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Frederick Eberstadt

b: 1926 NY

Eberstadt took the only recogised, original photograph I currently own. It features his wife, Isabel, possibly his daughter, Fernanda and an Yves Saint Laurent dress. I bought it in 2013 ($28.88 + 18 shipping) because of the dress — this was at the height of my Mondrian obsession.

Fernanda Eberstadt
by Diane Arbus, 1963

According to the inscriptions on the back of the print, it was printed in 1965 when Fernanda (who, incidentally, shares my birthday) would have been five. A copy of the photograph is shown on Fernanda's website and also a photograph of her by Diane Arbus, see right.

Information of Fred has proved hard to find. The following is from Lady. It sounds like an interesting life. I think he is still alive at the time of writing.

I took a self portrait based on this image in the rework of C&N Asg.1.

A true Renaissaince man, Frederick Eberstadt has lived one of those lives that truly exemplifies the twentieth century. Son of Ferdinand Eberstadt (a Wall street financier who wrote the first bylaws of the CIA), Frederick went to Exeter with Gore Vidal before marrying the daughter of poet Ogden Nash, Isabel, in 1954. The couple were patrons of New York’s avant-garde and hosts, noted for the incredibly stylish parties they gave at their apartment at 791 Park Avenue. Part of the city’s social whirl, many of Frederick’s first jobs as a photographer were shooting the charity galas and intimate dinners he already frequented for the party pages of Town & Country and Vogue in the 1950s and early 1960s. By chance I came across some of these party images a few years ago and tracked him down. One afternoon I ventured uptown to his immaculately chic apartment. I was led from the red foyer into the living room—all silvered walls, antiques and ferns—to learn more about his fascinating life.

He evolved from party photographs into fashion and beauty in the 1960s and 70s. Following breakthroughs in analysis that lifted him out of a deep depression Eberstadt became a psychotherapist in 1986. Still practicing, the nonagenarian lives between the Upper East Side and Florida; after his wife of 53 years passed away in 2007, he sold their 12-room Park Avenue co-op for $6.7 million and moved to a smaller bachelor pad on Sutton Place. There he hosts dinner parties that he still cooks and cleans up after himself in the lavender-grey dining room, and also treats patients in the fully book-lined library. Lady

sources - not in Wikipedia

links - Lady

added - 9Aug20

Harold Edgerton

b: 1903 Fremont, Nebraska / d: 1990 Cambridge, Massachusetts

Edgerton is introduced in Part 3 of the EyV course, Traces of Time, dealing with the shutter.

He was an MIT professor of electrical engineering who redeveloped the laboratory stroboscope for photographic use and then used it to photograph common objects, most famously, milk droplets.

And see Jennifer Bolande.

sources - Wikipedia

links

William Eggleston

William Eggleston
by Eric Chakeen

b: 1939 Memphis, Tennessee

Eggleston features in Higgins' Why it does not have to be in focus (Higgins, 2013, pp. 52-53) - I use that introduction for a dozen or so entries, but in Eggleston's case, he appears in pretty much every summary of contemporary photography.

Some of Eggleston's exhibited images might, superficially, be dismissed as snaps of trivial subjects, but most are deftly composed portrayals of contemporary daily life. Perhaps more importantly, Eggleston was an early proponent of this photography. Higgins (2013, p.52) states that

Eggleston's exhibition at … MoMA in May 1976 is hailed as the moment when 20th-century colour photography was finally accepted as art. In several interviews the legendary MoMA curator John Szarkowski claimed Eggleston was 'the inventor of colour photography’. Why it doe not have to be in focus (Higgins, 2013, p. 52)

sources - Wikipedia

links - artist's web site

added - 15Apr19

JH Engström

JH Engström

b: 1969 Karlstad, Sweden.

Engström is another example in the course material (EyV p. 15) for the Square Mile assignment.

1000 Words describes him as,

a leading Swedish photographer who lives between Värmland and Paris. He is best known for his influential photobooks, most notably the highly collectable monograph Trying to Dance, published in 2003, as well as From Back Home, a collaboration with Anders Petersen for which he won the Author Book Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles 2009&hellip He was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2005.
His photography is marked by a distinctly subjective approach to documenting his surroundings. Born out of emotional encounters, at the heart of his work lies both an intimate connection with his subjects and expression of his own self. Critic Martin Jaeggi has spoken speaking of Engström’s pictures as having “the impression of looking at memories.” 1000 Words

