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Sophie Calle (born 9 October 1953) is a French writer, photographer, installation artist, and conceptual artist. Calle's work is distinguished by its use of arbitrary sets of constraints, and evokes the French literary movement known as Oulipo. Her work frequently depicts human vulnerability, and examines identity and intimacy. She is recognized for her detective-like tendency to follow strangers and investigate their private lives. Her photographic work often includes panels of text of her own writing.

Since 2005, Calle has taught as a professor of film and photography at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. She has lectured at the University of California, San Diego in the Visual Arts Department. She has also taught at Mills College in Oakland, California.

Exhibitions of Calle's work took place at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia; Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme, Paris; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium; Videobrasil, SESC Pompeia, São Paulo, Brazil; Museum of Modern Art of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil; Whitechapel Gallery, London; and the De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg, Netherlands. She represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2007.

In 2017 she was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for her publication My All (Actes Sud, 2016). In 2019 she was the recipient of the Royal Photographic Society's Centenary Medal and Honorary Fellowship.

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Artist page for Sophie Calle (born 1953)

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One day in 1958 or '59, Ralph Eugene Meatyard walked into a Woolworths store in Lexington, Kentucky. An optician by trade, Meatyard was also a photographer-a "dedicated amateur," he called himself-and he kept an eye out for props. He might drop by an antiques store to buy eerie dolls or emerge from a hobby shop with a jar of snakes or mice cured in formalin. In Woolworths, he came upon a set of masks whose features suggested a marriage of Picasso and a jack-o'-lantern.

"He immediately liked their properties," recalls his son Christopher, who was with him at the time. Meatyard père bought a few dozen. "They were latex and had a very unique odor," says Christopher, now 56. "In the summer they could be hot and humid."

Over the next 13 years, Meatyard persuaded a procession of family and friends to don one of the Woolworths masks and pose in front of his camera. The resulting photographs became the best known of the pictures he left behind when he died of cancer in 1972, at age 46. That work, says the photographer Emmet Gowin, who befriended Meatyard in the 1970s, is "unlike anyone else's in this world."

"He picked the environment first," Christopher says of his father's method. "Then he'd look at the particular light in that moment in that place, and start composing scenes using the camera." With the shot composed, he would then populate it, telling his subjects where to place themselves, which way to face, whether to move or stand still.

For the 1962 portrait on the preceding page, Meatyard chose an abandoned minor-league ballpark and arranged his wife and their three children in the bleachers. (Christopher is at left; his brother, Michael, is in the middle; his sister, Melissa, at the bottom; and their mother, Madelyn, is seated top right.) The title he gave the image- Romance (N.) From Ambrose Bierce #3-provides only the broadest hint of what he was up to: In his Devil's Dictionary, Bierce had defined "romance" as "fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of Things as they are."

But still, why masks? Well, "the idea of a person, a photograph, say, of a young girl with a title 'Rose Taylor' or the title 'Rose' or no title at all becomes an entirely different thing," Meatyard once said. " 'Rose Taylor' is a specific person, whether you know her nor not. 'Rose' is more generalized and could be one of many Roses-many people. No title, it could be anybody." And in the same way, a mask "serves as non-personalizing a person."

And why would someone want to do that? In an essay on Meatyard's work, the critic James Rhem quotes one of his sitters, Mary Browning Johnson: "He said he felt like everyone was connected, and when you use the mask, you take away the differences."

Gowin, who posed for a Meatyard portrait, recalls thinking that wearing a mask would surely erase all sense of personhood. "But when I saw the pictures," he says, "I realized that even though you have the mask, your body language completely gives you away. It's as if you're completely naked, completely revealed."

Meatyard, whose surname is of English origin, was born in Normal, Illinois, in 1925. He served stateside in the Navy during World War II and briefly studied pre-dentistry before settling on a career as an optician. He plied that trade all his working life-9 to 5 on weekdays, 9 to noon on Saturdays-but photography became his ruling passion shortly after he purchased his first camera, in 1950, to photograph his newborn son, Michael. Four years later, Meatyard joined the Lexington Camera Club. Endlessly curious, he sought inspiration in philosophy, music and books-historical fiction, poetry, short stories and collections of Zen koans. Zen and jazz were enduring influences. "How many businessmen run Buddhist-style meditation groups over the lunch hour?" asks Gowin.

Despite his self-proclaimed status as an amateur, Meatyard soon became known in serious photography circles. In 1956, his work was exhibited beside that of Ansel Adams, Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan and Edward Weston. Five years later, Beaumont Newhall, then director of the George Eastman House, listed him in Art in America as one of the "new talents" in American photography. In the late 1960s, he collaborated with the writer Wendell Berry on The Unforeseen Wilderness, a book about Kentucky's Red River Gorge. In 1973, the New York Times called him a "backwoods oracle."

His last major project was The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater, a series of portraits of his wife and a rotating cast of family and friends; it was published posthumously in 1974. The project's title was inspired by the Flannery O'Connor story "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," in which a woman introduces both herself and her deaf-mute daughter as "Lucynell Crater." In Meatyard's book, everyone is masked, and everyone is identified as "Lucybelle Crater." As Gowin says of his friend: "He was so many people all mixed up in one."

The bookish Zen jazzmeister also served as president of the local PTA and the Little League and flipped burgers at the Fourth of July party. Meatyard "was a quiet, diffident, charming person on the surface," says his friend the writer Guy Davenport. But that, he added, was "a known ruse of the American genius."

David Zax, a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, New York, is a frequent contributor to Smithsonian.

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Ralph Eugene Meatyard: The Man Behind the Masks

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The "dedicated amateur" photographer had a strange way of getting his subjects to reveal themselves

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Richard Misrach was born in 1949 in Los Angeles, California. A leading photographer of his generation, Misrach explores the collision of nature and culture through his large-format color photographs. Fascinated by the political and environmental transformation of the deserts of the American southwest, Misrach creates hauntingly beautiful photographs of arid landscapes that contrast the natural and man-made tragedies found there: floods, fires, nuclear-test sites, the U.S.-Mexico border wall, and the traces of migrants who make the perilous journey north.

Misrach began his career in Berkeley, California, in the early 1970s, photographing the anti-war protests happening throughout the city. His first major series of photographs, Telegraph 3 AM (1974), depicted the homeless population of Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. Misrach realized that the work failed to meet his social-activist ambitions and instead turned his camera to the deserts of southern California, Nevada, and Arizona. His ongoing series, Desert Cantos, consists of groups of photographs that depict the ecological effects of human intervention in the desert landscape. A more recent chapter, Border Cantos, captures the pathos of the 2000-mile border between the U.S. and Mexico, including the border wall and the artifacts of migration-clothing, water barrels, ladders-left behind. The artist's other series include: Golden Gate, a study of the famous bridge; On the Beach, aerial views of beach-goers and bathers; and Destroy This Memory, a record of the graffiti found in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Richard Misrach received his BA in psychology from University of California, Berkeley. ﻿Major awards include an Aperture Award (2010); Kulturepreis for Lifetime Achievement in Photography, German Society of Photography (2002); Distinguished Career in Photography Award, Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies (1994); International Center for Photography Infinity Award (1988). He has had major solo exhibitions at San José Museum of Art, California (2018); High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia (2012); Berkeley Art Museum, California (2011); Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Texas (2010); New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana (2010); Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois (2007); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California (1983); Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France (1979); International Center for Photography, New York (1975); among others. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts (2019); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California (2018); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017); Whitney Biennial (1981, 1991); and many others. Misrach lives and works in Berkeley, California.

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Art21 is a celebrated global leader in presenting thought-provoking and sophisticated content about contemporary art, and the go-to place to learn first-hand from the artists of our time. A nonprofit organization, Art21's mission is to inspire a more creative world through the works and words of contemporary artists.

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Official website of The Irving Penn Foundation, with background information on the life and career of photographer Irving Penn. Includes images, biography, chronology, exhibition list, bibliography, and news.

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An experimental evening with DonChristian (live), Fragile/Wolfgang Tillmans (live) and Nedalot (DJ set)
Kantine am Berghain, Berlin, Sunday 16 June 2019, 7pm (doors) and Monday 17 June 2019, 7pm (doors)

Over the last four years Wolfgang Tillmans' band project Fragile has come together for concentrated periods of time to write, play and perform, culminating in ambitious experimental concerts. These have included an audio-visual performance at Tate Modern, London in 2017 where light, music, field recordings and the artist's videos were brought together in an immersive experience, Union Pool, New York (2017), as well as the bands biennial performances in Fire Island. This will be the band's first concert in Berlin.

Tillmans' ongoing musical collaborators are the Colombian visual artist Juan Pablo Echeverri, sound artist Kyle Combs and musician and visual artist Jay Pluck, from New York City. Berlin based musician and producer Tim Knapp, and Providence-based musician, academic and writer Thomas Roach.

Joining Fragile at Kantine am Berghain for his live debut in Germany will be the New York based visual artist, rapper, singer, songwriter and producer DonChristian Jones. His work spans musical and time based performance, rap mixtapes, video and public murals, blending genres of painting and hip hop, referencing classical and contemporary styles. Much of his work today is informed by his time spent painting murals on Rikers Island with youth inmates. Don has shown and performed at The Whitney Museum, MoMA Ps1, Webster Hall, Dancespace, Center for Performance Research, and was an artist-in-residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Captiva, Florida. "Where There's Smoke", released in July 2018, is DonChristian's first studio album.

Before and after the live programme on Sunday 16 June, Berlin based DJ, producer and artist Nedalot will put on some music.

