Paul Strand
1. 1936 Strand joined with Berenice Abbot to establish the Photo League in New York 2. Strand was the first photographer to acheive a really decisive break with pictorialism and apply some of the lessons of the new modern art to photography. 3. Paul Strand was born in New York and attended the Ethical Culture School where his teacher was Lewis Hine. 4. Strands later work moved toward a documentary approach, attempting to encapsulate a feeling a place and its people in a body of work, published in book form. The most successful of these dealth with rural communities such as the Hebridean Islands or a village in the Italian South. 5. Strands work was published in the last two issues of Camera Work and the pictures marked a turning point for photography.
Laslo Moholy-Nagy
1. Teacher at the Bauhaus School in Germany. 2. Establishes the New Bauhaus at the Chicago Institute of Design. 3. Used straight photography and photomontage. 4. Disorienting Images. 5. Experimented with stage design and photography.
Man Ray
1. Surrealist 2. Made dreamlike images 3. His revolutionary nude studies, fashion work, and portraits opened a new chapter in the history of photography. 4. he was enthusiastically welcomed into Dadaist and Surrealist circles 5. Man Ray experimented tirelessly with new photographic techniques, multiple exposure, rayography, and solarization being some of his most famous.
John Heartfield
1. Original name Helmut Herzfeld 2. German Dadaist. 3. Pushed the idea of using massprinted source material by inventing the photomontage. 4. practice social criticism 5. Wasn’t allowed to express himself in Germany during Hitler’s time.
Aleksandr Rodchenko
1. Aimed to make the familiar strange. 2. Wanted to challenge or provoke the viewer. 3. Valued technology 4. Style : close ups, unusual vantage points, tilted his camera. 5. Was born in Russia.
Edward Weston
1. Photographing natural landscapes and forms such as peppers, shells, and rocks, using large-format cameras and available light 2. produced sensuously precise images raised to the level of poetry. 3. He became successful working in a soft-focus, Pictorial style, winning many salon and professional awards. 4. By 1920 he was experimenting with semi-abstractions in a hard-edged style. 5. own portrait studio between 1911 and 1922 in Tropico, California.
Eugene Atget
1. first of photography’s social documenters 2. His images of Paris are perhaps the most vivid record of a city ever made. 3. sold 2500 negatives relating to the history of Paris, a large portion of the work he had been accumulating for two decades, to the Caisse National des Monuments Historiques. 4. some of his photographs were in the magazine La revolution surrealiste. 5. Work was included in the important modernist exhibition “Film und Foto” in Stuttgart in 1929.
Walker Evans
1. contributor to the development of American documentary photography 2. His precisely detailed, frontal depictions of people and artifacts of American life have influenced each succeeding generation of photographers 3. believed with Baudelaire that the artist’s task was to face head-on the harshest realities and to report them to the larger world. 4. took a leave of absence from the FSA in order to work on a Fortune magazine project with the writer James Agee. 5. From 1943 to 1945 he was a staff writer for Time.