Engström has stated that,

I most often have a camera on hand. I work both with primitive and intuitive shooting, and more planned shooting and the whole range in between. There is absolutely no hierarchy within that range. To only work with one method would be too simplistic and it would bore me as well. The way I prepare myself is by trying to catch the energies within me that are in connection with my inner conflicts, doubts, fears, contradictions, questions or the pure joy of existing. Leica Oskar Barnack award

sources Wikipedia

links - artist's web site, 1000 Words, Leica Oskar Barnack award

Elliott Erwitt

Elliott Erwitt
photographer n.k.

b: 1928 Paris

The Huxley Parlour Gallery says of Erwitt,

Known for his satirical humour and sharp wit, Elliott Erwitt (born 1928) rose to fame after he was invited to join Magnum Photos by founding member Robert Capa in the 1950s. He has since become one of the world’s most successful and influential photographers, having produced over twenty retrospective photography books and been honoured by numerous solo shows at establishments such as the Smithsonian, the Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Huxley Parlour Gallery

links - Magnum - Wikipedia

added - 25Mar20

Walker Evans

Walker Evans, 1937

b: 1903 St. Louis, Missouri / d: 1975 New Haven, Connecticut,

It has been said, though only by this writer, that,

If there had only ever been one photographer, then, so long as that one is Walker Evans, that might not be so bad a thing.
His compositional poise, his choice and range of subjects, his attention to detail and his approach and attitude to the medium is so often perfect that if the rest packed up and took to fishing instead, the world would probably not notice. Maybe Bill Brandt could cover the European side of things. Blackburn, N. 2018

His biography, condensed from Wikipedia,

Evans took up photography in 1928 around the time he was living in Ossining, New York. His influences included Eugène Atget and August Sander.
In May and June 1933, Evans took photographs in Cuba on assignment for Lippincott, the publisher of Carleton Beals' The Crime of Cuba (1933), a "strident account" of the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. There Evans drank nightly with Ernest Hemingway, who loaned him money to extend his two-week stay an additional week. His photographs documented street life, the presence of police, beggars and dockworkers in rags, and other waterfront scenes. He also helped Hemingway acquire photos from newspaper archives that documented some of the political violence Hemingway described in To Have and Have Not.
In 1935, Evans spent two months at first on a fixed-term photographic campaign for the Resettlement Administration (RA) in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. From October on, he continued to do photographic work for the RA and later the Farm Security Administration (FSA), primarily in the Southern United States.
In the summer of 1936, while on leave from the FSA, he and writer James Agee were sent by Fortune magazine on assignment to Hale County, Alabama, for a story the magazine subsequently opted not to run. In 1941, Evans's photographs and Agee's text detailing the duo's stay with three white tenant families in southern Alabama during the Great Depression were published as the groundbreaking book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Its detailed account of three farming families paints a deeply moving portrait of rural poverty.
Evans continued to work for the FSA until 1938. That year, an exhibition, Walker Evans: American Photographs, was held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. This was the first exhibition in the museum devoted to the work of a single photographer. The catalogue included an accompanying essay by Lincoln Kirstein, whom Evans had befriended in his early days in New York. In 1938, Evans also took his first photographs in the New York subway with a camera hidden in his coat. These would be collected in book form in 1966 under the title Many are Called.
Evans, like such other photographers as Henri Cartier-Bresson, rarely spent time in the darkroom making prints from his own negatives. He only very loosely supervised the making of prints of most of his photographs, sometimes only attaching handwritten notes to negatives with instructions on some aspect of the printing procedure.
In one of his last photographic projects, Evans completed a black and white portfolio of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.'s offices and partners for publication in "Partners in Banking," published in 1968 to celebrate the private bank's 150th anniversary. In 1973 and 1974, he also shot a long series with the then-new Polaroid SX-70 camera, after age and poor health had made it difficult for him to work with elaborate equipment. The first definitive retrospective of his photographs, which "individually evoke an incontrovertible sense of specific places, and collectively a sense of America," according to a press release, was on view at New York's Museum of Modern Art in early 1971. Selected by John Szarkowski, the exhibit was titled simply Walker Evans.
In 1994, The Estate of Walker Evans handed over its holdings to New York City's The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the sole copyright holder for all works of art in all media by Walker Evans. The only exception is a group of approximately 1,000 negatives in collection of the Library of Congress which were produced for the RA and FSA. wikipedia

sources -

links - MoMA, SFMoMA, Wikipedia

F64 Group

formed 1931-ish, disbanded 1935

A group of California-based photographers in the 1930s who disliked the manipulation of "pure" photographs. The founding members who exhibited in 1931 were (with links to this site or to Wikipedia) Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift, Willard Van Dyke and Edward Weston .

