Architecture

Biography: 19th Century photographer Charles Clifford

Biography: 19th Century photographer Charles Clifford

Charles Clifford (1820 – 1863) was a Welsh photographer based mainly in Spain. Clifford, known mostly for his daguerreotype, calotype and wet plate collodion images of scenes from around Spain, he was, together with the French photographer, Jean Laurent, one of the leading photographers of his day in Spain. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert are known to have purchased some…
Biography: 19th Century Berlin photographer Leopold Ahrendts

Biography: 19th Century Berlin photographer Leopold Ahrendts

Leopold Ahrendts (1825 – 1870) was a photographer in Berlin. He worked as a painter and lithographer. By the mid 1850’s, Leopold Ahrendts had already achieved a prominent reputation as an urban and architectural photographer. His work was well received by the Prussian court, as well as in the Berlin art world and the public sphere. Art magazines praised his…
Biography: Architecture photographer Édouard Baldus

Biography: Architecture photographer Édouard Baldus

Édouard-Denis Baldus (1813 – 1889) was a French landscape, architectural and railway photographer. Twenty-five-year-old Édouard Baldus arrived in Paris to study painting in 1838, shortly before Louis Daguerre first showed his magically precise photographic images to the world. In Paris, the self-taught Baldus worked outside the École des Beaux-Arts and atelier system, but submitted work to each of the annual…
Biography: 19th Century photographer Francis Bedford

Biography: 19th Century photographer Francis Bedford

Francis Bedford (1815 in London – 15 May 1894) was an English photographer. Francis Bedford was the son of the successful church architect Francis Octavius Bedford. He was christened at St Giles in Camberwell on 11 September 1815. He began his career as an architectural draughtsman and lithographer, before taking up photography in the early 1850s. He helped to found…
Biography: Architecture photographer Charles Marville

Biography: Architecture photographer Charles Marville

Charles Marville (1813 – 1879), was a French photographer, who mainly photographed architecture, landscapes and the urban environment. Sometime in the1850s Charles Marville was asked to document the old quarters of the French capital by the government’s Commission for Monumental Historical Monuments. Marville purposely took the photographs of Paris’s architecture and streets scenes when it was raining, so that the…
Biography: Architecture photographer Drahomir Josef Ruzicka

Biography: Architecture photographer Drahomir Josef Ruzicka

Drahomír Joseph Ruzicka (1870 – 1960) was born in Bohemia. At age six he moved with his family to a farm near Wahoo, Nebraska, a state that drew many Czech immigrants. In 1882, the young Ruzicka went to New York to finish high school, then to Vienna for college, and graduated from New York University with a medical degree in…
Biography: Architecture photographer Frederick H. Evans

Biography: Architecture photographer Frederick H. Evans

Frederick H. Evans (26 June 1853, London – 24 June 1943, London) was a British photographer best known for his platinum prints of architectural interiors of English and French cathedrals. Before devoting his time solely to the art of photography, Evans owned a small bookshop in London where many artists and writers, including George Bernard Shaw and Aubrey Beardsley, came…
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: Polish pioneer photographer Maksymilian Fajans

Biography: Polish pioneer photographer Maksymilian Fajans

Maksymilian Fajans (1825–1890) was educated in the Academy of Fine Arts and Parisian studios of local artists and was initially interested in drawing and lithography. In 1862, he became intrigued by the more and more trendy invention of photography. He was a portraitist and a documentarian. As a photoreporter he captured the – often now destroyed – developments of Warsaw:…
Biography: Documentary/Architecture photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher

Biography: Documentary/Architecture photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher

Bernd and Hilla Becher were German artists working as a collaborative duo. They are best known for their extensive series of photographic images, or typologies, of industrial buildings and structures. To create these works, the artists traveled to large mines and steel mills, and systematically photographed the major structures, such as the winding towers that haul coal and iron ore…
Biography: Architecture photographer Jan Bulhak

Biography: Architecture photographer Jan Bulhak

Jan Bułhak (1876–1950) was a pioneer of photography in Poland and present-day Belarus and Lithuania, and one of the best-known Polish photographers of the early 20th century. A theoretician and philosopher of photography, he was among the most prominent exponents of pictorialism. He is best known for his landscapes and photographs of various places, especially the city of Vilnius (then…
Biography: City Life photographer Berenice Abbott

Biography: City Life photographer Berenice Abbott

Berenice Abbott (July 17, 1898 – December 9, 1991), was an American photographer best known for her black-and-white photography of New York City architecture and urban design of the 1930s. Abbott studied for one year at Ohio State University, Columbus, before moving to New York in 1918 to study sculpture. While in New York, Abbott met Marcel Duchamp and Man…
Biography: Eugene Atget

Biography: Eugene Atget

Eugène Atget (February 12, 1857 – August 4, 1927) was a French pioneer of documentary photography, noted for his determination to document all of the architecture and street scenes of Paris before their disappearance to modernization. He became obsessed with making what he modestly called “documents” of the city and its environs, and compiling a visual compendium of the architecture,…
Biography: Alfred Stieglitz

Biography: Alfred Stieglitz

Alfred Stieglitz ( born January 1, 1864 in Hoboken, New Jersey – July 13, 1946) was an American photographer, art dealer, publisher, advocate for the Modernist movement in the arts. He was the son of Edward Stieglitz, a German Jew who came to the United States in 1849 and went on to make a comfortable fortune in the clothing business.…
Biography: Andre Kertesz

Biography: Andre Kertesz

André Kertész (2 July 1894 – 28 September 1985), born Kertész Andor, was a Hungarian-born photographer known for his groundbreaking contributions to photographic composition and the photo essay. In the early years of his career, his then-unorthodox camera angles and style prevented his work from gaining wider recognition. Kertész never felt that he had gained the worldwide recognition he deserved.…
Biography: Architecture photographer Samuel Gottscho

Biography: Architecture photographer Samuel Gottscho

Samuel Herman Gottscho (February 8, 1875 – January 28, 1971) was an American architectural, landscape, and nature photographer. After attending several architectural photograph exhibitions, Gottscho decided to perfect and improve his own work and sought out several architects and landscape architects. After twenty-three years as a traveling lace and fabric salesman, Gottscho became a professional commercial photographer at the age…
Biography: Architecture photographer Andreas Feininger

Biography: Architecture photographer Andreas Feininger

Andreas Feininger (born 27 December 1906 – 18 February 1999) was an American photographer best known for his dynamic black-and-white photographs of New York. The son of the painter Lyonel Feininger, he studied cabinetmaking and architecture at the Bauhaus and established a Swedish firm specializing in architectural and industrial photography. He immigrated to New York City and became a staff…