Portrait

Biography: Portrait photographer Julia Margaret Cameron

Biography: Portrait photographer Julia Margaret Cameron

Julia Margaret Cameron (11 June 1815 – 26 January 1879) was a British photographer. She became known for her portraits of celebrities of the time, and for photographs with Arthurian and other legendary themes. Julia was a largely talented, highly intelligent, free-spirited, eccentric, financially comfortable English woman who took up photography as a personal adventure, as she might have taken…
Biography: Portrait photographer Nadar

Biography: Portrait photographer Nadar

Nadar was the pseudonym of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (6 April 1820 – 23 March 1910), a French photographer, caricaturist, journalist, novelist, and balloonist. He is remembered as a photographer, for the portraits that he made of his great contemporaries. The Museum’s print of the Taylor portrait is a woodburytype, a kind of print in which the image is formed by ink…
Interview with Surreal / Nude photographer Mark Hamilton

Interview with Surreal / Nude photographer Mark Hamilton

Born 1957 in Brooklyn, New York, Mark Hamilton’s interest in photography began with hours looking at the great picture magazines of the sixties: Bazaar, Life, Look, and Vogue. The first camera he owned was Canon rangefinder purchased with Christmas money from his parents at Camera Barn on Broadway in NYC. A family vacation to Germany in the seventies started with…
Biography: Nude/Portrait photographer E. J. Bellocq

Biography: Nude/Portrait photographer E. J. Bellocq

E. J. Bellocq (1873 – 1949) was an American professional photographer who worked in New Orleans during the early 20th century. Knowledge of E. J. Bellocq barely transcends the level of rumor. This is true in the case of many exceptional photographers of the past, and it is especially true of professional photographers, who were less likely than amateurs (and…
Interview with Fashion / Portrait photographer Ross Garrett

Interview with Fashion / Portrait photographer Ross Garrett

A portrait and fashion photographer born and bred. Ross Garrett born in Johannesburg South Africa began his career as a graphic designer opening a multi media studio shortly after leaving college. After a while he found himself in the heart of the industry as a photographer. Shooting portraits of musicians and working for a number of advertising agencies locally. Known…
Biography: Portrait photographer Adolph de Meyer

Biography: Portrait photographer Adolph de Meyer

Adolph de Meyer (1st September 1868 – 6 January 1946) was a photographer famed for his elegant photographic portraits in the early 20th century. He was also the first official fashion photographer for the American magazine Vogue, appointed to that position in 1913. Although de Meyer habitually fictionalized his biographical information, it is fairly certain that he was educated in…
Biography: People photographer Adam Clark Vroman

Biography: People photographer Adam Clark Vroman

Adam Clark Vroman was born April 15, 1856, in La Salle, Illinois. Died July 24, 1916, in Altadena, California. Vroman started working for the Railroad in 1874. In 1892, to improve his wife’s health, they moved to Pasadena, California. He began taking photographs in 1892. In 1895 he started work on a complete series of the California missions. That summer…
Biography: Portrait photographer Diane Arbus

Biography: Portrait photographer Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus (March 14, 1923 – July 26, 1971) was an American photographer and writer noted for black-and-white square photographs of “deviant and marginal people (dwarfs, giants, transgender people, nudists, circus performers) or of people whose normality seems ugly or surreal”. Arbus believed that a camera could be “a little bit cold, a little bit harsh” but its scrutiny revealed…
Biography: Nude photographer Frantisek Drtikol

Biography: Nude photographer Frantisek Drtikol

Frantisek Drtikol (1883 – 1961) was a Czech photographer especially known for his nudes and portraits. Dritikol was born in 1883 in a mining town in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he rose to become a prominent artist and famed portraiture photographer. Drtikol grew up with a desire to draw and paint. After a period of military service, he…
Biography: Portrait photographer August Sander

Biography: Portrait photographer August Sander

August Sander (1876 – 1964) was a German portrait and documentary photographer. August Sander set for himself a problem that ranks among the most ambitious in the history of photography: He assigned himself the project of making a photographic portrait of the German people. He set about his task as systematically as a taxonomist, gathering, specimen by specimen, exemplary players…
Biography: Portrait photographer Man Ray

Biography: Portrait photographer Man Ray

Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky, August 27, 1890 – November 18, 1976) was an American modernist artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. He produced major works in a variety of media but considered himself a painter above all.…
Biography: Fashion/Portrait photographer Richard Avedon

Biography: Fashion/Portrait photographer Richard Avedon

Richard Avedon (May 15, 1923 – October 1, 2004) was an American fashion and portrait photographer. An obituary published in The New York Times said that “his fashion and portrait photographs helped define America’s image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century.” Avedon dropped out of high school and joined the Merchant Marine’s photographic section. Upon his return…
Biography: Portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh

Biography: Portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh

Yousuf Karsh (December 23, 1908 – July 13, 2002) was an Armenian-Canadian photographer, and one of the most famous and accomplished portrait photographers of all time. Karsh was born in Armenia in 1908 and grew up under the horrors of the Armenian massacres. His photographer uncle, George Nakash, brought him to Canada in 1924. After an apprenticeship in Boston with…
The only surviving images of veterans of Napoleonic Wars taken in 1858

The only surviving images of veterans of Napoleonic Wars taken in 1858

Napoléon Bonaparte’s final defeat was the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Even after his death in 1821, the surviving soldiers of Grande Armée revered his historic leadership. Each year on May 5, the anniversary of Napoléon’s death, the veterans marched to Paris’ Place Vendôme in full uniform to pay respects to their emperor. These photographs were taken on one of…
Biography: Fashion/Portrait photographer Irving Penn

Biography: Fashion/Portrait photographer Irving Penn

Irving Penn (June 16, 1917 – October 7, 2009) was an American photographer known for his fashion photography, portraits, and still lifes. His talent for picturing subjects with compositional clarity and economy earned him the widespread admiration of Vogue readers during his long association with that magazine, beginning in 1943. It also brought him recognition in the art world; his…