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B.U.G.A. U.P.

b: 1979 Sydney, Aus.

Included in Geoffrey Batchen's book, Each Wild Idea, is an essay, Australian Made that compares and evaluates books on the photographic history of that country. It mentions an activist pressure group B.U.G.A. U.P. (Billboard Using Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions).

The group targets hoardings featuring products it considers unhealthy and valdalises them imaginatively and creatively. Batchen shows a 1983 poster for 'Sydney Draught' beer with letters obscured to read 'Sydney Drug' and he also mentions 'marlboro' being amended to 'its a bore'.

The group's website still exists and it names the founders as Bill Snow, Ric Bolzan and Geoff Coleman. 

sources - Wikipedia

links - website

added - 8Aug20

David Bailey

David Bailey
by Patrick Lichfield
1965

b: 1938 London

Bailey is mentioned in the EyV course material, Part 4, in the context of the assessment criterion, Creativity. He is quoted (rather gnomically) as follows,

In photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary. David Bailey, cited in EyV p. 95

Bailey is famous as a photographer of 1960s “swinging London” celebrities and subsequent work for Vogue. He was something of a sleb himself, as the inspiration for Antonioni’s 1966 film (although he denies this - by a fine coincidence, he is being interviewed on Radio 3 as I write this [5Mar19 22:33]).

sources - Wikipedia

links -

added - 4Mar19

Francis Baker

Francis Baker

b:

Baker is featured in the excellent book, Experimental Photography, a Handbook of Techniques (Exp).

Francis Baker is an American outsider artist using alternative processes to communicate ephemeral qualities of life, such as: physical image, age, wholeness, individuality and the repeated patterns of human action all weighed against the dailyness of an existence constrained by war and 50% off a great pair of boots. It all boils down to finding the human spirit within the struggle of life. His older work also includes cyanotypes and vandykes, separate and in combination on a variety of material including canvas and tissue paper.
Francis has been exhibiting since 1994. He work has been presented in galleries and museums nationally and internationally. Francis lives and works in San Francisco. Alternative Photography

sources

links - artist's web site, Alternative Photography

Richard Baker

b:

Baker was cited in my tutor feedback for Asg. 5. Baker is an accomplished, prize-winning documentary photographer with an extensive portfolio shown on his web site. He was interviewed by LIP in 2011.

Of particular interest is Baker's series, Roadside Memorials, uploaded in 2008 which echoes two of the images in my submission.

It is noted that Baker attended Gwent College of Art, as did the sorely-missed Tish Murtha.

No images are shown because the web site pointedly states,

Copyright

© Richard Baker. No copying, screen grabbing, transmission or publication without permission.

Richard Baker

Baker's also site includes a potentially useful GPDR statement,

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) statement
In the context of journalism and the freedom of expression, I have a large collection of individuals' pictures in this online archive - some with and some without their knowledge as they were recorded (generally) in public places as reportage. In the past, some have made contact asking for copies and I have obliged. I have archived these photographs along with their embedded captions (and what descriptive metadata I can establish) in the public interest.
While I do not use marketing email systems or databases, I have saved some contact details in my private Gmail contacts, and on occasion added names to my captions, for example. I do not view or retain the personal details of those browsing this website and any Google web traffic analytics is, to my knowledge, unspecific.
I will always endeavour to protect the privacy of information and GDPR will not be used for any other purpose - nor will it be made available to anyone else without consent. Richard Baker

The other useful copyright notice I tend to emulate is from the late Arthur Jackson Hepworth's site. I have adapted it here.

links - artist's web site - LIP

added - 23Oct19

John Baldessari

from the artist's web site

b: 1931 California

Baldessari is described in Wikipedia as,

an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images.wikipedia

The impetus for including him on these pages is that he is one of five main photographers featured in Robin Kelsey's Photography and the art of chance (2015), a review of which is work in progress at the time of writing.

