This essay will be explain and go into to depth about 25 photographers and their works. Their work will be critically analysed into how they produced each series and what went into making them successful. It will also consist of the emotions and the narrative that theirs series showcase and why their work was inflectional at that period of time.
Alec Soth
Alec Soth is a photographer born and based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has published over twenty-five and has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards. He also created Little Brown Mushroom, a multi-media enterprise focused on visual storytelling.
Sleeping by the Mississippi, 1991 was a series Soth did when he made a road trip down to the Mississippi River and found that the river functioned exceptionally well for his photographic interests. Since then he has made several trips down the River Road. The series is about the spirit of the river and life along its banks, he wanted his work to speak about the American understanding of freedom. The journey starts at the frozen winters of Minnesota and the ends in the south, into the heat of Louisiana. This series features people who live in the area but he also photographs the washed-up debris or an abandoned interior that shows that there was life. It is through these small lives that the big river gets its meaning. Soth looks at illness, race, crime, death, learning, art, music, religion, procreation, redemption, politics, and sex. The photographs are saturated with colour and crisp with detail. They also reveal the dreams of the inhabitants both current and departed. The dreams and hopes that no longer matter how seemingly insignificant or sad are captured so eloquently.
His latest book, Songbook was taken from 2012 to 2014 where Soth travelled the United States looking for signs of social life in our era of virtual social networks. To aid in his search, Soth took the role of community newspaper reporter. With this role he attended hundreds of meetings, dances, festivals and family gatherings. Songbook is a lyrical depiction of the tension between American individualism and the ongoing desire to be united.
Zanele Muholi
Zanele Muholi is a photographer and self-proclaimed visual activist. She explores black lesbian and gay identities and politics in contemporary South Africa.
Her series Faces and Phases (2006-11), consisted of more than two hundred portraits of the black LGBTI community; the portraits are accompanied by moving testimonies by many of the participants about the lives and struggles.
The portraits are a visual statement and an archive as it marks and preserves an often invisible community for posterity. Muholi’s challenges the stigma surrounding gays and lesbians in South Africa with this series of work as she address the preponderance of hate crimes against homosexuals in her native country. Among other subjects, she has captured the survivors of “corrective rape”. In April 2012, Muholi’s apartment was robbed of over 20 hard drives holding years of photographic documentation, suggesting the continued controversy and sensitivity surrounding her work. Each black and white image in the series exists to counter the dominant narratives surrounding race, gender and sexuality in South Africa. As each subject poses confidently in their varying degrees of gender expression, they meet the viewers gaze directly and in doing so subvert.
Sally Mann
Sally Mann was born in 1951 in Lexington, Virginia. She photographed in the American South since the 1970s, producing series on portraiture, architecture, landscape and still life. She is perhaps best known for her intimate portraits of her family, her young children and her husband. Her work has attracted controversy at times, but it has always been influential.
Immediate Family (1992) is a project she produced that focused on her three children, who were all under the age of ten. The series touches on the ordinary moments of their daily lives but it also speaks to larger themes such as death and cultural perceptions of sexuality.
Her series Proud Flesh (2009) is where Mann turns the camera to her husband. The project was shot over a six year period, with portraits that reverses traditional gender roles, capturing a male subject’s moments of intimate vulnerability.
At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women (1988) is a series of portraits of twelve-year-old girls on the verge of adulthood. To be young and female in America is a time of excitement and social possibilities and being caught between childhood and adulthood. The girls in the photographs are still existing in an innocent world in which a pose is only a pose it’s how they are interpreted that becomes the issue. The consequences of this misunderstanding these poses can be resulting in abuse and unwanted pregnancy.
Lee Friedlander
Lee Friedlander was born in 1934 and began photographing the American social landscape in 1948. His photographs are humorous and poignant among the chaos of city life, dense landscapes and other subjects he photographs.
Friedlander began his career with the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, political assassinations as American culture and society changed radically. During this time Friedlander purposefully look away from this as his work looking at ongoing life in the streets and the lateral evidence of change. With this in mind he recorded his own reactions to the changes and discovered that photography is better at identifying changes.
