Photography

(b Dijon, July 1842 or 1843; d Auvers-sur-Oise, Val d’Oise, June 8, 1888).

French painter and printmaker. After a rudimentary education he was employed by his brother-in-law, a photographer, to retouch negatives. He then moved to Paris where he supported himself by working as a photographer while training at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Isidore-Alexandre-Augustin Pils. In Paris he became friendly with Emile Boilvin and also came to know Philippe Burty, Félix Bracquemond and Louis-Charles-Auguste Steinheil. Though he studied painting he also learnt to etch under Léon Gaucherel and Léopold Flameng and decided to devote himself to etching. He made his début at the Salon in 1865 with a drawing, but from 1868 he exhibited only etchings. His works, which were mainly reproductions of paintings by contemporary artists or by Old Masters such as Gainsborough, Rembrandt and Rubens, appeared in the journals L’Art and Gazette des beaux-arts and were also published by Galeries Goupil. He also produced original portrait etchings of contemporary writers including Turgenev, Tennyson and Théophile Gautier. In ...

(b Petilla de Aragón, Navarra, May 1, 1852; d Madrid, Oct 17, 1934).

Spanish photographer. Spain’s most accomplished photographic scientist, he was named Honorary President of Madrid’s first Real Sociedad Fotográfica (1900) and was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine (1906). He is known less for his images than for his experiments in colour photography, which culminated in his book Fotografía de los colores (Madrid, 1912). In retrospect he described photography as a ‘seemingly unattainable chimera’, and in 1925 he remarked on his attraction to colour movies. His autochromes, notably the still-lifes, are further evidence of his interests in this area.

Ramón y Cajal began medical studies in Saragossa (1869). As professor in Valencia (beginning 1884), he studied histology and used photography to further his research, then became professor in Normal Histology and Pathology in Barcelona (1887). His photography is rooted in the registration of physical phenomena, and he eventually distinguished between documentary and artistic photography, calling the former the ‘soul of modern reportage’, which eschewed tampering. As early as ...

[Anthony]

(b Wookey, nr Wells, Somerset, June 7, 1941; d London, March 13, 1972).

English photographer. He studied commercial design and photography at the London College of Printing (1957–61) and design at Yale University, New Haven, CT (1961–2 and 1963–4). In between these periods at Yale he worked with the Russian-born American photographer Alexey Brodovitch (1898–1971) and Richard Avedon at the Brodovitch Design Laboratory in New York. He worked as a freelance photographer in San Francisco and New York in 1965 before settling again in London in 1966. It was during the period in England that he took his best pictures, roving the country to record the peculiarities of English culture and behaviour, as in Glyndebourne (1967; see A Day Off, pl. 119). He died from leukaemia.

(b Carcassonne, 1946).

French painter, sculptor, film maker and photographer. He studied at the Faculté de Toulouse (1964–6) and the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques in Paris (1967–70). When he first left college he worked as a film technician on a number of mainstream films. During this time he also made his own films, including one devoted to Sonia Delaunay (1972) and another to Robert Delaunay (1973); he continued to make films intermittently throughout his career. In the early 1980s he began to exhibit a series of installations and large upright models with the appearance of scenography. Guéridon grigio (1980; see 1981 exh. cat.) was a model of a still-life composed of jugs and vases. The impression of round, volumetric forms created by means of a series of flat models in relief suggested the influence of Purism, yet the comical, simplistic and almost didactic manner in which Raynaud presented the shapes suggested a concern with the mediated character of the imagery as much as with compositional problematics. In later work he continued to draw from the history of French classicism. In the early 1990s he began to exhibit sculpture created from flight cases, either arranged as sculptures in their own right or used as light-boxes. ...

(b Stargard, Pomerania, Jan 5, 1931; d Berlin, Germany, Sept 28, 1993).