Photography and the Art of Chance The portrait, right / above is from the artist's web site where it is unattributed.

Kelsey features Baldessari's, delightfully named Throwing Three Balls In The Air To Get A Straight Line (Best Of Thirty-Six Attempts), 1973 (figs. 1 and 2), indeed it is used on the book cover.

Much of his art appears to consist of painting on the photographs of others, as in figs. 3-5.

There is a film about him here, A Brief History of John Baldessari, (2012).

He appeared in episode 13, season 29  of The Simpsons (2018), fig. 6.

On a brief acqaintance, I rate Baldessari as lucky to get away with it, but I might have a deeper insight when I have read the book. He is good at titles, though, Balls and Shadow being cases on point.

sources - Wikipedia, Apollo magazine (the Simpsons)

links - artist's web site

added - 28Dec18

Gawain Barnard

Gawain Barnard

born Rhondda

Barnard is mentioned in the course material (EyV p. 15) in the context of examples for the Square Mile assignment. The quote is from The Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles, the portrait too.

Gawain Barnard’s photographic work and research mainly focuses around the environment and people of his youth. Making quiet portraits of adolescence and precise observations of their surroundings, Barnard brings new and fresh reflections of the once industrialised regions of South Wales. He is also one of the founding members of “A Fine Beginning,” a collective whose aim is to discover and showcase contemporary photography being made in Wales today. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. annenbergphotospace.org

sources The Annenberg Space for Photography, A Fine Beginning

links - artist's web site

Tina Barney

Tina Barney

b: 1945 New York

Barney is also mentioned in the course material (EyV p. 15) as an of example for the Square Mile assignment. Whereas the other examples (there's a list here) tend to be to photographs of down-at-heel communities, Barney documents lives of privilege.

Wikipedia states,

Barney was born Tina Isles, one of three children of Philip Henry Isles and his wife 1940s fashion model Lillian Fox. Her parents later divorced and her mother remarried to writer Stephane Groueff. Her great-grandfather was Emanuel Lehman, co-founder of Lehman Brothers… Barney is most well known for creating large format, colorful photographs of her wealthy, East Coast family. The images straddle the line between candid and tableau photography. wikipedia

The AIC's interpretation of her life and work is,

Tina Barney has said, “I began photographing what I knew.” For much of the 1980s and 1990s, this meant taking pictures of her friends and family as they went about their daily lives in affluent areas of Long Island, New York City, and New England. Employing a large-format, 8-by-10-view camera enabled her to create highly detailed images that retain their focus and richness even when made into four-by-five-foot prints. Barney was thus one of the first photographers to present color work on a grand scale that rivaled most twentieth-century paintings. This scale also inspired a deliberate construction of the picture, at times requiring supplementary lighting and the direction of the sitters… Barney’s photographs expose the emotional and psychological currents that course just beneath the surfaces of perfect trappings and banal gestures. AIC

To this writer, Barney's early work, online, looks like a set of family snapshots and I was surprised to learn that they were taken on a view camera. This betokens some advanced technical competence on the part of Barney, but it only makes them big snaps.
This raises the question of whether print size and gallery installation bestows the images a dignity and importance they do not objectively merit.
Alternatively, perhaps my view derives from a subjective disapproval of the subjects' affluent lifestyles.
The answer to such questions is usually "a bit of both", nevertheless, when compared to Gawain Barnard's portrait above or Tish Murtha's body work, Barney's images seem, to me, trivial. My comments on Jodi Taylor (which are somewhat contradictory) might be relevant here too.

sourcesWikpedia

links - artist's web site, Art Institute of Chicago, Widewalls

Uta Barth

Uta Barth
from the MacArthur Foundation

b: 1958 Berlin

Appears in Higgins' Why it does not have to be in focus (Higgins, 2013, pp. 192-3).

