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Doris Ulmann
Doris Ulmann, Selfportrait, circa 1920
Doris Ulmann
Doris Ulmann

Doris Ulmann

Country: United States
Birth: 1882 | Death: 1934

Doris Ulmann was an American photographer, best known for her portraits of the people of Appalachia, particularly craftsmen and musicians, made between 1928 and 1934. Doris Ulmann was a native of New York City, the daughter of Bernhard and Gertrude (Mass) Ulmann. Educated at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, a socially liberal organization that championed individual worth regardless of ethnic background or economic condition and Columbia University, she intended to become a teacher of psychology. Her interest in photography was at first a hobby but after 1918 she devoted herself to the art professionally.

She practiced Pictorialism and was a member of the Pictorial Photographers of America. Ulmann documented the rural people of the South, particularly the mountain peoples of Appalachia and the Gullahs of the Sea Islands, with a profound respect for her sitters and an ethnographer's eye for culture. Ulmann was trained as a pictorialist and graduated from the Clarence H. White School of Modern Photography. Other students of the school who went on to become notable photographers include Margaret Bourke-White, Anne Brigman, Dorothea Lange, Paul Outerbridge, and Karl Struss.

Her work was exhibited in various New York galleries, and published in Theatre Arts Monthly, Mentor, Scribner's Magazine, and Survey Graphic. Ulmann was married for a time to Dr. Charles H. Jaeger, a fellow Pictorialist photographer and an orthopedic surgeon on the staff of Columbia University Medical School and a likely connection for her 1920 Hoeber publication The Faculty of the College of Physicians & Surgeons, Columbia University in the City of New York: Twenty-Four Portraits. This was followed in 1922 by the publication of her Book of Portraits of the Medical Faculty of the Johns Hopkins University; the 1925 A Portrait Gallery of American Editors, and in 1933, Roll, Jordan Roll, the text by Julia Peterkin. The fine art edition of Roll, Jordan Roll is considered to be one of the more beautiful books ever produced.

In an interview with Dale Warren of Bookman, Doris Ulmann referred to her particular interest in portraits. "The faces of men and women in the street are probably as interesting as literary faces, but my particular human angle leads me to men and women who write. I am not interested exclusively in literary faces, because I have been more deeply moved by some of my mountaineers than by any literary person. A face that has the marks of having lived intensely, that expresses some phase of life, some dominant quality or intellectual power, constitutes for me an interesting face. For this reason the face of an older person, perhaps not beautiful in the strictest sense, is usually more appealing than the face of a younger person who has scarcely been touched by life."

Ulmann's early work includes a series of portraits of prominent intellectuals, artists and writers: William Butler Yeats, John Dewey, Max Eastman, Sinclair Lewis, Lewis Mumford, Joseph Wood Krutch, Martha Graham, Anna Pavlova, Paul Robeson, and Lillian Gish. From 1927, Ulmann was assisted on her rural travels by John Jacob Niles, a musician and folklorist who collected ballads while Ulmann photographed. In 1932 Ulmann began her most important series, assembling documentation of Appalachian folk arts and crafts for Allen Eaton's landmark 1937 book, Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands. In failing health, she collapsed in August 1934 while working near Asheville, North Carolina, and returned to New York. Ulmann died August 28, 1934.

Upon Ulmann's death, a foundation she had established took custody of her images. Allen Eaton, John Jacob Niles, Olive Dame Campbell (of the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina), Ulmann's brother-in-law Henry L. Necarsulmer, and Berea schoolteacher Helen Dingman were named trustees. Samuel H. Lifshey, a New York commercial photographer, developed the negatives Ulmann had exposed during her final trip, and then made proof prints from the vast archive of more than 10,000 glass plate negatives. (Lifshey also developed the 2,000 exposed negatives from Ulmann's last expedition, and produced the prints for Eaton's book.) The proof prints were mounted into albums, which were annotated by John Jacob Niles and Allen Eaton, chair of the foundation and another noted folklorist, to indicate names of the sitters and dates of capture.

The Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia organized a major retrospective of her work in 2018 and published the largest book on her work to date. The Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division holds more than 150 photographic prints by Ulmann.

