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

Alex Webb

One of the street photographers who have had a strong impact on my street photography is Alex Webb. Webb is a Magnum photographer who uses strong colors, light, and emotion to capture beautifully complex images. After picking up a copy of Alex Webb’s “The Suffering of Light” I fell in love with his work and his use of color- and started to also make the transition from black and white to color.

Depth is a strong element in the work of Alex Webb. In many of his photographs, they have a strong foreground, mid-ground, and background. The great thing about this is that it leads you (the viewer) to invite yourself into the frame. You see what he sees. You enter the frame by looking at the things closest to you, and then you slowly make your way into the mid-ground, and then slowly out into the background.

From a recent interview he talks about the quote:

“My understanding – of course, I’m not a philosopher or a scientist – of an aspect of Goethe’s theory of color is that he felt that color came out of tension between light and dark. I think that is very appropriate when you think about the kind of color that I shoot.” – Alex Webb

He often describes when he is shooting in places- he looks for the tension between borders. For example, he found Istanbul a fascinating place because geographically- it is located as a hub for many different cultures. It is a melting pot in terms of socio-economic, political, and ethnic terms. He says about Istanbul, “I returned frequently between 2001 and 2005 to complete a book on this vibrant and melancholy city that sits between the divide between the East and west: Istanbul: City of a Hundred Names”.

The Decisive Moment by Henri Cartier-Bresson

Arguably the supreme master of candid photography, and one of the earliest adopters of the 35mm format, Henri Cartier-Bresson (HCB for short) is far and away one of the most storied and legendary image-makers in the entire history of photography. We honor him and his legacy this week, and thank him for all that he has done for our craft.

Born in France to a wealthy family (he was the first of 5 children), Cartier-Bresson was destined to break the mold of expectations set before him by his parents. He did not want to be a part of the family business, nor did he want to fall prey to the bourgeois attitudes & lifestyles that seemed to dominate his family’s station. However, given their position, this provided a distinct advantage for HCB as they were able to financially support him as he developed his interests (and talents) on his own independent schedule. It’s also worth noting that photography was not his first venture into the world of the arts, no, he made an unsuccessful attempt to learn music when he was rather young, and was soon afterwards introduced to oil painting by his uncle (who unfortunately died during World War I). By 1927, HCB was enrolled in a private art school where he was exposed to all of the new modern art-forms that were beginning to develop during this era. He did experience photography during this time, but it wasn’t until the beginning of the 1930′s that he became truly motivated to pursue it.

He was inspired by a photograph taken in 1930 by Martin Munkacsi (a Hungarian Photojournalist) of three black children that were just on the verge of becoming total silhouettes running towards the shoreline of Lake Tanganyika. This spontaneous moment exuded freedom, grace and joy of life to HCB. After experiencing this new enlightenment in the power of photography he had said:

“The only thing which completely was an amazement to me and brought me to photography was the work of Munkacsi. When I saw the photograph of Munkacsi of the black kids running in a wave I couldn’t believe such a thing could be caught with the camera. I said damn it, I took my camera and went out into the street.”

That moment is what captivated HCB to take photography seriously, to the effect that he stopped painting all together. This is also the point in his timeline when he would get his first Leica camera, which would ultimately form the most perfect symbiotic relationship between a photographer and a particular brand of camera (to this day, when I think of Leica, I think of HCB). This new small camera would allow him to document life’s fleeting milliseconds in the most candid of ways; he was able to capture the world as it actually was.