One of Barth's Ground series (#42, fig. 2) is used as the front cover for Higgins' book and so the approach is not unexpected. Barth is quoted in the book from her writings about Ground,

The question for me always is how can I make you aware of your own activity of looking, instead of losing your attention to thoughts about what it is you are looking at. Barth from Ground, quoted in Why it doe not have to be in focus (Higgins, 2013, pp. 192-3)

Barth as photographer is, then, presumably, going through the same thought processes as one creating an image which is intended to be looked at for its intrinsic merit, but is deliberately seeking to distract the viewer's attention from the actual image by … what? — making it uninteresting?

It is a fine notion, but it is difficult to see how it would ever achieve what Barth aims for. If an image in an exhibition (more so than in a book) does not engage the viewer, then arguably that is more likely to prompt the question, "why have they photographed and shown that", rather than cause them to analyse their own thought and engagement processes.

Furthermore, at a personal level, she has failed in her alleged purpose as I find Barth's images fascinating an soothing. There is a sense of lack of completedness that allows and encourages the viewer to engage with the photographs and fill in the gaps.

Fig. 4 is strongly reminiscent of one of Mona Kuhn's from Evidence, 2007.

sources - Wikipedia

links - Artist's web site, Tate

added - 14Apr19

Bernd & Hilla Becher, see Nichers

Bernd and Hilla Becher
collecting the Erasmus Prize, 2002

Bernd - b: 1931 Siegen, Germany / d: 2007 Rostock, Germany
Hilla - b: 1934 Potsdam, Germany

One (or two) of Peter Stepan's 50 Photographers You Should Know.

See also Huebler's playful portrait series of Bernd.

(adapted from Wikipedia) Bernd and Hilla met as students at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1957. They first collaborated on photographingthe disappearing German industrial architecture in 1959, using an 8x10 view camera. It continues,

The Bechers also photographed outside Germany, including from 1965 buildings in Great Britain, France, Belgium and later in the United States. In 1966, they undertook a six-month journey through England and south Wales, taking hundreds of photographs of the coal industry around Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Nottingham and the Rhondda Valley. In 1974, they traveled to North America for the first time, touring sites in New Jersey, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and southern Ontario, depicting a range of industrial structures, from coal breakers to wooden winding towers. The Bechers exhibited and published their single-image gelatin silver prints, grouped by subject, in a grid of six, nine, or fifteen. By the mid-1960s the Bechers had settled on a preferred presentational mode: the images of structures with similar functions are then displayed side by side to invite viewers to compare their forms and designs based on function, regional idiosyncrasies, or the age of the structures. The Bechers used the term “typology” to describe these ordered sets of photographs.[9] The works’ titles are pithy and captions note only time and location.[10] In 1989–91, for an exhibition at the Dia Art Foundation in New York, the Bechers introduced a second format into their oeuvre: single images that are larger in size — twenty-four by twenty inches — and presented individually, rather than as gridded tableaux. In 1976, Bernd Becher started teaching photography at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (policy matters prevented Hilla's simultaneous appointment), where he remained on the faculty until 1996. Before him, photography had been excluded from what was largely a school for painters. He influenced students that later made a name for themselves in the photography world. Former students of Bernd's included Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte and Elger Esser. wikipedia

Idris Khan
Every...Bernd And Hilla Becher Gable Sided Houses, 2004

Idris Khan paid homage to some of the Bechers' pieces, producing single composites of their collections, for example, Every...Bernd And Hilla Becher Gable Sided Houses, 2004. He does this with other subjects too, such as, Every ... page from Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, 2004.

sources - Wikipedia, Stepan (2008)

links

added - 8Dec18

Otto Olaf Becker

Otto Olaf Becker

b:

Becker was cited in my tutor feedback for Asg. 5, where I showed, on a much less grand scale than Becker, a local example of arboricide.

