Sander, August
Sander, August (1876-1964), German photographer, whose lifelong project, “Man in the Twentieth Century,” produced a large catalog of portraits and whose vision continues to influence photographers. Sander was born in Herdorf, near Cologne. He apprenticed as a miner, served in the army, and then took up photography, continuing a fascination begun as a teenager when he received a camera as a →
Eisenstaedt, Alfred
Eisenstaedt, Alfred (1898-1995), German-born American photographer, whose spontaneous and candid style made him a pioneer in the field of photojournalism. Eisenstaedt is noted for his ability to capture the unposed, fleeting gesture, the moment that tells the story. For example, one of his most widely known photographs, VJ Day—Times Square (1945), shows an American sailor enthusiastically kissing a girl on the →
Moholy-Nagy, László
Moholy-Nagy, László (1895-1946), Hungarian-American painter, sculptor, designer, and photographer, born in Bacsbarsod. Originally a law student, he studied art in Berlin after World War I, where he became an adherent of the abstract school known as constructivism. From 1923 to 1928 he taught at the Bauhaus and became a leader in the development of abstract art in many media. He explored →
Kertész, André
Kertész, André (1894-1985), Hungarian-American photographer, known for his realistic and sensitive scenes of everyday life; one of the founders of photojournalism. As early as 1912, he was taking spontaneous, unposed pictures of people and street life. He always sought the unusual angle, the unexpected detail, and the revealing moment; his work—first in Hungary, then in Paris in the 1920s, and later →
Capa, Robert
Capa, Robert (1913-1954), Hungarian-born American photographer, outstanding for his war photographs. His original name was André Friedmann. He covered the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939; see Spain: Civil War), World War II (1939-1945), and the war in what was known as French Indochina (1946-1954; see Vietnam: The Expulsion of the French), where he was killed by a land mine in 1954. To →
Hill, David Octavius, and Adamson, Robert
Hill, David Octavius, and Adamson, Robert Scottish portrait photographers who pioneered the production of calotypes, images developed from paper negatives. Hill (1802-1870) and Adamson (1821-1848) became partners in 1843, when Hill, who had trained as a painter, was preparing a large commemorative canvas featuring several hundred delegates to the founding convention of the Free Church of Scotland. To secure accurate likenesses →
Rodchenko, Aleksandr
Rodchenko, Aleksandr (1891-1959), Russian painter, draftsman, sculptor, and photographer. Working in a wide range of media, he was one of the central figures of constructivism, a Russian abstract art movement that emerged in the period just before the Russian Revolution of 1917. Rodchenko was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, but moved to the city of Kazan in 1907, and in 1911 enrolled →
Leibovitz, Annie
Leibovitz, Annie (1949- ), American photographer, known for her portraits of celebrities, who range from political figures to musicians and athletes. Her work has included magazine, fashion, and advertising photography. Many of Leibovitz's portraits of rock music celebrities have become signature images. A notable example is her portrait of the nude John Lennon on a bed with his fully clothed →
Cazneaux, Harold
Cazneaux, Harold (1878-1953), Australian photographer whose landscape images are part of a movement in photography know as pictorialism. Like other pictorialists, he emphasized the role of the photographer over that of the camera, manipulating prints and negatives to produce romanticized compositions which drew inspiration from traditional western paintings. Cazneaux was born in Wellington, New Zealand, but his Australian family returned to →
Newton, Helmut
Newton, Helmut (1920- ), German-born Australian fashion and portrait photographer, best known for his aggressively erotic fashion shots, which broke new ground in commercial photography in the 1970s. His celebrity portraits and fashion photography have been widely published in magazines and have also appeared in exhibitions and books. In the 1970s, Newton’s fashion photographs for the French and Italian versions of Vogue →
Henri Cartier-Bresson
In a portrait, I'm looking for the silence in somebody. Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908 - ) French photographer, painter, and writer. The Observer (London), "Sayings of the Week"
Lollobrigida, Gina
Lollobrigida, Gina (1927-), Italian motion-picture actor, often cast as an alluring romantic interest in her many films. Born in Subiaco, Italy, Lollobrigida studied sculpture and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. She worked as a singer and model before appearing in her first film, Aquila Nera (Black Eagle), in 1946. In 1949 Lollobrigida moved to the United States to →
Ball, James Presley
Ball, James Presley (1825-1905), American daguerreotypist and photographer. Born free in Virginia, James Ball operated short-lived businesses in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1845, 1847, and 1849. Two years later he opened his first successful photography studio, which prospered until the early 1870s (see Photography, African American). Active in the movement for abolitionism in the United States, he commissioned a 223-sq-m (267-sq-yd) antislavery →
Avedon, Richard
Avedon, Richard (1923- ), American photographer, known for helping revolutionize fashion photography in the 1950s. He later made innovative portraits of writers, musicians, politicians, convicts, and drifters. Avedon created many of his pictures for Vogue, a fashion magazine for which he worked for more than 25 years. His pictures appeared in the magazine alongside those of American photographer Irving Penn. The →
Battey, Cornelius M.
