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American photography foundation and publisher. Aperture magazine was founded in San Francisco in 1952 by American photographers Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Barbara Morgan, Minor White, Ernest Louie, Melton Ferris, and Dody Warren, with writer–curators Beaumont Newhall and Nancy Newhall. They intended the organization to serve as a forum for discussing photography, to exhibit photographers’ work, and to raise the profile of art photography in the United States.

The journal Aperture, which began publication in 1952, dedicated itself to the practice of photography as a fine art and thus distinguished itself from popular and commercial photographic periodicals. In this way the journal emulated Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work (1903–17). Photographer Minor White was the journal’s first editor and, under his tenure, it became concerned with the capacity of photography to deal with spirituality and profound human experiences. The first issue included the work of Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and French photographer Lisette Model. All contributors were urged to write about their own work. In ...

(b Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort, March 8, 1831; d Alès, April 9, 1885).

French photographer and photographic printer. Bonfils is best known for his photographs of the Mediterranean and Middle East, particularly his five-volume Souvenirs d’Orient: Egypte. Palestine. Syrie. Grèce (1878). Prior to opening a studio briefly in Alès in 1865, he was apprenticed to Abel Niépce de St Victor (180570). Having travelled to Lebanon in 1860 with the French Army to intervene in the conflict between the Druse and the Maronites, Bonfils decided to return to Beirut in 1867 with his wife Marie-Lydie Cabanis and son Adrian to establish a photographic studio under the name La Maison Bonfils. From there Bonfils began his photographic tour of Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Greece, and sold his views back in his studio. These views included (he claimed) 15,000 albumen prints and 9000 stereoscopic cards. La Maison Bonfils became well known throughout Lebanon, the Middle East, and Europe as a première photographic studio and attracted many tourists seeking photographs of the surrounding area and peoples. Bonfils’s success was compounded when he presented his photographs to the Société Française de Photographie in ...

Journal devoted to photography that was published from 1903 to 1917. Camera Work evolved from a quarterly journal of photography to become one of the most ground-breaking and influential periodicals in American cultural history. Founded in January 1903 by photographer Alfred Stieglitz as the official publication of the Photo-Secession, the journal originally promoted the cause of photography as a fine art. As Stieglitz, its editor and publisher, expanded the journal’s scope to include essays on aesthetics, literature, criticism and modern art, Camera Work fueled intellectual discourse in early 20th-century America.

Camera Work mirrored the aesthetic philosophy of its founder Alfred Stieglitz. The journal resulted from his decade-long campaign to broaden and professionalize American photography. Serving for three years as editor of American Amateur Photographer (1893–6), Stieglitz championed the expressive potential of photography and advocated expanded exhibition opportunities comparable to those available in European photographic salons. In 1897, when the Society of Amateur Photographers merged with the New York Camera Club, Stieglitz convinced the enlarged organization to replace their modest leaflet with a more substantial quarterly journal, Camera Notes, which he edited until ...

(b 1854; d England, 1913).

English photographer, publisher and writer. He first travelled to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) as private secretary to the Bishop of Colombo. In 1870 he set up a small bookshop in Colombo, which by 1884 had diversified into a flourishing publishing house, H. W. Cave & Company, and a printing firm equipped to produce books with excellent quality photographic reproductions. He took a serious interest in photography, and this enabled him to illustrate the pictorial travelogues written by him and published by his own firm. His close supervision of the details of book production and photographic reproduction gave him a competitive edge over other commercial photographers. He returned to England in 1886 after the death of his wife and settled down in Oxford. He made occasional visits to Ceylon, but continued to manage his firm’s business from England.

In his photography Cave specialized in rural and landscape scenes and was especially interested in creating views with luxuriant tropical vegetation, using dramatic atmospheric lighting effects. Some of the best examples of this type of work are reproduced in his lavishly printed travelogues ...

[Fr. phototypie; Ger. Lichtdruck]

First viable commercial printing process capable of translating the continuous tones of photography into the permanency of printer’s ink. Patented in 1855 by the Frenchman Alphonse Louis Poitevin, the technique involved printing from a surface of photosensitized gelatin, hence its English name (from Gr. kolla: ‘glue’). During the 19th century collotype was called by a bewildering variety of names: some, such as ‘Photopane’, ‘Hoeschotype’ and ‘Autotype Mechanical Process’, deriving from the names of individuals or companies who adopted it and others, such as ‘photogelatine process’, referring to its technical features. ‘Ink photos’, made by transferring to lithographic stone an image developed as a coarse collotype grain on gelatin, were used in the 1880s before relief half-tones were possible.

