Photography

(b Glasgow, Sept 17, 1960).

Scottish photographer and writer, of Ghanaian descent. In 1985 she came to prominence as one of eleven women artists exhibited in The Thin Black Line at the ICA, London, curated by Lubaina Himid. This show marked the first significant breakthrough for contemporary Black and Asian art in a British public gallery. Sulter’s subsequent presentations gained her international recognition: she was awarded the British Telecom New Contemporaries Award 1990 and the Momart Fellowship at the Tate Gallery of Liverpool in 1990. She employed a variety of media in her work, including text, photography, sound recordings and performance. A frequent traveller and a prolific writer as well as artist, she focused her activity on a critical reappraisal of received histories and an assertion of Black cultural heritage. Noted works by Sulter include Zabat (1987; London, V&A), a series of Cibachrome photographic portraits of contemporary Black artists, musicians and writers, posed as a theatre of ancient muses. In ...

(b Headingley, Yorks, Oct 6, 1853; d Whitby, Yorks, May 31, 1941).

English photographer. He was the son of the painter and etcher Thomas Sutcliffe (1828–81) and spent his early years in Whitby. He took up photography around 1871 and in 1872–3 photographed Yorkshire castles and abbeys for the photographic firm of Francis Frith. He made an unsuccessful bid to establish a fashionable portrait photography studio in Tunbridge Wells, Kent (1875), and returned to Whitby in 1876, where he did set up a business. He soon discovered a conflict between what he considered to be a good photograph and what he could sell. His clients made it clear that boldly lit portraits were unacceptable, so he had to use a north-facing studio with white walls to ensure a soft, luminous lighting to please his sitters.

In order to supplement the income from his portrait business, which was seasonal, Sutcliffe took photographs of Whitby and its environs, revealing the beauties of the town and harbour and the lifestyle of the inhabitants in a personal and intimate manner, and gaining him a wide reputation as ‘the pictorial Boswell of Whitby’. This led in ...

(Ivanovich)

(b Moscow, 1874; d Moscow, 1964).

Russian photographer. He was apprenticed while still in his early teens to a Moscow photographer, Yevgeni Ovcharenko, for whom he worked as receptionist, retoucher and photographer’s assistant. In the early 1900s he acquired his own photographic studio on Kuznetsky Bridge (Most) Street and in 1906 he was elected a member of the Russian Photographic Society (RFO: Russtoye Fotograficheskoye Obshchestvo). By 1910 his name had become widely known through his participation in international photographic exhibitions. In 1911 he became a member of the board of the RFO, as well as its exhibition organizer, librarian and tutor of its seminar for photographers. He became a leading light in Russian photography and a master of studio work. In the 1920s Svishchov-Paola exhibited successfully at international shows in the USA, Canada, Japan, Italy, Spain and France, where he was awarded a gold medal at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (Paris, ...

(b Bohuňovice, July 27, 1934).

Czech photographer. He trained as a porcelain modeller in Karlovy Vary and studied stage design in Prague. He took up photography seriously in 1958. He first worked as a graphic artist in advertising, then as a photographer at the Museum of Industrial Art in Prague and from 1983 freelance. From the beginning Svoboda intentionally followed the style, and even the lifestyle, of Josef Sudek. Svoboda concentrated exclusively on the world of intimate images, photographing static objects belonging to his immediate surroundings and expressing intimate feelings through depictions of his flat or workplace. He enlarged from medium or large format negatives, and light plays a meaningful role in his images....

(b Cluj, Jan 11, 1812; d Bucharest, June 3, 1887).

Romanian painter, lithographer and photographer. He studied drawing at the Reformed College and the Catholic Lyceum in Cluj (1819–27) before moving to study in Vienna. In 1831–7 he made watercolours of views in Wallachia and Moldavia (Bucharest, Roman. Acad. Lib.) and later published lithographs of landscapes from Transylvania in the album Erdely Kepben (Cluj, 1843). He travelled in Germany (1835) and in Italy and France (1836–40) and was subsequently employed by the princes of Wallachia, Alexandru Dimitrie Ghica (reg 1834–42) and Gheorghe Bibescu (reg 1842–8), to sketch official ceremonies. He also painted several portraits of Princess Maria Bibescu in peasant costume (c. 1845; Bucharest, N. Hist. Mus. Romania and Roman. Acad. Lib.). In 1850 he made his first voyage to the Middle East, visiting Baghdad, Chorsabad, Baalbek and Constantinople (now Istanbul), to which he returned in 1864, in the entourage of Alexander Couza, Prince of Romania (...

