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Michal Karcz
Michal Karcz
Michal Karcz

Michal Karcz

Country: Poland
Birth: 1977

I was born in 1977 in Warsaw, Poland. I had graduated from the High School of Art in Warsaw. My journey into the world of photography began in the early 90's, but at that time my biggest passion was painting. Painting helped me develop vision that was hard to create. Unfortunately I had to leave the paintbrush and canvas. A few years ago, I opened "the door" to my own world with help of a different key... My early fascinations of painting and photography was combined into one piece, with use of digital tools. This digital photography and software gave me the opportunity to generate unique realities that are impossible to create with ordinary dark room techniques. Most of my work is the journey to the places which don't exist, places from my dreams, desire and imagination. I'm taking my inspiration from many artists and it doesn't matter if they get across to me by sense of vision or hearing I always try to make an extraordinary picture and my goal is to make a viewer stop for a minute, to influence on emotions and take away from reality. Am I making it happen?. appraise yourself.
 

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Fred Lyon
United States
1927 | † 2022
Lyon has been called "San Francisco's Brassaï ," and has also been compared to Cartier-Bresson, Atget, and André Kertész, but with a San Francisco twist. The lifelong San Francisco Native happily admits his debt to those icons. Now 88, his nonstop career reaches back to the early 1940s and embraced news, fashion, architecture, advertising, and food. In the golden years of magazines his picture credits were everywhere from Life to Vogue. Lyon still maintains a lust for life, and is now combining his extensive picture files for galleries, publishers, and print collectors. Source: Peter Fetterman Gallery Fred Lyon is a time traveler with a camera and tales to tell. This former Life magazine photographer and fourth generation San Franciscan has an eye for the city and stories to match. We showed photos from Fred's books San Francisco, Portrait of a City: 1940-1960 and San Francisco Noir, and images spanning his diverse career. In conversation he'll discuss his art, work, and life; recollections of old friends like Herb Caen and Trader Vic Bergeron; and more. He shared his unique perspective after nearly a century in San Francisco. Fred Lyon's career began in the early 1940's and has spanned news, architecture, advertising, wine and food photography. In the golden years of magazine publishing his picture credits were everywhere from Life to Vogue and beyond. These days find him combing his picture files for galleries, publishers and print collectors. He has been called San Francisco's Brassaï. That's fine with this lifelong native who happily admits his debt to those icons.Source: The Interval Fred Lyon, a fourth generation San Franciscan, has accomplished a lot over his seventy-year career with his trusty mechanical film cameras and he continues to explore the medium to this day. Lyon has worked alongside photography greats while creating a name for himself, becoming known as San Francisco's Brassaï. He got his start at age fourteen as an assistant at Gabriel Moulin Studios and studied under famed landscape photographer Ansel Adams. When asked why he initially wanted to get into photography, he grinned and explained that, "Cameras were cool and I thought it would be a good way to get the girls. Guess how that went?" After a stint in the Navy as a press photographer, working directly with Roosevelt's office, he went on to photograph fashion in New York City. After a trip back to the San Francisco Bay Area, he decided to return permanently to the city that holds his heart, and luckily for us, he never left. His professional career spanned decades and his work has been seen in Time Magazine, Life, Vogue, and countless other fashion, home and garden magazines.Source: Leica Store San Francisco
Adolphe Braun
France
1812 | † 1877
Jean Adolphe Braun was a French photographer, best known for his floral still lifes, Parisian street scenes, and grand Alpine landscapes. One of the most influential French photographers of the 19th century, Braun used contemporary innovations in photographic reproduction to market his photographs worldwide. In his later years, he used photographic techniques to reproduce famous works of art, which helped advance the field of art history. Braun was born in Besançon in 1812, the eldest child of Samuel Braun (1785–1877), a police officer, and Marie Antoinette Regard (born 1795). When he was about 10, his family relocated to Mulhouse, a textile manufacturing center in the Alsace region along the Franco-German border. He showed promise as a draftsman, and was sent to Paris in 1828 to study decorative design. In 1834, he married Louis Marie Danet, who he had three children with: Marie, Henri, and Louise. That same year, Adolphe, alongside his brother Charles, opened the first of several unsuccessful design partnerships. After several unsuccessful design ventures in the 1830s, Adolphe Braun published a successful collection of floral designs in 1842. Upon the premature death of his wife 1843, Braun sold his Paris studio and moved back to Mulhouse, where he became chief designer in the studio of Dollfus-Ausset, which provided patterns for textiles. He remarried to Pauline Melanie Petronille Baumann (1816–1885) on 12 December 1843 and had two more children with her; son Paul Gaston and daughter Marguerite. In 1847, he opened his own studio in