Photography Masters

Biography: Portrait photographer Philippe Halsman

Biography: Portrait photographer Philippe Halsman

Halsman (1906 – 1979) grew up in Riga, Latvia, in a family of assimilated Jews and studied engineering at a university in Dresden. Two years after his graduation, he moved to Paris, turned his photographic hobby into a profession, and opened his own portrait studio, specializing in fashion and theater portraits. A few years later, with the threat of World War…
Biography: Documentary photographer Ed van Wijk

Biography: Documentary photographer Ed van Wijk

Ed van Wijk (1917 – 1992) was a Dutch photographer. He preferred to work in black-and-white and captured the events and people of Netherlands, especially in Hague. In the years 1954 to 1963 he published a series of books about the Hague, Scheveningen, Madurodam, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Leiden and Friesland.
Biography: City Life photographer Ruth Orkin

Biography: City Life photographer Ruth Orkin

Ruth Orkin (3 September 1921 – 16 January 1985) was an American photographer. Orkin moved to New York in 1943, where she worked as a nightclub photographer and shot baby pictures by day to buy her first professional camera. She worked for all the major magazines in 1940s, and also went to Tanglewood during the summers to shoot rehearsals. She…
Biography: Pictorial Portrait photographer Rudolph Eickemeyer Jr

Biography: Pictorial Portrait photographer Rudolph Eickemeyer Jr

Rudolf Eickemeyer, Jr. (August 7, 1862 – April 25, 1932) was an American pictorialist photographer, active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Rudolf Eickemeyer’s photography combined the technological calculation of his engineer father and the aestheticism of the amateur photography clubs that nurtured his art in the 1880s. Purchasing his first camera in 1884, Eickemeyer devoured the ample…
Biography: Nude photographer Iwase Yoshiyuki

Biography: Nude photographer Iwase Yoshiyuki

Iwase Yoshiyuki was born in Onjuku (1904 – 2001) a fishing village on the pacific side of the Chiba peninsula, which encloses Tokyo Bay on the east. After graduating from Meiji University Law School in 1924, he took up lifelong pursuits, heading the family sake distillery and documenting the receding traditions of coastal Japan. In the late 1920’s Yoshiyuki received…
Biography: XIX Century Portrait photographer Napoleon Sarony

Biography: XIX Century Portrait photographer Napoleon Sarony

Napoleon Sarony (1821 – 1896) was an American lithographer and photographer. Sarony was one of the first photographers to start paying well known individuals to pose for him and then having the rights to sell their photos for profit. Sarony usually wrote personal letters to the celebrities inviting them to his studio for a photo session. In 1871, Samuel Clemens,…
Biography: Abstract photographer Francis Bruguiere

Biography: Abstract photographer Francis Bruguiere

Francis Bruguière (1879-1945) was an American photographer. He was born in San Francisco to a wealthy banking family and was privately educated. In 1905 he travelled to New York where he met and became friends with Frank Eugene and Alfred Stieglitz. Eugene encouraged Bruguière to investigate the aesthetic possibilities of photography, and Stieglitz accepted him as a member of the…
Biography: Fine Art / Botanical photographer Karl Blossfeldt

Biography: Fine Art / Botanical photographer Karl Blossfeldt

Karl Blossfeldt (1865 – 1932) was a German photographer, sculptor, teacher, and artist who worked in Berlin, Germany. In 1881 Blossfeldt began his studies as an apprentice at the Art Ironworks and Foundry in Mägdesprung, Germany, where he studied sculpture and iron casting. He then moved to Berlin to study at the School of the Museum of Decorative Arts (Kunstgewerbemuseum).…
Pictorial Landscape / Nude photographer Anne Brigman

Pictorial Landscape / Nude photographer Anne Brigman

Anne Brigman (1869–1950) was an American photographer. Brigman was one of two original California members of the art photography group the Photo-Secession, founded by Alfred Steiglitz, and she was the only Western photographer to be made a Fellow of the group. Three issues of Camera Work featured her photographs, and the British Linked Ring society of photographers elected her a…
Biography: Circus Life photographer Harry A. Atwell

