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Atkinson, Conrad  

British, 20th – 21st century, male.

Active in California.

Born 1940, in Cleator Moor (West Cumbria).

Painter, ceramicist, print artist, film maker, photographer. Textiles.

Conrad Atkinson graduated from Carlisle College of Art (1961), Liverpool College of Art (1962) and the Royal Academy Schools in London (...

Article

Braun, Adolphe  

French, 19th century, male.

Born, 13 June 1812, near Besançon, France; died 31 December 1877, in Dornach, France.

Photographer, textile designer, entrepreneur.

Botanicals, landscapes, nature, architecture, figures, animals.

Adolphe Braun had a successful career creating designs for printed fabrics and wallpapers. In the early 1840s, he was admitted to the Société Industrielle de Mulhouse, and designs by his firm were gaining international recognition. To provide his designers with models for study, Braun photographed botanical arrangements using the wet collodion process, which was perfected in the early 1850s. His albumen silver prints of flowers, grasses and botanical materials are richly toned and expressive, in contrast to standard scientific botanical studies. Although Braun initially approached photography as a technical means to further the art of textile design, he quickly realized the artistic merit of his photographs and distributed them to a wider public in catalogues....

Article

Braun, Adolphe  

Patricia Strathern

(b Besançon, 1812; d Dornach, 1877).

French photographer. He worked in Paris as a textile designer, discovering his interest in photography in 1853, when he photographed a collection of 300 studies of flowers intended to serve as models for painters and fabric designers (see fig.). He set up a studio in Paris in 1868. His subjects were very diverse—reproductions of works of art, architecture (e.g. the Peristyle of the New Opéra, c. 1874; see Regards sur la photographie en France au XIXe siècle, pl. 30), portraits, landscapes, still-lifes and unposed, spontaneous photographs of city life. He travelled widely in Europe and also in Egypt, producing panoramic landscape photographs. He published an album of his photographs of the landscapes of Alsace in 1858. From 1859 onwards he collaborated with many other French photographers, and from 1858 to 1862 he photographed landscapes in Switzerland, Germany and France. He was a member of the Société Française de Photographie from ...

Article

Devourdy, Robert  

French, 20th century, male.

Born 1921, in Roanne (Auvergne).

Painter, draughtsman, watercolourist. Figures, landscapes.

A textile designer and later a photographer, Devourdy began painting during adolescence. He got to know Jean Puy in 1950 and made a short film about him and his work in ...

Article

Dyck, Aganetha  

Canadian, 20th–21st century, female.

Born 1937, in Marquette (Manitoba).

Sculptor, mixed-media artist. Fabric art, environmental art.

Aganetha Dyck is best known for her sculptural work that involves a long-term collaboration with bees. Dyck places ready-made items in beehives, often repeatedly, and the bees build honeycombs onto the surfaces of these objects. An early example is her series ...

Article

Dye  

M. C. Whiting

Compound that can be applied to textiles (or to such other materials as leather or the gelatine in a photographic emulsion) with the effect of changing their colour more or less permanently. Not every strongly coloured compound will behave as a dye: the term is used of a substance that can be dissolved and will then migrate from its solution to a fibre, remaining there when the fibre is rinsed free from excess dye. Ideally, it should survive subsequent washing, exposure to light and rubbing without change in colour. If, in addition, it resists the effects of moderately acidic and alkaline liquids, which are common hazards in normal life, it is a good, fast dye. Unfortunately, the dyes used in the past, and most that are used in the late 20th century, are less resistant than the textiles to which they are applied, so care is needed to avoid damaging them....

Article

Fashion photography  

Meghan E. Grossman

Fashion photography is the use of photography to communicate the latest trends in clothing. It acts as a representation of popular taste and is created to serve a commercial industry, yet it has also served as an avenue for change, pushing the boundaries of acceptability with innovations in style, technique, and the portrayal of fashion. Fashion photography was a democratizing force in the acceptance of photography, as it brought the new form of expression to an audience of every social level, rich or poor, urban or suburban. Via mass media, photography serves to relate changes in fashion over long distances and many cultures, primarily disseminating the styles of high fashion in Paris, Milan, or New York to the rest of the world.

Fashion photography as it exists today falls into three main categories: editorial, advertising, and documentary. In the first category, photographs are commissioned by a publication to provide the “news” in fashion to its audience. These photographs are intended to feature the best designs of the current season, without monetary compensation from the companies whose products are included. Editorial photographs are often tied together by theme or narrative, to create a coherent multi-page spread featuring several different designs. Advertising photographs are commissioned by the design house, manufacturer, or retailer to feature a product or brand identity. The company pays for the space in which the advertising photograph appears. Finally, fashion design companies often commission photographers to document their collections; these photographs can be used in-house for documentary purposes or published in the form of a catalog, which serves as additional advertising. Depending on the purpose of the assignment, the photographer may choose to feature the clothes on a model, or hide fashion pieces amongst a jumble of unrelated objects. The goal of the photographer is to elevate the clothing to its highest status, the “fashion object,” through visual cues, lighting, composition, and creativity. Photography has served to add prestige to fashionable clothes since its introduction....