Source: Wikipedia


 

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Philip-Lorca diCorcia
United States
1951
Philip-Lorca diCorcia (born 1951) is an American photographer. He studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Afterwards diCorcia attended Yale University where he received a Master of Fine Arts in Photography in 1979. He now lives and works in New York, and teaches at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. diCorcia's work has been exhibited in group shows in both the United States and Europe since 1977 , he participated in the traveling exhibition Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort, organized by New York's MOMA in 1991. His work was also featured in the 1997 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and, in the 2003 exposition Cruel and Tender at London's Tate Modern. The following year diCorcia’s work was included in Fashioning Fiction in Photography Since 1990 at the MOMA. His most recent series was seen in the Carnegie Museum of Art’s 54th Carnegie International exhibition in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He has also exhibited in Germany (Essen), Spain (Salamanca) and Sweden (Stockholm)[citation needed]. diCorcia received his first solo show in 1985 and from then on he has been featured in one-person exhibitions worldwide, including those at New York's Museum of Modern Art; Paris' Centre National de la Photographie; London's Whitechapel Art Gallery; Madrid's Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía; Tokyo's Art Space Ginza; and Hannover's Sprengel Museum. In March 2009, David Zwirner in New York held an exhibition of one thousand actual-size reproductions of diCorcia's Polaroids, entitled Thousand. Sprüth Magers London showed a series of Philip-Lorca diCorcia's Polaroids in 2011. DiCorcia alternates between informal snapshots and iconic quality staged compositions that often have a baroque theatricality. Using a carefully planned staging, he takes everyday occurrences beyond the realm of banality, trying to inspire in his picture's spectators an awareness of the psychology and emotion contained in real-life situations. His work could be described as documentary photography mixed with the fictional world of cinema and advertising, which creates a powerful link between reality, fantasy and desire. During the late 1970s, during diCorcia's early career, he used to situate his friends and family within fictional interior tableaus, that would make the viewer think that the pictures were spontaneous shots of someone's everyday life, when they were in fact carefully staged and planned in beforehand. He would later start photographing random people in urban spaces all around the world. When in Berlin, Calcutta, Hollywood, New York, Rome and Tokyo, he would often hide lights in the pavement, which would illuminate a random subject in a special way, often isolating them from the other people in the street. His photographs would then give a sense of heightened drama to the passers-by accidental poses, unintended movements and insignificant facial expressions. Even if sometimes the subject appears to be completely detached to the world around him, diCorcia has often used the city of the subject's name as the title of the photo, placing the passers-by back into the city's anonymity. Each of his series, Hustlers, Streetwork, Heads, A Storybook Life, and Lucky Thirteen, can be considered progressive explorations of diCorcia’s formal and conceptual fields of interest. Besides his family, associates and random people he has also photographed personas already theatrically enlarged by their life choices, such as the pole dancers in his latest series. His pictures have black humor within them, and have been described as "Rorschach-like", since they can have a different interpretation depending on the viewer. As they are planned beforehand, diCorcia often plants in his concepts issues like the marketing of reality, the commodification of identity, art, and morality. Source: Wikipedia Philip-Lorca diCorcia is among the most influential and innovative photographers of the past thirty years. Bringing together 125 photographs made from the late-1970s to the present, including selections from all of his distinct series, this exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of diCorcia's work in the United States. DiCorcia's images perch on the lines between fact and fiction, blending a documentary mode with techniques of staged photography. The viewer is often unsure whether a scene has been found or posed by diCorcia, which lends an uncanny quality to the typically mundane imagery the artist presents. Ultimately, his work asks viewers to question the assumed truth of a photograph and to consider alternative ways that images might speak to and represent reality. In the mid-1970s, DiCorcia (born 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut) attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, followed by a Masters of Fine Art in Photography at Yale University. From the very beginning, he pursued a middle ground between two major photographic modes of the period. A modernist documentary style influenced by Walker Evans, Garry Winogrand, and Diane Arbus is evident, but so too is an approach informed by conceptual art, which mobilizes images as cultural archetypes or signs. In all his work, diCorcia captures moments that seem arrested in the chaotic flux of the larger world. From the psychological tension of his staged tableaux to his portraits of pedestrians on city streets to his experimental narrative sequence A Storybook Life, the ultimate effect of diCorcia's photographs is a sense of reality hanging in a threshold, uncertain, unstable, and poetic. Source: www.icaboston.org
Amy Anderson
United States
1977