(b Brussels, Jan 22, 1939).

Belgian architect, photographer and teacher. He was among the last generation of architects to be trained at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de la Cambre, Brussels, by the great names of Belgian Modernism, such as Victor Bourgeois, Louis Herman De Koninck and Jean De Ligne. After graduating in 1964, he became associated in 1968 with André Jacqmain, with whom he shared a taste for elaborate forms and a varied approach and language. From their collaboration emerged the Place des Sciences (1972–5) in the university town of Louvain-la-Neuve and various houses and offices in Brussels, including the block ‘Building Stéphanie’ (1982–3) at the entrance of Avenue Louise, which has been considered a successful Post-modernist addition to the city.

In 1984 he became a partner of Nele Huisman (b 1939) and was awarded the Robert-Maskens prize for a garden pavilion at Bierges (1982...

(b Lyon, July 12, 1897; d Nice, Feb 23, 1984).

French photographer. In 1914 he immigrated with his family to the USA, where his father worked in a silk mill. There he studied silk design by day and art, mainly painting, by night until he became interested in photography, which he studied under Emil Brunel at the New York Institute of Photography in 1916. He was impressed by the work of Edward Steichen, among others, and became a friend of his assistant Harvey White. After various menial jobs, he worked as a portrait photographer for Bachrach Studios from 1922 to 1928 in Baltimore, MD, although he also produced several official portraits in Washington, DC, including some of the Coolidge family. In 1927 he also studied portraiture under the painter Carlos Baca-Flor in New York. In 1928 he moved to Paris, intending to work as a fashion photographer, and met Man Ray, who taught him the technique of solarization. He also became a friend of René Magritte and the French Surrealist writer Phillipe Soupault (...

(b Los Angeles, Dec 7, 1923; d Baarlo, March 15, 2009).

American sculptor, photographer and film maker, active in the Netherlands. Born of Japanese parents, he received his first training in sculpture from the American sculptor Donal Hord (1902–66) in 1941. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor (on his 18th birthday) his family was sent to an internment camp, an experience that left scars more intense than his war wounds. To escape the camp, he joined a brother in the US army, and after demobilization he worked as an antiques restorer and from 1947 to 1948 studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. He moved to Paris in 1948 where he studied under Ossip Zadkine and in 1949 under Fernand Léger. In the latter year he came into contact with the Cobra group and exhibited with them at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In 1950 he was one of the co-founders of the Galerie 8 in Paris and also studied at the Académie de la Grand Chaumière. Also in ...

(b Melbury, Dorset, Feb 11, 1800; d Lacock Abbey, Wilts, Sept 17, 1877).

English gentleman of science, antiquarian, and inventor of the calotype process. Talbot’s activities ranged across the natural sciences and many fields of Classical and antiquarian scholarship. His scientific interest in nature and natural phenomena, including optics, botany, and horticulture, was complemented by studies of Classical literature, Assyriology, decipherment of ancient script, and etymology. He became famous as one of the first inventors and advocates of photography.

Talbot’s early scholarly successes as a student at the University of Cambridge included competitive prizes in Greek verse and mathematics. His participation in these and many other fields is documented by the vast collection of research notebooks, correspondence, documents, and objects that he left behind and that now comprise the Talbot archive housed at the British Library, London, and other institutions. The notebooks show that Talbot was active in botany from an early age, for example, and that he worked at the forefront of chemical and optical research in the 1820s and 1830s. Talbot’s archive also contains many notebooks on etymology and philology from the 1830s and 1840s. The more than one hundred Assyriological notebooks—the majority of the notebooks in the British Library collection—suggest he was devoted to this subject between the 1850s and the end of his life. An abiding interest in origins and a persistent fascination with script and inscription, languages and decipherment appear throughout the Talbot archive....

(b London, March 4, 1967).