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An experimental evening with DonChristian (live), Fragile/Wolfgang Tillmans (live) and Nedalot (DJ set)Kantine am Berghain, Berlin, Sunday 16 June 2019, 7pm (doors) and Monday 17 June 2019, 7pm (doors) Over the last four years Wolfgang Tillmans' band project Fragile has come together for concentrated periods of time to write, play and perform, culminating in ambitious experimental concerts.

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Search Results | International Center of Photography

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Search Results | International Center of Photography

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This website stores cookies on your computer. These cookies are used to collect information about how you interact with our website and allow us to remember you. We use this information in order to improve and customize your browsing experience and for analytics and metrics about our visitors both on this website and other media.

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21 Photographs by Raghubir Singh | MetCollects | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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21 Photographs by Raghubir Singh | MetCollects | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Still Life with Apples and a Pot of Primroses, ca. 1890. Oil on canvas; 28 3/4 x 36 3/8 in. (73 x 92.4 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Sam A. Lewisohn, 1951 (51.112.1)

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Gathered Leaves, The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama, Hayama, Japan. June 2022

A Pound of Pictures. MACK, 2022.

'[An] obsessive ode to image-making ... this serendipitous approach has become Soth's signature.' New Yorker

'[A Pound of Pictures] gathers together a number of superlative photographs..He's delivered his most personal body of work in at least a decade, and that risk-taking openness feels encouragingly contagious.' Collector Daily

'Following along with Soth as his photographic journey has unfolded over the years is not unlike keeping in touch with a friend who is excited to let you in on their latest discovery. Whether you are an astute photo enthusiast...or just interested in photography in general, I don't think you'll be disappointed by this work.' The Washington Post

'As viewers invest works with meaning, and as we respond to these pictures with reveries of our own, we make them larger, heavier, though not with mass so much as with metaphor or memory...The joy of A Pound of Pictures is that it allows Soth, and us, to create meaning for these works beyond what is given.' Hyperallergic

'Alec Soth [is] the great road-tripping witness of American life ... A Pound of Pictures free-associates ... Connections and themes emerge. One is a sense of people searching among wasteland wildflowers for something unknown.' The Guardian

'[A Pound of Pictures] captures the ordinariness of American life and elevates it to something poetic.' Artnet

'Soth has been one of the great visual chroniclers of the American condition...But his new project, A Pound of Pictures, takes a turn inward. Here, America as Soth finds it serves less as a subject than as a vehicle to examine the photographic medium itself, and his relationship to it.' The Paris Review

'Soth creates sonnets, elegies and odes to American life that engage both intuition and the imagination in equal measure ... A Pound of Pictures is a window into both our world and Soth's process itself.' AnOther

'[An] expansive lyrical contemplation of the nature of photography itself and of the innate human impulse to document our own lives.' i-D

A Pound of Pictures at Sean Kelly, New York, January 14-February 26, 2022.Recent Press: Collector Daily, Widewalls, Musée, AnOther, Galerie Magazine, Juxtapoz, The Guardian, This is Tomorrow, The Art Newspaper, Breaking Latest News, Star Tribune, The New Yorker.
Photo credit: Cooper Dodds

A Pound of Pictures by Alec Soth will be released by MACK in January 2022 along with exhibitions at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York, Weinstein Hammons in Minneapolis, and Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco.

The Space Between Us, Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Xiamen, China, October 6-November 14, 2021.

Paris / Minnesota, Nemeth Art Center, Park Rapids, Minnesota, July 22 - October 2, 2021

The Palms, Alec Soth and Dave King at Mass MoCA, June 25 & 26, 8pm. Purchase Tickets.

Pictures & Words #1

Alec discusses Real Time vs. Stoytime on YouTube

I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating, Arendt House, Luxembourg, December 12, 2020 - April 15, 2021

Rambling through Eggleston's Democratic Forrest on YouTube

Alec discusses John Cage and other things on YouTube

The Palms January 30, 2021, 8pm. Alec Soth and Dave King. Commissioned by The Great Northern. ( purchase tickets) Reviews in the Star Tribune and Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.

The Parameters of Our Cage by C. Fausto Cabrera & Alec Soth is available for preorder at MACK. Recent press about The Parameters of Our Cage in The Guardian, Star Tribune, BuzzFeed, CNN, The New Yorker, The Washington Post.

Alec Soth gives a tour of his library for MACK Live on April 16, 2020.

Alec Soth: Photography Is A Language. Kunst Haus Wien. Vienna, Austria. February 26-August 16, 2020

The Little Brown Mushroom Newsletter is Alec's latest experimental project at LBM. Sign up today!

Desire Lines: Reframing the American Road Trip Narrative in Alec Soth's Photographs by Rebecca Bengal for IMA Magazine, vol 30. This article is now on Magnum Photos

A new online course titled Alec Soth: Photographic Storytelling is now available at learn.magnumphotos.com

Director Brennan Vance recently released a short film through MN Originals about happiness and the farmhouse.

Recent press: New York Times, Guardian, Photograph Magazine, Magnum, Vice, Huck, Star Tribune, AnOther, MINN Post, Monopol, Wall Street International, MPR News, Art News, Document, Daily Art Magazine, Minnesota Monthly, T Magazine, Internazionale, Artsy, Garage, Sleek, ASX, Berlin Art Link, Photobookstore Magazine, Feature Shoot, Domus, Wallpaper, Lens Culture, Art Observed, Brooklyn Rail, Financial Times, W Magazine, Washington Post, New Yorker.

Alec Soth and Vince Aletti in conversation at Sean Kelly Gallery, April 4, 2019.

Desert Island Pics. Alec Soth in conversation at the Barbican for Photoworks

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Alec Soth (born 1969) is an American photographer, based in Minneapolis. Soth is known for his large-scale projects and portraits.

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Susan Meiselas is a documentary photographer and President of the Magnum Foundation

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Vivian Maier Photographer | Official website of Vivian Maier | Vivian Maier Portfolios, Prints, Exhibitions, Books and documentary film

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Vivian Maier Photographer | Official website of Vivian Maier | Vivian Maier Portfolios, Prints, Exhibitions, Books and documentary film

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The Ansel Adams Gallery strives to cultivate an aesthetic appreciation and concern for our world by offering visitors a unique variety of books, handcrafts, fine art prints, and an extraordinary collection of Ansel Adams original photographs.

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The Ansel Adams Gallery - Welcome To The World Of Fine Arts

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The Ansel Adams Gallery strives to cultivate an aesthetic appreciation and concern for our world by offering visitors a unique variety of books, handcrafts, fine art prints, and an extraordinary collection of Ansel Adams original photographs.

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Kehinde Wiley on Protests’ Results: ‘I’m Not Impressed Yet’ - The New York Times

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Kehinde Wiley on Protests’ Results: ‘I’m Not Impressed Yet’ - The New York Times

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The artist Kehinde Wiley, who has been stationed in Dakar since February, said that watching what has been happening in America from across the Atlantic has "felt like a bit of a freak show." Credit... Abdoulaye N'dao for The New York Times

The artist, riding out the pandemic in Dakar, also talked about torn-down Confederate monuments and where they should go - like in "a hall of horrors."

The artist Kehinde Wiley, who has been stationed in Dakar since February, said that watching what has been happening in America from across the Atlantic has "felt like a bit of a freak show." Credit... Abdoulaye N'dao for The New York Times

When Covid-19 started spreading across the globe in late winter and some nations began sealing their borders, the American artist Kehinde Wiley was abroad and quickly had to decide where he wanted to ride out the coming viral storm.

He chose Dakar, Senegal, site of his spacious, magnificently windswept Black Rock studio complex on the sea. For the past year, the West African studio has been home to a revolving cast of painters, photographers, authors and others who were selected in Mr. Wiley's first round of his residency program, designed to offer artists the time and space to pursue their craft.

Watching from across the Atlantic as America roils, deaths from the coronavirus mount, protests swell over police killings and Confederate statues fall has "felt like a bit of a freak show," said Mr. Wiley.

The 43-year-old artist, whose father is Nigerian and mother is African-American, is best known for his portrait of President Barack Obama. His timely "Rumors of War" statue of a Black man with ponytailed dreadlocks, hoodie and ripped jeans on the back of a horse - in the style of monuments to Confederate war generals - graced Times Square last year before being moved to its permanent home in Richmond, Va.

The pandemic reshaped plans for Mr. Wiley and for some of the artists at his residency. His exhibition of residents' work set for display at an old airplane hangar at Dakar's 2020 Biennale had to be scrapped when the festival was canceled. The originally planned six-week residency of one artist at Black Rock, the Nigerian writer Kelechi Njoku, has turned into a nearly seven-month stint after Nigeria sealed its borders and Mr. Njoku couldn't return home.

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Mr. Wiley has embraced the pause as a residency of his own, using the time to focus on his painting (including these works in progress) at his studio in Dakar. Credit... Abdoulaye N'dao for The New York Times

For the past few weeks, he and Mr. Wiley have been the only inhabitants, besides staff members, in the spacious complex as the other artists returned to their home countries.

"Being with him has definitely taught me how he thinks and how he approaches his art and how to have a business sense to play the long game," Mr. Njoku said. "It's like being with an older brother."

Mr. Wiley has embraced the experience as a residency of his own, taking an extended pause from his other work across the globe to focus on his painting in his studio, situated along a coastline of jagged volcanic rocks.

While there's no end in sight to Mr. Njoku's residency, Black Rock is already taking applications until Aug. 31 for its new season. To encourage applications from more African artists, Mr. Wiley has publicized the residency in not just English, but also French, the colonial language spoken in some West African countries, as well as Wolof, the language most widely spoken in Senegal.