Dornach, a suburb of Mulhouse. In the early 1850s, Braun began photographing flowers to aid in the design of new floral patterns. Making use of the recently developed collodion process, which allowed for print reproduction of the glass plates, he published over 300 of his photographs in an album, Fleurs photographiées, in 1855. These photographs caught the attention of the Paris art community, and Braun produced a second set for display at the Paris Universal Exposition that same year. In 1857, Adolphe Braun formed a photography company, Braun et Cie, and with the help of his sons, Henri and Gaston, and several employees, set about taking photographs of the Alsatian countryside. These were published in 1859 in L’Alsace photographiée, and several were displayed at the 1859 Salon. By the 1860s, the Braun et Cie studio was operating in a factory-like manner, producing all of its own materials except paper. The studio created thousands of stereoscopic images of the Alpine regions of France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. Braun also produced a number of large-format panoramic images of the Alpine countryside, using the pantoscopic camera developed by English inventors John Johnson and John Harrison. Photography historian Naomi Rosenblum described Braun's work as representative of the relationship between art and commercialism in the mid-19th century. His self-sustaining Mulhouse studio helped elevate photography from a craft to a full-scale business enterprise, producing thousands of unique images which were reproduced and marketed throughout Europe and North America. Rosenblum also suggests that Braun's detailed reproductions of works of art in European museums brought these works to art students in North America, providing a major catalyst for the field of art history in the United States. Braun's early photographs were primarily of flowers, originally taken to complement his work as a pattern designer. Subsequent photographs focused on Alpine landscapes, especially lake scenes, and glacier scenes. Unlike many landscape photographers during this period, Braun liked to include people in his scenes. Photography historian Helmut Gernsheim suggested that Braun was one of the most skillful photographers of his era in rendering composition. While not known as a portraitist, he did take portraits of several notable individuals, including Pope Pius IX, Franz Liszt, and the Countess of Castiglione, mistress of Napoleon III. Braun's work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, the George Eastman House, and the Musée d'Orsay. His photographs of Parisian street scenes and Alpine landscapes are frequently reproduced in works on the history of photography.Source: Wikipedia Trained as a fabric designer, Adolphe Braun began his photography career in 1853. His photographs of flowers, for a catalog titled Fleurs photographiées, were to be transferred onto printing blocks for wallpaper and fabric designs. It was an extremely successful project for Braun; one album of the photographs was presented to Empress Eugénie of France, and it earned him a medal at the 1855 Paris Exposition Universelle. By the early 1860s, Braun's focus had shifted to the making of topographical views of scenes throughout Europe and, beginning in 1866, to reproductions of works of art. The reproduction of paintings, drawings, lithographs, engravings, and sculpture was an important endeavor in France, and photography provided an accurate record. Braun opened a photography studio that became one of the world's largest publishers of such images. In 1869 Braun's was one of only two photographic firms invited to photograph the opening of the Suez Canal in Egypt.Source: The J. Paul Getty Museum
Roy Stryker
United Kingdom
1893 | † 1975
Roy Emerson Stryker was an American economist, government official, and photographer. He headed the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the Great Depression, and launched the documentary photography program of the FSA. It hired photographers to travel across the United States and document people in different areas and settings as part of showing the state of people in rural areas in those years. Specific projects were conceived to help assess effects of government programs. He later worked several years on a documentary project for Standard Oil, established the Pittsburgh Photographic Library (PPL), consulted with other companies, and taught photo-journalism at University of Missouri. In his later years he returned to the West, living at last in Colorado. After serving in the infantry in World War I, Stryker went to Columbia University, where he studied economics. He used photography to illustrate his economics texts and lectures. At Columbia, he worked with Rexford Tugwell. When Tugwell became part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Resettlement Administration, Stryker followed him. Tugwell and Stryker refocused the attention of the Resettlement Administration to document the problems of the heartland, and in 1935 Stryker became the head of the Historical Section (Information Division) of the RA. The RA was renamed as the Farm Security Administration, and Stryker set up the photo-documentary project. Stryker was a manager of the FSA's photographic project. The photographers involved attested to his skill in getting good work from them. He ensure that the photographers were well briefed on their assigned areas before being sent out, and that they were properly funded. However, Stryker has been criticized for his destructive editing, as he would sometimes physically deface negatives by punching holes in them. Stryker