Search Results

(Edward)

(b Alfred, ME, July 17, 1883; d San Francisco, Nov 11, 1973).

American photographer. Self-taught, Abbe started to produce photographs at the age of 12. From 1898 to 1910 he worked in his father’s bookshop and then worked as a reporter for the Washington Post, travelling to Europe in 1910. Having earlier produced photographs of ships and sailors for tourist cards, from 1913 to 1917 he worked as a freelance photojournalist in Virginia. In 1917 he set up a studio in New York, where he produced the first photographic cover for the Saturday Evening Post as well as photographs for Ladies Home Journal, the New York Times and other publications. From 1922 to 1923 he worked as a stills photographer, actor and writer for film studios. Though this was mainly for Mack Sennett in Hollywood, he also worked for D. W. Griffiths as a stills photographer on Way Down East (1920) and accompanied Lilian Gish to Italy to provide stills for Griffiths’s ...

(b Springfield, OH, July 17, 1898; d Monson, ME, Dec 9, 1991).

American photographer. She spent a term at the Ohio State University in Columbus (1917–18) and then studied sculpture independently in New York (1918–21) where she met (Henri-Robert-)Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. She left the USA for Paris in 1921 where she studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière before attending the Kunstschule in Berlin for less than a year in 1923. From 1924 to 1926 she worked as Man Ray’s assistant and first saw photographs by (Jean-)Eugène(-Auguste) Atget in Man Ray’s studio in 1925. Her first one-woman show, at the gallery Le Sacre du Printemps in Paris in 1926, was devoted to portraits of avant-garde personalities such as Jean Cocteau, James Joyce, and André Gide. She continued to take portraits, such as that of James Joyce (1927; see Berenice Abbott: Photographs, p. 26), until leaving Paris in 1929. After Atget’s death (1927) she bought most of his negatives and prints in ...

(b Kabul, June 5, 1973).

Afghan video and performance artist and photographer, active also in the USA. After fleeing Soviet-occupied Kabul with her family in the late 1980s, Abdul lived as a refugee in Germany and India before moving to Southern California. She received a BA in Political Science and Philosophy at California State University, Fullerton, and an MFA at the University of California, Irvine, in 2000. Abdul first returned to a post-Taliban Afghanistan in 2001, where she encountered a place and people transformed by decades of violence and unrest. Since that time, Abdul has made work in Kabul and Los Angeles, staging herself in performances and creating performance-based video works and photography that explore ideas of home and the interconnection between architecture and identity.

Beginning in the late 1990s, Abdul made emotionally intense performance art informed by that of Yugoslavian artist Marina Abramović and Cuban-born American artist Ana Mendieta. At the time unable to travel to Afghanistan, Abdul created and documented performances in Los Angeles that probed her position as Afghan, female, Muslim, a refugee and a transnational artist. In ...

(b Nelson, 1949).

New Zealand photographer. Aberhart became a leading photographer in New Zealand from the 1970s with his distinctive 8×10 inch black-and-white photographs, taken with a 19th-century large format Field Camera. He is particularly well known for his images of disappearing cultural history, often melancholic in tone, in New Zealand.

Aberhart’s use of an ‘outmoded’ process for picturing subjects in apparent decay or decline paradoxically re-invigorated them. He was inspired by the documenting traditions of New Zealand’s itinerant 19th-century photographers. His generally provincial subjects included vacant architectural interiors and exteriors, such as domestic houses, Masonic lodges, churches, Maori meeting-houses, and cemeteries, war memorials, museum exhibits, landscapes, and horizons (see A Distant View of Taranaki, 14 February 2009, Auckland, A.G.). Aberhart also produced several compelling portraits, especially those from the late 1970s and early 1980s of his daughters (e.g. Kamala and Charlotte in the Grounds of the Lodge, Tawera, Oxford, 1981; Christchurch, NZ, A.G.)....

(b La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, Seine-et-Marne, Jan 9, 1818; d Paris, 1881).

French photographer and sculptor. He originally worked as a sculptor, and he turned to portrait photography under the influence of the Munich photographer Franz Hanfstaengel. Adam-Salomon’s antique poses, making much use of light and shade to give painterly effects, were inspired by Classical sculpture and painting and incorporated expensive fabrics and settings. He also favoured heavy retouching of the negatives, for which he was criticized by some contemporaries. He was, however, much admired for the imposing character of many of his portraits (e.g. Portrait of a Man, c. 1865; see Berger and Levrault, no. 1). He continued his sculpture as well, producing portrait busts (many still extant), generally based on photographs. Subjects included Rossini and the poet Lamartine, as well as a monument in Les Invalides, Paris, to the Duke of Padua. Some of those hostile to photography, such as Lamartine, were persuaded to consider it as an art by the work of Adam-Salomon. He founded his studio in Paris in ...

