Background
Richard Avedon was born on May 15, 1923 to a Jewish Family in New York City. Having been born and raised in Manhattan, it would remain his home for the rest of his life. Avedon’s father, Jacob, had his own successful dress business called Avedon’s Fifth Avenue; his mother, Anna, encouraged young Avedon’s love of fashion and art. He toyed with the family’s Kodak Box Brownie, snapping photographs of his younger sister Louise. She was his first real muse, a beautiful subject to be captured on film who would eventually live her life in a mental institution after withdrawing from the world and ultimately being diagnosed with schizophrenia. Avedon heard his mother say to Louise “You’re so beautiful you don’t have to open your mouth.” He grew to be keenly aware that beauty had an element of tragedy, it faded for one thing, or it came at a terrible loss of self. These early influences of beauty, fashion, and tragedy would later influence Avedon’s photographs and his love of capturing unconventional portraits.
Early Career
Avedon’s early photography interest led him to join the Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA) Camera Club at age 12. He went on to attend DeWitt Clinton High School in Bedford Park, Bronx where he developed poetry and was named “Poet Laureate of New York City High School”. His love of poetry prompted him to Columbia University to study it along with philosophy but he dropped out after only one year. Avedon went on to pursue his real passion of photography, starting out as the photographer taking identification pictures of crewmen for the Merchant Marines in 1942. He then began to study photography at the New School for Social Research under Alexey Brodovitch, the art director for Harper’s Bazaar. The two of...
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...he bitterness he had towards his father for the neglect he showed him as a child came through the photos. But there is more than just that in the photographs, there is tenderness because they reflect man’s suffering. Many critics were disturbed by the series, finding them invasive, an assault, disrespectful, a kind of murdering his father with his camera. Avedon said, “…that’s the property of a work of art. That is the arena of a work of art. It is to disturb. It is to make you think. It is to make you feel…If my work didn’t disturb from time to time it would be a failure in my own eyes. It’s meant to disturb. In a positive way.” That same year Avedon was inspired to create a compelling collection of photographs from a new perspective. He was commissioned by Mitchell A. Wilder, the director of Amon Carter Museum to complete what would become “In the American West”.
Richard Allen was enslaved at birth to a family in Philadelphia of a prominent lawyer and officeholder, Benjamin Chew. Allen was sold with his family to Stokely Sturgis, a farmer in Delaware in 1768. In 1777, Allen experienced a religious conversion to Methodist. And then he later purchased his freedom in 1780. Allen was co-founder of the Free African Society in 1787, he helped many during the Yellow Fever Epidemic of Philadelphia in 1793, and he established Mother Bethel’s African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816.
Born of Irish immigrants in 1823 in a little place called Warren County, New York; Mathew Brady is known as “The Father of Photojournalism.” While a student of Samuel Morse and a friend of Louis Daguerre (inventor of the “Daguerreotype,” a method of photography that the image is developed straight onto a metal coated surface), in which he had met while under the study of Morse, Brady took up his interest in photography in the year of 1839, while only seventeen years of age. Brady took what he had learned from these two talented and intellectual men to America where he furthered his interest in the then-growing art of photography.
For my museum selection I decided to attend Texas State University’s Wittliff Collection. When I arrived, there was no one else there besides me and the librarian. To be honest, I probably would have never gone to an art museum if my teacher didn’t require me to. This was my first time attending the Wittliff Collection, thus I asked the librarian, “Is there any other artwork besides Southwestern and Mexican photography?” She answered, “No, the Wittliff is known only for Southwestern and Mexican photography.” I smiled with a sense of embarrassment and continued to view the different photos. As I walked through Wittliff, I became overwhelmed with all of the different types of photography. There were so many amazing pieces that it became difficult to select which one to write about. However, I finally managed to choose three unique photography pieces by Alinka Echeverria, Geoff Winningham, and Keith Carter.
It’s his compassion for his subjects and his commitment to them that surpasses the act of making a pretty picture. Spending days with his subjects in the slums of Harlem or the hardly developed mountains of West Virginia, he immerses himself into the frequently bitter life of his next award-winning photo. Often including word for word text of testimonials recorded by junkies and destitute farmers, Richards is able to provide an unbiased portrayal. All he has done is to select and make us look at the faces of the ignored, opinions and reactions left to be made by the viewer. Have you ever been at the beach safely shielded by a dark pair of sunglasses and just watched?
He wanted to get his point across to other people, and photography was one of the easiest ways, because each picture was worth a thousand words and expressed more emotion than did in his writing. However, he used pictures to be the main support of his very famous novel, “How the Other Half Lives,” in which he details in writing his experiences and thoughts about tenement housing and social
In the chapter, “The Mirror with a Memory”, the authors, James Davidson and Mark Lytle, describe numerous things that evolved after the civil war, including the life of Jacob Riis, the immigration of new peoples in America, and the evolution of photography. The authors’ purpose in this chapter is to connect the numerous impacts photography had on the past as well as its bringing in today’s age.
John Gardner: Making Life Art as a Moral Process. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. 86-110. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed.
Through the exploration of this diverse range portraiture, the contrasting ideals of masculine and feminine beauty in the Renaissance have been explored. Yet overall, no matter what the gender orientation of the subject, it the discovery of such passionate and artistic talent presented which is essentially ‘beautiful’. Consequently, the grand appeal of such glorious images is still appreciated today, and will continue to delight viewers for generations to come.
Aristotle once claimed that, “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” Artists, such as Louise-Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun and Mary Cassatt, captured not only the way things physically appeared on the outside, but also the emotions that were transpiring on the inside. A part no always visible to the viewer. While both artists, Le Brun and Cassatt, worked within the perimeters of their artistic cultures --the 18th century in which female artists were excluded and the 19th century, in which women were artistically limited-- they were able to capture the loving relationship between mother and child, but in works such as Marie Antoinette and Her Children and Mother Nursing her Child 1898,
“The advent of photography served as a catalyst in challenging the realist tradition that had predominated since the Ren...
Through Frida Kahlo’s extensive self-portrait pieces, audiences are able to view her life in an almost biographical way. Each portrait conveys deep emotion and meaning, and carry a story which Kahlo has experienced. Her self-portraits are very personal, and overall show just how tragic her life had been.
Born to Nettie Lee Smith and Bill Smith on December 18, 1918 in Wichita, Kansas was William Eugene Smith, who would later revolutionize photography. His mother Nettie was into photography, taking photos of her family, especially her two sons as they grew up, photographing events of their lives (Hughes 2). Photography had been a part of Smith’s life since he was young. At first it started out always being photographed by his mother, and then turned into taking photographs along with his friend Pete, as he got older. They often practiced developing photos in Nettie’s kitchen, and he later began to create albums with his photographs. His photographs diff...
To begin with, photography appeared to me as something entertaining a simple step in which one took a camera and simply shot a photograph of oneself or a friend. When I was handed my schedule for Mrs. Jones’s class, I felt as if this class had in store a special reward for me. As the days went by, Instead of being anxious of getting out of class I had a craving for additional time in the class. The class kept my eyes glued to the screen ...
"History of photography and photojournalism.." History of photography and photojournalism.. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2013. .
The women which Stephen comes across in his journey in becoming an artist define him and change him by nurturing him, fascinating him, and inspiring him. Stephen was forever changed by his mother, the Virgin Mary, Eileen, the prostitute, and the seaside woman. The object of the artist is to create the object of the beautiful, I argue that it was the beauty in the women of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which created the artist in the end.