In a phone conversation, he addressed watching America at this time of uncertainty from afar. These are edited excerpts from the interview.
How did you end up staying in Dakar?
This was not planned at all. I was in Norway doing some work there and then had to quickly make a decision on where to be. This was around the time New York was really starting to take some heavy hits. I just decided to hang out in Dakar. It was a great opportunity for me to spend time here in a way that is uninterrupted time. This was really impossible to find - these long stretches of time in Senegal. They had repatriation flights, and I had the opportunity to leave before things were a little too far advanced to do so. It was a choice to stay; a very decided moment.

While some have called Mr. Wiley's "Rumors of War" prescient, the artist said, "The fact I wanted to engage that conversation seems rather obvious to me." Credit... Rachel Papo for The New York Times

Mr. Wiley would like to see empty pedestals like this one in Richmond, Va., where a monument to Stonewall Jackson once stood, become home to a rotating cast of artwork. Credit... Nichelle Dailey for The New York Times

What have you gained from it?
I got to spend time with the art residents. It was an opportunity to really spend quality time with them with studio visits and critiquing each other's work. They each come with their own kind of energy so it's never quite the same program. They stay between one to three months, and so the roster of personalities is constantly shifting. You never get a sense of one Black Rock.
What does this moment in America mean to you, in particular with the protests following George Floyd's death?

It's a wake-up call to the white population in America. It's what so many Black Americans have known and been trying to communicate for centuries. It comes as no shock or surprise to us that Black bodies are under assault on a daily basis. What comes as a shock is that so few have listened. By virtue of technology we're able to have visualized in real time the destruction of Black bodies in public spaces. It's loud and it's in your face and it's undeniable. America at large has had this ability to justify these killings. Now people are wondering whether this will actually bring change. We'll see. I'm not impressed yet. I'm seeing a lot of self-aggrandizing and self-congratulations on the part of our white allies. I want to see that translate into change with prison reform and education reform, and not this abstract thing.
How do you respond to people who say your "Rumors of War" piece seems prescient in light of the movement to tear down Confederate monuments?
Everyone says, "You really had your finger on the pulse with that idea." We are expected to subsume this constant narrative of monuments - terrifying monuments - that are an insult to people of good will, and the fact I wanted to engage that conversation seems rather obvious to me. The timing of it and the way things all came together with the calls for removal of monuments - that is something special.

While the first round of Mr. Wiley's residency program hasn't exactly ended - with one member marooned in Dakar after his home country sealed its borders - Black Rock is already taking applications (until Aug. 31) for its new season. Credit... Abdoulaye N'dao for The New York Times

Does the sculpture take on new meaning now?
Art has always been about taking up space. That's one reason equestrian sculpture has been a thing - it's about dominance. We as a society stand behind the glorification of this human being on a pedestal for any number of reasons. That we now are allowed that volume of space, that massive amount of space to be allocated to a Black person in a hoodie might seem trivial. But this is a revolutionary act of embracing a Black presence in the public square - and it's actually quite shocking that these moments are still revolutionary in the 21st century. "Rumors of War" is such a simple act, yet that stands in sharp relief to the fact that we don't often value Black people with our actions and our monuments. It's the proper time now to create a type of public moment that can point to a terrible past, but also perhaps provide a path forward in terms of representation.
What should commemorating this moment look like?
Instead of having one monument that goes up on the spot where Confederate statues were, we should have artists of all styles come in for a period of time where their work is on the pedestal. Then it comes down and other voices go up there. I like that idea of the pedestal itself as the frame. It's our way of creating a stage, and whomever we decide to shine the spotlight on in that moment is incredibly important. That's where we as a society are announcing what we believe in. It's incredibly moral.

What should we do with all the Confederate statues that came down?
We need a hall of horrors. You don't have to melt it all down but create a space where we see our terrible past. It's less about should it be in existence but should it be deified. Take it off the stage and put it back where it belongs.

Your portrait of former President Obama is hanging in the National Portrait Gallery. How would you paint Trump if you had to do his portrait?

(Laughter.) Yeah, that's just never going to happen. Just the idea causes a physical reaction in me. You definitely weirded me out with that question. Oooh, I wonder who is going to be stuck with that job. That's going to be an interesting moment.

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Kehinde Wiley on Protests' Results: 'I'm Not Impressed Yet'

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The artist, riding out the pandemic in Dakar, also talked about torn-down Confederate monuments and where they should go - like in "a hall of horrors." The artist Kehinde Wiley, who has been stationed in Dakar since February, said that watching what has been happening in America from across the Atlantic has "felt like a bit of a freak show."

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Copyright © 2020 The Peter Hujar Archive. All rights reserved.

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Lead Image Photography by Tyler Mitchell

The American photographers Tyler Mitchell and Ryan McGinley have risen to global acclaim for their dream-like imagery of youth and possibility. Their photographs are mesmerising meditations on a utopian state of bliss, offering the understanding that liberation from all that constrains us is not only possible but a fundamental necessity of existence. It is a viewpoint that led both artists to prominence at the outset of their careers: in 2018, Mitchell, then 23, was the first Black photographer to shoot the cover of American Vogue; 15 years earlier, McGinley, then 25, became the youngest artist to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The July 28 publication of , Mitchell's debut monograph, is an intimate and powerful vision of Black utopia, bathed in the rich sun-soaked light which has become the photographer's signature. It stands alongside The Kids Are Alright (2002), McGinley's first handmade book, which captured the exploits of the artists, skaters, and graffiti writers populating New York's downtown scene at the turn of the millennium, in an ongoing conversation about the power of beauty, freedom, and truth.

On a Friday in July, McGinley met with Mitchell in his Brooklyn home to discuss the joys of coming of age as skaters, artists, and authors in the new millennium.

Ryan McGinley: When I came in, we were talking about your library. You're building up your book collection. What are the spots that you hit? I call bookstores drug shops because I get high from buying photo books.

Tyler Mitchell: I'm all over the place. It's whatever I grab and find anywhere. I miss the obvious books; the totems that I probably should have, I don't have. I've gone for the ones that are harder to get or are more in the moment. The Kids Are All Right and Viviane Sassen's Umbra were like calls to action; they are both delicate, amazing revisions of what I've thought a photography book was.

RM: Books are the most important part of photography for me. They let me know that there was a community of other like-minded artists. Sometimes you don't look at them for few years, but you can revisit it and it always gives you something different every time. There's this idea of feeling recognised and really being seen when you have a book.

TM: From that starting point to having a published book, there's something psychically that happens, like I exist, I'm alive. Like even if I like died tomorrow, there would be this book that would live on. Books are even more important than a show, which seems to be the marker of success. The book lives on in people's homes. I feel good that people can now experience the work in book form rather than on Instagram 'cause that's how it started.

RM: Let's start in the beginning. Where are you from?

TM: I'm from Marietta, Georgia. I probably wasn't myself for like the first 13 years of my life. I hadn't found the thing that I really loved; I was just doing things like basketball and soccer. Skateboarding was the first thing that I found that was like, OK, this is a community that I love.

RM: What got you into image-making?

TM: I started to understand image-making style through skate videos. Spike Jonze was a huge inspiration to me. Everything he did with Fully Flared, taking the more cinematic approach, down to Baker Three, which is just raw, fuck-shit-up destruction.

RM: For me, skateboarding was important because it brought me out of the suburbs of New Jersey into a community of people where it didn't matter what the colour of your skin was, what your economic background was. You show up at the skate spot and if you're cool and if you're good, you can hang.

TM: And even if you're not good, if you're just cool and you want to learn, that's alright.

RM: It's the antithesis of team sports. Skating is about individuality.

TM: But also it's you against yourself. The only dialogue you're having is with yourself to get better.

RM: Skateboarding is tied to the street. It's dirty and gritty. There isn't this idea of entrepreneurship that you can take this art form or sport and turn it into like a career, and seeing Spike [Jonze] do that was inspiring. It created a new path.

TM: It woke me up to things. Over time it was a natural portal into what I'm doing now. Music also was foundational in this. Skate, rap, music, photography, and filmmaking are all intertwined.

RM: What was your video camera?

TM: It was the Canon 70; it has that flip mode between the video and the photos. I would literally be taking photos while I was doing videos. My brain really conflates those two into one. In a similar way, I've always I focused on the mundane images of Black folks, just being like: how can I conflate those feelings into a work? That's what I hope to make the book about. The book doesn't place importance on one thing over the other. I like that there's fluidity between film stills and photographic stills. There is a still image from my film Idyllic Space that I made in Atlanta. Then on the next page there's a photograph that I made in a park in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn next to a photograph that I made for a magazine.

RM: One of the most important things as a photographer making art and shooting for magazines, films, and fashion is to keep your style consistent.

TM: That's definitely a big part of it. Whether that's photographing Beyoncé, Spike Lee, skaters in Cuba, or friends - it's about making it all feel like my work.

RM: When people ask me how I started taking photos, I say I was the kid with the fisheye lens and the Handycam that was filming everyone. At that time I didn't think about it as like photography. I was drawn to the in-between moments where like everyone was just chilling. I gravitated to people being like their authentic selves.

TM: What was it like coming from New Jersey into New York?

RM: The New York that I saw was like a Scorsese film. One of my mentors is Jack Walls, a poet and who was the lover of Robert Mapplethorpe. We've been friends since 1998, so for 22 years, and it's amazing to have his insights on art, photography, being photographed by Mapplethorpe. It helps me as an artist.

TM: The New York I came to in 2013 and the experience I had in those first two years dictate what this book has become for me. There were people who I saw making Black folks the protagonists of their images in uncompromising yet widely seen ways that reminded me that I can be that as well. My work is like a series of inspirations, you being one of them. Seeing those images as a teenager through Tumblr and being like that looks fun - that's what I want to do and live but also what I want to make.

RM: Yo, film or digital?

TM: Digital is too easy.

RM: Why does everyone who is young shoot film?

TM: I think it's the fact that our generation is obsessed with nostalgia. There's no denying my own personal relationship with nostalgia and film.