(Easton )

(b San Francisco, CA, Feb 20, 1902; d Carmel, CA, April 22, 1984).

American photographer. Adams trained as a musician and supported himself by teaching the piano until 1930. He became involved with photography in 1916 when his parents presented him with a Kodak Box Brownie camera during a summer vacation in Yosemite National Park. In 1917–18 he worked part-time in a photo-finishing business. From 1920 to 1927 he served as custodian of the LeConte Memorial in Yosemite, the Sierra Club’s headquarters. His duties included leading weekly expeditions through the valley and rims, during which he continued to photograph the landscape. He considered his snapshots of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada Mountains, taken during the early 1920s, to be a visual diary, the work of an ardent hobbyist. By 1923 he used a 6½×8½-inch Korona view camera on his pack trips, and in 1927 he spent an afternoon making one of his most famous images, Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park...

(b Orange, NJ, May 8, 1937).

American photographer. After teaching English literature for several years, Adams turned to photography in the late 1960s, studying with Minor White. In his black-and-white photographs of the American West, such as his series From the Missouri West (1980), he emphasized man’s presence in nature and the tension between the beauty of the landscape and man’s effect upon it. His landscapes include such features as telephone poles and wires, mountains edged by highway guard-rails, parking lots and housing complexes. In 1975 Adams took part in the group exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape (see New Topographics). As a photographer and an articulate writer on photography, he has published Summer Nights (1985) and important essays on 19th- and 20th-century photography.

(b Fife, 1809; d St Andrews, Fife, 1870).

Scottish photographer. He studied medicine in Edinburgh (1829) and Paris, but returned to St Andrews in the 1830s. A member of the St Andrews Literary and Philosophical Society, he associated with the circle interested in photographic experimentation and theory. Adamson experimented with Talbot’s calotype process, introduced to Scotland by Sir David Brewster (1781–1868), and made the first calotype portrait in Scotland, of Miss Melville Adamson (c. 1842; Edinburgh, Royal Mus. Scotland; see Morrison-Low, p. 20). He taught several of the early Scottish photographers, including his younger brother, Robert (see Hill and Adamson), and Thomas Rodger (1833–83) of St Andrews. Most of Adamson’s surviving work is in the Royal Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, and St Andrews University Library.

Hill and Adamson...

Advertising uses visuals (predominantly photographic) and copy (text) to convey an idea or make an affective appeal. Typically, specialists in commercial images are commissioned by companies to produce imagery to a specific brief, including such considerations as image size, media placement, and length of campaign. Until the growth in the 1980s of stock libraries, which offer a wide range of images that are licensed for use, commissioning photography was standard in the advertising industry. The proliferation of digital photography in the early 21st century has also prompted the use of consumer-generated or amateur photography in advertising. Finally, whereas most of the history of advertising has been print-based, digital advertising now appears across an array of platforms.

As a commercial practice, advertising photography is client-driven; awards for creativity inevitably go to the whole creative team of an advertising agency and not just to the photographer. Nevertheless, influential photographers have emerged from this commercial realm. Advertising is practised around the globe, but its photographic history centres on London, New York, and Paris where agencies such as J. Walter Thompson, Reynell & Son (now part of TMP Worldwide), and Publicis were established early in the 20th century....

Photographic projects of commercial, personal, civic, and scientific import, created by devotees and professionals who were local, itinerant, or immigrant, are to be found all over the continent of Africa from 1839. Yet there are significant barriers to the study of these histories. Foremost is the relative lack of archives that house and preserve the oldest photographic production on the continent. Present-day arts infrastructure—educational institutions, museums, galleries, and temporary exhibitions on the continent—are vastly underfunded and comparatively sparse, contributing to a common misapprehension that modern and contemporary photographers of note derive primarily from South Africa or Mali (two countries which have staged international photography fairs originating in the 1990s). Academic and glossy publications are rare and widely disproportionate to the significant range of photographic production. Of these, many tend to consolidate diverse photographic images, biographies, and histories into a monolithic treatment as ‘African’, or lump together the world’s second largest continent as a coherent or unified subject. As a result of climatic and economic pressures, moreover, many of the oldest photo collections from Africa are extremely fragile or have disappeared. This ephemerality highlights the imperatives and political dimensions to sustained and historical engagement with these collections before they disappear entirely. Disparities in access have skewed art discourse of modernist and contemporary photographic practices on the continent as well. Following ...

(Vladimirovich) [Alpert, Max]

(b Simferopol’ [now in Ukraine], March 18, 1899; d Moscow, Nov 30, 1980).