His first book, Self Portrait (1970) is based on this discovery. In the book we never lose sight of Friedlander as the point of view, even superficially as his shadow or reflection in the image.
His series America by Car (2010) features one of America’s icons of the car. The highway remains vital for adventure and discovery, and allows viewers to take in the country’s vast scale. Friedlander drove across most of the country’s 50 states in an ordinary rental car to complete this project. He cleverly frames his images using the car as a border with the use of the side view mirror, rear view mirror, the windshield and the side windows. This method allows for fascinating effects in which steering wheels and dashboards bump up against roadside bars, motels, churches, monuments, suspension bridges, landscapes and often Friedlander himself. The nearly 200 images in the series are full of virtuoso touch and clarity, while also revisiting themes from older bodies of work.
Andres Petersen
Anders Petersen is a Swedish photographer who was born in 1944 and is best known for his intimate and documentary based projects.
He is best known for his project, Café Lehmitz (1967-1970) in which he photographed prostitutes, transvestites, lovers, drunkards, and drug addicts. The photographs are very close and personal, and incredibly humanistic and soulful. He took shots of a cafe for three years where he would sleep in the kitchen for free, in exchange for looking after the cook’s children. The Cafe Lehmitz sat at the red light district in Hamburg. One remarkable aspect of the series is the sense of connection and acceptance between the subjects. He documents the world-weary and worn down by life of these individuals, he show cases that these people have found a small refuge from judgement within the four walls of the cafe.
Since then, he has gone on to publish more than 20 books, almost all of which are like personal diaries of his experiences with people and places that are only encountered in the outskirts of towns or under cover of darkness. For an extended period of time Petersen practically lived in a high-security prison to make the photographs for his book Fangelse (1984).
He has also documented the people in an insane asylum, and others living in a home for old people. In each body of work, Petersen forces us to regard from the often uncomfortably close vantage point with situations that most people would avoid at all costs yet what he reveals is tenderness, beauty and common humanity.
Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange is known for her photographs taken during the Great Depression of the unemployed men who wandered the streets. Lange’s first exhibition, held in 1934, established her reputation as a skilled documentary photographer. Lange’s first real taste of documentary photography came in the 1920s when she travelled around the Southwest, mostly photographing Native Americans. With the onslaught of the Great Depression in the 1930s, she stared to see in her own San Francisco neighbourhoods: labour strikes and breadlines.
Lange travelled extensively over five years, documenting the rural hardship she encountered for the Farm Society Administration. This body of work included Lange’s most well-known portrait, “Migrant Mother,” an iconic image from this period that gently and beautifully captured the hardship and pain of what so many Americans were experiencing. Lange’s access to the inner lives of these struggling Americans was the result of patience and careful consideration of the people she photographed.
“Migrant Mother”, became the iconic photo of the Depression, and one of the most familiar images of the 20th century. At the time, the dust blown interior of the United States was full of families like hers, whom poverty had forced off their land and into a life of wandering. Their poverty was total; they had nothing and she is on her own.. Her worried, vacant expression seems to communicate what we, at our end of history, already know: Things were not going to get better for a long, long time.
Andreas Gursky
Andreas Gursky makes large-scale, colour photographs distinctive for their incisive and critical look at the effect of capitalism and globalisation on contemporary life.
In the early 1980s, he broke from this tradition, using colour film and spontaneous observation to make a series of images of people at leisure, such as hikers, swimmers and skiers, depicted as tiny protagonists in a vast landscape.
Since the 1990s, Gursky has concentrated on sites of commerce and tourism, making work that draws attention to today’s high-tech industry and global markets. His photographs range from the vast, anonymous architecture of modern day hotel lobbies, apartment buildings and warehouses to stock exchanges and parliaments in places. Although his work adopts the scale and composition of historical landscape paintings, his photographs are often derived from inauspicious sources.
Gursky emerged just as photographers were beginning to compete successfully with painters for attention and space on the walls of galleries and museums. In the process they discovered new opportunities in scale.
