Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty Foundation

Eudora Welty as Photographer from Smithsonian.com

From Biography.com:

(born April 13, 1909, Jackson, Mississippi, U.S.—died July 23, 2001, Jackson) American short-story writer and novelist whose work is mainly focused with great precision on the regional manners of people inhabiting a small Mississippi town that resembles her own birthplace and the Delta country.

Welty attended Mississippi State College for Women before transferring to the University of Wisconsin, from which she graduated in 1929. During the Great Depression she was a photographer on the Works Progress Administration's Guide to Mississippi, and photography remained a lifelong interest. Photographs (1989) is a collection of many of the photographs she took for the WPA. She also worked as a writer for a radio station and newspaper in her native Jackson, Mississippi, before her fiction won popular and critical acclaim.

Welty's first short story was published in 1936, and thereafter her work began to appear regularly, first in little magazines such as the Southern Review and later in major periodicals such as The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker. Her readership grew steadily after the publication of A Curtain of Green (1941; enlarged 1979), a volume of short stories that contains two of her most anthologized stories—“The Petrified Man” and “Why I Live at the P.O.” In 1942 her short novel The Robber Bridegroom was issued, and in 1946 her first full-length novel, Delta Wedding. Her later novels include The Ponder Heart (1954), Losing Battles (1970), and The Optimist's Daughter (1972), which won a Pulitzer Prize. The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943), The Golden Apples (1949), and The Bride of Innisfallen and Other Stories (1955) are collections of short stories, and The Eye of the Story (1978) is a volume of essays. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty was published in 1980.

Welty's main subject is the intricacies of human relationships, particularly as revealed through her characters' interactions in intimate social encounters. Among her themes are the subjectivity and ambiguity of people's perception of character and the presence of virtue hidden beneath an obscuring surface of convention, insensitivity, and social prejudice. Welty's outlook is hopeful, and love is viewed as a redeeming presence in the midst of isolation and indifference. Her works combine humour and psychological acuity with a sharp ear for regional speech patterns.

One Writer's Beginnings, an autobiographical work, was published in 1984. Originating in a series of three lectures given at Harvard, it beautifully evoked what Welty styled her “sheltered life” in Jackson and how her early fiction grew out of it.

Nancy Rexroth

Nancy Rexroth at the Robert Mann Gallery

Review from New York Times:

It is easy to imagine discovering Nancy Rexroth's haunting and beautiful photographs in an old album in your parents' attic. They look as if a child in the 1950's took the photographs with a new Brownie camera. Images of empty, strangely luminous bedrooms, old clapboard houses, children at play and views of a small town are blurry and often obliquely framed, as if they been made by someone na?ly experimenting with a camera for the first time.

In fact, Ms. Rexroth created the series titled ''Iowa'' from 1971 to 1976, when she was in her late 30's. She used a toy camera called a Diana, and though she shot all the pictures in rural Ohio, she wanted to evoke memories of her childhood in Iowa in the late 1940's and early 50's. As much as they are about autobiographical memory and nostalgia, however, her pictures are about the talismanic role played by photographs in the emotional lives of modern people. Soon Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince and countless other simulators and appropriators would begin to explore what and how photographs of all types mean and feel, and photography about photography would eventually become a familiar academic genre. Anticipating that trend, Ms. Rexroth's ''Iowa'' still feels like something poetically rich and urgently new.

 KEN JOHNSON

Minor White

Minor White Portfolio: Masters-of-Photography

From Profotos.com:

Minor White was an American photographer, educator, poet and a critic. He was recognized for this intense commitment of photography and his vision. Minor White was a textural photographer. Textural photographs are pictures of items such as a bush, a tree, cracks in the road, or even a rusted up car.

Minor White was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1908. He studied botany at the University of Minnesota and worked for a few years on odd jobs before he started concentrating on photography. He worked as a photographer for the Works Progress Administration in Oregon from 1938 to 1939. From 1942 to 1945 he served as an infantryman in the Philippines. In 1945, White did his studies with Edward Weston, which was extremely intense due to the tonal beauty of his photographs. He then proceeded to work on a tenure with Alfred Steiglitz. It was at this time when White's photographs began to reflect on spiritual issues, including Roman Catholicism, Zen Buddhism, and mysticism.White believed that taking photographs and examining photographs was a spiritual act.

In 1945, White moved to New York City, where he studied at the University of Columbia. In 1946 he was united with the faculty of the California School of Fine arts where he worked as an assistant to Ansel Adams. While working with Adams, White co-founded the magazine 'Aperture' with Adams, Lange, and Beaumont and Newhall. White eventually succeeded Adams and became the Director of the California School of Fine Arts. From 1953 through 1965, White worked at the Eastman House and taught at the Rochester Institute of Photography. White edited much of Aperture during these years and much of his significant work was produced during this period, including "Windowsill." In 1965, White became professor of photography at the Massachussets Institute of Technology (MIT), where he served until 1976 when he passed away.

White's nature studies are so devotedly observed abstractions. However, to the male nude figure study, he brought a lyrical passion, and unmatched eroticism. White's writings emphasized and promoted his ideas as in Mirrors, Messages, and Manifestation. Undoubtedly, Minor White's work in photography altered the medium forever.

George Tice

George Tice at 70: From Gallery 270

George Tice Amish Collection: From After Image Gallery

From The J. Paul Getty Museum:

Tice was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey--the state in which his ancestors had settled generations earlier. At fourteen, he joined a camera club. A turning point in his self-training happened two years later, when a professional photographer critiquing club members' work praised his picture of an alleyway. Tice briefly studied commercial photography at Newark Vocational and Technical High School; he then joined the Navy. A published image he made of an explosion aboard an American ship caught the eye of photographer Edward Steichen, who purchased it for The Museum of Modern Art. For about a decade, Tice worked as a portrait photographer and helped establish a gallery. That success enabled him to concentrate on personal projects.

In the 1960s, Tice shifted from smaller camera formats to larger ones, which enabled him to craft carefully toned and detailed prints. He portrayed traditional Amish and Shaker communities, as well as the hard lives of fishermen in Maine. In the 1970s, Tice began exploring his home state. Those photographs formed the beginnings of his Urban Landscapes series, which he worked on until the year 2000. His publications include: Fields of Peace: A Pennsylvania German Album (1970), Paterson, New Jersey (1972), Seacoast Maine: People and Places (1973), Urban Landscapes: A New Jersey Portrait (1975), and Hometowns: An American Pilgrimage (1988). Tice has taught at the Maine Photographic Workshops since 1977.

David Octavius Hill

David Octavius Hill

From Answers.com:

Scottish photographers. David Octavius Hill (b. 1802, Perth, Perthshire, Scot. — d. May 17, 1870, Newington, near Edinburgh), originally a painter, was a founding member of the Royal Scottish Academy and its secretary for 40 years. In 1843 he enlisted the help of Robert Adamson (b. 1821, Berunside, Scot. — d. January 1848, St. Andrews), a chemist experienced in photography, in photographing the delegates to the founding convention of the Free Church of Scotland. They used the calotype process, by which an image was developed from a paper negative. In these and other portraits they demonstrated a masterly sense of form and composition and a dramatic use of light and shade. Their five-year partnership resulted in some 3,000 photographs, including many views of Edinburgh and small fishing villages. Before Adamson died at age 27, they produced some of the greatest photographic portraits of the 19th century.