Masters of Photography

Thursday, October 27, 2011

William Coupon

"William Coupon, Self Portrait"

William Coupon personal web site

William Coupon portfolio on 100 Eyes Photographers

William Coupon figure studies on Photoicon

William Coupon portfolio on Rock, Paper, Photo

From Still Life Series

From Traditional Hatians Series

From Places Series

"Wheel Twirl, Carnival, Maryland"

"The Bellagio, Las Vegas"

"Holiday Inn, Las Vegas"

From Portrait Series

From Native Americans Series

I want to thank William Coupon for his kind permission, allowing me to share his work here on my Masters of Photography blog.

Willaim Coupon biography from his web site:

My first photographs were photographs that talked – called "audiographs" – which were photographs that had looped cassettes behind a framed image, and photographs that moved – called "kinetographs" – which were photographs that were attached to moving motors. The "kinetographs" were commissioned for window displays at Bloomingdale’s in the late l970’s. I photographed a documentary on Studio 54, the legendary New York disco, in late summer l978, and they immediately were included in the International Center of Photography exhibition: "Fleeting Gestures: Treasures of Dance Photography."

I became interested in formal studio portraits in 1979 while observing it’s lower Manhattan youth (my peers) and it’s present counter-culture, and decided early on to use a single-light source and simple mottled backdrop, and when I needed to, I would set this up as a portable studio, one highly mobile. This was then used to document global sub-cultures. Many of the projects – referred to as "Social Studies" – became documents of indigenous people. These include projects on Haiti, Australian Aboriginals, Native Americans, Scandinavian Laplanders, Israeli Druzim, Moroccan Berbers, Spanish Gypsies, Turkish Kurds, Central African Pygmy, and Panamanian Cuna and Chocoe. These projects also included Death Row Inmates, Drag Queens, and Cowboys. Stylistically, they were always photographed formally on the backdrop, and contextually, or environmentally , with 2 1/4 Rolleiflex black and white images, which were meant to be companions to the studio portraits.

Willaim Coupon biography from Wikipedia:

William Coupon (born December 3, 1952) is an American photographer, born in New York City, known principally for his formal painterly backdrop portraits of tribal people, politicians and celebrities.

William Coupon was born in New York City, but moved to Washington, D.C. and later to San Francisco. He attended Syracuse University and ultimately moved to New York City to begin his photographic career. He began in 1979 to photograph backdrop portraits of New York’s youth culture, to document its “New Wave/Punk” scene at the then popular Mudd Club in lower Manhattan. Commercial work soon followed for a variety of international magazines, record companies and advertising agencies.

The portrait style is up-close and painterly, with very warm earth tones against a mottled canvas. The style is usually medium-shot and classically lit using medium format cameras, referencing the Dutch painting masters such as Rembrandt and Holbein. The portraits have a quality about them that is less about fashion than about personality and as groups there is attempt to show their disparity as well what is relatable amongst the earth’s faces in a manner that is real, non-compromising, or over-glamorized. They were often accompanied by environmental images, which have a noticeably journalistic feel.

Some of his most notable images are of the Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton (which were “Person of the Year” covers for Time Magazine), Yasser Arafat, George Harrison, Willy DeVille, Mick Jagger, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Miles Davis.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Hannah Höch

"Hannah Höch with Dada Dolls," 1920

"I wish to blur the firm boundaries which we self-certain people tend to delineate around all we can achieve."

"Da Dandy," 1919

"And Why Do You Think the Moon Is Setting," 1921

"Love in the Bush," 1925

"Indian Female Cancer," 1930

"Grotesque," 1963

Hannah Höch books on Art Books

Hannah Höch auction results on Art Facts

Hannah Höch collection on Art Fortune

Hannah Höch collection on Images! Come See the Art

Hannah Höch on Luminous-Lint

Hannah Höch Photomontages from The University of Chicago Collection

Hannah Höch video by Artpopulus on You Tube

Hannah Höch biography from the review of "The Photomontages of Hannah Höch" by Missy Finger, Co-Director, Photographs Do Not Bend Gallery, Dallas, Taxas. Featured are essays by Peter Boswell, Maria Makela, Carolyn Lanchner.