Katy Grannan
Katy Grannan was first recognized in 1998 for an intimate series of portraits of strangers she met through newspaper advertisements. Grannan worked for years throughout the northeast and produced several different series. Grannan’s process and the consequent images are informed by her own conflicted childhood in the American northeast. Each photograph is imbued with secrecy, desire, and hidden intentions.
Boulevard marked the beginning of a series of street portraits. These photographs appear to be made without the subjects’ knowledge, but are in fact, spontaneous collaborations between Grannan and strangers met on the streets of San Francisco and Hollywood and later throughout the Central Valley. Boulevard and the subsequent series, 99, unfold as an enormous procession of humanity. Grannan uses the ubiquitous white walls of city buildings and the glaring noon sunlight to serve as a backdrop that emphasizes each individual and defies any preconceived assumption of their anonymity.
The 99, Grannan’s continuation of “street portraits” refers to Highway 99, which runs down the spine of California through the Central Valley. Grannan followed and was influenced by Dorothea Lange’s trajectory and discovered a similarly austere terrain and stoic sensibility. Grannan’s large black and white vistas describe a uniquely psychological landscape enveloping cities along Highway 99, where for most; the “American Dream” is pure myth. The region and its inhabitants remain overlooked and undervalued, yet there exists a quiet beauty in the seemingly mundane interactions among those living within this parched landscape.
Dougie Wallace
Dougie Wallace is a London based photographer who grew up in Glasgow. He is internationally recognised for his long-term social documentary projects and a distinct direct style of expressive street photography. His work is motivated by human behaviour with people’s interactions and emotions. His stories are thematic; they have similarities of expressions running through them. His work is informed by today’s growing culture of commercialization, the effect this has on our leisure time, global tourism and the inescapable consequences of corporate and brand domination that have ensued. He translates this into social wit, criticism and humorous vignettes through his camera.
Blackpool has an unenviable reputation for its stag and hen parties. Every weekend marauding packs of brides and grooms, close friends and family, overflow its streets on a mission to consume dangerous, liver-crushing levels of alcohol. This, their rite of passage acted out on the last night of freedom, before the conventions and responsibilities of marital life, mortgage, children. Dougie Wallace has captured a town heaving with everything from bunny girls, banana men, girls dressed in togas, all matching gold handbags and neatly-done hair. He spent two and a half years, Wallace frequently returned to the seaside town to snap the multitude of stag and hen parties that descended on the home of the Pleasure Beach at weekends.
Wolfgang Tillman
Wolfgang Tillman is a German photographer who began making photographs that constitute an intriguing hybrid of fashion photography and documentary reportage. Working at first with Hamburg-based style and fashion journals, he took photographs of the European club scene. In 1988 he began an extensive collaboration with the British lifestyle magazine, in whose pages he published much of his work. His subjects range from intimate still life’s to portraits of friends and celebrities, referring often explicitly to his involvement with political issues such as homelessness, racism and gay rights.
The Cars is one of the many series he has produced. This book looks at a cross section of what cars actually look like in a global sampling and how they interact with the environment around them. He wanted to show how cars appear in typical street view which is rarely the subject of photographs. Cars are usually avoided in photography and usually photographers are waiting until a car has exited a view. The ordinary presence of cars is rarely worthy of representation. It’s always the special car or the extreme traffic jam or, the exciting crash that is being pictured. The Cars pays tribute to the shapes and forms we look at every day. How much time we spend with them, sitting inside them, the endless hours we stare at a dashboard. Even if we don’t own a car ourselves, their presence is unavoidable.
Marcus Doyle
Marcus Doyle is known for his film landscape photography; he was born and raised in Carlisle. He is fascinated by the eerie glow of street lamps within the landscape and how the light changes around the landscape throughout time, and season. Many of his landscaped bring up the same colour palette which makes the photos extremely captivating, the magnificent view point within his images are persistent enhancing the view for the audience which leads into the darkness of the horizon. He has his own colour due to this style of working called Doyle Blue which is the blue that is seen during the time of day he photographs. His early work was totally all black and white until he was influenced by American photographs and decided to travel.