RM: I'm excited that film is coming back. I'm also excited about movies like Moonlight winning Best Picture and other works of art kind of expanding our notion of masculinity. What does masculinity mean to you?

TM: I don't think it means much of anything. I'm interested in taking down or subverting masculinity.

RM: Masculinity is an interesting word for me. I immediately identify it with sexuality because growing up with queer masculinity, being masculine was like passing. Your generation has so much more language for that, which I admire.

TM: I don't identify as queer so when I think of masculinity, I'm thinking about it from the point of view of growing up Black in the South. If I wear a certain hoodie, my mother is concerned that I'm going to be pulled over, stopped, killed, et cetera. Those kinds of preventions from expressing oneself are passed down generational laws or rules around masculinity and what it should be.

RM: It has to do a lot with presentation - what that role means or who represents it.

TM: I'm in fashion because those things are linked: identity, dress, masculinity, and personhood. Images have a powerful way of changing associations and making all of these things irrelevant so we have new notions of what life could be.
I Can Make You Feel Good by Tyler Mitchell is published by Prestel.

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Tyler Mitchell in Conversation With Ryan McGinley

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Lead Image Photography by Tyler Mitchell The American photographers Tyler Mitchell and Ryan McGinley have risen to global acclaim for their dream-like imagery of youth and possibility. Their photographs are mesmerising meditations on a utopian state of bliss, offering the understanding that liberation from all that constrains us is not only possible but a fundamental necessity of existence.

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Fashion photographer Sir Cecil Beaton (1904 - 1980) launched his career as a 'society' photographer in 1926 with an exhibition in London that won him an immediate contract with Vogue, where he worked for the next 30 years.

Beaton's fascination with glamour and high society prevailed throughout his life and in 1937 he became court photographer to the British Royal Family. He also became a successful set and costume designer for stage and film productions, most notably My Fair Lady (1956) and Gigi (1958).

Cecil Beaton began to pursue photography at a very early age. As a teenager he spent many hours attempting to recreate the look of glamorous society portraits using his sisters, Nancy and Baba, as models. Candid snapshots and studio portraits of Beaton by his contemporaries display his sense of style, his charm, vanity and vivacious personality.

His career took off in the mid 1920s, when he began to contribute photographs and illustrations to Vogue magazine. His first solo exhibition in London in 1927 established him as one of the leading fashion photographers and portraitists of his generation.

Beaton became sought-after on both sides of the Atlantic, photographing famous faces from Hollywood, the theatre world, society and the British royal family.

Although best known as a photographer, Beaton also worked as an illustrator and designer for stage and film. His designs for productions such as My Fair Lady (1956), and Gigi (1958), defined the glamorous look of the era, as well as winning him three Oscars for costume and art direction.

In 1971 Beaton organised an exhibition at the V&A, Fashion: An anthology by Cecil Beaton. He contacted designers and the well-dressed elite of Europe and America to lend a prestigious collection of 20th century haute couture clothing, including a significant number by the Spanish couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga. Many of the lenders to the exhibition, including Vogue editor Diana Vreeland and the Duchess of Windsor, subsequently donated these items to the Museum, greatly enriching our fashion collection.

Cecil Beaton began to use a visitors' book in 1930 when he moved to Ashcombe House in Wiltshire. A 'who's who' of the 20th century, it contains the signatures of Greta Garbo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dali and the Queen Mother, among many celebrities and luminaries who visited Beaton at home. The book spans the 30s, the 40s, and all the way up to 1979. Beaton's family have kindly allowed us to take a look inside the book, and view the signatures, sketches and personal hand-written messages from his huge circle of family and friends.

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This video was produced for the exhibition Queen Elizabeth II by Cecil Beaton, which ran at theV&Ain spring 2012.

Find out more about Cecil Beaton.

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Fashion photographer Sir Cecil Beaton launched his career as a society photographer with an exhibition in London that won him an immediate contract with Vogue

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hands of roi partridge at the etching press 2

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Another Arm, 1973 , Braille, 1933 , Doctor's Hands, 2, 1974 , Hand and Leaf of Voodoo Lily, 1972 , Hand of a Hand Surgeon 2, 1973 , Hand of Gerald Warburg 2, 1929 , Hand with Snake, 1967-68 , Hands of a Hand Surgeon, 1974 , Hands of Henry...

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Official website of William Eggleston and the Eggleston Art Foundation.

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from here i saw what happened and i cried

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Designed and developed by Lisa Goodlin Design

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Welcome to the official website of artist Carrie Mae Weems

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The Robert Frank Collection at the National Gallery of Art is the largest repository of materials related to renowned photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank. Spanning Frank's career from 1937 to 2005, the collection includes vintage and later prints, contact sheets, work prints, negatives, three bound books of original photographs, technical material, and various papers, books, and recordings.

For a complete account of photographs, contact sheets, and work prints in the collection, see Robert Frank photographs, contact sheets, and work prints in the collection. The spreadsheet lists subjects photographed by Frank, in chronological order, along with the corresponding number of photographs, contact sheets, and work prints in the collection and the accession number of each object.

To search the collection by title, key words, credit line, provenance, or accession number, please visit the National Gallery of Art collection search page.

Regarding titles: please note that many are descriptive only, derived either from information given by Robert Frank to the National Gallery, or from notes he wrote on the sleeves that held his negatives. Regarding dates: please note that at times corresponding prints and contact sheets have been assigned different dates. Like titles, dates have in most cases been provided by Frank and not always confirmed through historical research.

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The Robert Frank Collection at the National Gallery of Art is the largest repository of materials related to renowned photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank. Spanning Frank's career from 1937 to 2005, the collection includes vintage and later prints, contact sheets, work prints, negatives, three bound books of original photographs, technical material, and various papers, books, and recordings.

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Born André Friedmann in Budapest, Robert Capa left Hungary in 1930 for Berlin, enrolled in the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik as a student of journalism and political science, and served as a darkroom assistant at the Deutsche Photodienst Agency. With the rise of the Nazis in 1933, Capa left Germany for Paris, where he shared a darkroom with Henri Cartier-Bresson and Chim (David Seymour). He worked regularly as a photojournalist, and between 1936 and 1939 made several trips to Spain with his companion, Gerda Taro, to document the civil war. His photographs from this conflict, including his most famous image, Death of a Loyalist Soldier (1936), were heralded almost immediately for their stunning impact; Picture Post termed him "the greatest war photographer in the world" in 1938. When World War II began, he moved to America and worked freelance for LIFE, Time, and other publications. From 1941 to 1946, he was a war correspondent for LIFE and Collier's, traveling with the US Army and documenting Allied victories in North Africa, the Allied landing at Normandy, and the Allied capture of Leipzig, Nuremberg, and Berlin. After the war, Capa joined Henri Cartier-Bresson, Chim (David Seymour), and George Rodger in founding Magnum, a cooperative photography agency providing pictures to international publications. In 1948-1950, he photographed the turmoil surrounding Israel's declaration of independence. He traveled to Hanoi in 1954 to photograph the French war in Indochina for LIFE; shortly after his arrival, he stepped on a landmine and was killed.
Robert Capa made photographs that achieved their exceptionally powerful effect through his strong connection to and affection for people. This attitude, and his use of the small 35-millimeter camera, allowed him to approach his subjects and throw himself into the action as no one else. The result was a breakthrough in the history of photojournalism.
Lisa Hostetler
Handy et al. Reflections in a Glass Eye: Works from the International Center of Photography Collection, New York: Bulfinch Press in association with the International Center of Photography, 1999, p. 211.
Magnum Photos represents Cornell and Robert Capa.
For reproduction rights, contact
Magnum

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Born André Friedmann in Budapest, Robert Capa left Hungary in 1930 for Berlin, enrolled in the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik as a student of journalism and political science, and served as a darkroom assistant at the Deutsche Photodienst Agency.

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From inception to present works, take a journey into Peter Lindbergh's creativity.

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A woman with brown hair dressed entirely in black faces a display of Andy Warhol's works. Two rows of small, screen-printed portraits are hung on a white wall. Some of Warhol's sculptural work-- including reproductions of Campbell's boxes, Brillo boxes, and a tray of silver Coca-Cola bottles-- sit on a low platform in front of the portraits.

Photo by Dean Kaufman

The Andy Warhol Museum tells Andy Warhol's story and explores his legacy through the largest collection of Warhol art and archives in the world.

Seven Floors and The Underground

We would like to thank our museum partners

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Tim Walker rose to prominence in the mid-1990s with his highly imaginative and fantastical photographs inspired by his love of fairy tales and a thirst for adventure. Since then, his exuberant fashion pictures and inimitable portraits have graced the pages of magazines such as Vogue, Vanity Fair, W, LOVE, Another Man and i-D. He has published seven books and staged solo exhibitions at major museums. His short films and projects with musicians have won international acclaim.

Walker was born in England in 1970 and began taking pictures as a young boy. A year working in the Cecil Beaton archive at the Condé Nast Library in London inspired him to study photography at Exeter College of Art. After his degree, he continued to hone his craft as photographic assistant to Richard Avedon in New York. Walker shot his first story for British Vogue aged only 25 and began to build creative relationships which endure to this day.

He became known for his lavish tableaux and ambitious narrative-driven shoots on location around the world. A champion of new talent and unconventional beauty, he enjoys longstanding collaborations with models and performers including Edie Campbell, Karen Elson, Kate Moss, and Tilda Swinton. After working for many years with extraordinary sets and props, he challenged himself to create portraits in a simple white space. Every portrait involves meticulous preparation: Walker carefully researches the motives and passions of the sitter in order to capture their essence in a single image.