Manifesto (this also appears on the manifestos page)

The name of this Group is derived from a diaphragm number of the photographic lens. It signifies to a large extent the qualities of clearness and definition of the photographic image which is an important element in the work of members of this Group.
The chief object of the Group is to present in frequent shows what it considers the best contemporary photography of the West; in addition to the showing of the work of its members, it will include prints from other photographers who evidence tendencies in their work similar to that of the Group.
Group f/64 is not pretending to cover the entire [spectrum] of photography or to indicate through its selection of members any deprecating opinion of the photographers who are not included in its shows. There are great number of serious workers in photography whose style and technique does not relate to the metier of the Group.
Group f/64 limits its members and invitational names to those workers who are striving to define photography as an art form by simple and direct presentation through purely photographic methods. The Group will show no work at any time that does not conform to its standards of pure photography. Pure photography is defined as possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form. The production of the "Pictorialist," on the other hand, indicates a devotion to principles of art which are directly related to painting and the graphic arts.
The members of Group f/64 believe that photography, as an art form, must develop along lines defined by the actualities and limitations of the photographic medium, and must always remain independent of ideological conventions of art and aesthetics that are reminiscent of a period and culture antedating the growth of the medium itself.
The Group will appreciate information regarding any serious work in photography that has escaped its attention, and is favorable towards establishing itself as a Forum of Modern Photography. Manifesto, 1932

sources - Group f/64

links - Wikipedia

Andreas Feininger

Andreas Feininger

b: 1906 Paris / d: 1999 New York

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

Feininger is described in Wikipedia as,

an American photographer and a writer on photographic technique. He was noted for his dynamic black-and-white scenes of  Manhattan  and for studies of the structures of natural objects.wikipedia

He is best known for one image, used in Life magazine, of the photojournalist Denis Stock, behind a Leica. It is usually shown in high contract with all but the face and camera lost in shadow (fig. 2, 1951) but the version on the MoMA site (fig. 1) dated 1955 has more detail in the grey, different hand positions and a different haircut and so may be a different photograph and perhaps a different session.

sources - MoMA, Stepan (2008)

links - Wikipedia

added 19Dec18

Roger Fenton

Roger Fenton, self portrait,

B: 1819 Rochdale, Lancashire / d: 1869 Potter's Bar, Middlesex

Fenton was born into a wealthy family. After graduating from Oxford with an Arts degree, he studied law, became interested in painting and, after visiting the 1851 Great Exhibition, in photography. He was instrumental in setting up what became the RPS.

He was encouraged by the establishment to photograph the Crimean War. The equipment he used was cumbersome, as evidenced by his van in fig. 1. Because of the low light-sensitivity of his materials, long exposures were needed and that limited the subject matter, though he consciously avoided photographing dead and wounded soldiers. One famous image from Crimea is of cannonballs in "The Valley of the Shadow of Death" (fig. 2), although this has now been discredited (see Wikipedia) as it was not the location of the Charge of the Light Brigade and the cannonballs were arranged for the shot. There is an interesting parallel image by Paul Seawright, Afghanistan, 2002 and see also Terry Towery's View of Crimean Battle Scene, 2006.

As photography became more available and affordable, Fenton gradually lost interest and in 1863 sold his equipment and returned to the practise of law.

sources - Gen

links - Wikipedia

Trude Fleischmann

Self portrait c. 1930

b: 1895 Vienna / d: 1990 New York

Fleischmann is described by the Getty as "The Photographer of the Famous". She was born and began her career as a portrait photographer in Vienna, moved to New York (via Paris and London) 1930s to avoid persecution, and resumed her career.

Her work is notable for delicate lighting and characterised by the subjects looking away from the camera (with the exception of those who stare intently at it).

She gained fame and some notoriety for her nude studies of the dancer Claire Bauroff in 1925.

sources - Wikipedia

links - Getty

added - 15Jun19

Fernand Fonssagrives

Fernand Fonssagrives

b: 1910 Paris / d: 2003 Little Rock, Arkansas.

Fonssagrives was a fashion photographer in the 1940s and 1950s when he took pictures for Town and Country and Harper's Bazaar magazines. At one point he was the highest paid photographer in New York. His later pictures featured female nudes with patterns of light on their skin. He was also an award winning sculptor working in Bronze, a painter and a writer. (Wikipedia)

His Telegraph obituary is headlined, "Fernand Fonssagrives was once the world's hottest photographer married to one of the world’s most beautiful models. Why did he lose it all?" The piece seems to blame his resentment regarding his wife Lisa's continuing success as a model, while he lost his creative spark.