Thursday’s by the Sea, this project was based on the dry salt lakes in California and he took ten photographs each Thursday. He worked during the sunset as it would reflect off the salt. Overall he took three hundred photographs over a year every Thursday to complete this project.
By Coastal, This project began with a small series entitled North Shores, a body of work exploring the Scottish coastline from East to West paying homage to my late Grandfather John McGregor: Following the same route he made in the 1950’s as an artist who set out to create his own interpretations of the coastal landscape. Once this work was finished he continued around the rest of the British Isles working within a quarter mile of the coastline.
John Early
John Early is an automotive photographer mainly, and is obsessed with the way light captures the essence of the mechanical vehicle, from child hood he claimed that he had always had a love for the play of light within nature which is what led him to become a top automotive photographer after graduating, He also photographs landscapes, and editorial pieces.
Early is known mostly for his work in sports photography and as Huddersfield Town Football Clubs photographer. These images featured a selection of partners in the football club who where homosexual and including a small biography of some of the attending members. Kicker Conspiracy, this project he looked at the equality and diversity that football teams had and focused on a ‘gay friendly’ football team called the Yorkshire Terriers. He also did portraits of footballs again edgy backdrops which he started as voluntarily work until they where liked and then began to charge. This proves that starting off with free work is a good idea to follow on.
Nick Knight
Nick Knight is among one of the world’s most influential photographer with his editorial work for large fashion and advertisement companies including Vogue, Christian Dior and Calvin Klein. Knight was known for pushing boundaries technically and creatively. His work has covered many issues that have been a big part of history, such as racism, disability, ageism and fat-ism. He still continues to challenge conventional ideals of beauty. In 2010, he received an OBE in recognition of the contribution he made to the arts over his career. Knight didn’t just affect the art of photography but fashion around the world. In 1993 he made fashion history by adapting ring flash photography to capture Linda Evangelista for the cover of British Vogue, creating a harsh, overexposed aesthetic. Photographs like these had never graced the cover of such a respected publication before, and introduced the idea of creative photography to the majority.
Martin Parr
Martin Parr is one of the most experimental photographers, with his photographs being exaggerated or even grotesque. The colours he uses in his work are garish and the perspectives are unusual. As a result, his photographs are original and entertaining, accessible and understandable. But at the same time they show us in a penetrating way how we live, how we present ourselves to others and what we value. This brings a huge social side to the era with the relation to us.
Some of his work was shocking compared to how society is now with pictures, like with a little boy with no pants underwear on, but in the 80’s this was acceptable. His photographs are original and entertaining, accessible and understandable. But at the same time they show us in a penetrating way how we live, how we present ourselves to others, and what we value.
Leisure, consumption and communication are the concepts that this British photographer has been researching for several decades now on his worldwide travels. In the process, he examines national characteristics and international phenomena to find out how valid they are as symbols that will help future generations to understand our cultural peculiarities. Parr enables us to see things that have seemed familiar to us in a completely new way.
Stephen Shore
Stephen Shore is an American photographer known for his photographs of banal objects and scenes in the United States. His work was influenced by Walker Evan’s when I received a copy of his book, American Photographs. His career began when he was only fourteen when he sold three of his prints to the curator of MoMA, Edward Steichen. At seventeen he met Andy Warhol where he began photographing Warhol and the creative people that surrounded him.
Shore then started to create a series of cross country road trips photographs of American and Canadian landscapes. American Surfaces was a series he produced following a journey from Manhattan to Amarillo, Texas to expand his interest for colour photography. He photographed the views of the streets and towns he passed along his journey using a 35mm hand held camera. He expanded his equipment as he went along to larger format cameras.
Uncommon Places was a series of frequently returned to road of North America from 1973 to 1981. His initial intention was to redo his American Surfaces project but he found that with his new equipment he was forced to photograph in an altogether different way. Throughout the 1970’s he successfully exhibited hundreds of photographs from this series. But by 1981 he that nearly all of the creative questions behind his project had ultimately been answered and to avoid repetition he put an end to the series. The series and Shores work was inflectional and acknowledged by several notable photographers including Nan Goldin, Martin Parr, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth.