In 2010 his first short film, The Lost Explorer, premiered at Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland and later won Best Short Film at the Chicago United Film Festival. Five other films followed; most recently a ballet based on Hans Christian Andersen's story The Steadfast Tin Soldier. Walker regularly collaborates with performers and musicians, creating the official video for Blissing Me from Björk's album Utopia (2017), and shooting the album art for Kate Bush's Director's Cut (2011) and Harry Styles' Fine Line (2019).

In recent years Walker has explored the subject of the nude, fusing contemporary and historic motifs in reference to the art historical canon. In 2015, he received a commission to create an ambitious new series of pictures for The Nicola Erni Collection, Switzerland. Taking inspiration from The Garden of Earthly Delights by the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516), Walker's photographs evoke the darkly surreal and sensuous mood of Bosch's original work. The images were printed on vast, gesso-coated canvasses and exhibited at Noordbrabants Museum in the city of s'Hertogenbosch, Bosch's birthplace, to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the artist's death.

The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) invited Walker to produce an extensive body of work inspired by its eclectic collection. The resulting exhibition, Tim Walker: Wonderful Things (2019-2020), was seen by almost 200,000 visitors and is touring museums around the world until 2022. His previous exhibitions include the retrospectives Tim Walker: Pictures at the Design Museum (2008) and Storyteller at Somerset House (2012-2013). Walker's photographic prints are housed in private collections and in public institutions including the V&A and London's National Portrait Gallery.

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Tim Walker rose to prominence in the mid-1990s with his highly imaginative and fantastical photographs inspired by his love of fairy tales and a thirst for adventure. Since then, his exuberant fashion pictures and inimitable portraits have graced the pages of magazines such as Vogue, Vanity Fair, W, LOVE, Another Man and i-D.

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Official website of The Irving Penn Foundation, with background information on the life and career of photographer Irving Penn. Includes images, biography, chronology, exhibition list, bibliography, and news.

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Richard Avedon Archives - American Masters

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Some of the 20th century's most important photographic portraits are on the social media platform.

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To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video

This Course Video Transcript

Although taking, sharing, and viewing photographs has become second nature for many of us, our regular engagement with images does not necessarily make us visually literate. This course aims to address the gap between seeing and truly understanding photographs by introducing a diversity of ideas, approaches, and technologies that inform their making. In this course you will look closely at photographs from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art and hear a variety of perspectives on what a photograph is and the ways that photography has been used throughout its nearly 180 year history: as a means of artistic expression, as a tool for science and exploration; as an instrument of documentation; to tell stories and record histories; and as a mode of communication and critique in our ever increasingly visual culture. Learning Objectives * Develop skills to better examine and understand the differences between photographs and photographic images. * Discover how context influences the production, circulation, and reception of photographic images. * Learn about different modes of artistic and technological experimentation and innovation in photography. * Investigate photography's role in our increasingly visual culture.

View Syllabus

Skills You'll Learn

Art History, Art, History, Photography

EE

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Constructing Narratives & Challenging Histories

Learn to look critically at the way photographs have been used to construct narratives that shape our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

Taught By

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5.6 Carrie Mae Weems. From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried. 1995 - Constructing Narratives & Challenging Histories | Coursera

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Video created by The Museum of Modern Art for the course "Seeing Through Photographs". Learn to look critically at the way photographs have been used to construct narratives that shape our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

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Painting After All

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Devoted to one of the greatest artists of our time, Gerhard Richter: Painting After All considers Richter's six-decade-long preoccupation with the dual means of representation and abstraction to explore the material, conceptual and historical implications of painting. Spanning the entirety of Richter's prolific and innovative career, the exhibition presents over one hundred works that focus on his specific commitment to the medium, as well as his related interests in photography, digital reproduction, and sculpture.

Major loans include the series (2006) and (2014), twin cores of the exhibition, as well as the recent work House of Cards (5 Panes) (2020), all of which are exhibited in the United States for the first time.
Accompanied by a catalogue.
#MetRichter

This exhibition was scheduled to run from March 4 to July 5, 2020. Due to the COVID-19 closure of The Met, it instead closed on March 12, 2020.
"Contemporary art's great poet of uncertainty" -New York Review of Books "Richter's abstractions [are] miraculously, often staggeringly, beautiful, with an air of having come into being through a will of their own . . ." -New Yorker "This beautiful valediction, with 60 years of work, affirms the artistic and moral force of his irresolution and skepticism." -New York Times
The exhibition is made possible by the Barrie A. and Deedee Wigmore Foundation.

Corporate sponsorship is provided by

Major support is provided by David S. Winter and the Modern and Contemporary Art Visiting Committee.

Additional funding is provided by Angela A. Chao and Jim Breyer, Jane C. Carroll, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Kenneth and Rosalind Landis, and the Peterson Family Foundation.

The exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

The catalogue is made possible by the Mary C. and James W. Fosburgh Publications Fund.

Additional support is provided by Christie's, and by Sharon Wee and Tracy Fu.

Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932). Ice (detail), 1981. Oil on canvas, 27 9/16 x 39 3/8 in. (70 x 100 cm). Collection of Ruth McLoughlin, Monaco. © Gerhard Richter 2019

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Devoted to one of the greatest artists of our time, Gerhard Richter: Painting After All considers Richter's six-decade-long preoccupation with the dual means of representation and abstraction to explore the material, conceptual and historical implications of painting.

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To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video

This Course Video Transcript

Although taking, sharing, and viewing photographs has become second nature for many of us, our regular engagement with images does not necessarily make us visually literate. This course aims to address the gap between seeing and truly understanding photographs by introducing a diversity of ideas, approaches, and technologies that inform their making. In this course you will look closely at photographs from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art and hear a variety of perspectives on what a photograph is and the ways that photography has been used throughout its nearly 180 year history: as a means of artistic expression, as a tool for science and exploration; as an instrument of documentation; to tell stories and record histories; and as a mode of communication and critique in our ever increasingly visual culture. Learning Objectives * Develop skills to better examine and understand the differences between photographs and photographic images. * Discover how context influences the production, circulation, and reception of photographic images. * Learn about different modes of artistic and technological experimentation and innovation in photography. * Investigate photography's role in our increasingly visual culture.

View Syllabus

Skills You'll Learn

Art History, Art, History, Photography

EE

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Examine pictures of people-as individuals or as representatives of a type, posed or captured unaware-and discover how the choices made by both photographer and subject inform our assumptions about those depicted.

Taught By

[MUSIC] The photograph offers a kind of unexpected intimacy in pushing a boundary. My hope is that you can empathize and maybe even recognize something in someone that you might not pay very much Much attention to. So will you tell a little bit about how you get to a picture like this? >> I wanted to meet people that wanted to be photographed. I didn't want to be a fly on the wall or photograph someone from afar. And so it's always important to me that I ask permission, and if you're interested then great. And then we walk around and find a white wall and my one direction is always, don't look at the camera. Because I wanted them to appear almost as though they were unaware, to reference a kind of street photography. Eventually, they often relax or they're bored or aggravated. Maybe a little bit of okay, are we done yet? And then something interesting happens and those are almost inevitably the best pictures. When you make a picture that's this reductive, you take so much away, so much context, so much potential narrative. The entirety of all this detail amounts to what makes it the strongest photograph. >> Do you feel like that can be though almost- >> Too much information? >> I mean, I hesitate to say cruel except sort of on the spectrum of cruel and tender, it's like- >> I think that we all look like that, if we were all to be photographed with that kind of detail. This is what we look like, and this is who we are. And I find the most cruel kinds of pictures to be the covers of fashion magazines. I mean, nobody looks like that. So in my mind, not only is this much more honest, I find this woman incredibly beautiful and I don't think there's anything cruel about the lines and what the sun has done to her face and what that reveals about her. But also, what is revealed by the fact that she's put on eyeliner and she's put on her lipstick and her pink- >> Matching her outfit, yeah. >> Matching coat and there's a heart button and that tells us so much about, in a way, her optimism. Part of the criticism of my work has always been, oh, you're photographing poor people, or you're photographing the homeless, although, that's a broad assumption. They're not celebrities, they're not politicians. I find that when people have a lot of power, whether it's money, whatever kind of power, they have a lot more to lose and sort of present themselves in a very specific light. Whereas with people who don't have as much to lose, they are so much more generous with themselves and so much more at ease with what some viewers might perceive as imperfections. This is not here to make us feel better about ourselves and the way that we see the world. It's here to hopefully have a kind of aesthetic seduction but then to have to confront maybe uncomfortable truths and, what are we bringing to this photograph? Why am I uncomfortable confronting this person? What is it about me? I think you have to contend with a lot. And that to me is a very worthwhile experience.

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4.3 Interview with Katy Grannan - Pictures of People | Coursera

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Video created by The Museum of Modern Art for the course "Seeing Through Photographs". Examine pictures of people-as individuals or as representatives of a type, posed or captured unaware-and discover how the choices made by both photographer and ...

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This landmark exhibition features more than 100 photographs that together redefine Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971), one of the most influential and provocative artists of the 20th century. It focuses on the first seven years of her career, from 1956 to 1962, the period in which she developed the idiosyncratic style and approach for which she has been recognized praised, criticized, and copied the world over.

Arbus made most of her photographs in New York City, where she lived and died, and where she worked in locations such as Times Square, the Lower East Side, and Coney Island. Her photographs of children and eccentrics, couples and circus performers, female impersonators and Fifth Avenue pedestrians are among the most intimate and surprising images of the era.

The majority of the photographs in the exhibition have never before been seen and are part of the Museum's Diane Arbus Archive, acquired in 2007 by gift and promised gift from the artist's daughters, Doon Arbus and Amy Arbus. It was only when the archive came to The Met that this remarkable early work came to be fully explored. Arbus's creative life in photography after 1962 is well documented and already the stuff of legend; now, for the first time, we can properly examine its origins.

