Elliott Erwitt

Elliott Erwitt

 American, b. Paris 1928

It's about reacting to what you see, hopefully without preconception. You can find pictures anywhere. It's simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. You just have to care about what's around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy. ”

Born in Paris in 1928 to Russian parents, Erwitt spent his childhood in Milan, then emigrated to the US, via France, with his family in 1939. As a teenager living in Hollywood, he developed an interest in photography and worked in a commercial darkroom before experimenting with photography at Los Angeles City College. In 1948 he moved to New York and exchanged janitorial work for film classes at the New School for Social Research.

Erwitt traveled in France and Italy in 1949 with his trusty Rolleiflex camera. In 1951 he was drafted for military service and undertook various photographic duties while serving in a unit of the Army Signal Corps in Germany and France.



While in New York, Erwitt met Edward Steichen, Robert Capa and Roy Stryker, the former head of the Farm Security Administration. Stryker initially hired Erwitt to work for the Standard Oil Company, where he was building up a photographic library for the company, and subsequently commissioned him to undertake a project documenting the city of Pittsburgh.

In 1953 Erwitt joined Magnum Photos and worked as a freelance photographer for Collier's, Look, Life, Holiday and other luminaries in that golden period for illustrated magazines. To this day he is for hire and continues to work for a variety of journalistic and commercial outfits.



In the late 1960s Erwitt served as Magnum's president for three years. He then turned to film: in the 1970s he produced several noted documentaries and in the 1980s eighteen comedy films for Home Box Office. Erwitt became known for benevolent irony, and for a humanistic sensibility traditional to the spirit of Magnum.

Nan Goldin

                  As a teenager in Boston in the 1960s, then in New York starting in the 1970s, Nan Goldin has taken intensely personal, spontaneous, sexual, and transgressive photographs of her family, friends, and lovers. In 1979 she presented her first slideshow in a New York nightclub, and her richly colored, snapshot like photographs were soon heralded as a groundbreaking contribution to fine art photography. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency—the name she gave her ever-evolving show—eventually grew into a forty-five-minute multimedia presentation of more than 900 photographs, accompanied by a musical soundtrack.

Arnold Newman (1918 – 2006)

        Arnold Abner Newman was an American photographer, noted for his environmental portraits of artists and politicians. He was also known for his carefully composed abstract still life images.

                  Newman is often credited with being the first photographer to use so-called environmental portraiture, in which the photographer places the subject in a carefully controlled setting to capture the essence of the individual’s life and work. Newman normally captured his subjects in their most familiar surroundings with representative visual elements showing their professions and personalities. A musician for instance might be photographed in their recording studio or on stage, a Senator or other politician in their office or a representative building. Using a large-format camera and tripod, he worked to record every detail of a scene.

Alfried Krupp, industrialist, Essen, Germany, 1963












             Newman always focus on the background, and the feeling that the circumstance can bring to the viewers. When I first see this image, I feel a strong visual impact, the gaze and the deep image of the background. It make me feel that he already know what behind him and what behind you! Maybe, we never know what behind us, but this image bring me a strange feeling about what I cannot see in my back.

Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

Nonstop imagery (television, streaming video, movies) is our surround, but when it comes to remembering, the photograph has the deeper bite.

― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others 20

 

New demands are made on reality in the era of cameras. The real thing may not be fearsome enough, and therefore needs to be enhanced; or reenacted more convincingly.

― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others 50

 

In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding—at a distance, through the medium of photography—other people's pain

― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others 13

 

The ubiquity of those photographs, and those horrors, cannot help but nourish belief in the inevitability of tragedy in the benighted or backward—that is, poor—parts of the world.

― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others 56

 

The dual powers of photography—to generate documents and to create works of visual art—have produced some remarkable exaggerations about what photographers ought or ought not to do

― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others60

Mary Ellen Mark

                   Mary Ellen Mark is an American photographer known for her photojournalism, portraiture, and advertising photography. She has had 16 collections of her work published and has been exhibited at galleries and museums worldwide.

Photographer Mary Ellen Mark is one of the most respected and influential image makers of our time.  Her work photographing diverse cultures across the globe has become iconic in the field of documentary photography and portraiture. Mark has received a Cornell Capa Award , the Infinity Award for Journalism, the Photographer of the Year Award from the Friends of Photography; the World Press Award for Outstanding Body of Work Throughout the Years; the Victor Hasselblad Cover Award; two Robert F. Kennedy Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and three National Endowment for the Arts awards. Her photo essays and portraits have exhibited globally, featured in such publications as LIFE, New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair, and published in eighteen books. In addition, Mark has photographed advertising campaigns for Barnes and Noble, British Levis, Coach Bags, Eileen Fisher, Hasselblad, Heineken, Keds, Mass Mutual, Nissan, and Patek Philippe.

Michael Kenna

        


          The ghostly images of Michael Kenna give us a hauntingly beautiful lens with which to view our natural world. Many of his photos are inspired by his travels abroad, with Japan being one of his biggest influences. When Kenna first visited Japan in 1987 for a one-person exhibition, he became completely entranced with the countries stark terrain.




















             Since then, Kenna has traveled throughout the world snapping his striking, minimalist landscapes, which continue to capture the essence and grace of the eerie mountains, oceans and valleys he photographs.



            

            Kenna’s work lies in the realm of simplicity and clarity. He has described his body of work as, “more like a haiku rather than a prose,” alluding to the idea that his photographs are captured in short poem form. The process with which Kenna creates his work explains why his photos give off the feelings they do: suspended. He often makes his photographs at dawn or in the dark hours of the morning with exposures up to 10 hours.

           


                  Kenna has said “you can’t always see what’s otherwise noticeable during the day … with long exposures you can photograph what the human eye in incapable of seeing”. What Kenna’s pictures allow us to see are breathtaking landscapes through a supernatural lens, which is no easy feat.

 

Ernst Haas

 
             Born in 1921, Vienna’s Ernst Haas is considered by many to be one of the first true masters of color photography, though he began his career working with black and white. Following the tradition established by Henri Cartier Bresson, who focused heavily on the decisive moment and rich monochromatic tonality, Haas would receive worldwide recognition for his early work documenting the homecoming of Austrian prisoners of War. Haas eventually moved to color, favoring its ability to work in a more metaphoric, poetic vein that photographers like Saul Leiter and Eliot Porter were examining.

          A significant amount of Haas’s output throughout his career landed in the pages of mainstream magazines such as Life, Look and Esquire. But in addition to this more commercial work, Haas was always making photographs for himself. It is these photographs that the German publisher Steidl has brought together for the new book, Ernst Haas: Color The book shows mostly unseen work by Haas, work that is at once rich in color and texture as well as being more edgy and experimental than much of the work he became known for during his lifetime.





 A car drives down a desert road in twilight, USA, September 1967

 A cracked pane of glass, March 1963.

                                                          

                                                             New York, USA, 1974