novarro was at this time best remembered for his starring role in the silent film Ben Hur, which was the ‘Star Wars’ of its day in terms of ticket sales.

In one of these photos, "New Orpheus", from 1929, Ramon Novarro is dressed as Parcivil, and is standing in contemplation of his sword, next to Pancho Barnes’ horse. When Pancho saw this photograph, she exclaimed: “If George Hurrell can make my horse look as beautiful as the most handsome man in America, then everyone should be using George Hurrell as their photographer.”

As it turned out, Ramon Novarro did quite well in his contract negotiations and remained at MGM. No opera career. However, Novarro showed the photos that Hurrell took of him to his best friend back at MGM who was having problems of a different sort. Her name was Norma Shearer, who was married to the head of production at MGM -- Irving Thalberg. Norma had recently read a script, called the "Divorcee", that had a part that she very much wanted to play. The role required her to be a sexy vamp -- a modern woman. But, up until this time, Norma Shearer was basically best known for her “all-American girl next door” image. So this role would greatly change her image, and also give her the opportunity to show others that she was a skilled actress, capable of playing several kinds of roles. However, when she showed the script to her husband, he replied “Honey, I don’t think this part is for you. You are not sexy in THAT way.” Well, that really got her upset hearing this from her husband.

Shortly after the ‘bad news’ message from her husband, Ramon Novarro visited Norma with the stack of photos that George Hurrell had taken of him. Looking at the "New Orpheus" photo Hurrell had taken of him she said, “Ramon, you are so sexy in this photo.” In continuing to look through the other photos Hurrell had taken she added, “I have never seen you photographed so beautifully.” Ramon replied, “Yes, Hurrell captured my mood exactly.” Well, she was sold. She decided to have some photos taken by Hurrell so that she could convince her husband that she WAS INDEED sexy in THAT way.

So she showed these photos her husband. He agreed. She was indeed sexy, in THAT way. Their marriage improved, she got the film role. By the way, she won the Academy Award for Best Actress as a result of her portrayal in that film.

It was early October 1929, and Hurrell was offered a job as portrait photographer at MGM. At first he hesitated, thinking that he’d play ‘hard to get.’ Also, he was an independent type person, and didn’t immediately warm to the idea of working for anyone -- even if it was MGM. But then in late October, the stock market crashed. People lost fortunes over night, and even stock brokers were jumping out of windows in desperation. It was the start of the Great Depression. Pancho encouraged her friend to take the job. She even offered to fly him up to Culver City to MGM’s employment office so he could sign his employment contract. Hurrell took her advice. Pancho flew him to his meeting, and on the flight back to Laguna Beach, Hurrell ‘wing walked’ on her plane in celebration.

George Hurell Biography from Wikipedia:

In the late 1920s, Hurrell was introduced to the actor Ramon Novarro, by Pancho Barnes, and agreed to take a series of photographs of him. Novarro was impressed with the results and showed them to the actress Norma Shearer, who was attempting to mould her wholesome image into something more glamorous and sophisticated in an attempt to land the title role in the movie The Divorcee. She asked Hurrell to photograph her in poses more provocative than her fans had seen before. After she showed these photographs to her husband, MGM production chief Irving Thalberg, Thalberg was so impressed that he signed Hurrell to a contract with MGM Studios, making him head of the portrait photography department. But in 1932, Hurrell left MGM after differences with their publicity head, and from then on until 1938 ran his own studio at 8706 Sunset Boulevard.

Throughout the decade, Hurrell photographed every star contracted to MGM, and his striking black-and-white images were used extensively in the marketing of these stars. Among the performers regularly photographed by him during these years were silent screen star Dorothy Jordan, as well as Myrna Loy, Robert Montgomery, Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Rosalind Russell, Carole Lombard and Norma Shearer, who was said to have refused to allow herself to be photographed by anyone else. He also photographed Greta Garbo at a session to produce promotional material for the movie Romance. The session didn't go well and she never used him again.

In the early 1940s Hurrell moved to Warner Brothers Studios photographing, among others Bette Davis, Ann Sheridan, Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Alexis Smith, Maxine Fife, Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney. Later in the decade he moved to Columbia Pictures where his photographs were used to help the studio build the career of Rita Hayworth.