The exhibition is made possible by the Alfred Stieglitz Society.

Additional support is provided by The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation and the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne.

Related Article

Read an interview with the exhibition's curators on Now at The Met.

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971). Lady on a Bus, N.Y.C. (detail), 1957. Gelatin silver print; 8 1/2 x 5 3/4 in. (21.6 x 14.6 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Danielle and David Ganek, 2005 (2005.493.11). © The Estate of Diane Arbus

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This landmark exhibition features more than 100 photographs that together redefine Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971), one of the most influential and provocative artists of the 20th century. It focuses on the first seven years of her career, from 1956 to 1962, the period in which she developed the idiosyncratic style and approach for which she has been recognized praised, criticized, and copied the world over.

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Ten curators, artists, critics, and friends share their thoughts on their favorite Cindy Sherman work. See all works in MoMA's collection by Cindy Sherman: h...

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Diane Arbus' work was included in only a handful of museum exhibitions before she died, by her own hand, at the age of 48 in 1971. Nevertheless, she had already gained renown with a series of unforgettable images-a "Jewish giant" looming over his bespectacled parents, an elderly couple sitting naked in a nudist-camp cabin, a grimacing boy clutching a toy hand grenade-that seem to reflect our deepest fears and most private wishes.

The first major retrospective of Arbus' work was held in 1972, a year after her death, at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City, where she lived for most of her life. The show drew huge crowds and praise for the humanity and formal beauty of her work. But some found her images disturbing, even repellent: critic Susan Sontag, for example, called her portraits of "assorted monsters and border-line cases. . . . anti-humanist." Arbus' work, Sontag wrote, "shows people who are pathetic, pitiable, as well as repulsive, but it does not arouse any compassionate feelings."

Today Arbus, who once said her pictures sought to capture "the space between who someone is and who they think they are," has become one of America's best-known photographers and one of its most controversial. But her achievements as an artist have been somewhat overshadowed by her suicide and by the disturbing strangeness that wells up out of her pictures. Famous as a "photographer of freaks," she has been regarded as something of a freak herself.

Now a new generation of viewers and critics is debating the meaning and significance of Arbus' compelling, unsettling images, thanks to "Diane Arbus Revelations," an exhibition of nearly 200 of her pictures on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through May 31. The first Arbus retrospective since the 1972 MOMAshow, "Revelations" places her at the center of 20th-century American photography.

"To cast Arbus in the role of a tragic figure who identified with freaks is to trivialize her accomplishment," says Sandra S. Phillips, senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), where the show originated. "She was a great humanist photographer who was at the forefront of what has become recognized as a new kind of photographic art."

The exhibition has already elicited strong critical reactions. San Francisco Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker praised Arbus' work for its intelligence and compassion, and Arthur Lubow, writing in the New York Times Magazine, called her "one of the most powerful American artists of the 20th century." But others have dismissed her as guilt-ridden and morbid. "Arbus is one of those devious bohemians," wrote The New Republic's Jed Perl, "who celebrate other people's eccentricities and are all the while aggrandizing their own narcissistically pessimistic view of the world."

Opinions will likely become even more deeply split as the show moves around the country-next to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston (June 27-August 29) and then to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (March 1-May 29, 2005). Additional venues include the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany, the Victoria and AlbertMuseum in London and the WalkerArtCenter in Minneapolis.

Jeff Rosenheim, the Metropolitan's associate curator of photography, believes that Arbus' pictures remain provocative because they raise disturbing questions about the relationship between photographer, subject and audience. "Her work implicates you and the ethics of vision itself," he says. "Our license to have that experience of viewing another person is changed and challenged, supported and enriched. I firmly believe this might be the most important single-artist photography exhibition our museum will ever do."

Until recently, mystery surrounded many of the details of Arbus' life and work. For decades, her estate refused to cooperate with any effort to write an Arbus biography and allowed the public to see only a tiny portion of her work. All this has changed with the new exhibition, which was developed with the cooperation of the estate and its administrator, Doon Arbus, the older of Arbus' two daughters. The show includes not only Arbus' most famous pictures but also early photographs and mature work never exhibited before. In addition, displays of her books, cameras, letters and working notebooks convey a powerful sense of the photographer's personality-whimsical, brainy and endlessly curious.

"This is a new view of Arbus, through her own words," says independent curator Elisabeth Sussman, who organized the retrospective with SFMOMA's Phillips. "She was extremely smart and witty and incredibly perceptive, and the photographs are just a part of that."

The exhibition catalog, Diane Arbus Revelations (Random House), offers not only the most complete selection of Arbus images ever put between covers but also a fascinating 104- page illustrated chronology of Arbus' life, studded with excerpts from her letters and other writings. The chronology, put together by Sussman and Doon Arbus, is effectively the first authorized biography of the photographer and the first to be able to draw on her papers.

Arbus was born Diane Nemerov in 1923. Her mother, Gertrude, chose her daughter's name, pronouncing it "Dee- Ann." Talent was abundant in the Nemerov family, a wealthy New York clan that ran Russek's, a fashionable Fifth Avenue department store. Diane's older brother was Howard Nemerov, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who was named U.S. poet laureate in 1988. Her younger sister, Renée Sparkia, became a sculptor and designer. After retiring from Russek's, their father, David Nemerov, launched a second, successful career as a painter.

Diane's artistic and literary gifts were apparent early on. Her father encouraged her to become a painter, and she studied art in high school. At the age of 14 she fell in love with Allan Arbus, the 19-year-old nephew of one of her father's business partners. Her parents disapproved of her infatuation, but the romance flourished in secret. Soon Diane lost interest in painting and in going to college, saying her only ambition was to become Allan's wife. "I hated painting and I quit right after high school because I was continually told how terrific I was," she said many years later. "I had the sense that if I was so terrific at it, it wasn't worth doing."

Diane and Allan were married as soon as she turned 18, in 1941, with the grudging acceptance of her family. The couple pursued a shared interest in photography, turning the bathroom of their Manhattan apartment into a part-time darkroom. David Nemerov gave them work shooting fashion photographs for Russek's advertisements.

During World War II, Allan served as a military photographer. One of the earliest photographs in the "Revelations" show is a 1945 self-portrait Diane made for Allan while he was in the Army. Though pregnant with Doon, who would be born later that year, in the picture she is still slender, and very beautiful, with dark eyes and a wistful, otherworldly air.

After the war, the Arbuses' career as commercial photographers took off, and soon they were working for top women's magazines and advertising agencies. Usually Allan shot the pictures while Diane came up with clever ideas and props. Diane also took care of Doon and their second daughter, Amy, born in 1954. (Doon, now 59, became a writer, worked on several magazine projects with her mother and later published two books with photographer Richard Avedon. Amy followed in her mother's footsteps and became a photographer.)

A photograph that Allan and Diane made for Vogue magazine of a father and son reading a newspaper was included in the Museum of Modern Art's popular "The Family of Man" show in 1955. But both of them felt frustrated by the limitations and stresses of fashion work. Diane wanted to be an artist, not just a stylist, while Allan dreamed of becoming an actor. Their growing discontent put strain on their marriage. So did the depressive episodes that Diane suffered, similar to the despair that had periodically paralyzed her mother. In 1956 Diane quit the couple's business in order to make photographs on her own. Allan continued to work under the name Diane & Allan Arbus, while taking acting classes and beginning a career in the theater.

Although magazines such as Life, Look and the Saturday Evening Post had created a booming market for photography, there was little interest in pictures whose sole purpose was to be a work of art, rather than to document social realities or sell products. Nevertheless, Robert Frank, William Klein and other refugees from the fashion world were pursuing their own vision of what photography could be, and a favorite approach was street photography, which discovered unexpected beauty and meaning in everyday people and places.

Several of Diane Arbus' early photographs in the current exhibition show her trying out her own version of street photography. But she had not yet found her subject. A turning point came when she took a class with the Viennese-born photographer Lisette Model at New York City's NewSchool.

"She came to me and said, 'I can't photograph,' " Model later told Doon Arbus. "And I said, 'Why not?' And she said, 'Because what I want to photograph, I can't photograph.' " Model told Diane to go home and figure out what it was she really wanted to take pictures of. "And the next session she came to me and she said, 'I want to photograph what is evil.' And that was it," Model said.

"I think what she meant was not that it was evil, but that it was forbidden, that it had always been too dangerous, too frightening, or too ugly for anyone else to look on," Doon wrote in a reminiscence published shortly after her mother's death. "She was determined to reveal what others had been taught to turn their backs on."

Fascinated by risk-taking, Diane had long embraced the New York City art world's life-on-the-edge attitudes about money, social status and sexual freedom. Now she pursued the same kind of thrill in her photographs. "I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do-that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse," she later recalled. Model had often taken photographs of the seamier parts of the city, including Coney Island and Hubert's Museum, a sideshow in Times Square. Arbus went even further, exploring wax museums, dance halls and flophouses. "My favorite thing," Arbus is often quoted as saying, "is to go where I've never been."

We get a glimpse of her omnivorous sensibility in the displays of personal materials in the exhibition. There are wellthumbed art books (on Delacroix, Picasso, Berenice Abbott, El Greco) and texts both weighty (philosophical essays by Schopenhauer) and hip (Allen Ginsberg's epic poem Howl) alongside lists of ideas for projects ("seance, gypsies, tattoo, opera opening backstage"), collections of newspaper clippings ("Woman Tortured by Agonizing ITCH") and mementos of odd characters (the 942-pound "Human Blimp"). Arecreation of one of her bulletin boards combines her own photographs (of a three-eyed circus freak and his wife, of a pretty girl and her mother) with postcards, snapshots, tabloid photos (an unwrapped mummy, a snarling J. Edgar Hoover) and a panel torn from an "Orphan Annie" comic warning, "The best things carried to excess are wrong."