The Hoppen Gallery, who held a rare exhibition of his work in 2010 describes it thusly,

Lisa's elegant, sculptural form was constant inspiration to Fonssagrives whether he photographed her in the open air, or in a studio, experimentally draped in shadows to define contours of the human body. When World War II forced them to return to New York, they were catapulted into separate but highly successful careers.
Unfortunately, their careers diverged and the marriage ended; Lisa was the epitome of fashion, and though Fonssagrives worked for the cream of the magazine industry such as Vogue, Harpers' Bazaar and Town & Country, he began to hate fashion and the commercialization of his work. To regain his creative freedom after becoming disillusioned with advertising photography, he moved to Spain, taught himself to sculpt, and regained his creative independence. michaelhoppengallery.com

sources - Wikipedia

links - Telegraph obituary, Wikipedia

William Henry Fox Talbot

William Henry Fox Talbot, by John Moffat, 1864

b: 1800 / d: 1877

Wikipedia states,

William Henry Fox Talbot FRS 11 February 1800 – 17 September 1877) was an English scientist, inventor and photography pioneer who invented the salted paper and calotype processes, precursors to photographic processes of the later 19th and 20th centuries. His work, in the 1840s on photomechanical reproduction, led to the creation of the photoglyphic engraving process, the precursor to photogravure. He was the holder of a controversial patent which affected the early development of commercial photography in Britain. He was also a noted photographer who contributed to the development of photography as an artistic medium. He published The Pencil of Nature (1844–46), which was illustrated with original salted paper prints from his calotype negatives, and made some important early photographs of Oxford, Paris, Reading, and York.
A polymath, Talbot was elected to the Royal Society in 1831 for his work on the integral calculus, and researched in optics, chemistry, electricity and other subjects such as etymology and ancient history.

wikipedia

† This is referred to in Wikipedia as, "A positive from what may be the oldest existing camera negative", with an additional note that, "A contemporary letter by Talbot states that his January 1839 Royal Institution exhibit included '...various pictures, representing the architecture of my house in the country ... made with the Camera Obscura in the summer of 1835.' A basis for naming this famous image as the oldest among the surviving camera negatives of similar date is not apparent."

sources - Wikipedia

links - Catalogue Raisonné

Robert Frank

Robert Frank

b: 1924 Zürich / d: 2019

Frank is introduced in Part 3 of the EyV course, Traces of Time, for "blur as style (rather than accident or necessity) … used creatively".

Wikipedia reports,

Robert Frank is a Swiss-American photographer and documentary filmmaker. His most notable work, the 1958 book titled The Americans, earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and nuanced outsider's view of American society. Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014, said The Americans "changed the nature of photography, what it could say and how it could say it. [ . . . ] it remains perhaps the most influential photography book of the 20th century." Frank later expanded into film and video and experimented with manipulating photographs and photomontage. wikipedia

At the time of writing (Oct18), Frank is still alive and reportedly,

He has acquired a reputation for being a recluse … declining most interviews and public appearances. He has continued to accept eclectic assignments, however, such as photographing the 1984 Democratic National Convention, and directing music videos for artists such as New Order ("Run"), and Patti Smith ("Summer Cannibals"). Frank continues to produce both films and still images, and has helped organize several retrospectives of his art." wikipedia

[12Sep] He died on 9th September 2019 age 96. Here is the New York Times obituary.

sources - Wikipedia

links

Lee Friedlander

Lee Friedlander, self portrait

b: 1934 Aberdeen, Washington

This entry arose from a tangential project.

Context is important. Consider Lee Friedlander's Provincetown, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, 1968 (right). At first sight, this appears to be a trivial, inconsequential image. With the back-story provided by Jackie Higgins

[one of many self-portraits, this] seemingly narcissistic project started in ernest in 1964. While looking over his contact sheets, he noticed how often his shadow accidently intruded, so he set about consciously including it. He photographed it on the backs of women walking (New York City, 1966), on their faces (Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1966). He photographed himself reflected in windows (New Orleans, Louisiana, 1968) … [etc.] … In the rare instances that he presented his face to the camera, he sought to obscure it with something as mundane as a light bulb. Why Photography Matters, Jerry L Thompson, p. 13

This context makes the self portrait far more interesting, in a similar way to knowing knowing that Tina Barney's family snaps are taken with a view camera puts them in a different light. Where this puts Friedlander's self portrait on a scale running from worthwile to self-indulgent remains open to question, but the fact that it derives from a thought process and has a developmental context clearly works in its favour.