He left Hollywood briefly to make training films for the First Motion Picture Unit of the United States Army Air Forces. When he returned to Hollywood in the mid-1950s his old style of glamour had fallen from favour. Where he had worked hard to create an idealised image of his subjects, the new style of glamour was more earthy and gritty, and for the first time in his career Hurrell was not seen as an innovator. He moved to New York where he worked for fashion magazines and photographed for advertisements before returning to Hollywood in the 1960s.

Hurrell died from his long standing problem with testicular cancer. When his doctors delivered the message to him that he had perhaps only a day left to live, he replied, "Well, at least my girlfriend will never have the pleasure of looking after these two danglers." He died on May 17, 1992.

Since his death, his works have appreciated in value.

Ilse Bing

“I didn’t choose photography; it chose me. I didn’t know it at the time. An artist doesn’t think first then do it, he is driven.”

“I felt that the camera grew an extension of my eyes and moved with me.”

“When I was a little girl, children were looked upon as, “not yet”—something not yet perfect. I resented this approach toward me. But I was no fighter, and I retreated into my own world. This world was so colorful and so rich that I wanted never to become a grown-up.”

"Ilse Bing: Photography Through the Looking Glass" by Larisa Dryansky

ArtNet Portfolio

Edwynn Houk Gallery Portfolio

I Photo Central Portfolio

Lee Gallery Portfolio

Lomography Portfolio

Luminous_Lint Portfolio

New York Times Obituary

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Collection

Victoria and Albert Museum Collection

Whitney Museum Collection

Ilse Bing's work is currently on exhibit at the Delaware Art Museum

(2301 Kentmere Parkway, Wilmington, DE, 302-571-9590)

through September 15, 2013

Ilse Bing's biography from the Victoria and Albert Museum:

Ilse Bing was born into a comfortable Jewish family in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, in 1899. As a child, her education was rich in music and art and her intellectual development was encouraged. In 1920 she enrolled at the University of Frankfurt for a degree in mathematics and physics, but soon changed to study History of Art.

In 1924 she started a doctorate on the Neo-Classical German architect Friedrich Gilly (1772–1808). Needing to illustrate her thesis, Bing bought a Voigtlander camera in 1928 and started to teach herself photography. The following year she bought a Leica, the new and revolutionary 35mm hand-held camera that had been commercially introduced just three years earlier and enabled photographers to capture fast-moving events.

In 1929, while still pursuing her studies, Bing started to gain photojournalism commissions for Das Illustriete Blatt, a monthly supplement of the illustrated magazine Frankfurter Illustriete. She continued to provide regular picture stories for the magazine until 1931.

At this time, Bing also started collaborating with the architect Mart Stam, a prominent modernist who taught at the Bauhaus school of design from 1928-9 and was appointed chief architect to 'Das Neue Frankfurt' (a major construction project) in 1929. Stam commissioned Bing to record all of his housing projects in Frankfurt. He also introduced her to Frankfurt's avant-garde artistic circles, in particular that of artist Ella Bergman-Michel and her husband Robert, great patrons of the arts who frequently hosted artists such as El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters, Jean Arp and Hannah Höch at their house.

With her artistic horizons expanding and finding some commercial success, Bing finally gave up her thesis in the summer of 1929 to concentrate on photography - a rather shocking decision for a woman of her background that astonished her family. The following year, greatly impressed by an exhibition of modern photography in Frankfurt, especially by the work of Paris-based Swiss photographer Florence Henri, Ilse Bing decided to move to Paris, the capital of the avant-garde and epicentre of developments in modern photography.

Ilse Bing arrived in Paris at the end of 1930 and initially found lodgings at the Hotel de Londres, rue Bonaparte, an address recommended by her friend Mart Stam. The Hungarian journalist Heinrich Guttman, who she had met through the publisher of the Frankfurter Illustriete, found her work and lent her his garage to use as a darkroom in exchange for illustrations for articles Guttman wrote for mainly German newspapers. Bing also provided illustrations for a book published by Guttman in 1930 on the history of photography.

For the first couple of years in Paris, Bing still published her work regularly with German newspapers, continuing her association with Das Illustriete Blat. Gradually, she also started to publish work in the leading French illustrated newspapers such as L'Illustration, Le Monde Illustré and Regards, and from about 1932, increasingly worked for fashion magazines Paris Vogue, Adam and Marchal, and from 1933-4, American Harpers Bazaar.