Hannah Höch, an artist mostly known as the sole female member of the Berlin DADA movement, was a pioneer of photomontage. The complex imagery of her montage work explores her fragmented life as a woman within a male dominated art movement and pre-war and post-war society in Germany. The book was published in conjunction with an exhibition which specifically chronicles her artistic career in photomontage, even though she was working with other media such as painting, water-color, and drawing throughout her life. The exhibition was organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and traveled to The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) and the Los Angeles County Museum afterwards last year.

The extraordinary book includes three essays that analyze Höch's career from pre-World War II Germany to post-war Germany, with over 100 color reproductions of the montages, a great asset to this book. It also includes a fully illustrated chronology of Höch's life.

The term photomontage is a term coined by the Berlin Dadaists that translates as a piecing together of photographic and typographic sources. The exhibition included the most memorable and largest photomontage (44 7/8 x 35 7/16 inches) from her DADA years, Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die Letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany) from 1919-1920. This belongs to the National Gallery, Berlin, and was seen only in the MOMA venue in New York.

Berlin DADA members included Raoul Hausmann, Hannah's lover for seven years, John Heartfield, George Grosz, Johannes Baader, and Richard Huelsenbeck. The group dealt with social and political issues in their art with a zest for breaking conventions. Painting was bourgeois and their anti-art generated new media including found objects. It is interesting to note that Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann developed the montage idea while on vacation in 1918 in a town on the Baltic Sea, Heidebrink. There they found a technique of engraving which placed photographic portraits of heads of local men away at war atop a generic, uniformed torso.

Tracing Höch's career as a DADA member, the book asserts the fact that her male counterparts marginalized her participation. This was during the time in Europe that women were given suffrage, magazines were being published for women, and Höch was using this epochal time as material for her art.The rigid gender roles are toyed with in a destructive manner, often placing a woman's head or legs on a male body, and vice versa.

In the post-war era, she infuses African art in her Ethnographic Museum series we note that women are justaposed with primitive imagery, relating women's slow progress in contemporary German culture. An interesting example of this period of work can be seen at the Modern Art Museum of Ft. Worth, Liebe im Busch 1925 (Love in the Bush).

Höch was born in the small town of Gotha in 1889. She later pursued the applied arts, rather than fine arts, as a more practical career choice for a woman at that time.She was employed by Ullstein Press designing dress and embroidery patterns for Die Dame (The Lady) and Die praktische Berlinerin (The Practical Berlin Woman). Working for the company that publishes BIZ, Der Querschnitt and Uhu, gave Höch the source material for her montage work. The exhibition book sometimes illustrates the original photograph that Höch used for a particular montage, giving us the advantage of seeing her clever, but complex manipulation of form and images.

Her art throughout her life reflects many influences of style, from constructivism to surrealism to futurism. We can see the roots of Robert Rauschenberg's massive scale collages of the sixties, and we can also appreciate that Pop Art has its roots in DADA.

Later montages by Höch become less cutting, more humorous. She inscribes at the bottom of a drawing from 1969, Dank für die Zeitschriften (Thanks for the magazines)--the source for these photomontages that are published in this scholarly book and exhibition.

For people associated with the Goethe Center, it might be interesting to note that in 1985, the West German government showcased Hannah Höch in a program of traveling exhibitions to introduce 20th Century German art to non-German audiences, the New York Goethe House being one venue in 1992. Now there are several books written about Höch in the English language. Many of the collages illustrated in this book were selected from the collections of the following German museums: Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum Für Moderne Kunst, Photographie und Architektur, Berlin; Staatliche Museen Zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett; Institut Für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart; and the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg.