East German graphic artist, painter, photographer, filmmaker, and action artist. He is best known as a pioneer of Correspondence art in East Germany. He studied graphic arts and painting at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin-Charlottenburg (1948–53) under Alexander Camaro and Wolfgang Hoffmann. After graduating, he joined the Association of Visual Artists in East Germany and worked as an independent (freischaffende) artist in East Berlin.

In the 1950s, he began experimenting in a variety of media, including assemblage, collage, photography, Super 8 film, and visual poetry, together with his friends Ingo Kirchner and Hanfried Schulz. He also collaborated with Schulz on commissions for architectural art. During these years, his studio in East Berlin-Pankow became an important meeting place for experimental artists whose work did not fit the traditional media expected by the state. It was not until the mid 1970s that he was able to start exhibiting work within the East German system, in small but important galleries of experimental art such as the Galerie Arkade in Berlin in ...

(b Sweden, 1813; d London, Jan 18, 1875).

Swedish photographer and painter active in England. After training in painting and lithography he began photographing in 1853 using the wet collodion negative process and albumen prints. Rejlander’s interest was directed toward the artistic potential of photography, and he is known as the ‘father of art photography’. He believed that lessons were to be learnt from the great masters of the fine arts. However, he did not copy paintings but sought to produce photographic equivalents. His models varied according to the type of photograph he was creating. For ‘high art’ photographs and some figural studies, he took inspiration from Italian High Renaissance art; for genre photographs, he used sources in Dutch and Flemish genre painting, English narrative painting and also popular imagery, such as cartoons in Punch. While other photographers also borrowed from art of the past, Rejlander appears to have studied a broader range of potential sources than most of his contemporaries....

(b Valencia, May 17, 1907; d E. Berlin, Oct 11, 1982).

Spanish photomontagist and printmaker, active in Mexico and Germany. He studied painting at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Carlos in Valencia (1919–26), subsequently becoming a graphic designer and photomontagist (1928–39) in Valencia, Madrid, and Barcelona. In his printmaking, which was influenced by John Heartfield and by Socialist Realism, he showed a strong commitment to the Republican cause and a talent for satire, often expressed through the use of colourful popular imagery. When the Spanish Civil War ended in 1939 he went into exile in Mexico, where he executed a series of photomontages entitled The American Way of Life (1949–66), in which he denounced American imperialism and capitalism. In 1958 he moved permanently to East Berlin, where he executed the series Fata Morgana U.S.A.

(b Wurzburg, June 22, 1897; d Wamel, Sept 27, 1966).

German photographer. He began taking photographs as a schoolboy. He was influenced by his father, an enthusiastic amateur. After active service in World War I, he studied chemistry (1919–21) in Dresden but did not complete his degree. In 1922 he became the director of the picture archive of the Folkwang-Auriga publishing house in Hagen, where, among other things, he provided much of the pictorial material for the books on plants by the owner of the press, Ernst Fuhrmann (e.g. Das Photographieren von Blüten, 1924. When Renger-Patzsch’s first book of photographs, Das Chorgestühl von Kappenberg (1925), appeared, he left the press and opened a studio in Bad Harzburg.

Renger-Patzsch disapproved of the techniques employed in pictorial photography; he focused on details and surfaces with such clarity that the object photographed became detached from its wider context (e.g. Insulator-chain, c. 1927; Aachen, Gal. Schürmann & Kicken). He exposed the structures of the material world, juxtaposing manmade with natural images to stress their links with the underlying immutable, structural laws. With his concentration on detail, as in the scientific illustrations he admired, Renger-Patzsch believed that photography extended man’s understanding, regarding as successful a photograph rooted in realism with aesthetic qualities that were derived from the practice of photography rather than the fine arts. Natural and industrial images served as models for beauty, particularly in ...