Miss Rosen on Huck describes his work as,

[examining] the complex relationship between mankind and the environment [and] ... [exploring] the impact of overpopulation on natural resources – including land, water, food, energy, and heavy metals – in remote corners of the earthMiss Rosen on Huck

links - artist's web site - Huck

added - 23Oct19

Ruth Bernhard

Ruth Bernhard,
Larry Colwell

b: 1905 Berlin / d: 2006 San Francisco

Bernhard was described by Ansel Adams as "the greatest photographer of the nude" (Wikipedia).
A friend of Berenice Abbott, Bernhard decided to become a photographer in the late 1920s and began to photograph nudes in 1934. She met Edward Weston by chance in 1935 and, inspired by his work, she moved to California for four years.

Her biography continues as a who's-who of American photography for the next 60 years.

sources - Wikipedia

links

added 20Nov18

Ilse Bing

Self portrait with Leica,
Ilse Bing
© Ilse Bing Estate

b: 1899 Frankfurt / d: 1998 New York

Ilse was born into a wealthy Jewish family, studied the arts, was increasingly drawn to photography in her 20s (while working on a doctorate in architecture) and influenced by local avant-guard artists. She moved to Paris in 1929 and developed her association with Florence Henri and other Modernists.

Her reputation grew as an innovative freelance photographer in Paris with her work appearing in leading magazines and being included in exhibitions in France and the USA.

With the coming of WW2, Bing and her Jewish husband Konrad Wolff were interned in the South of France but managed to obtain visas to emigrate to the USA in 1941. Bing struggled to reestablish her reputation in the States, experimented with colour in the 1950s but gave up photography altogether.

In the 1970s, MoMA bought and exhibited some of her early photographs and interest in her work was gradually rekindled.

sources MLC, Wikipedia

links Wikipedia, V&A

Guy Bourdin 

Self portrait c. 1950

b: 1928 Paris / d: 1991 Paris

Bourdin is mentioned in the course material as one who "played with the artificiality of the image" and sought to find "intense psychological situation" in variations on everyday scenes.

He first artistic interest was as a painter but he was introduced to photography during his national service in 1948-49. From the mid 1950s his work was published in Vogue and he thereby met shoe designer Charles Jourdan who became his patron.

The V&A, which exhibited his works in 2003 stated, "At the heart of Guy Bourdin’s fashion photographs is a confrontation with the very nature of commercial image making. While conventional fashion images make beauty and clothing their central elements, Bourdin’s photographs offer a radical alternative.".

There is a selection of Bourdin's images at The Red List. They describe Bourdin's work as changing "the identity of  fashion photography with the flawless, exotic and Surrealist-like images he created, bringing death, violence and fetishism  into the pages of [Vogue]".

sources Pho, V&A, Wikipedia

links - The Red List

Ian Bradshaw

Ian Bradshaw

b: USA

This is a fairly convoluted story. Ian Bradshaw is an American photographer who spent some time working as a photo-journalist and photo-editor in the UK. He is most famous for one photograph, that of a streaker at a rugby match, fig. 1.

In March 2018 there was an exhibition at St Stephen Walbrook church called Stations of the Cross, showing representations of The Crucifixion. I attended the exhibition and saw one of the images, Divine Altercation by Martin Leaver (fig. 2) which uses Bradshaw's image. That reminded me of the 1974 photograph (I would have been around 20 at the time) and introduced me to the church, which I photographed for Assignment 2.

There is very little biographical information on Bradshaw, either on Wikipedia or on artist's web site.

Wikipedia quotes Don McCullin as saying in a 2006 Sunday Times interview that Bradshaw's is the one image that he wished he had taken. The photograph appears in the Daily Mirror story. It was a special charity match to raise funds for the Paris Air Disaster Appeal and  France beat England 26-7. The image was taken in colour but is better known in black and white.

sources - Wikipedia

links - artist's web site

added - 6Jan19

Mathew Brady

Mathew Brady

b: 1822 New York / d: 1896 New York

One of Peter Stepan's 50 Photographers You Should Know.