Russian photographer. He was the son of an artisan. In 1914 Al’pert moved to Odessa and entered a photographic studio as an apprentice. After serving in the Red Army, he worked from 1924 as a photojournalist, taking news photographs for Rabochaya gazeta. He was already distinguished by his energy and his ability to capture events in a highly professional manner. Many of his photographs (e.g. Maxim Gorky’s Return from Italy, 1928; see Shudakov, p. 21) were widely published. In 1928 he moved to the newspaper Pravda, where he began to work systematically on serial photography (e.g. The Construction of the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Factory, 1929; see Morozov and Lloyd, pp. 130–31). The photoseries 24 Hours in the Life of the Filippov Family (1931; see Shudakov, pp. 22–3) became widely known; it was executed by a collective of photographers in which Al’pert and Arkady Shaykhet played an active role. A consummate example of photonarrative, it reveals in detail the life of a simple Moscow worker’s family....

(b Saïda, Algeria, 1953).

French painter, sculptor, photographer, film maker, writer and installation artist of Algerian birth. Born to Spanish parents, he was much affected by North African as well as Southern European culture. He trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre. Despite a pervasive and diverse use of media, Alberola often stressed the coexistence of his different artistic practices as leading to painting alone. His paintings relied heavily on evocative narratives, at once personal and ‘historical’. Alberola conceived of his role as a storyteller, on the model of African oral cultures. Convinced that narratives could not be renewed, he argued that a painter’s main task was to reactivate his work through contact with his pictorial heritage. The main points of reference for his paintings of the early 1980s were Velázquez, Manet or Matisse, whose works he quoted in a personal way. In the early 1980s he undertook a series of paintings inspired by mythological subjects, which he combined with his own history as the principal subject-matter of his work. The biblical story of Susannah and the Elders as well as the Greek myth of Actaeon provided his most enduring subjects, both referring to the act of looking as taboo, as in ...

Spanish photographic firm. It was founded by Alfonso Sánchez García (b Ciudad Real, 21 Feb 1880; d Madrid, 13 Feb 1953) and later run with his son Alfonso [Alfonsito] Sánchez Portela (b Madrid, 16 Nov 1902). After apprenticeship to a number of important Madrid-based studio photographers, Alfonso Sánchez García alternated studio photography and photojournalism. In 1909 he covered the calamitous campaign in Spanish Morocco. A year later he opened the successful Madrid Alfonso studio and photographic agency, where his son Alfonsito was apprenticed. Alfonsito, known as Alfonso after 1930, published press photographs while still in his mid-teens, and in 1921 he accompanied his father on a trip to document the continuing hostilities in North Africa. A year later Alfonsito photographed the Moroccan chieftain Abd al-Karim, but it was during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923–30), the Spanish Republic (1931–6) and the Spanish Civil War (...

(b Mazarambroz, Toledo, Aug 14, 1832; d Toledo, Dec 3, 1914).

Spanish photographer. He moved to Toledo c. 1862, and he and Fernando González Pedroso were the first two professional photographers to set up a permanent establishment there. His suite of 12 vistas de Toledo (Toledo, 1871) consisted of 14 photographs mounted on decorated passe-partouts. Alguacil is known for this format, which he enlarged for certain views contained in the 1870s series of publications of Monumentos artísticos do España (Toledo; R. Amador de los Ríos, ed.). Alguacil is usually identified with this series, in which the views were not limited to Toledo. He also maintained a ‘Museo fotográfico’, produced a series of photographs on San Juan de los Reyes (1895) and in 1906 won the photographic competition in La Mancha for photographing monuments and art objects. The Alguacil archives are located in the town hall in Toledo.

Italian family of photographers. From 1845 to 1850 Leopoldo Alinari worked in Florence for a wealthy lithographer, Giuseppe Bardi. With him he organized Fratelli Alinari, Presso Bardi, a small photographic laboratory in the Via Cornina, Florence. In a city that took a keen interest in the thriving photographic industry, their venture was soon successful. By 1854 Leopoldo was able to purchase the business from Bardi, and with his brothers Romualdo Alinari (1830–91) and Giuseppe Alinari (1836–92) he founded Fratelli Alinari, Editori Fotografichi. They specialized in art reproductions, as well as portraits and landscapes (e.g. photographs of Tuscany and of the buildings and monuments in Florence, Pisa (see fig.), Siena, Rome and Naples). In 1861 they moved the studio to new premises at 8, Via Nazionale. After Leopoldo’s death his brothers carried on the business. Giuseppe experimented with such new photographic processes as wet collodion, and the firm published numerous catalogues, concentrating on photographs of buildings and works of art. In ...

[née Martínez de Anda, Dolores]

(b Largos de Moreno, Jalisco, Apr 3, 1907; d Mexico City, Jul 31, 1993).