See Shadows and Ouvres for a subsequent, more generous view.

sources - Foc

links - Wikipedia, Fraenkel Gallery

Fay Godwin

Fay Godwin

b: 1931 Berlin / d: 2005 Hastings

Fay is mentioned in the course in the context of carrying on the deep-focus landscape tradition of Ansel Adams a nd the F/64 Group. She is quoted in Wikipedia as saying,

My way into photography was through family snaps in the mid-1960s. I had no formal training, but after the snaps came portraits, reportage, and finally, through my love of walking, landscape photography, all in black and white. A Fellowship with the National Museum of Photography in Bradford led to urban landscape in colour, and very personal close-up work in colour has followed. Fay Godwin, ca. 2000

Godwin's archive, including approximately 11,000 exhibition prints, the entire contents of her studio, and correspondence with some of her subjects, was given to the British Library.

Godwin features in Henry Carroll's, Photographers on photography (2018),

The more conscious I am of why I'm taking it, the less successful the picture turns out to be.Godwin, quoted in Henry Carroll's, Photographers on photography

sources - Guardian obituary, Wikipedia

links - British Library, Wikipedia

David Goldblatt

David Goldblatt
© Getty Images

b: 1930 Randfontein, South Africa / d: 2018 Johannesburg

The Times obituary described Goldblatt as an "uncompromising South African photographer who chronicled apartheid yet shied away from violence". It continues,

Although there was no more unflinching chronicler of life under apartheid than David Goldblatt, his photographs were not suffused with pictures of demonstrations: “I’m a coward, I run away from violence,” he said.
As opposition to apartheid grew in the 1950s he had begun photographing meetings and rallies organised by the Congress Alliance, but, he recalled: “I began to realise that I wasn’t terribly interested in events . . . I developed the sense that it was the underbelly that drew me — the values and conditions that gave rise to the events.”
A formative experience came in 1963 in Lesotho when he took a photograph of a man selling communist pamphlets on the street. As he walked past, the man asked him: “Am I an ox?” After that, Goldblatt rarely took pictures of people without their permission.
Goldblatt bequeathed his archive to the University of Cape Town, but later reversed his decision in protest at its policy of removing any art that might offend students. Instead he gave his work to Yale University in the US. “I make all kinds of compromises in my life,” Goldblatt said. “But I will not compromise about my work.” … ” The Times

sources - The Times

links - Wikipedia

Andreas Gursky, see Nichers

Andreas Gursky

b: 1955 Leipzig

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

Wikipedia states (rearranged),

He is known for his large format architecture and landscape colour photographs, often employing a high point of view.
Between 1981 and 1987 at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, Gursky received critical training and influence from his teachers Hilla and Bernd Becher, a photographic team known for their distinctive, dispassionate method of systematically cataloging industrial machinery and architecture.
Gursky shares a studio with Laurenz Berges, Thomas Ruff and Axel Hütte on the Hansaallee, in Düsseldorf. The building, a former electricity station, was transformed into an artists studio and living quarters, in 2001, by architects Herzog & de Meuron, of Tate Modern fame.In 2010-11, the architects worked again on the building, designing a gallery in the basement. wikipedia

Gursky rekindled my interest in photography when I saw one of his pieces in Tate Modern. That was Paris, Montparnasse, fig. 1 (Tate Modern opened in 2000, Tate bought the work in 1995). I prefer his earlier pieces which tend to be simpler and work mostly because of their vast size †. Or, perhaps, the genre was striking when first encountered, but the novelty has worn off.

His work sells for extraordinary prices. The Guardian reported that a print of Rhine II (fig. 3) sold for  $4.3m (£2.7m) in 2011. Is it just me, or does anyone else find that absurd?

† The Tate gives the dimensions of Paris, Montparnasse as,
"Image: 1342 x 3190 mm
support: 1800 x 3500 mm
frame: 1875 x 3550 x 65 mm".

Paris, Montparnasse, 1993, on loan from the Tate, was on display at the Wellcome Collection's exhibition Living with Buildings: Health and Architecture exhibition. This was the venue for a tutor-led OCA visit on 12Jan19.

Note how the image quality and print size are just right to get a little detail on the contents of every apartment. Perfectly judged.

sources - The Guardian, The Tate

links - Wikipedia, Stepan (2008)

added 19Dec18

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