French family of photographers of German origin. The family’s portrait studio was founded by Charles Reutlinger (b Karlsruhe, 25 Feb 1816; d Karlsruhe, after 1880) in Paris in 1850. The images and poses were very conventional (e.g. Mlle Elven of the Palais Royal, c. 1883; see Levrault, pl. 132), but Charles photographed many of the best-known artists, musicians and writers of his time, including Liszt, Verdi and Berlioz. He handed over his studio to his brother Emile Reutlinger (b Karlsruhe, 27 Aug 1825; d Germany, 9 Aug 1907) in 1880. Emile’s son Léopold-Emile Reutlinger (b Callao, Peru, 17 March 1863; d Paris, 16 March 1937) began to work for his father when he went to Paris from Peru in 1883. He took over the Reutlinger studio in 1890 and produced photographs for advertising purposes, as well as for magazines and newspapers. He frequently held exhibitions of his work in the offices of the newspapers that he worked for. He stopped working in ...

(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...

(b Neuilly, nr Paris, Dec 18, 1952).

French photographer. She took up photography in 1978 after returning to Paris from New York, where she had worked as a model. She subsequently produced fashion and celebrity photography for newspapers, magazines and commercial agencies, alongside a large body of independent work displayed in galleries and museums. Her first museum exhibition, Portraits (Paris, Pompidou, 1981), contained photographs of striptease artists and acrobats whom she had invited to pose in her studio. In 1982 she began a series of photographs of stuffed animals in poses that made them appear animated in a parody of traditional portraiture, raising questions about anthropomorphic imagery and traditional memento mori. The completed series was presented in the book Animals 1982–1994 (Munich, 1994). Her 1990 exhibition Modern Lovers (Charleroi, Pal. B.-A.; Paris, Maison Eur. Phot.; London, Hamilton Gals) consisted of over 30 images of androgynous youths, in an intriguing intermingling of male and female physical identity. This was followed by the illustrated book ...

(b Halton, Bucks, May 21, 1954).

English photographer. After training as a painter, from 1985 she used the photo-booth as the primary tool for works that usually consist of strips of mechanically produced images collaged into various formats. While the photo-booth has clearly defined technical parameters, including a limited focal range and a dependence on artifical lighting, Rideal managed to apply its limited scope to wide-ranging imagery. Since there was no possibility of being behind the lens, as would be the case for a conventional photographer, in her early works she featured herself acting out mini-dramas. These first performance-like pieces were made in public booths; the circumstances as well as the cost dictated that the works be small in scale. After obtaining access to machines in the quieter and more private location of the manufacturer, Rideal was able to produce larger works, to concentrate more precisely on subject-matter and to exercise greater control over the imagery. Often large numbers of images were combined to create a single image on a much bigger scale. For ...

(b Lathen, Jan 9, 1938).

German photographer. After an apprenticeship as a pharmacist, he studied photography under Otto Steinert from 1963 to 1965 at the Folkwangschule in Essen. He settled in Hannover in 1966 and began working as a photojournalist. He is best known for working on series of photographs in a subjective but documentary style, paying attention to clarity of composition. Among these are ...

(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 Buenos Aires, Jul 14, 1937; d Barcelona, Nov 6, 2009).

Argentine photographer, active in Spain. In Buenos Aires he belonged to the circle of the photographer Sameer Nakarius, who founded the Forum Group in the 1950s. From 1959 to 1970 he was head of the photography department at the Instituto Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires, and he worked in Barcelona in 1976–7. His style, which matured particularly after his move to Europe in the mid-1970s, combines the inquisitive nature of documentary photography with the rigorous methodology of conceptual art. His most interesting work includes a series of photographs of unoccupied hotel rooms, taken over a period of years around the world, which in spite of their apparent emptiness reveal much about human behaviour.

(b Paris, Oct 3, 1810; d Paris, 1882).

French photographer. Originally working as a painter at the Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres (where he had taken over the job from his father, Pierre-Rémy Robert), Robert first learned to make calotype prints under Regnault family, §1, then director of the famous porcelain factory. Regnault, who was himself an important calotypist, likely influenced Robert’s interest in the photographic process. Before becoming the director of Sèvres in 1871, Robert studied chemistry and industrial engineering at the Ecole centrale des arts et manufactures in Paris. After returning to Sèvres, he became an early adopter of William Henry Fox Talbot’s calotype paper process, and soon became an expert in the field. Between 1858 and 1872 he also taught photography at the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées and the Ecole du Génie Maritime. Robert was a founding and lifelong member of the Sociéte Française de Photographie. His photographs are valued today for their rich tonal gradients, the soft lighting, and his careful posing of portrait sitters (see, for example, ...