English photographer, film and video artist. On graduating from Goldsmiths’ College, London, in 1990, Taylor-Wood worked predominantly as a photographer, often showing herself in sexually confrontational and challenging roles. In Fuck, Suck, Wank, Spank (C-type print, 1993; see 1997 exh. cat., p. 41) she poses with classical contrapposto, her trousers around her ankles, wearing a T-shirt printed with the title of the work. In 1994 she made her first film, Killing Time (video projection with soundtrack, artist’s priv. col.; see 1997 exh. cat., pp. 194–201), in which four separate screens show ordinary people miming the libretto to Strauss’s opera Elektra. Their fidgeting, self-awareness and boredom when not singing becomes central to the work, suggesting affinities with contemporary ‘slacker’ culture. The themes of isolated subjects, self-conscious exhibitionism and anxiety were explored in subsequent films. In 1995 she made the first of what was to become an extended series of colour photographs, ...

(b Saint-Flour, Cantal, Jan 14, 1817; d Saint-Martin-le-Vinoux, nr Grenoble, Aug 28, 1892).

French photographer and civil engineer. He was fascinated by Egyptology from an early age and visited Egypt from 1851 to 1852. He returned there in 1869 with an official invitation to the opening of the Suez Canal. He brought a number of calotypes back to France after his first trip, and these made up his album Egypte et Nubie. Sites et monuments les plus intéressants pour l’étude de l’art et de l’histoire. Atlas photographique accompagné de plans et d’une table explicative servant de complément à la grande ‘description de l’Egypte’. This sumptuous work, illustrated by 160 large-format plates printed by H. de Fonteny, was published from 1853 to 1858 by Goupil. The views shown were varied and included ancient monuments such as the Temple of Abu Simbel, the Pyramid of Chephren and the Ruins of Aswan as well as modern ones such as the Town of Asyut, the banks of the Nile and local people going about their daily business, as in ...

(b Edinburgh, June 14, 1837; d London, Sept 30, 1921).

Scottish photographer and writer. After studying chemistry at Edinburgh University he settled on the island of Pinang, Malaysia, where he began practising as a professional photographer in 1862. Over the next 12 years he travelled extensively in the region, taking many photographs in Siam (now Thailand; see fig.), Cambodia, Vietnam and China. His subjects ranged from ethnography to antiquities, and his style is distinguished by the directness with which he represented landscapes and social practices that to his western contemporaries appeared almost fantastic. Despite acute difficulties of climate and terrain, he used the cumbersome wet collodion process, producing large-format (up to 360×480 mm) and stereographic negatives that are noted for their clarity of detail and richness of tone.

Unlike most travel photographers of his generation Thomson rarely exhibited his work, preferring the illustrated album as the medium best suited to his documentary approach. In all he produced nine such albums, varying widely both in format and reprographic process. The first, ...

(b Remscheid, Germany, Aug 16, 1968).

German photographer. After a period living and working in Hamburg (1987–90), he studied at the Bournemouth and Poole College of Art (1990–92), and then settled in London. In 1995, at the end of a year in New York, he won both the ars viva Prize from the Kulturkreis der Deutschen Wirtschaft and the Bremen Böltcherstrasse Prize. In 1998 he was appointed guest professor at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg. In the late 1980s Tillmans began making photographs that constitute an intriguing hybrid of fashion photography and documentary reportage. Working at first with Hamburg-based style and fashion journals, he took photographs of the European club scene. In 1988 he began an extensive collaboration with the British lifestyle magazine i-D, in whose pages he published much of his work. His subjects range from intimate still-lifes to portraits of friends and celebrities, referring often explicitly to his involvement with political issues such as homelessness, racism and gay rights. He exhibits his images in carefully constructed wall montages, mixing ink-jet prints with photographs and pages taken from the magazines, for instance in the exhibition ...

(b The Hague, Oct 17, 1835; d nr Marzuq, North Africa, Aug 1, 1869).

Dutch photographer and explorer. She was an amateur photographer but must have learnt the art from one of the professional photographers who had settled in The Hague, possibly Herman Bückmann (1820–84), the Delboy brothers (fl early 1860s) or the German Maria Hille (1827–?1893). Between 1860 and 1861 Tinne made photographs of mansions, buildings and lanes in The Hague (Leiden, Rijksuniv., and The Hague, Gemeentearchf). They are albumen prints of large format (370×450 mm), made from glass negatives, which were prepared with liquid collodion to be made light-sensitive shortly before use. She had a small carriage made for this purpose, which she kept with her while photographing and in which she could prepare the negatives. Her photographs show that the photographer chose her viewpoint and composition very carefully and spent a lot of thought on the lighting. The light and shade effects in the photographs create almost graphic effects....

