Florence Henri was a surrealist artist born in New York City 1893, to a French father and a German mother. She left the United States permanently at age two, following the death of her mother in 1895. Henri and her father began traveling for his work as a director of a petroleum company. She spent her [...]
“I didn’t choose photography; it chose me. I didn’t know it at the time. An artist doesn’t think first then do it, he is driven.” - Ilse Bing Ilse Bing was an American-German photojournalist and commercial photographer born in 1899 to a Jewish family, she went on to study at universities in Frankfurt and Vienna. She [...]
Jérôme Liebling was an American photographer, director and teacher, he was born on April 14th, 1924 in Harlem and died on July 27th, 2011 in Northampton, Massachusetts. He grew up in poverty in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn. In 1942, Liebling dropped out during the first semester from the Brooklyn University and joined the Second [...]
“I’m the damned soul of my damned camera, and God, how it hates me sometimes” - George Platt Lynes George Platt Lynes is recognized today as a master of 20th century photography, influencing artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Herb Ritts. Though Lynes was commercially successful in New York fashion and portrait photography, his art [...]
“My greatest aim has been to advance the art of photography and to make it what I think I have, a great and truthful medium of history.” - Matthew Brady Referred to as the father of photojournalism, Mathew Brady was born in 1823, near Lake George, New York, U.S. Well-known in the 19th-century this American photographer was celebrated [...]
Henry Hamilton Bennett was born in Farnham, Lower Canada. In 1857, at the age of 14, Bennett moved with his father and uncle to Wisconsin. They settled in Kilbourn City, today known as Wisconsin Dells, and Henry worked as a carpenter in the town. After the outbreak of the American Civil War, Bennett joined the army and fought [...]
“Pictorialism never really had the same interest for me as the real snapshot - that is, people and things as the man on the street sees them.” - Paul Martin Paul Augustus Martin was born in Herbeuville, France in 1864 in Alsace-Lorraine, but in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war and experiencing dire poverty during the Paris Commune fled [...]
‘I’d rather stalk with a camera than a gun’ - Toni Frissell Born in 1907, Antoinette Frissell Bacon better known as Toni Frissell was a native New York city photographer known for her fashion photography, World War II photographs, and portraits of famous Americans, Europeans, children, and women from all walks of life. When Frissell [...]
"I believe in functional photography because it has the quality of extreme clarity and to the audience a vivid realism. Documentation of a social scene is one of the functions to which photography is particularly well adapted." - Sol Libsohn A New Yorker by birth, Mr. Libsohn taught himself how to take pictures after [...]
“Photography is like life. What does it all mean? I don’t know, but you get an impression, a feeling... I’m very suspicious of people who say they know what it means.” - Leonard Freed Born in Brooklyn, New York, to working-class Jewish parents of Eastern European descent, Leonard Freed first wanted to become a painter. [...]