(b England, c. ?1810; d ?India, after ?1881).

English photographer and medallist. He was active from about 1850 in Malta, where he met the Beato family brothers, whose sister, Maria Matilde, became Robertson’s wife. Together with the Beato brothers, Robertson travelled to Athens in 1852, and then c. 1853 to Constantinople, where he was appointed chief engraver of the Imperial Mint of Turkey. With the help of the Beatos, whom he had probably taught, Robertson took a series of photographs of Constantinople in 1853 (e.g. Eastern Scene, see Lucie-Smith, pl. 66). This was followed, in September 1855, by a series of the battlefields of the Crimea, in which he continued the work begun by Roger Fenton of documenting the war. Many of the photographs of this period bear the signature Robertson & Beato, and this is found on other photographs up until 1862.

In 1857 Robertson left Turkey and set out with the Beato brothers on a long journey from Athens to Egypt, Jerusalem, and eventually to India. Probably during his stay in Athens, Robertson gave many of his photographic plates to ...

(b Ludlow, Salop, July 9, 1830; d Tunbridge Wells, Feb 21, 1901).

English photographer. As a young man he worked in a bookshop while studying art. He became interested in photography at the Great Exhibition, London (1851), and photographed landscapes and architecture in Shropshire and Warwickshire. In 1857 he opened a portrait studio in Leamington Spa and became interested in the composite photographs of O. G. Rejlander. Robinson, too, began to compose his photographs from a number of separate negatives in an attempt to elevate photography to the status of painting in the academies. The process was known as combination printing (see Photography, §I). In 1858, under Rejlander’s tutelage, Robinson produced Fading Away (composite albumen print; Bath, Royal Phot. Soc.), a combination print from five separate negatives representing a young girl on her deathbed accompanied by her family.

Robinson’s narrative photographs of allegorical or sentimental genre themes were often combination prints assembled from many negatives. He created tableaux with actors and props, sometimes incorporating a verse caption to help establish the narrative purpose of the composition, for example ...

[Alexander] (Mikhaylovich)

(b St Petersburg, Nov 23, 1891; d Moscow, Dec 3, 1956).

Russian painter, sculptor, designer and photographer. He was a central exponent of Russian Constructivism, owing much to the pre-Revolutionary work of Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin, and he was closely involved in the cultural debates and experiments that followed the Revolution of 1917. In 1921 he denounced, on ideological grounds, easel painting and fine art, and he became an exponent of Productivism (see Constructivism, §1) in many fields, including poster design, furniture, photography and film. He resumed painting in his later years. His work was characterized by the systematic way in which from 1916 he sought to reject the conventional roles of self-expression, personal handling of the medium and tasteful or aesthetic predilections. His early nihilism and condemnation of the concept of art make it problematic even to refer to Rodchenko as an artist: in this respect his development was comparable to that of Dada, although it also had roots in the anarchic activities of Russian Futurist groups....

(b West Bromwich, W. Midlands, May 18, 1961; d London, March 4, 1998).

English installation artist and photographer. He studied from 1981 to 1985 at Trent Polytechnic, where he met Keith Piper (b 1960) and Eddie Chambers (b 1960), both of whom, like Rodney himself, featured prominently in black political art of the later 1980s. He also studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, from 1985 to 1987. Rodney’s work often combined elements of his personal life with a political statement. A good example is The House that Jack Built (1987; see 1990 book, p. 3), for which he arranged found x-rays into the shape of a house onto which he painted the slogans ‘save our shit, save our souls, save our struggle’, and in front of which he placed a headless mannequin as a kind of self-portrait. He used a variety of media to comment on the situation of black people in Britain, as in ...