also made sure that mainstream publications had access to FSA photographs. This both helped focus public attention on the plight of the rural poor and set up the commercial careers of his photographers. Overall, from 164,000 developed negatives, some 77,000 different finished photographic prints were made for the press, plus 644 color images. Photographers hired by Stryker for the FSA included Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, John Vachon, Marion Post Wolcott, Russell Lee, Jack Delano, Gordon Parks, John Collier, Carl Mydans, and Edwin and Louise Rosskam. During World War II, the photographic unit of the FSA was reassigned to the Office of War Information. It was used to produce what was essentially propaganda and disbanded after a year. At the same time, the US Congress disbanded the FSA. The holdings of the FSA's photographic unit were transferred to the Library of Congress. Stryker resigned from the government. He worked for Standard Oil in its public relations documentary project from 1943 to 1950, hiring some of the photographers he had worked with at FSA. In selecting photographers for projects at Standard Oil (SO), Stryker sought those who possessed what he described as an "insatiable curiosity, the kind that can get to the core of an assignment, the kind that can comprehend what a truck driver, or a farmer, or a driller or a housewife thinks and feels and translate those thoughts and feelings into pictures that can be similarly comprehended by anyone." Photographers on the SO project included, among others: Berenice Abbott, Gordon Parks and Todd Webb; as well as Esther Bubley, Harold Corsini, Russell Lee, Arnold S. Eagle, Elliott Erwitt and Sol Libsohn, who would later follow Stryker to his next project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. After suggesting topics he wanted to be documented, Stryker gave his photographers the freedom to pursue their individual approaches to their subjects. As with all his projects, Stryker was adamant that his staff understand their subjects and their context before going out on an assignment. From 1950 to 1952, Stryker worked to establish the Pittsburgh Photographic Library (PPL). In 1960, the collection was transferred to the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. After leaving the PPL, Stryker directed a documentation project at Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation. Thereafter, he accepted consulting jobs on occasion and conducted seminars on photo-journalism at the Journalism School of University of Missouri. Stryker eventually returned to the West in the 1960s. He died in Grand Junction, Colorado. The Roy Stryker Papers, including manuscripts, correspondence, and vintage prints from the Stryker-directed projects: Farm Security Administration (FSA), the Standard Oil (New Jersey) Co. and Jones & Laughlin Steel, are held in Photographic Archives, Archives and Special Collections, University of Louisville.Source: Wikipedia
Arlene Gottfried
United States
1950 | † 2017
Arlene Harriet Gottfried was a New York City street photographer who was known for recording the candid scenes of ordinary daily life in some of the city's less well-to-do neighborhoods; her work was not widely known until she was in her 50s. Born in Coney Island, she was the daughter of Lillian (Zimmerman), a homemaker, and Max Gottfried, who ran a hardware store with his own father, above which the family lived. Gottfried was the older sister of comedian and actor Gilbert Gottfried (1955–2022). When she was 9, Arlene moved to Crown Heights, where she became heavily influenced by the nearby, fast-growing Puerto Rican community. Later in the 70s, she moved with her Jewish immigrant family to the neighborhoods of Alphabet City and the Lower East Side. When Gottfried was a teenager, her father gave her an old 35 mm camera, which she eventually took to Woodstock, even though she said, "I had no clue what I was doing". She credited her upbringing for giving her the ability to get intimate photographs of strangers: "We lived in Coney Island, and that was always an exposure to all kinds of people, so I never had trouble walking up to people and asking them to take their picture." Gottfried graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology taking photography courses. She worked as a photographer for an advertising agency before freelancing for publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Fortune, Life, the Village Voice, and The Independent (London). She was a habitué of Nuyorican Poets Café, a friend of Miguel Piñero, and on the Lower East Side sang gospel with the Eternal Light Community Singers. In 1991 while on assignment Gottfried photographed the Eternal Light Community Singers, eventually singing with them, as well. Gottfried also sang gospel with the Jerriese Johnson East Village Gospel Choir. In her later years, she published five books of her work: The Eternal Light (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 1999), Midnight (powerHouse 2003), Sometimes Overwhelming (2008), Bacalaitos and Fireworks (powerHouse 2011), and Mommie: Three Generations of Women (powerHouse 2015). Her photographs and archives have been exhibited at the Leica Gallery in New York and Tokyo, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the European House of Photography (MEP), the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the New York Public Library. Gottfried died on August 8, 2017, from complications of breast cancer at her home in Manhattan at the age of 66 surrounded by friends and family.
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