Amy Anderson is an award-winning portrait photographer living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her work has been exhibited internationally and hangs in local and national galleries, museums and private collections. She has had works acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Florida Photographic Museum. She has received the prestigious Minnesota State Arts Board grant in 2012 and again in 2018 resulting in several solo shows. Funded again in 2021 by the state of Minnesota, she is currently working on a new body of portraits exploring ways to encourage reconnection in her own community after a time of isolation and unrest. Statement I strive to impact my community by creating authentic portraits that explore the universal themes that connect us as humans. My practice has been to live alongside a community and create connection with the people I photograph in hopes of presenting a meaningful image of a an individual to our larger collective community. I have completed several large, multi-year projects including At Risk, With Promise ; a series exploring the challenges and triumphs of at-risk youth in Minnesota. Over the course of this project I explored themes like marginalization and resilience, adolescence and personal growth, disconnection and intersecting identities. At Risk, With Promise culminated in a full and completed body of work that received recognition and was included in many local and national exhibitions. In 2018 with funding from the Minnesota State Arts Board, I began a new body of work exploring these and other themes in the context of several different communities, most significantly the elderly. Working closely with one woman, Rose Kaprelian, allowed me to dig deeper into the everyday realities of this nearly invisible marginalized group. As a nonagenarian in a culture increasingly connected by technologies that are foreign and largely inaccessible, women like Rose face isolation and stagnation as they age. This work is developing to encompass many universal themes from a unique perspective as well as preserving voices that are fading from our collective conversations. During the isolation and uprising in my city in 2020 I continued to make portraits as a way to document and explore the events that changed our world. From window portraits of those who were isolated to protest photos of those who marched, each image was an attempt to connect with my community and explore the changing landscape in which we found ourselves. I continue this exploration daily.
Lucien Clergue
France
1934 | † 2014
Lucien Clergue was born in Arles. From the age of 7, he learned to play the violin. Several years later, his teacher revealed to him that he had nothing more to teach him. From a family of shopkeepers, he could not pursue further studies in a conservatory. In 1949, he learned the rudiments of photography. Four years later, at a corrida in Arles, he showed his photographs to Pablo Picasso who, though subdued, demanded to see others. Within a year and a half, young Clergue worked with the goal of sending photos to Picasso. During this period, he worked on a series of photographs of traveling entertainers, acrobats and harlequins, the Saltimbanques. He also worked on a series whose subject was carrion. On 4 November 1955, Lucien Clergue visited Picasso in Cannes. Their friendship lasted near 30 years until the death of the Master. The book, Picasso my Friend retraces the important moments of their relation. Clergue has taken many photographs of the gypsies of southern France, and he was instrumental in propelling the guitarist Manitas de Plata to fame. In 1968 he founded, along with his friend Michel Tournier the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival which is held in Arles in July. His works was presented during the festival from 1971–1973, 1975, 1979, 1982–1986, 1989, 1991, 1993, 1994, 2000, 2003, 2007. Clergue has illustrated books, among these a book by writer Yves Navarre. Clergue’s photographs are in the collections of numerous well-known museums and private collectors. His photographs have been exhibited in over 100 solo exhibitions worldwide, with noted exhibitions such as 1961, Museum of Modern Art New York, the last exhibition organized by Edward Steichen with Lucien Clergue, Bill Brandt and Yasuhiro Ishimoto. Museums with extensive inventory of photographs by Lucien Clergue include The Fogg Museum at Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His photographs of Jean Cocteau are on permanent display at the Jean Cocteau Museum in Menton, France. In the US, the exhibition of photographs of Jean Cocteau was premiered by Westwood Gallery, New York City. In 2007, the city of Arles honored Lucien Clergue and dedicated a retrospective collection of 360 his photographs dating from 1953 to 2007. He also received the 2007 Lucie Award. He is named knight of the Légion d'honneur in 2003 and elected member of the Academy of Fine Arts of the Institute of France on 31 May 2006, on the creation of a new section dedicated to photography. Clergue is the first photographer to enter the Academy to a seat devoted to photography.Source: Wikipedia (…) Until I saw Picasso…I lived in the most perfect solitude and did my work without thinking of anything beyond that. After seeing Picasso and being received by him in Cannes when he repeated: “I’ve never seen anything like it, I’ve never seen anything like it”, I thought, or rather I let myself be convinced that despite my 21 years the time had perhaps come to begin showing my work. -- Correspondence Jean Cocteau, Lucien Clergue Lucien Clergue frequented Pablo Picasso for twenty years, being received on numerous occasions at his villa the California, in Cannes and at Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins where he made his last portrait of the artist in 1971, two years before his death. Picasso, enthusiastic about Clergue’s images of dead animals and the circus children, considered him to be a greater photographer than Henri Cartier Bresson, and complimented him by saying: Clergue’s photographs are the good Lord’s sketchbooks! Or again was quoted in one of Cocteau’s lettres to Clergue, dated 1956: Picasso told me… his complete admiration for your series Stomachs. “You could, he said, sign Renoir”. Thanks to Picasso, the young photographer was able to meet not only Jean Cocteau, but also the historian and art collector Douglas Cooper, who opened up his extraordinary collection of books and artworks to the young man, avid for visual stimulation. Picasso’s generosity to Clergue and his admiration for the work of the budding photographer resulted in many collaborations, notably Picasso’s illustration for the cover of Corps mémorable in 1957, where Clergue’s images accompanied Paul Eluard’s poems; or again, the poster for Clergue’s first exhibition in Cologne in 1958 and then the cover for the book Poesie der Photographie in 1960.Source: lucien-clergue.com
Deba Prasad Roy
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