Biography: Circus Life photographer Harry A. Atwell

Harry A. Atwell (1879-1957) was an American photographer. Atwell was hired for his first circus assignment in 1910 to travel with the Ringling Bros. Circus. Over the next forty years he documented the roustabouts, big top crowds, sideshow performers and center-ring stars of the circus during a time when shops, schools, and even factories closed when the circus came to…
Biography: Photojournalist Ara Guler

Biography: Photojournalist Ara Guler

Ara Guler (born August 16, 1928 in Beyoglu, Istanbul, Turkey) is a Turkish Armenian photojournalist, nicknamed “the Eye of Istanbul” or “the Photographer of Istanbul”. He began his journalistic career in 1950 on the Yeni Istanbul newspaper while still a student at the Faculty of Economics. On completing his military service he began work on the Hayat magazine, where he…
Biography: City Life / Street photographer Herbert Dombrowski

Biography: City Life / Street photographer Herbert Dombrowski

Herbert Dombrowski (1917-2010) was a German photographer. Dombrowski was born in Hamburg in 1917 and began to take pictures as a high-school student. He was 19 when he went to the Hamburg port at night to photograph the SS St. Louis. The image, taken with a used Leica camera, was published on the cover of Reclams Universum, a popular illustrated…
Biography: Portrait photographer Emile Gsell

Biography: Portrait photographer Emile Gsell

Emile Gsell (1838 – 1879) was a French photographer who worked in Southeast Asia, becoming the first commercial photographer based in Saigon. He participated in at least three scientific expeditions, and the images he produced from the first, to Angkor, are amongst the earliest photographs of that site. Though he died at an early age he managed to make several…
Biography: Pictorial photographer Leonard Misonne

Biography: Pictorial photographer Leonard Misonne

Leonard Misonne (1870 – 1943) was a Belgian photographer. Misonne was a master pictorialist photographer, whose atmospheric landscapes and street scenes are among the finest pictorial depictions of such subject matter. He employed many process and techniques throughout his career and championed a highly diffused printing system and light quality. His photographs are among many important collections and anthologies on…
Biography: Surreal Architecture photographer Simon Marsden

Biography: Surreal Architecture photographer Simon Marsden

Sir Simon Marsden (1 December 1948 – 22 January 2012) was an English photographer. In 1969 he went to work in London as an assistant to the Irish photographer Ruan O’Lochlainn, who specialised in film stills and record covers. O’Lochlainn’s wife, Jackie Mackay, was a master printer who had worked in New York with the portrait photographer Karsh, and Marsden…
Biography: Portrait photographer James Abbe

Biography: Portrait photographer James Abbe

James Abbe (1883 – 1973) was an American photographer. Abbe had a remarkable talent for inspiring trust in stars and Lillian Gish convinced him to come to Italy in 1923 to work as a lighting consultant and still photographer for “The White Sister.” He closed his Broadway studio, abandoned his wife and children, and moved to Italy. He spent the…
Biography: Nude photographer Ruth Bernhard

Biography: Nude photographer Ruth Bernhard

Ruth Bernhard (October 14, 1905 – December 18, 2006) was a German-born American photographer. In 1927, after two years at the Berlin Academy of Art, Ruth moved to New York where she began to seriously pursue a career in photography. Eight years later she met Edward Weston in California and was deeply moved by his work. He revealed to her…
Biography: Street photographer Louis Stettner

Biography: Street photographer Louis Stettner

Louis Stettner (born November 7, 1922) is an American photographer of the 20th century whose work includes streetscapes, portraits and architectural images of New York and Paris. His work has been highly regarded because of its humanity and capturing the life and reality of the people and streets of both cities. Since 1947, Stettner has photographed the changes in the…
Biography: Experimental photographer Heinz Hajek-Halke

Biography: Experimental photographer Heinz Hajek-Halke

Heinz Hajek-Halke (1898–1983) was a German experimental photographer who co-founded the Fotoform group with Otto Steinert. Heinz Hajek-Halke, born in Berlin in 1898, spent part of his childhood in Argentina. He worked as a photo editor, press photographer and commercial artist, concentrating almost from the start on montage techniques. During World War II he lived quietly and photographed small animal…