Modern collotypes are made by pouring a solution of gelatin and potassium bichromate over a sheet of plate-glass. When dry, the plate is placed in contact with a continuous tone negative and exposed to light. Where the light shines through the negative and strikes the sensitized gelatin, the coating hardens in such a way that it later rejects moisture but accepts printing ...

The process of creating, storing, manipulating, and displaying photographic images through electronic devices such as digital cameras, computers, and printers. By the late 20th century digital technology had largely replaced traditional chemical photographic processes. That digital photographs are easier to produce, manipulate, and distribute than their analogue predecessors has led to significant changes to vernacular, artistic, and commercial photographic practices. The boundaries of what constitutes Photography—once defined quite clearly through its optical and chemical nature—have also expanded, to the point where many question whether digital photography is an incremental step in the evolution of the medium, or a radical leap into an entirely new form of image production.

While a traditional photograph is an image embodied in physical form, a digital photograph exists as a computer file that describes the image. Most digital photographs today are composed of bitmaps, grids filled with numbers that represent the colour and tonal characteristics of each square, which is called a pixel. Most commonly, each pixel is described by three numbers that can range from 0 to 255 (or 2...

[Höllinger, Waltraud]

(b Linz, 1940).

Austrian film maker, video artist, photographer and performance artist. After studies in Linz and Vienna (1955–64) and work as a script girl, film editor and film extra (1965–8), she signalled her decision to follow a career as an artist by changing her name to Valie Export (a combination of the abbreviated form of her forename and a reference to a popular brand of cheap Austrian cigarettes, ‘Austria Export’). The provocative and politically engaged stance she then developed in her work constituted a relentless exploration of feminist issues and a wish for direct social change as a result of her activities as an artist. In one of her best-known earlier works, Genital Panic (1969), originally an impromptu performance in a Munich cinema, she confronted audience members wearing trousers exposing her genitals. This work was later made into a photographic poster depicting the artist wearing the same confrontational apparel, sporting a wild hair-do and holding a gun. Agitational erotic interaction had also featured in a well-known street performance of the same year, ...

(b Buenos Aires, Apr 18, 1932).

Argentine photographer and publisher. She trained as a painter at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires (1947–1953), and took up photography only in the late 1950s. She studied in Buenos Aires first in the studio of Luis d’Amico and then in 1960 under Annemarie Heinrich. In 1960 she opened a studio in Buenos Aires with the Argentine photographer Alicia D’Amico (1933–2001). She contributed to La Nación and Autoclub, and in 1973, together with María Cristina Orive, she co-founded La Azotea, a publishing house specializing in Latin American photography. She was primarily a documentary photographer, whose reputation did not depend on the recording of sensational events. Her photographs were realistic portrayals of the Argentine way of life; they were taken using natural light and were not modified in the laboratory.

(b Chesterfield, Derbys, 1822; d Cannes, Feb 25, 1898).

English photographer. He is noted for his studies of the Middle East and for establishing the largest photographic publishing firm in the 19th century. He was born into a Quaker family and spent five unrewarding years apprenticed to a cutler in Sheffield, suffering a nervous breakdown in 1843. After two years recuperative travel he became a successful businessman, first in wholesale groceries and later in printing. His involvement with photography began at this time. He was one of the founder-members of the Liverpool Photographic Society in 1853 and he exhibited portraits and landscapes to much critical acclaim.

The sale of Frith’s printing firm in 1854 financed the expeditions to Egypt and the Holy Land that were to establish his pre-eminence among early travel photographers. He made three trips between 1856 and 1860 (see fig.). On the first, he sailed up the Nile to the Second Cataract, recording the main historic monuments between Cairo and Abu Simbel. On the second, he struck eastwards to Palestine, visiting Jerusalem, Damascus and other sites associated with the life of Christ. The final expedition was the most ambitious, combining a second visit to the Holy Land with a deeper southward penetration of the Nile. His photographs of the temple at ...

(b Senigallia, Ancona, Aug 1, 1925; d Senigallia, Ancona, Nov 25, 2000).