In 1959 the Arbuses separated, and Diane moved into a small carriage house in Greenwich Village with their two daughters. Her new situation and her determination to be independent created pressure on her to bring in more income. Luckily, new opportunities were opening up. Some magazines were starting to publish a more personal, novelistic brand of journalism that needed a new, consciously artful kind of photography to complement it. In the fall of 1959, Diane obtained her first magazine assignment, a photo essay about New York City for Esquire that included portraits of a Skid Row eccentric, a sideshow performer known as the Jungle Creep, a young socialite and an anonymous corpse.

The pictures, however, did not have the distinctive sharp-focus look we generally associate with Arbus. In the 1950s and early '60s, she was using a 35-millimeter camera and natural lighting, and her work from that period showed the influence of Model, Robert Frank and other practitioners of street photography. Like them, she favored blurred surfaces and grainy textures, a long way from the tidy look of mainstream commercial photographs.

Then, sometime around 1962 she switched to a 2 1/4 format camera, which allowed her to create sharper images with brilliant detail. Describing this shift years later, she recalled that she had grown tired of grainy textures and wanted "to see the difference between flesh and material, the densities of different kinds of things: air and water and shiny." She added, "I began to get terribly hyped on clarity."

Nor was this shift merely a matter of camera size or lighting choices (she later added a strobe flash). More and more, Arbus made her intense relationship with the people she photographed the subject of her work-her curiosity about the details of their lives, their willingness to share their secrets and the thrilling discomfort she felt during these encounters. "She could hypnotize people, I swear," fellow photographer Joel Meyerowitz is quoted as saying in Patricia Bosworth's 1984 unauthorized biography of Arbus. "She would start talking to them and they would be as fascinated with her as she was with them." This sense of mutuality is one of the most striking and original things about Arbus' photographs, giving them a lucidity and focus that are as much psychological as photographic.

A reader of Freud, Nietzsche and James Frazer's treatise on religion and mythology, The Golden Bough, Arbus saw the circus performers, eccentrics, midgets and transvestites she photographed both as fascinating real-life personages and as mythic figures. Through them she found her way to still more people and places, far from her own background. "I have learned to get past the door, from the outside to the inside," she wrote in a 1965 fellowship application. "One milieu leads to another. I want to be able to follow."

Her intelligence and elfin beauty proved valuable assets. And her excited appreciation of whoever struck her as extraordinary allowed her to gain entree to a female impersonator's boudoir, a dwarf 's hotel room and countless other places that would have been closed to a less persistent, less appealing photographer. Once she obtained permission to take pictures, she might spend hours, even days shooting her subjects again and again and again.

Her subjects often became collaborators in the process of creation, sometimes over many years. For example, the Mexican dwarf she photographed in a hotel room in 1960 was still appearing in her photographs ten years later. And she first photographed Eddie Carmel, whom she called the Jewish giant, with his parents in 1960, ten years before she at last captured the portrait she had been seeking.

When Arbus went to San Francisco in 1967, photographer Edmund Shea introduced her to some "hippie chicks" who were working as topless dancers. He was not surprised that Arbus was able to convince them to pose for her. "Some people like to think of her as cynical. That's a total misconception," he says. "She was very emotionally open. She was very intense and direct, and people related to that." Arbus herself had mixed feelings about her ability to draw out her subjects. "Kind of two-faced" is how she once described herself: "I hear myself saying, 'How terrific.' . . . I don't mean I wish I looked like that. I don't mean I wish my children looked like that. I don't mean in my private life I want to kiss you. But I mean that's amazingly, undeniably something."

For several years Arbus' distinctive photographs proved popular with magazine editors. Following that first Esquire photo essay, she published more than 250 pictures in Harper's Bazaar, the Sunday Times Magazine of London and more than a dozen other magazines, and generated hundreds of additional pictures that were assigned but went unpublished. She also did a small number of private commissions, one of which forms the basis of a smaller Arbus exhibition that is also traveling the country this year and next. Titled "Diane Arbus: Family Albums," the show originated at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in Massachusetts and presents some of Arbus' magazine portraits of celebrities along with the complete contact sheets from a newly discovered photo session with a Manhattan family. The show's run includes stops in Maine, Oregon and Kansas.

Although Arbus regarded much of her photography-forhire as mere pay-the-bills work, she often convinced magazine editors to help fund and obtain access for her artistic projects. Some of her most personal, best-known photographs- the 1970 portrait of the king and queen of a senior citizen's dance, for example-first appeared in large-circulation magazines. At the same time, the fine-art world began to recognize that Arbus' pictures were more than clever magazine journalism. In 1967, 32 of her photographs were chosen by MOMA for its "New Documents" exhibition. The show also included work by two other important young photographers, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, but Arbus drew most of the attention. New York magazine called her work "brutal, daring and revealing" and Newsweek credited her with "the sharp crystal-clear generous vision of a poet." But New York Times critic Jacob Deschin wrote that her work "sometimes . . . borders close to poor taste," and other viewers found her pictures infuriating.

"I remember going to 'New Documents' when I was in college and seeing a man spit at her work," says SFMOMA's Phillips. "People hadn't seen an unambiguous picture of a man in curlers with long fingernails smoking a cigarette, and at the time it seemed confrontational. Now, at this distance in time, it seems elegiac and empathetic rather than threatening." Arbus found the attention hard to cope with. "The show was splendid but too many calls and letters and people thinking I am an expert or incredibly lovable," she wrote to a friend. "I need to be forlorn and anonymous in order to be truly happy." She told an interviewer from Newsweek, "I always thought I'd wait until I'm ninety to have a show . . . I wanted to wait until I had it all done."

Perversely, her growing fame coincided with a drop in assignments, in part because of changing fashion, in part because celebrities may have been wary about being photographed by a woman who was becoming renowned (in the words of one reviewer) as "the wizard of odds." To complicate matters further, Allan, to whom she remained close, moved to California in 1969 to pursue a full-time acting career. He eventually landed work in dozens of movies and, beginning in 1973, a long-running role on the popular TV series "M*A*S*H" as psychiatrist Dr. Sidney Freedman.

In hopes of bringing in some income, Diane launched plans to sell a limited edition of ten of her photographs, encased in a clear plastic box that would double as a frame, for $1,000 per set. The project, however, was ahead of its time, and only four sets sold during her lifetime: one to artist Jasper Johns, the other three to close friends. "She was trying to package photography as an art form before it was really accepted as such," says Phillips. Recently, one of the sets commanded $380,000 at auction.

But if money eluded her, recognition did not. Museums included her work in shows and publishers petitioned, in vain, to come out with a book of her images. In 1971 she was chosen to represent the United States at the 1972 Venice Biennale- the first American photographer ever to be so honored at this prestigious art event. But she appears to have regarded such evidence of success as a distraction from her desire to keep adding to her photographic catalog-she called it her butterfly collection-of odd and intriguing people. A1971 fellowship proposal (which was not accepted) described a desire to photograph "The Difference. Those of birth, accident, choice, belief, predilection, inertia." The challenge, she wrote, was "not to ignore them, not to lump them all together, but to watch them, to take notice, to pay attention."

One project that particularly engaged her was a series of photographs begun in 1969 of residents at state institutions for the severely retarded. Seeking a new look, she struggled to use natural light, in combination with strobe flash or by itself, "trying to make my sharp pictures blurred but not too much so," she wrote to her ex-husband that August. By the end of the year she was getting results that excited her. "I took the most terrific pictures," she reported in another letter to Allan, calling them "lyric and tender and pretty." These images marked a new direction, with their soft lighting and more casual composition-"like snapshots but better," Diane wrote. Never shown during her lifetime, they stand out as among her most moving, most powerful photographs. But neither the recognition she was getting nor the work itself could forestall the periods of depression, likely exacerbated by several bouts with hepatitis, that plagued her. In 1968 she described her dark moods to a friend as "chemical, I'm convinced. Energy, some special kind of energy, just leaks out and I am left lacking the confidence even to cross the street." In the summer of 1971 she was again overwhelmed by "the blues." This time they proved fatal. On July 26, she took a large quantity of barbiturates and slit her wrists. A friend discovered her body in the bathtub of her WestVillage apartment two days later.

Arbus' death and the 1972 show that followed it made her famous in a way she had never been while she was alive. But some critics found in her suicide evidence that her pictures reflected pathology more than art. Indeed, the drama of her life has sometimes threatened to eclipse the reputation of her work. Yet however much her art and life may have become conflated, the impact of Arbus' photographs and their ability to meld the mythic with the intensely personal is stronger than ever.

By giving the public a chance to encounter an unprecedented number of her pictures, the "Revelations" exhibition demonstrates that she was an artist of the first rank and a pioneer in breaking down the walls separating photography from painting and the rest of the so-called fine arts.

The show also asks whether the disquieting intimacy that is still sometimes viewed as a weakness isn't instead a source of artistic power in Arbus' pictures. In her catalog essay, Phillips notes the high value the art world of the 1960s put on work that was "assertive, even arrogant, and suspicious of content," especially content that smacked of emotion or storytelling. By that standard, Arbus' work could be easily dismissed as too personal, too neurotic. In the 21st century, however, with personal identity and narrative central issues for artists, Arbus has emerged as a daring innovator.

"I have never been moved by any other artist as I have been by Arbus," says the MetropolitanMuseum's Rosenheim. "Her pictures have this power that is the exact correlation of the intimate relation she must have had with her subjects. They forever affect the way you look at the world." Whether Arbus is photographing a tattooed man, a drag queen or a wailing baby, the more we look at her pictures, the more we feel they are looking back at us.