Brady is described by Wikipedia as,

one of the earliest photographers in American history, best known for his scenes of the Civil War. He studied under inventor Samuel F. B. Morse, who pioneered the daguerreotype technique in America. Brady opened his own studio in New York in 1844, and photographed Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and Abraham Lincoln, among other public figures.
When the Civil War started, his use of a mobile studio and darkroom enabled vivid battlefield photographs that brought home the reality of war to the public. Thousands of war scenes were captured, as well as portraits of generals and politicians on both sides of the conflict, though most of these were taken by his assistants, rather than by Brady himself.
After the war, these pictures went out of fashion, and the government did not purchase the master-copies as he had anticipated. Brady's fortunes declined sharply, and he died in debt. Wikipedia

Another Civil War photographer on these pages is Timothy O'Sullivan.

sources - Wikipedia, Stepan (2008)

links

added 1Dec18

Bill Brandt [V&A]

Bill Brandt, 1945
Laelia Goehr

b: 1904 Hamburg / d: 1983 London

Wikipedia has an admirably succinct summary or his life,

Born in Hamburg, Germany, son of a British father and German mother, Brandt grew up during World War I, during which his father, who had lived in Germany since the age of five, was interned for six months by the Germans as a British citizen. Brandt later disowned his German heritage and would claim he was born in South London. Shortly after the war, he contracted tuberculosis and spent much of his youth in a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland. He traveled to Vienna to undertake a course of treatment by psychoanalysis. He was, in any case, pronounced cured and was taken under the wing of socialite Eugenie Schwarzwald. When Ezra Pound visited the Schwarzwald residence, Brandt made his portrait. In appreciation, Pound allegedly offered Brandt an introduction to Man Ray, whose Paris studio and darkroom Brandt would access in 1930.
In 1933 Brandt moved to London and began documenting all levels of British society. This kind of documentary was uncommon at that time. Brandt published two books showcasing this work, The English at Home (1936) and A Night in London (1938). He was a regular contributor to magazines such as Lilliput, Picture Post, and Harper's Bazaar. He documented the Underground bomb shelters of London during The Blitz in 1940, commissioned by the Ministry of Information.
During World War II, Brandt concentrated on many subjects – as can be seen in his "Camera in London" (1948) but excelled in portraiture and landscape. To mark the arrival of peace in 1945 he began a celebrated series of nudes. His major books from the post-war period are Literary Britain (1951), and Perspective of Nudes (1961), followed by a compilation of his best work, Shadow of Light (1966). Brandt became Britain's most influential and internationally admired photographer of the 20th century. Many of his works have important social commentary but also poetic resonance. His landscapes and nudes are dynamic, intense and powerful, often using wide-angle lenses and distortion.
Brandt died in London in 1983. Wikipedia

Brandt (or is it Jay) on lenses,

It is essential for the photographer to know the effect of his lenses. The lens is his eye, and it makes or ruins his pictures. A feeling for composition is a great asset. I think it is very much a matter of instinct. It can perhaps be developed, but I doubt if it can be learned. To achieve his best work, the young photographer must discover what really excites him visually. He must discover his own world. Bill Brandt, Views on nudes by Bill Jay , pp. 119-20

sources - Wikipedia

links - artist's estate web site

Wide angle Kodak View Camera

I at first assumed that the image of Brandt was a mirror self portrait and used it as an example in a brief paper on the subject. In fact, it is a portrait by Laelia Goehr described in Delaney's biography as 'Brandt with poilice camera'. It is a distinctive and interesting camera, described in some detail here by the V&A, here by Greg Neville and fully depicted in this auction posting that states,

Kodak wide angle view camera / Bill Brandt. The camera is equipped with a Carl Zeiss Protar 1:18 8.5cm lens. This very rare Kodak wide angle view camera is very slim, and does not have bellows. The front accepts interchangeable panels should the user wish to fit other suitable lenses. There is a spring-back with a ground glass, two plate holders and a transport case. Bill Brandt used one of these cameras for photographs in his book "Wide Angle Nudes". Format 6.5 x 8.5 inches (16.5 X 21.5 cm) The wide angle lens has a very large depth of field, and the aperture of f45 eliminates the need to focus. The field of view is 110 ° or the equivalent to a rectilinear lens of 14 or 15 mm on a 35 mm camera. antiq-photo.com

Brassaï

Brassaï Photographing,
Boulevard Saint-Jacques c. 1931-32

b: 1899 Brassó (now Romania) / d: 1984 Beaulieu-sur-Mer, France

One of Peter Stepan's 50 Photographers You Should Know.