Italian photographer. A self-taught painter from the age of 13 and a printer by profession, he began working as a photographer in the early 1950s and quickly developed an intense and personal style, rendering poetic, dream-like visions in strongly contrasting blacks and whites. From the start he worked on a range of themes that closely reflect his concerns for the life of the rural communities of his birthplace; he also extensively documented the often miserable living conditions of the old, poor and sick, with great intensity of feeling and uncompromising directness. Although he sometimes worked on commissions, mainly for the national television company, his best works spring from the need to exorcise his personal obsession with decay, death and old age. Consequently, he intensely disliked documentary photography and printed only the images that reveal his experience, rejecting those that appear to be ‘just taken by the camera’. He generally used a simple twin-lens reflex Kobel press camera, with an 80 mm lens and no exposure meter, allowing himself the maximum technical freedom in the taking and developing of the images. He regarded landscape as a subject comparable to the human face and explored its possibilities throughout his career....

(b Kiev, Sept 4, 1919; d Miami, FL, Nov 19, 1999).

American painter, photographer and publishing executive of Ukrainian birth. Raised in England and France, he received a degree in philosophy and mathematics from the Sorbonne in 1930. Connected to the Russian exile community in Paris, he was introduced to artists Aleksandr Yakovlev and Marc Chagall. In 1931, he studied painting with André Lhote and enrolled at the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture, where he was a student of Auguste Perret. Later that year, he transferred to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. While studying architecture, he was apprenticed to graphic artist Cassandre through whom he found work at the newsweekly Vu, where he created photomontage covers with Russian Constructivist sensibilities and later rose to art director. At Vu he worked with imagery by pioneers of 35 mm photography Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassaï and Erich Salomon. A prolific photographer since childhood, he enthusiastically identified with the candid documentary style of the 35 mm camera.

Arriving in New York in ...

English commercial enterprise, founded in 1908. The Society was established by Philip Lee Warner and his cousin by marriage, Eustace Gurney, with the purpose of publishing photographic reproductions of Old Master prints. The first ‘Medici’ prints had been commissioned in 1906 by Lee Warner from the offices of the publishers Chatto & Windus, London. These were reproduced by Hoesch of Milan using the Collotype process, which had recently been improved, permitting editions of several thousand to be run off and the introduction of full-colour prints of exceptional quality. Initially, colour separations were made directly from the paintings with the aid of huge cameras, and artists’ copies of the paintings were used as colour guides for later retouching. Subscribers to the scheme received copies of Old Master prints as they were produced. The Burlington Magazine was quoted on the first prospectus: ‘Nothing of the kind so good and so cheap has ever been issued before’. The membership scheme was later abandoned because of insufficient support, and the prints were then sold in shops and galleries. In ...

[Tournachon , (Gaspard ) Félix ]

(b Paris, April 8, 1820; d Paris, March 21, 1910).

French photographer, printmaker, draughtsman, writer and balloonist. He was born into a family of printers and became familiar with the world of letters very early in life. He abandoned his study of medicine for journalism, working first in Lyon and then in Paris. In the 1840s Nadar moved in socialist, bohemian circles and developed strong republican convictions. Around this time he adopted the pseudonym Nadar (from ‘Tourne à dard’, a nickname he gained because of his talent for caricature). For his friend Charles Baudelaire (see fig.), Nadar personified ‘the most astonishing expression of vitality’. In 1845 he published his first novel, La Robe de Déjanira, and the following year he embarked on his career as a caricaturist, working for La Silhouette and Le Charivari and subsequently for the Revue comique (1848) and Charles Philipon’s Journal pour rire (1849), which later became the Journal amusant...

Annual French art photography fair created in 1997 by the Dutch publisher Rik Gadella. Paris Photo is mounted each year in early November in the Carrousel du Louvre, an underground commercial space between the Musée du Louvre and the Place du Carrousel, lit partially by the inverted pyramid skylight designed by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners. Compared to other large art photography fairs, like the Association of International Photographic Art Dealers in New York or Fotofest in Houston, TX, Paris Photo has featured more contemporary than vintage photography. Starting in 1999, Paris Photo featured different genres of art photography: fashion in 1999 and corporate collections in 2000. Subsequently, it showcased photography from different countries, starting with Germany and later including the Netherlands, Spain, Mexico, Japan, and Italy. The fair’s organizers also started a more ambitious programme of hiring curators to organize the national exhibitions. Mariko Takeuchi, a photography critic, scholar, and researcher, organized the ...

(b Ribe, Denmark, May 3, 1849; d Barre, MA, May 26, 1914).

