Photography
And its earliest stages.
Alfred Stieglitz
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Stieglitz made Photography ad acceptable art form though 50 years of creativity.
He was born in Hoboken.
He went to school for mechanical engineering, but switched to a photography
major.
In 1929 Stieglitz opened An American Place, a
gallery where he showed paintings by
contemporary Americans and, later,
photographs. From the windows of this 17thfloor gallery and from his apartment he
photographed New York City. He died on July
13, 1946.
Ansel Easton Adams
• Majority of his photographs were in Black and
white.
• He was an environmentalist.
• He passed away on April 22, 1984.
• He died from heart failure, at age 82.
• He received a doctor of Arts from Harvard and Yale.
Adams was a hopeless, rebellious student, but, once his father bowed to the inevitable and
removed him from school at age 12, he proved a remarkable autodidact. He became a
serious and ambitious musician who was considered by qualified judges (including the
musicologist and composer Henry Cowell) to be a highly gifted pianist. After he received his
first camera in 1916, Adams also proved to be a talented photographer. Throughout the
1920s, when he worked as the custodian of the Sierra Club's lodge in Yosemite National Park,
he created impressive landscape photographs. During this period he formed a powerful
attachment—verging on devotion—to Yosemite Valley and to the High Sierra that guarded
the valley on the east. It might be said that the most powerful and original work throughout
his career came from the effort to discover an adequate visual expression for his nearmystical youthful experience of the Sierra.
By 1935 Adams was famous in the photographic community, largely on the strength of a
series of articles written for the popular photography press, especially Camera Craft.
These articles were primarily technical in nature, and they brought a new clarity and
rigour to the practical problems of photography. It was probably these articles that
encouraged Studio Publications (London) to commission Adams to create Making a
Photograph (1935), a guide to photographic technique illustrated primarily with his own
photographs. This book was a remarkable success, partly because of the astonishing
quality of its letterpress reproductions, which were printed separately from the text and
tipped into the book page. These reproductions were so good that they were often
mistaken for original (chemical) prints.
While photography and the piano shared his attention during his early adulthood, by about
1930 Adams decided to devote his life to photography. (As late as 1945, however, he still
thought enough of his playing to have a recording made of his interpretations of
Beethoven, Chopin, and perhaps others.) In 1930 he met the American photographer Paul
Strand and was shown the negatives that Strand was then making in New Mexico. Adams
was deeply impressed with the simplicity of the images' conception and by their rich and
luminous tonality, a style in contrast to the soft-focus Pictorialism still in vogue among
many contemporary photographers. The experience confirmed in him his evolution toward
a purer and more realistic style. In 1932 Adams helped form Group f.64, a loose and shortlived association of West Coast photographers (including Edward Weston and Imogen
Cunningham) who favoured sharp focus and the use of the entire photographic gray scale,
from black to white, and who shunned any effects borrowed from traditional fine arts such
as painting.
Ansel Adams (1902-1984) was not only a
masterful photographic technician but a
lifelong conservationist who pleaded for
understanding of, and respect for, the natural
environment. Although he spent a large part of
his career in commercial photography, he is
best known for his majestic landscape
photographs.
Anna-Lou Annie Leibovitz
• Born in Waterbury, Connecticut
• She attended the San Fransisco art school
• She spent time in the phillipines as an air force brat.
She was one of the six children born to Sam, an Air Force lieutenant, and Marilyn
Leibovitz, a modern dance instructor. In 1967, Leibovitz enrolled at the San Francisco
Art Institute, where (although initially studying painting) she developed a love for
photography.
After living briefly on an Israeli kibbutz, Leibovitz returned to the U.S., in 1970, and
applied for a job with the start-up rock music magazine Rolling Stone. Impressed with
Leibovitz’s portfolio, editor Jann Wenner offered her a job as a staff photographer.
Within two years, the 23-year-old Leibovitz was promoted to chief photographer—a
title she would hold for the next 10 years. Her position with the magazine afforded her
the opportunity to accompany the Rolling Stones band on their 1975 international
tour.
Resources.
• Google.com
• Answers.com
• Biography.com
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Camera Obscura - A darkened chamber in which the real image of an object is received through a small opening or lens and focused in
natural color onto a facing surface rather than recorded on a film or plate.
Photography - The art or process of producing images of objects on photosensitive surfaces.
Collotype - A printing process employing a glass plate with a gelatin surface that carries the image to be reproduced. Also called
photogelatin process.
Tintype – photograph printed on tin. also melainotype and ferrotype, is a photographic process first described by Adolphe-Alexandre
Martin in France in 1853, and patented in the United States in 1856 by Hamilton Smith, professor at Kenyon College, in Ohio, who
patented the process on February 19, 1856. William Kloen also patented the process in the United Kingdom in the same year. It was
first called melainotype, and then ferrotype (by a rival manufacturer of the iron plates used); finally came the name tintype. All three
names describe both the process and the resulting photograph.[1]
Tintypes are made by a wet-plate process, in which the photographic emulsion is contained in liquid collodion. The ambrotype was the
first wet-plate collodion process, invented by Frederick Scott Archer in 1851 and introduced in the United States by James Ambrose
Cutting in 1854.
Cartes de Visite – a type of small photograph type of small photograph which was patented in Paris, France by photographer André
Adolphe Eugène Disdéri in 1854.[1] It was usually made of an albumen print, which was a thin paper photograph mounted on a thicker
paper card. The size of a carte de visite is 2.125 × 3.5 inches mounted on a card sized 2.5 × 4 inches. It was made popular in 1859 in
Europe, and from 1860 in the United States. The new invention was so popular it was known as "cardomania"[2] and eventually spread
throughout the world. In 1854, Disdéri had also patented a method of taking eight separate negatives on a single plate.
-Wikipedia.com
William Henry Fox Talbot - the inventor of the negative / positive photographic process
Joseph Nicephore Niepce - most noted as the inventor of photography and a pioneer in the field. He is well-known for taking some of
the earliest photographs, dating to the 1820s.
Polaroid – instant photograph, photograph company, founded in 1937 by Edwin H. Land
Matthew Bradley – one of the first known photographers, to make photography an accepted art form, also considered a master
photographer
Alfred Stieglitz – photographed in black and white . Stieglitz was born the eldest of six children in Hoboken, New Jersey and raised in a
brownstone on Manhattan's Upper East Side. His father moved with his family to Germany in 1881. The next year, Stieglitz began
studying mechanical engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin and soon switched to photography. Traveling through the
European countryside with his camera, he took many photographs of peasants working on the Dutch seacoast and undisturbed nature
within Germany's Black Forest and won prizes and attention throughout Europe in the 1880s.
-Wikipedia.com.
Wedgewood - is credited with a major contribution to technology, for being the first man to think of and develop a method to copy
visible images chemically to permanent media.
Carol Steele - Creative Wedding and Portrait Photography, professionally qualified photographer (Associate of the Society of Wedding
& Portrait Photographers) and have been working from a studio in Torquay, South Devon for the past 22 years. research chemist, but
left that profession because she disliked intensely the suffering caused to animals in the laboratories where I worked.
Louis Jecques Mande Daguerre - inventor of the first practical process of photography,
George Eastman- founded the Eastman Kodak Company and invented the roll of film