When on assignment, Bing would take extra pictures that satisfied her own artistic interests, and she built up a large body of work for exhibition. During a commission to photograph the Moulin Rouge, she made a series of photographs of dancers which were exhibited in the gallery window at the newly-established publishers La Pléiade in 1931. This was her first exhibition. Later that year, her photographs were included in the 26th Salon Internationale d'Art Photographique, organised by the Société francaise de photographie. They quickly caught the attention of the photographer and critic Emmanuel Sougez who praised the dynamism of the photographs and christened Bing 'the Queen of the Leica'. Sougez continued to be an important and influential supporter of her work throughout the 1930s.

In 1931 Bing moved to 146 avenue de Maine. That year she also met the New York-based Dutch American writer Hendrik Willem van Loon who became her most important patron and introduced her work to American clients. Most importantly, Van Loon showed Bing's work to the collector and gallerist Julien Lévy who included her work in the exhibition Modern European Photography: Twenty Photographers at his New York Gallery in 1932.

During the 1930s Bing also frequently exhibited in Parisian galleries, where her work was shown alongside that of Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Florence Henri, Man Ray and André Kértesz.

In 1933 Bing moved to an apartment at 8 rue de Varenne, where she was able to use the kitchen as her darkroom. Here she met her future husband Konrad Wolff, a German pianist also living in the same block of flats whose music she would hear drifting up to her flat. The photographer Florence Henri, whose work Bing had first seen in Frankfurt, also lived at 8 rue de Varenne. However, despite clear links between her work and that of Henri and other photographers from the period, including Kértesz, Bing later claimed that she had little contact with other photographers during her Paris days.

In 1936 Ilse Bing was given a solo exhibition at the June Rhodes gallery in New York. Hosted by her patron Van Loon, she travelled to the USA, where she stayed for three months, during which time she made photographs in New York and Connecticut.

Bing was greatly impressed by New York. She appears to have been enthusiastically received, and her visit aroused some public interest. In an interview in the New York World Telegraph, June 8th 1936 entitled 'Famous German Woman sees life in New York as Transitory and Wild', Bing spoke of her excitement with the 'jazz rhythm' of New York, and by the newness of American cities as well as the wildness of American nature. She saw the New York skyline as a hybrid of the two, stating that, 'I did not find the New York skyline big like rocks. It is more natural than that, like crystals in the mountains, little things grown up.'

Tellingly, Bing asked to be described as a 'German Jew', explaining that her family was still in Germany and that she was worried for their safety.

During her stay, Bing met Alfred Stieglitz, doyen of the American photographic world and great exponent of modern photography. This meeting was, she later stated, a major event in her life and we can see the influence of Stieglitz's vision on Bing's photographs of New York.

Characteristically, Bing also absorbed the aesthetics of other contemporary American artists - some of whom she met through Stieglitz - and her street scenes show the influence of the realism current in American art at that time.

In 1937 Ilse Bing married Konrad Wolff (she maintained her maiden name for her photographic activities, but also assumed the name Ilse Bing Wolff). Although she took fewer photographs during the latter years of the 1930s, she continued to find inspiration in Paris and undertook commissions, including stories on the Glyndeborne opera that were published in 1938, for which she made her only documented trip to the UK. Bing continued to be ranked among the leading photographers of the time, with her work included in an important survey exhibition 'Photography 1839-1937' at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the accompanying publication by Beaumont Newhall.

In 1938 moved Bing and Wolff moved together to boulevard Jourdan, hoping to live a comfortable married existence in their new, elegant apartment. However, the photographs Bing made of the splendid views across Paristowards Sacré Coeur from the balcony of this apartment were some of her last in Paris. The outbreak of the Second World War changed everything. In 1940 Bing and Wolff were forced to leave Paris and, both Jews, were interned in separate camps in the South of France. Bing spent six weeks in a camp in Gurs, in the Pyrenees, before rejoining her husband in Marseille, which was under 'Vichy' control. The couple spent nine months there, awaiting visas for America. Eventually, with the support of the fashion editor of Harpers Bazaar, they were able to leave for America in June 1941.

Although Bing had managed to take her negatives with her and keep them with her in the camp, she left all her prints behind in Paris in the safekeeping of a friend. This friend then sent them on to Marseille but Bing and her husband had left France before the photographs arrived. The prints remained in a shipping company's warehouse in Marseille, miraculously missing the many bombs that fell on the port, until the end of the War, when they were despatched to Bing in New York. Tragically though, when they arrived, Bing was unable to pay customs duty on all of them, and had to sift through the prints, deciding which to keep and which to throw away. Some of her most important vintage prints, including the only photographs Bing had taken in England, were lost at this time.