American photographer of Danish birth. The son of a school teacher and editor, he was well-educated when he came to the USA in 1870. He was a self-taught photographer and worked at a variety of jobs before becoming a journalist, and he understood the power of the written and illustrated word. Riis’s work in journalism began in 1873 when he was employed by the New York News Association. By 1874 he was editor and then owner of the South Brooklyn News. In 1878 he won a coveted job as a police reporter at the Tribune and found the basis of his life’s work in his assigned territory, Mulberry Bend, where the worst slums and tenements were (e.g. Mulberry Bend as It Was, see Riis, 1901, p. 265).

Using flash photographs to document articles and lectures, Riis emphasized the dehumanizing conditions of New York’s slums with works such as Tenement House Air-shaft...

(b Rothrist, Aargau, Aug 14, 1901; d Berne, April 25, 1953).

Swiss photographer. He emerged as a leading photo-journalist during the 1930s, working for Zürcher illustrierte under the guidance of its editor Arnold Kübler. His work during this period and into the 1940s was primarily concerned with the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Although attached to the German ministry of information from ...

(b Minneapolis, MN, 1969).

American photographer, publisher, and book artist. Soth graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY, where he studied painting and took classes with photographer Joel Sternfeld. He came to prominence in 2004 with Sleeping by the Mississippi, which was included in that year’s Whitney Biennial. That project, shot in large-format colour on road trips along the Mississippi River, established many of the ongoing themes of his major bodies of work, such as freedom, isolation, dreams, and desire. Soth’s career is characterized by a restless visual curiosity that manifests in multiple aesthetic forms: he worked fluidly among photographic formats, including digital and online platforms, and sought out experimental modes of engagement with his audiences. In 2004 he was nominated for the esteemed photojournalism collective Magnum, and became a full member in 2008.

In many of his larger projects, such as Niagara (2006), Broken Manual (2010), and Songbook...

(b Hoboken, NJ, Jan 1, 1864; d New York, July 13, 1946).

American photographer, editor, publisher, patron and dealer. Internationally acclaimed as a pioneer of modern photography, he produced a rich and significant body of work between 1883 and 1937 (see fig.). He championed photography as a graphic medium equal in stature to high art and fostered the growth of the cultural vanguard in New York in the early 20th century.

The first of six children born to an upper-middle-class couple of German–Jewish heritage, Stieglitz discovered the pleasure of amateur photography after 1881, when his family left New York to settle temporarily in Germany. His father, Edward Stieglitz, had retired from a successful business in the wool trade with a fortune that enabled him to educate his children abroad. In ...

British artistic and literary movement, founded in 1914 by the editor of Blast magazine, Wyndham Lewis, and members of the Rebel Art Centre . It encompassed not only painting, drawing and printmaking but also the sculpture of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Jacob Epstein and the photographs of Alvin Langdon Coburn. Notable literary allies were Ezra Pound, who coined the term Vorticism early in 1914, and T. S. Eliot. T. E. Hulme’s articles in The New Age helped to create a climate favourable to the reception of Vorticist ideas.

The arrival of Vorticism was announced, with great gusto and militant defiance, in a manifesto published in the first issue of Blast magazine, which also included work by Edward Wadsworth, Frederick Etchells, William Roberts and Jacob Epstein. Dated June 1914 but issued a month later, this puce-covered journal set out to demonstrate the vigour of an audacious new movement in British art. Vorticism was seen by Lewis as an independent alternative to Cubism, Futurism and Expressionism. With the help of ...

(Martin )

(b Minneapolis, MN, July 9, 1908; d Boston, MA, June 24, 1976).

American photographer and writer. He took his first photographs as a child with a Kodak Box Brownie camera and later learnt darkroom procedures as a student at the University of Minnesota. After graduating in 1933 with a degree in botany and English, he wrote poetry for five years while supporting himself with odd jobs. He moved to Portland, OR, in 1938 and became increasingly interested in photography. During 1938–9 he worked for the Works Progress Administration Federal Arts Project as a creative photographer documenting the early architecture and waterfront of Portland. In 1941 the Museum of Modern Art in New York exhibited several of his images. His first one-man show, photographs of the Grande Ronde-Wallowa Mountain area of north-eastern Oregon, opened at the Portland Art Museum in 1942.

White served in the Army Intelligence Corps from 1942 to 1945, during which time he wrote about photography but took few photographs. He visited Alfred Stieglitz in New York at his gallery, An American Place, in ...