Ansel Adams
Ansel Adams is well known worldwide for his photographs of the American wilderness and the landscapes on his travels. His work has shaped the views of many people of the way we see the natural world as he bring his environmentalist spirit to the photographs. His most well known work is his black and white landscapes of the American West, especially Yosemite National Park.
Adams produced his first portfolio in 1927 called Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras, which included his famous photograph Monolith, the Face of Half Dome. Later on between 1929 and 1942 his work matured and he became more established. Adams expanded his works, focusing on details close up and as well as large subjects like mountains and in1930 he published his first book, Taos Puelblo.
This photograph is of the church located a few miles south of the Taos Pueblo and was described as one of the most beautiful buildings left in the United States. Adams spent a large part of his career travelling frequently epically New Mexico as he was inspired by its scenic and cultural wonders.
Noboyushi Araki
Noboyushi Araki is a Japanese photographer and contemporary artist. He has published over three hundred books by the time he had reached 2005 and still continued to produce more this included Sentimental Journey (1971) and Tokyo Lucky Hole (1985). Araki is considered one of the most prolific artists dead or alive in Japan and in the world. His photography is emotionally raw and erotic but can be sometimes classed as pornographic. Sentimental Journey was a diary of the life of his wife up until she died of ovarian cancer in 1990. The book showcases the journey the couple embarked when it came to married life with photographs of their honeymoon and having sex. But the pictures then started to decay as his wife was slowly losing life. By blurring the boundaries between life and art the work becomes uncomfortably candid, presenting death with the same shocking and graphic way he photographs his erotic material.
Ernest Withers
Ernest Withers was born in 1922; he showed his interest in photography from a young age. Withers started as a military photographer while serving in the South Pacific during World War II. Upon returning home Withers chose photography as his profession. In the 1950’s withers played a key role in the Civil Rights Movement as a result, he self-published a photo leaflet on the Emmett Till trial. Over the next two decades Withers formed a close relationship with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Withers’s pictures of key civil rights events go from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the strike of Memphis sanitation workers are historic. He also photographed the famous, which include pictures of early performances from Elvis Presley, Tina Turner, Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin. But Withers most historical moment was the photographs around Martin Luther King, Jr’s assassination and funeral, with photographs like Memorial March after assassination (Fig 18).
Matthew B. Brady
Matthew B. Brady is one of the most important 19th century photographers with his photographs of important historical personalities. Brady was the first to undertake the photographic documentation of the American civil war. Bringing light to the heroes and allowing ordinary people into the devastating realisation of war through his photographs. Although devoting his life to preserving history, Brady still lived alone, sick, destitute and unappreciated during this era. Brady sacrificed his own life for these photographs and saw others loose theirs. He faced a huge amount of struggles to face to capture his photographs. Brady’s important personalities include a young Major General George Armstrong Custer who was an officer of the federal army in 1865 (fig 2) this print was developed on wet plate glass negative, the detail that is shown in his photographs are perfectly preserved, giving the impression of artificial lighting.
Chris Packham
Chris Packham is a wildlife photographer born in Southampton in 1961. He started by doing an undergraduate course in zoology at Southampton University. After this he began to take photographs and trained as a wildlife film cameraman. The photography continues with exhibitions and invitations to judge prestigious competition, but he moved on to become a presenter. Chris began with the award winning Really Wild Show in 1986 and has been working ever since. He is currently well known for also being the presenter of both Autumnwatch and Springwatch. Also Chris ran a hugely successful production company Head Over Heels making programmes for Animal Planet, National Geographic, ITV and the BBC.
Packham feels that we live in exciting times for conservation; we have learned how to rebuild habitats, reintroduce extinct animals and plants, we have audited, mapped and studied much of our flora and fauna and we are increasingly clear about where our conservation priorities should lie.