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Biography: 19th Century Paris photographer Bruno Braquehais

Biography: 19th Century Paris photographer Bruno Braquehais

Bruno Braquehais (1823 – 1875) was a French photographer active primarily in Paris in the mid-19th century. Braquehais’s early photographs consist primarily of portraits and female nudes, many of which were colored by his wife, Laure. Art critics have pointed out that many of Braquehais’s photographs of female nudes are cluttered with distracting objects (e.g., the Venus de Milo), giving…
Leonard Freed: Six Stories

Leonard Freed: Six Stories

Freed (born 1929, Brooklyn, died 2006, Garrison, New York) was one of the leading photographers of the post-War era. Culled from Freed’s extensive archive, this exhibition presents over 75 vintage black and white prints from six of the photographers most important bodies of work. Freed has been the subject of numerous recent museum exhibitions surveying the six decades of his…
Vintage: Ottawa – Capital City of Canada (late 19th Century)

Vintage: Ottawa – Capital City of Canada (late 19th Century)

Starting in the 1850s, large sawmills began to be erected by entrepreneurs known as lumber barons, and these became some of the largest mills in the world. Rail lines erected in 1854 connected Ottawa to areas south and to the transcontinental rail network via Hull and Lachute, Quebec in 1886. The original Parliament buildings which included the Centre, East and…
Yoga: The Secret of Life By Francesco Mastalia

Yoga: The Secret of Life By Francesco Mastalia

Yoga: The Secret of Life is a photo-documentary about the spiritual and physical journey of yoga. Through photographs and text this fine art book explores the personal experiences of 108 of today’s leading practitioners and how this ancient practice has transformed their mind, body, and spirit. The photographs are taken on glass plates using the wet collodion process, a photographic…
Bernd & Hilla Becher at Sprüth Magers

Bernd & Hilla Becher at Sprüth Magers

In a photographic project spanning five decades, Bernd and Hilla Becher documented the soon-to-be-forgotten architectural forms of industry – Mine Heads, Blast Furnaces, Water Towers, Coal Bunkers, Cooling Towers, Industrial Facades, Gas Tanks, Grain Elevators, to name but a few. Systematically photographing each structure, the artists examined their shared qualities and categorized the images into grid typologies or displayed them…
Ofir Barak: Mea shearim – The streets

Ofir Barak: Mea shearim – The streets

Mea Shearim was established in 1874 as the fifth settlement outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. Its name is derived from a verse in the weekly Torah portion that was read the week the settlement was founded: “Isaac sowed in that land, and in that year he reaped a hundredfold (מאה שערים, Mea Shearim); God had blessed…
The Art of the Platinum Print

The Art of the Platinum Print

Peter Fetterman Gallery is pleased to present a new exhibition surveying the chronology of the Platinum printing process including early Pictorialism, social-documentary, vernacular, and landscape photographs, along with modern portrait, fashion, and nude works. The installation celebrates the now rare analog process known for its delicate, extensive tonal range, warm color palette, and archival longevity. Originating in the early 1870s,…
Mathew Brady: Antebellum Portraits

Mathew Brady: Antebellum Portraits

Mathew Brady may be best known today for his Civil War–era photographs, but he established his reputation as an internationally acclaimed portrait photographer more than a decade before the war. Brady opened his first daguerreotype portrait studio in New York City in 1844, just five years after the introduction of the first commercially practical form of photography. By 1851, he…
Vintage: Gum Bichromate Process by Robert Demachy (late 19th Century)

Vintage: Gum Bichromate Process by Robert Demachy (late 19th Century)

Robert Demachy was the leading French proponent of Pictorialism and the director of the Photo-Club de Paris, the French parallel to the American Photo-Secession (led by Alfred Stieglitz), the Viennese Kleeblatt, and the British Brotherhood of the Linked Ring. Like his American and European counterparts, Demachy produced and promoted a type of photography that self-consciously evoked drawing and painting-part of…
Horst P. Horst: Classic Fashion

Horst P. Horst: Classic Fashion

Horst P. Horst is a seminal modernist photographer of fashion and style. He was an arbiter of taste with an instinctive sense of elegance that became synonymous to his work. He was born in Weissenfels, Germany in 1906 and would prove himself to be a critical figure in the history of 20th century photography. He apprenticed with Le Corbusier in…
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…
Jean-François CANTREL: Camera’s Faces

Jean-François CANTREL: Camera’s Faces

This series is inspired by black and white photographs found in family albums from the fifties and sixties: anonymous portraits taken by my father during his travels. So here are my own strangers, now capturing the photographer, or the viewer. All unified by cameras that have made History. The capture’s instant, the click, is materialised by the movement of the…
Vintage: San Francisco Before the Quake (1900s)

Vintage: San Francisco Before the Quake (1900s)

By 1890, San Francisco’s population approached 300,000, making it the eighth-largest city in the United States at the time. Around 1901, San Francisco was a major city known for its flamboyant style, stately hotels, ostentatious mansions on Nob Hill, and a thriving arts scene. The first North American plague epidemic was the San Francisco plague of 1900–1904.
Biography: 19th Century Architecture photographer Louis-Émile Durandelle

Biography: 19th Century Architecture photographer Louis-Émile Durandelle

Louis-Émile Durandelle (1839 – 1917) was a French photographer best known for his work documenting the renovation of Paris during the Second Empire. He, along with his partner, Delmaet (with whom he worked until 1862) photographed the new Opera of Paris and its construction in great detail. After its opening, Louis-Emile Durandelle made a publication of 45 photos entitled Le…
The Duchess of Carnegie Hall: Photographs by Editta Sherman

The Duchess of Carnegie Hall: Photographs by Editta Sherman

Art was a business and a calling for photographer Editta Sherman (1913-2013). After her husband’s death in 1954, she worked tirelessly to maintain the portrait photography business that they had established. Working—and living—in one of the artist studios above Carnegie Hall for more than 60 years, Sherman charmed her celebrity clients with a vivacity and warmth that was reflected in…
Historic B&W photos of Copenhagen, Denmark, late 19th Century

Historic B&W photos of Copenhagen, Denmark, late 19th Century

In 19th century, Copenhagen experienced a period of intense cultural creativity known as the Danish Golden Age. Painting prospered under C.W. Eckersberg and his students while C.F. Hansen and Gottlieb Bindesbøll brought a Neoclassical look to the city’s architecture. In the early 1850s, the ramparts of the city were opened to allow new housing to be built around The Lakes…
I DO, I DO

I DO, I DO

Ricco/Maresca Gallery is pleased to present “I DO, I DO,” an exhibition that explores and re-contextualizes the theme and iconography of marriage. The core of “I DO, I DO” is a collection of 100 vintage nuptial cabinet cards ranging from ca. 1885-1900, all produced by studios in Wisconsin; a geographic specificity that remains a mystery and, perhaps beyond coincidence, is…
Vintage: Women’s Styles of Maine from the Late 19th Century

Vintage: Women’s Styles of Maine from the Late 19th Century

19th century fashions are highly romanticized in books and movies. Despite the prim and proper feminine ideal of the day, fashions in this period created an often exaggerated, ostentatious look. Tight corsets, gigantic hoop-skirts, and outrageous bustles make today’s fashion trends look sedate by comparison. These rare and interesting vintage photographs from Camden’s Knox Mill treasurer Charles W. Babb (1863-1956)…