He also (I have now learned) features in the course material, Part 4 on varieties of light (EyV pp.84-5), particularly his Paris De Nuit, with this link to an interview.

Brassaï's original name was Gyula Halász. Quote from the Huxley-Parlour Gallery,

One of the most renowned photographers of the interwar period, Brassaï enjoyed a natural affinity with Paris, revelling in the city’s rich atmosphere and photographic potential. The artist’s photographs of Parisian street scenes would later come to epitomise the Surrealist uptake and embodiment of the flâneur.
Brassaï seemed to have a natural affinity with Paris, revelling in its rich atmosphere and photographic potential. In 1933, he published his first book, Paris De Nuit, which was met with great critical acclaim, and has proven hugely influential ever since: Bill Brandt, for example, was particularly inspired by it.
Brassaï’s best known photographs come from the 1930s, and deal with Paris’s seamier side: prostitutes, down and outs, drinkers, pimps and other inhabitants of the night, all taken in poor light, and filled with brooding atmosphere and implied narratives. Late in the decade, he added further to this repertoire by focusing on the city’s graffiti, the subject of a solo exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1957. However, he also photographed the more respectable sections of Paris society: its writers, artists, intellectuals, operas and ballets.
In 1935 he joined the Rapho photographic agency, and quickly became world-famous for his images of Paris, a city that seemed the centre of all things artistic during the inter-war period. He was also a prolific writer, film-maker and sculptor. huxleyparlour.com

sources - Wikipedia, Stepan (2008)

links - interview cited EyV p.85

added - 7Dec18

Victor Burgin

Victor Burgin

b: 1941 Sheffield

Burgin is quoted in the course material (EyV p. 27) when discussing the image frame, he says that composition is "a device for retarding...recognition of the frame" (Photography, Phantasy, Fiction, 1980).

Burgin is described by The Tate as,

an artist and a writer… Burgin first came to attention as a conceptual artist in the late 1960s and at that time was most noted for being a political photographer of the left who would fuse photographs and words in the same picture. He has worked with photography and film, calling painting "the anachronistic daubing of woven fabrics with coloured mud". His work is influenced by a variety of theorists and philosophers, most especially thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Henri Lefebvre, Andrè Breton, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. The Tate

[23Feb23] This is one of the earliest entries on these pages, denoted by the fact that it is not dated. I was not terribly impressed by Burgin and I find most of his writing impenetrable. But, I later learned, he did create (or sort-of created) one of the cleverest photo-works there is, Photopath, 1967.

sources - The Tate, Wikipedia

links

Nancy Burson

b: 1948

See DIC.

Burson features in Higgins' Why it doe not have to be in focus (2013, pp. 16-17).

She is best known for producing composite photographs of linked individuals, for example:
1950s film actresses in First Beauty Composite (featuring Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Sophia Loren and Marilyn Monroe);
1980s actresses (Jane Fonda, Jacqueline Bisset, Diane Keaton, Brooke Shields and Meryl Streep) in Second Beauty Composite;
and, brilliantly,
world political leaders weighted by the number of nuclear missiles they controlled in Warhead I (1982), comprising 55% Reagan, 45% Brezhnev, "with hints of" Thatcher, Mitterand and Deng Xiaoping.

Burson has been added to the list of Nichers.

sources - Wikipedia

links - artist's web site

added - 19Jan19

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sources Wikipedia

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