After a decade of relative obscurity, Bing held her first one-person exhibition in 17 years at the Lee Witkin Gallery in New York in 1976, the show that marked a revival of interest in her work. In the late 1970s, photography's status within museums was being re-evaluated, and this coincided with a renewed interest in those photographers like Bing whose careers had been somewhat interrupted by the Second World War, as well as feminist art history's interest in giving the careers of women artists due prominence.

In 1976 the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired some of Bing's work. Her work was included in a touring exhibition, organised by the Art Institute of Chicago, about the art collection of Julien Levy. This collection, including a large number of Bing's prints, was eventually acquired by the Art Institute. From this point, Bing's work was exhibited more frequently in museums and commercial galleries and acquired by American and French museums. A major retrospective, 'Ilse Bing: Three Decades of Photography' was shown at the New Orleans Museum of Art in 1985 and then toured to the International Center of Photography in New York and the Kunstverein, Frankfurt in 1987. The Musée Carnavalet, Paris, followed in 1988 with a retrospective of Bing's photographs of Paris. This gradual growth of interest in Ilse Bing's work has re-established her reputation at the centre of the development of modern photography and ensured her a permanent place in the history of the medium.This text was originally written to accompany the exhibition The Ilse Bing: Queen of the Leica on display at the V&A South Kensington between 7 October 2004 and 9 January 2005.

Brooklyn Museum Collection

"The Sphinx and Pyramid of Khafre"

"Nubie", ca. 1880's

"Forecourt, Temple of Horus"

"Karnak, Interior"

"Pyramid at Saqqara"

"View of the Aswan Along the Nile"

ca. 1870

"Arab Children"

"Egyptian Woman"

"Water Carriers", ca. 1864

Biography from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Antonio Beato (after 1832 - 1906), also known as Antoine Beato, was a British and Italian photographer. He is noted for his genre works, portraits, views of the architecture and landscapes of Egypt and the other locations in the Mediterranean region. He was the younger brother of photographer Felice Beato (1832 - 1909), with whom he sometimes worked.

Little is known of Antonio Beato's origins but he was probably born in Venetian territory after 1832, and later became a naturalized British citizen. His brother, at least, was born in Venice, but the family may have moved to Corfu, which had been a Venetian possession until 1814 when it was acquired by Britain.

Because of the existence of a number of photographs signed "Felice Antonio Beato" and "Felice A. Beato", it was long assumed that there was one photographer who somehow managed to photograph at the same time in places as distant as Egypt and Japan. But in 1983 it was shown by Italo Zannier (Bennett 1996, 38) that "Felice Antonio Beato" represented two brothers, Felice Beato and Antonio Beato, who sometimes worked together, sharing a signature. The confusion arising from the signatures continues to cause problems in identifying which of the two photographers was the creator of a given image.

Antonio often used the French version of his given name, going by Antoine Beato. It is presumed that he did so because he mainly worked in Egypt, which had a large French-speaking population.

In 1853 or 1854 Antonio's brother and James Robertson formed a photographic partnership called "Robertson & Beato". Antonio joined them on photographic expeditions to Malta in 1854 or 1856 and to Greece and Jerusalem in 1857. A number of the firm's photographs produced in the 1850s are signed "Robertson, Beato and Co." and it is believed that the "and Co." refers to Antonio.

In late 1854 or early 1855 James Robertson married the Beato brothers' sister, Leonilda Maria Matilda Beato. They had three daughters, Catherine Grace (born in 1856), Edith Marcon Vergence (born in 1859) and Helen Beatruc (born in 1861).

In July 1858 Antonio joined Felice in Calcutta. Felice had been in India since the beginning of the year photographing the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Antonio also photographed in India until December 1859 when he left Calcutta, probably for health reasons, and headed for Malta by way of Suez.

Antonio Beato went to Cairo in 1860 where he spent two years before moving to Luxor where he opened a photographic studio in 1862 and began producing tourist images of the people and architectural sites of the area. In the late 1860s, Beato was in partnership with Hippolyte Arnoux.

Interestingly, in 1864, at a time when his brother Felice was living and photographing in Japan, Antonio photographed members of Ikeda Nagaoki's Japanese mission who were visiting Egypt on their way to France.

Antonio Beato died in Luxor in 1906. His widow published a notice of his death while offering a house and equipment for sale.