New Documents, 1967 – Sarah Hermanson Meister
From Amazon: In 1967, The Museum of Modern Art presented New Documents, a landmark exhibition organized by John Szarkowski that brought together a selection of works by three photographers whose individual achievements signalled the artistic potential for the medium in the 1960s and beyond: Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. Though largely unknown at the […]
Read MoreNicholas Nixon
Nicholas Nixon was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1947 and grew up in a middle-class family in the suburbs. He studied American literature at the University of Michigan before turning to photography, earning his MFA from the University of New Mexico in 1974 under the tutelage of Beaumont Newhall. It was there that Nixon committed […]
Read MoreOn Photography – Susan Sontag
From Waterstones: Susan Sontag’s groundbreaking critique of photography asks forceful questions about the moral and aesthetic issues surrounding this art form. Photographs are everywhere, and the ‘insatiability of the photographing eye’ has profoundly altered our relationship with the world. Photographs have the power to shock, idealize or seduce, they create a sense of nostalgia […]
Read MorePaul Outerbridge
Paul Outerbridge was born in 1896 in New York City, into a family of comfortable means that encouraged his early interest in art and design. He studied at the Art Students League of New York and served briefly in the Canadian Royal Flying Corps and the United States Army during the First World War. Upon […]
Read MorePaul Strand
Paul Strand was born in 1890 in New York City, the son of Bohemian immigrants who had settled on the Upper West Side. His life in photography began at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, where at the age of seventeen he enrolled in a class taught by the documentary photographer Lewis Hine. Hine introduced Strand […]
Read MorePeter Hujar
Peter Hujar was born in 1934 in Trenton, New Jersey, into circumstances that could scarcely have been less promising for a future artist. His mother was unable to care for him, and he was raised largely by his maternal grandparents on a farm in rural New Jersey. The isolation of his childhood, combined with an […]
Read MorePhilip-Lorca diCorcia
Philip-Lorca diCorcia was born in 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut, into an Italian-American family. He studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and later received his MFA from Yale University in 1979, where he studied under Tod Papageorge and was exposed to the conceptual approaches to photography that were beginning to reshape […]
Read MorePHOTOGRAPHY A Very Short Introduction – Steven Edwards
Review by Amazon Photography: A Very Short Introduction examines the definition, importance, and meaning of photography by combining a sense of the historical development of photography with an analysis of its purpose and meaning within a wider cultural context. Photographs are everywhere, in print and online. They are an integral part of our daily lives […]
Read MorePhotography Changes Everything – Marvin Heiferman
From Amazon: Photography Changes Everythingdrawn from the online Smithsonian Photography Initiative offers a provocative rethinking of photography’s impact on our culture and our lives. It is a reader-friendly exploration of the many ways photographs package information and values, demand and hold attention, and shape our knowledge of and experience in the world. At this transitional moment […]
Read MoreRalph Eugene Meatyard
Ralph Eugene Meatyard was born in 1925 in Normal, Illinois, a small college town whose name would prove ironically apt for an artist whose life’s work was devoted to exploring the uncanny spaces between the normal and the strange. He showed no particular artistic inclination as a young man, serving in the United States Navy […]
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