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A new retrospective featuring an unprecedented number of the troubled photographer's images makes the case for her innovative artistry

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Dorothea Lange Archives - American Masters

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In today's partisan political landscape, thoughtful and open discussions about the major issues can sometimes be hard to find. Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman are turning to art -- including highway billboards and remakes of revered images -- as a way to catalyze conversations and reinvigorate democracy.

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In a searching session of talks hosted by curator and photographer Deborah Willis and her son, artist Hank Willis Thomas (who spoke together at TEDWomen 2017), 12 speakers explored conflict, love, the environment and activism, and more. The session featured duet talks from Paula Stone Williams and Jonathan Williams, Neha Madhira and Haley Stack, Aja Monet and phillip agnew, Beth [...]

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The TED community has been making headlines - here are a few highlights. Tobacco-free finance initiative launched at the UN. Oncologist and Tobacco Free Portfolios CEO Bronwyn King has made it her mission to detangle the worlds of finance and tobacco - and ensure that no one will ever accidentally invest in a tobacco company [...]

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In today's partisan political landscape, thoughtful and open discussions about the major issues can sometimes be hard to find. Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman are turning to art -- including highway billboards and remakes of revered images -- as a way to catalyze conversations and reinvigorate democracy.

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Gordon Parks Photography

The youngest of 15 children, Gordon Parks was born in 1912 (d. 2006) in Fort Scott, Kansas. His parents had moved there from Tennessee in the years following the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Although he was close with his supportive family, Parks could not ignore the inequality and racism around him. He recalls, "The indignities came so often that I soon began to accept them as normal. But I always fought back."

Parks purchased his first camera in 1937 and committed himself to becoming a photographer. A consummate observer of the world, he found inspiration in magazines, museums, and books. He began experimenting with portraiture and some of his photographs were featured in the local African American newspaper in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Though primarily self-taught, Parks's education was influenced by other artists and mentors he encountered in the early part of his career. He would go on to achieve extraordinary success in his field, a major accomplishment for an African American photographer during the 1940s. In addition to photographing for Life, Ebony, and Vogue, Parks was a poet, author, musician, and filmmaker.

Parks was just 28 years old when he took this self-portrait. He carefully composed it to demonstrate his close connection with his vocation: his face is aligned with the lens of his camera (one typical of those used by press photographers at the time) and his expression is quite contemplative.

Gordon Parks Photography

Gordon Parks Photography

Parks moved to Chicago in 1941 and became affiliated with the South Side Community Art Center, where he had a studio and darkroom. He developed relationships with a number of artists living and working in Chicago, including Charles White. White encouraged Parks, who was primarily shooting portraits, to take his camera into the streets and document the poverty he found there.

With his own tools in hand, White is featured in front of his mural, Chaos of the American Negro. What strategies does Parks use in his composition to communicate his respect for this artist? Compare this portrait with Parks's Self-Portrait also taken in 1941 (Slide 1). What similarities and differences do you notice?

Learn more about Charles White

Gordon Parks Photography

Gordon Parks Photography

As one of Parks's first assignments for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), he interviewed Ella Watson, who was cleaning offices at the Department of Agriculture, where the FSA was housed. He learned of her story of hardship and with her permission photographed her not only at work, but at home, with her family, and in her community. It was from this series of approximately 85 images that Parks produced one his most iconic works, Washington, D.C. Government charwoman (American Gothic). The additional photographs in the series offer a multilayered presentation of Ella Watson's life. Many of the images reflect the oppression and hardship she, like Parks, experienced in Washington, DC, but they also show moments of spirituality, love, and hope.

In this photograph, Parks shows Ella Watson alone, cleaning one of the many government offices. The harsh light focused on one point on the floor casts Watson into the shadows of the room, hinting at the invisibility of her work. Consider the role of light in this photograph and compare it to Parks's portrait of Marva Trotter Louis.

What can we learn about Ella Watson's professional and personal life from this photograph?

Learn more about Washington, D.C. Government charwoman (American Gothic)

Gordon Parks Photography

As one of Parks's first assignments for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), he interviewed Ella Watson, who was cleaning offices at the Department of Agriculture, where the FSA was housed. He learned of her story of hardship and with her permission photographed her not only at work, but at home, with her family, and in her community. It was from this series of approximately 85 images that Parks produced one his most iconic works, Washington, D.C. Government charwoman (American Gothic). The additional photographs in the series offer a multilayered presentation of Ella Watson's life. Many of the images reflect the oppression and hardship she, like Parks, experienced in Washington, DC, but they also show moments of spirituality, love, and hope.

This is an image of Watson at home with her family. We glimpse her adopted daughter, Loretta, in the reflection of the mirror (on the right), seemingly contemplating the photograph of Watson's parents, also visible to us. Watson is surrounded by her grandchildren in the kitchen, perhaps enjoying some time together after dinner. Four generations are included in this photograph, demonstrating the importance of Watson's extended family.

What can we learn about Ella Watson's professional and personal life from this photograph?

Learn more about Washington, D.C. Government charwoman (American Gothic)

Gordon Parks Photography

Compare this photograph with the one of a mother in the Frederick Douglass housing project similarly sitting by an open window, both taken by Parks in 1942 in Washington, DC. What details do you notice that help to tell each woman's story? Why do you think he has us looking at the backs of their heads? Do you consider these works to be portraits? Why or why not?

What is Parks possibly communicating about race and gender in 1940s America?

Gordon Parks Photography

In 1943, the increasingly unpopular Farm Security Administration (FSA) was abolished, pieces of which were then absorbed into the Office of War Information (OWI). Before the FSA closed though, Parks was selected to transfer to the OWI, which he did in October 1942. He was assigned as a war correspondent to cover the 332nd Fighter Group, the first regiment of black pilots, who were training near Detroit, Michigan. Parks's attempts to travel with the pilots for their first deployment abroad were continually thwarted by officials in the federal government, some of whom were not supportive of black pilots receiving such publicity.

Gordon Parks Photography

Gordon Parks took this photograph while on assignment for the Standard Oil Company (New Jersey), a corporation suffering a massive public relations crisis related to a rubber shortage that threatened the country's ability to fight in World War II. Part of Parks's assignment was to represent how the oil industry positively impacted life in the United States. Parks spent eight days with the Brown family, pictured here sharing a family meal.

Look closely at who is gathered around the table. Hercules Brown sits with his wife, three daughters, and grandson. His son-in-law is away fighting in the war. What can you learn about this family based on what you see in the photograph? Notice how we, as the viewer, seem to be looking down at the table. Where do you think Parks was when he took this picture?

Compare with this image with Anacostia, D.C. Frederick Douglass Housing Project.

Gordon Parks Photography

Gordon Parks Photography

Given its reliance on oil and lubricants, transportation was an important theme for the documentary photographers at Standard Oil Company (New Jersey). New York Harbor, where crowds of commuters made their way to Manhattan on the Staten Island Ferry, represented the epicenter of this idea.

Consider the perspective in this photograph: Where is the photographer standing to take this picture? What does this photograph tell us about the nature of work in the United States? Who is present? Who is missing?

Gordon Parks Photography

Here, Parks tackles issues of race in a visibly bold manner, reminiscent of his work Washington, D.C. Government charwoman (American Gothic).

Parks took this picture on assignment for Ebony magazine in 1947 for an article called, "Problem Kids: New Harlem clinic rescues ghetto youth from emotional short circuit." The article featured the work of psychiatrists Mamie and Kenneth Clark, whose "doll test" research investigated issues of segregation and self-esteem in black children. African American children in segregated schools were shown a black doll and a white doll and then asked to choose one. The majority picked the white doll, indicating that segregation impacted the children's feelings of self-worth. Their research, while not wholly scientific, was used in school desegregation lawsuits including Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

Imagine you are the editor of Ebony magazine. Would you have chosen to include this image in your story? Why or why not?

Gordon Parks Photography

On assignment for Life magazine, Parks followed Leonard "Red" Jackson, a 17-year-old Harlem gang leader. Parks's photo essay captured the violence and fear experienced by gang members and their families, and positioned him as an important documentary photographer. A year later, Parks would become the first African American to be named staff photographer at Life. Forty years later, Parks ran into Red Jackson, who suggested, "You know, you and me could go back up to Harlem together and save some of those kids up there. I'm always asking myself about how I got into so much trouble" (Gordon Parks, Half Past Autumn: A Retrospective [Boston, 1999], 84).

This photograph does not directly depict the danger associated with gang violence. Jackson does not face the camera, yet the photograph offers close, almost intimate, access to the subject. It invites us to consider what he might be thinking, seeing, or feeling. What role might these photographs play in a larger essay on gang violence? Do they offer hope? Describe how the setting, details, and lighting in each photograph inform your opinion.

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Gordon Parks Photography The youngest of 15 children, Gordon Parks was born in 1912 (d. 2006) in Fort Scott, Kansas. His parents had moved there from Tennessee in the years following the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Although he was close with his supportive family, Parks could not ignore the inequality and racism around him.

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Imogen Cunningham occupies a singular position in the history of American art of the twentieth century. For seventy years she explored, with innovation and a new perspective, all the major traditions associated with the medium as fine art. Official site of the Imogen Cunningham Trust.

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Edward Weston & Cole Weston Family Website

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Thank you for your interest in edward-weston.com. Since Cole's passing this site has been managed by his children. Each family member has individual photographs for sale from their personal collections. Each family member may be contacted directly for information regarding photographs for sale. The images contained on this site are for your viewing pleasure, and may or may not be available for sale at any given time as print availability does fluctuate. Prices are subject to change without notice on this site.

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Edward Weston & Cole Weston Family Website

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Thank you for your interest in edward-weston.com. Since Cole's passing this site has been managed by his children. Each family member has individual photographs for sale from their personal collections. Each family member may be contacted directly for information regarding photographs for sale.