Battey, Cornelius M. (1873-1927), African American photographer known for his portraiture technique, who established the photography department at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University). Born in Augusta, Georgia, Battey was well known for his photographic portraiture in New York City and Cleveland, Ohio, by the age of 27. At his popular portrait studio on New York's Mott Street, he photographed well-known people such →
Abbott, Berenice
Abbott, Berenice (1898-1991), American photographer, best known for her documentary images of New York City in the 1930s and 1940s. Pictures such as George Washington Bridge Construction (1930) and Cortland Street with Ninth Avenue Elevated (1936) reflect on the changing texture of city life caused by the construction of skyscrapers and bridges. Her images show the influence of French photographer →
Whistler, James (Abbott) McNeill
Whistler, James (Abbott) McNeill born July 14, 1834, Lowell, Mass., U.S. died July 17, 1903, London, Eng. American-born artist noted for his paintings of nocturnal London, for his striking and stylistically advanced full-length portraits, and for his brilliant etchings and lithographs. An articulate theorist about art, he did much to introduce modern French painting into England. His most famous work is “Arrangement in →
Delaroche, (Hippolyte-)Paul
Delaroche, (Hippolyte-)Paul born July 17, 1797, Paris died Nov. 4, 1859, Paris painter whose painstakingly realistic historical subjects made him one of the most successful academic artists of mid-19th-century France. Delaroche's father was an art expert, his uncle was curator of the Cabinet des Estampes, and his brother was the painter Jules-Hippolyte Delaroche. In 1832 he became a professor at the École Nationale →
Influence of man’s environment on religious symbolism and iconography
Influences from nature The main streams of the influence from nature are derived from man's experience of nature itself, his position in the universe, and his attempt to master his world in religious terms. Man's sense of the holy influences the way he perceives and understands nature. The space that surrounds man provides him with the dimensional coordinates of his religious →
Absence of representational forms
The absence of an expected object, person, plant, or animal in a picture or the absence of all pictorial representation may also represent the holy or divine. In the Holy of Holies of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem there was no picture of Yahweh in or on the ark of the Covenant, although it was supposed to be a sort →
Icons and systems of iconography
Icons and systems of iconography Throughout the history of their development, religious iconography and symbolism have been closely interrelated. Many religious symbols can be understood as conceptual abbreviations, simplifications, abstractions, and stylizations of pictures or of pictorial impressions of the world of sense objects that are manifested in iconographic representations. In conceiving, describing, and communicating the experience of reality, the realistic →
Musical symbolism
Musical symbolism Music, like the word, also may have symbolic meaning. The basic elements out of which musical symbolism is built are sounds, tones, melodies, harmonies, and the various musical instruments, among which is the human voice. Sound effects can have a numinous (spiritual) character and may be used to bring about contact with the realm of the holy. A specific →