Mexican photographer. Born in Lagos de Moreno in the northern state of Jalisco, Martínez lived her first years in Guadalajara. After her parents’ separation in 1910, she moved to Mexico City with her father and brother. After her father’s sudden death in 1916, she was adopted by an older half-brother who sent her to a Catholic boarding school. At 18 she married a young friend and neighbor, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who was then working at the Ministry of Finance as an accountant. In 1925 he was offered a better post in the southern city of Oaxaca, where the couple moved. Manuel started producing “weekend photographs” and Lola acted as his lab assistant. With Manuel’s camera, she started to produce her first photographs. On returning to Mexico City in 1927, she gave birth to a son, Manuel, and continued to assist her husband in the first stages of his career as a photographer. The couple displayed an active social agenda in the post-revolutionary cultural movement, sharing projects with friends who included Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo, María Izquierdo, Julio Castellanos, Frances Toor, Tina Modotti, Luis Cardoza y Aragón, and some of the “Contemporáneos” (Xavier Villaurrutia, Carlos Mérida, Salvador Novo, and Carlos Pellicer). The Álvarez Bravos opened an informal gallery at their home in Tacubaya in ...

(b Mexico City, Feb 4, 1902; d Mexico City, Oct 19, 2002).

Mexican photographer. Álvarez Bravo’s interest in photography began in his adolescence while living in Mexico City in the 1910s, the years of the Mexican Revolution. He left school at the age of 13 to help support his family but pursued his creative interests by studying foreign photography magazines and receiving instruction from the German photographer based in Mexico, Hugo Brehme. Álvarez Bravo’s earliest images, made with a large-format Graflex camera, reflected the romantic pictorialist mode identified with Brehme’s generation. By 1925, however, he turned to a modernist aesthetic inspired by the photographs Edward Weston made in Mexico in the mid-1920s as well as those of Tina Modotti, who accompanied Weston and remained in the country until 1930. During this era Álvarez Bravo came to know Modotti as well as the artists who led Mexico’s cultural renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, including Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Rufino Tamayo. Also central to this circle was ...

[Atkinson, Isaac; Dunbar, William Nugent]

(b Blencarn, Cumb. [now Cumbria], March 11, 1813; d Rome, Feb 27, 1877).

English photographer, active in Italy. Born Isaac Atkinson, he went to Paris as a young man to study painting, and in 1838 he went to Rome, where he adopted the names William Nugent Dunbar and later James Anderson, and where he participated in the annual exhibition of the Società degli Amatori e Cultori delle Belle Arti. By 1849 he was established as a photographer of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture and views of Rome, all for the tourist market. In 1859 he published his first album of photographic prints. Later he turned more exclusively to reproducing famous works of art. The business was continued into the 20th century by his eldest son, Domenico Anderson, and into the 1950s by the third generation of the family. In the 1960s Anderson’s prints and negatives became part of the great art-historical archive in Florence.

(b Jaffna, Ceylon [now Sri Lanka], Sept 26, 1869; d Colombo, July 2, 1910).

Ceylonese photographer. His family had practised photography for three generations. His grandfather, Adolphus Wilhelmus Andree (b 1799), was one of the early pioneers of daguerreotypy in Ceylon, and his father, Adolphus William Andree, had a flourishing photographic business between the 1860s and 1880s with studios in the capital Colombo and the provincial towns of Jaffna, Galle and Matara. At 18, he was already working as an apprentice in the studio of an American photographer at Chatham Street, Colombo, using the ferrotype process (see Photography §I). By 1893 he had established the Hopetown Studio, Slave Island, Colombo, which within a decade was one of the most fashionable and best-equipped in the country. Andree earned several awards at the Exposition Universelle, Paris, in 1900 and at the World’s Fair in St Louis, MO, in 1904. In 1901 the government appointed him as one of its official photographers to cover the visit to Ceylon of the Duke and Duchess of York....

(Platonovich)

(b Serpukhov, Moscow district, Oct 1, 1882; d Serpukhov, April 29, 1947).

Russian photographer. He was the son of a hairdresser. In 1901 Andreyev studied painting and, at the same time, ‘art’ photography. In his later works he successfully combined the qualities of easel painting and photography, and he experimented widely with printing techniques involving oil pigment, bromoil and gum arabic. He was a master of delicate, lyrical landscapes, striving for the broadest tonal generalization of forms in his depictions of the countryside of middle Russia. Among his most famous landscape photographs are the coarse-grained Crimean Landscape (1929; see Morozov, no. 140) and Into the Blizzard (1930; see Morozov, no. 141). The same rich tonality and picturesque quality are also present in his genre photographs. From 1906 he successfully exhibited at national and international photographic exhibitions, where he was awarded many diplomas and gold medals.