(b Boissy l’Aillerie, France, Sept 28, 1954).

French photographer . While studying architecture in Paris (1973–9), Tosani produced his first experimental photographs, systematically exploring the possibilities of focus, depth of field and scale. These ideas were subsequently developed in series of photographs that focus on one object or figure, arranged in a studio. His interest in the idea that photography can disrupt ordinary cognitive processes can be seen in a series of photographs taken of small figurines, mostly dancers or sportsmen, encased in ice. With Le Plongeur (1987; 1.2 × 1.7 mm, colour photograph; Paris, Gal. Liliane et Michel Durand-Dessert), a diver caught mid-plunge in a slowly melting block of ice, he demonstrated an interest in scales of magnitude and time. Other series made during the 1980s were concerned with elements of fire and rain, as well as sense perception: for example, the series Portraits (1984–5) made from highly blurred photographic portraits projected onto sheets of Braille. Towards the end of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s his imagery became more organic, focusing especially on the human body. The series ...

(b Devonport, 1822; d Devonport, 1902).

English photographer. He was an enthusiastic photographer while stationed with the army in India from 1839 to 1875. In the 1850s he initiated and undertook numerous surveys of sites of historical and ethnographical interest: the best-known include commissions for the British East India Company (1855) and the Madras Presidency (...

(b London, May 12, 1815; d London, April 29, 1894).

English photographer. He began photographing country churches, trees, family and friends in 1849, using the calotype process. In the early 1850s he became a pioneering amateur photographer of the British landscape and its picturesque monuments. From 1852 he used the paper negative in combination with albumen positives on a large scale (262×381 mm). His work was shown at major exhibitions, including the Society of Arts, London (1852), and International Exhibition, London (1862), bringing him international renown. He was Vice President of the Photographic Society of London and Treasurer and Honorary Secretary of the Photographic Exchange club (1855–7).

Turner’s prints are rich and vigorous in tonality, skilful and original in composition. He was a successful tallow-chandler by trade, with premises in the Haymarket. Above these he erected a glass house or studio, in which he made portraits of family, friends and fellow photographers. His landscape and architectural subjects were the only photographs that he exhibited. Inspired by the Great Exhibition of ...

(b Malmédy, Aug 31, 1910; d March 24, 1985).

Belgian painter, sculptor and photographer, active in France. He originally intended to become a waterways and forestry inspector. His interest in art was aroused when he made his first visit to Paris in 1928 and met several artists, including Otto Freundlich. After returning to Malmédy he read the Manifeste du Surréalisme (1924) by André Breton. In 1930 he settled in Paris and made contact with the Surrealist group, attending the first showing of Luis Buñuel’s film L’Age d’or (1931). He attended the Faculté des Lettres of the Sorbonne briefly but soon left to frequent the studios of Montparnasse. About 1933–4 he attended the Ecole des Arts Appliqués for more than a year, studying mainly drawing and photography. In the course of a visit to Austria and the Dalmatian coast in 1933, he visited the island of Hvar where he made some assemblages of stones, which he drew and photographed, for example ...

(Ivanovich)

(b Serpukhov, 1888; d Moscow, 1976).

Russian photographer. After graduating from a school of commerce and chemical technology he worked in Ivan Sytin’s zincographic workshop. In 1911 he joined Karl Fisher’s photographic studio, where he trained as a portrait photographer. In 1917–20 he was a photographer at the Armoured Vehicles Academy. From 1922 to 1930 he exhibited at photographic shows and received numerous awards in Europe, North America and Japan. He was a member of the Russian Photographic Society and an editor of the journal Fotograf. In 1928–30 he taught basic photography to trade union groups and in 1931 founded the Moscow Industrial Union’s first school of photography. From 1934 he taught photography at the Moscow Printing Institute, where he developed the ‘bromochromotype’, a three-colour positive printing technique (which he used in his photograph Red Flag, 1930s), and he experimented in the design of photographic equipment. He was known for his psychological portraits, such as ...