Article

Fibre art  

Mildred Constantine

revised by Elissa Auther

[Fiber art]

Collective term, coined in the 1970s, for creative, experimental fibre objects. A wide range of techniques is used, often in combinations that encompass both traditional (e.g. felting, knotting) and modern (e.g. photographic transfer) practices. The eclectic range of materials includes many not previously associated with textiles, such as paper, wood, iridescent film, nylon mesh and wire.

The first experimental work was done during the 1920s and 1930s by such artists as Anni Albers (see Albers, Anni) and Stölzl, Gunta in Germany. Equally innovative work was produced in the 1940s and 1950s by Trude Guermonprez (1910–1976), Luba Krejci (1925–2005), Lenore Tawney (1907–2007), Loja Saarinen (1879–1968), Dorothy Liebes (1897–1972), Marianne Strengell (1909–1998) and others. These artists were concerned with natural and manmade materials, vibrant colours, formal pattern-making and texture derived from construction. By the 1960s a new direction in ...

Article

Goshorn, Shan  

Native American (Eastern Band of Cherokee), 20th–21st century, female.

Born 1957, in Baltimore.

Multimedia artist, photographer, illustrator, basket-weaver with paper.

Shan Goshorn, given the Cherokee Wolf Clan name of Yellow Moon, began training in silversmithing at the Cleveland Institute of Art and transferred to the Atlanta College of Art for her final year, receiving a BFA degree in painting and photography (double major) in ...

Article

Jacobi, Peter  

Romanian, 20th century, male.

Active in Germany from 1968.

Born 1935, in Ploiesti.

Hand-weaver, sculptor, photographer.

Peter Jacobi graduated at the N. Grigorescu Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest in 1961. That same year he met his future wife who later became known in the world of tapestry design as Ritzi Jacobi. Together they created their first three-dimensional tapestries in ...

Article

Rey, Guido  

Margherita Abbozzo Heuser

(b Turin, Nov 26, 1861; d Turin, June 24, 1935).

Italian photographer. He was born into a family of textile industrialists and was expected to follow the family business. He began taking photographs in the mid-1880s, using the gelatine silver process. He soon adopted recently introduced portable cameras to document his numerous alpine climbing expeditions; while he frequently published and exhibited these photographs in sporting circles, he also developed great technical skills in order to create more structured images in the studio. The latter reflect his interests in the visual arts and in the new aesthetic of Pictorialism. Rey’s accurate portrayals of historical themes, his elegant treatment of light, a poetic handling of subject-matter and a preference for the platinum print also brought his work close in style to that advocated by the Linked Ring, Brotherhood of the and remained typical of his imagery from 1893.

Rey’s photographs were first published in Italy in 1898 and in England in 1900...

Article

Shonibare, Yinka  

Andrew Cross

revised by Mary Chou

(b London Aug 9, 1962).

British sculptor, painter and installation artist. Born to Nigerian parents, he grew up in Nigeria before returning to England to study Fine Art in London at Byam Shaw School of Art and Goldsmiths’ College where he completed his MFA. Shonibare’s West African heritage has been at the heart of his work since he started exhibiting in 1988, when he began using ‘Dutch-wax’ dyed fabrics, commonly found in Western Africa, both for wall-mounted works (as pseudo paintings) and for sculpted figures. Generally perceived as ‘authentic’African cloth, the tradition of Batik originated in Indonesia, and was appropriated by the Dutch who colonized the country. Manufactured in Holland and Britain, the cloth was then shipped to West Africa where it became the dress of the working class in nations such as Nigeria. Shonibare used the material as a way of deconstructing the more complex histories that determine these and other images of ethnicity. As such, he has been described as a ‘post-cultural hybrid’ or the ‘quintessential postcolonial artist’ by critics as well as the artist himself....

Article

Spender, Humphrey  

(b London, April 19, 1910; d Malden, Essex, March 11, 2005).

English photographer, painter and textile designer. He studied architecture at the Albert-Ludwigs Universität, Freiburg, in Germany (1927–8) and at the Architectural Association School in London (1929–34). During his time in Germany he absorbed the influence of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement and of photographic developments in illustrated journals such as the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung and Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung. Though largely self-taught, he did learn photographic techniques from his brother Michael Spender, an employee of the Leitz camera factory. Among other jobs he worked as a commercial and portrait photographer (1934–9), and as a staff photographer for the Daily Mirror (1936–8) and for Picture Post (1946–9). From its foundation in 1937 until 1939 he was the official photographer for the Mass Observation project, which brought together painters, poets, social scientists and film makers to record the details of everyday British life. During the project Spender worked with a concealed camera so that the scenes he captured were entirely natural, as in ...

Article

Spender, John Humphrey  

British, 20th century, male.

Born 19 April 1910, in Hampstead, London; died 11 March 2005, in Ulting (Essex).

Painter, textile designer, photographer, wallpaper designer. Interiors, landscapes, figures.

Humphrey Spender was the brother of the poet Stephen Spender. He studied art history at the Albert-Ludwig-Universität in Freiburg in ...

Article

Ubac, Raoul  

Belgian, 20th century, male.

Active in France from 1930.

Born 31 August 1910 , in Malmédy, in Cologne, according to official records; died 22 March 1985 , in Dieudonné (Oise), France.

Painter (including gouache), sculptor (including slate), engraver, mosaicist, lithographer, illustrator, draughtsman, photographer. Designs for stained glass, tapestries, postage stamps, architectural integration...