More information about Hannah Höch can be found in the following publications: Hannah Höch, 1889-1978: Collages (Foreign Cultural Relations, Stuttgart, 1985); Cut with the Kitchen Knife: Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch (Yale University, 1993); and Three Berlin Artists of the Weimar Era: Hannah Höch, Käthe Kollwitz, Jeanne Mammen (Des Moines Art Center, 1994). All these books are reviewed by Jean Owens Schaefer in the Fall/Winter 1997 issue of Woman's Art Journal.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Anne W. Brigman

Self Portrait

Anne W. Brigman Auction Results on Artnet

Anne W. Brigman Collection at The George Eastman House Archive

Anne W. Brigman Portfolio: Intimate Circles, Women in the Arts

Anne W. Brigman Portfolio: The J. Paul Getty Museum

Anne W. Brigman Portfolio at The Lee Gallery

Anne W. Brigman Portfolio at Luminous Lint

Anne W. Brigman Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Anne W. Brigman Gallery: Woman Artists of the American West

"The Watcher," 1908

"Figure in the Landscape," 1923

"Tranquility," 1929

"Sancturay," 1921

"The Breeze," 1910

"Spirit of Photography," 1908

"Souls of the Weeping Rock," 1910

Anne W. Brigman biography from Wikipedia:

Anne Wardrope (Nott) Brigman (1869–1950) was an American photographer and one of the original members of the Photo-Secession movement in America. Her most famous images were taken between 1900 and 1920, and depict nude women in primordial, naturalistic contexts.

Brigman was born in the Nuuanu Valley above Honolulu, Hawaii on 3 December 1869. She was the oldest of eight children born to Mary Ellen Andrews Nott, whose parents has moved to Hawaii as missionaries in 1828. Her father, Samuel Nott, was from Gloucester, England. When she was sixteen her family moved to Los Gatos, California, and nothing is known about why they moved or what they did after arriving in California. In 1894 she married a sea captain, Martin Brigman. She accompanied her husband on several voyages to the South Seas, returning to Hawaii at least once.

After 1900 she stopped traveling with her husband and became active in the growing bohemian community of the San Francisco Bay area. She was close friends with the writer Jack London and the poet and naturalist Charles Keeler. Perhaps seeking her own artistic outlet, she began photographing in 1901. Soon she was exhibiting in local photographic salons, and within two years she had developed a reputation as a master of pictorial photography. In late 1902 she came across a copy of Camera Work and was captivated by the images and the writings of Alfred Stieglitz. She wrote Stieglitz praising him for the journal, and Stieglitz in turn soon became captivated with Brigman's photography. In 1902 he listed her as an official member of the Photo-Secession, which, because of Stieglitz's notoriously high standards and because of her distance from the other members in New York, is a significant indicator of her artistic status. In 1906 she was listed as a Fellow of the Photo-Secession, the only photographer west of the Mississippi to be so honored.

From 1903 to 1908 Stieglitz exhibited Brigman's photos many times, and her photos were printed in three issues of Stieglitz's journal Camera Work. During this same period he often exhibited and corresponded under the name "Annie Brigman", but in 1911 she dropped the "i" and was known from then on as "Anne". Although she was well known for her artistic work, she did not do any commercial or portrait work like some of her comptemporaries. In 1910 she and her husband separated, and she moved into a house with her mother. By 1913 she was living alone "in a tiny cabin...with a red dog...and 12 tame birds". She continued to exhibit for many years and was included in the landmark International Exhibition at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in New York in 1911 and the Internation Exhibition of Pictorial Photography in San Francisco in 1922.

In California, she became revered by West Coast photographers and her photography influenced many of her contemporaries. Here, she was also known as an actress in local plays, and as a poet performing both her own work and more popular pieces such as Enoch Arden. An admirer of the work of George Wharton James, she photographed him on at least one occasion.

She continued photography through the 1940s, and her work evolved from a pure pictorial style to more of a straight photography approach, although she never really abandoned her original vision. Her later close-up photos of sandy beaches and vegetation are fascinating abstractions in black-and-white. In the mid-1930s she also began taking creative writing classes, and soon she was writing poetry. Encouraged by her writing instructor, she put together a book of her poems and photographs call Songs of a Pagan. She found a publisher for the book in 1941, but because of World War II the book was not printed until 1949, one year before she died. Brigman died on 8 February 1950 at her sister's home in El Monte, California.

Brigman's photographs frequently focused on the female nude, dramatically situated in natural landscapes or trees. Many of her photos were taken in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in carefully selected locations and featuring elaborately staged poses. Brigman often featured herself as the subject of her images. After shooting the photographs, she would extensively touch up the negatives with paints, pencil, or superimposition.

Brigman's deliberately counter-cultural images suggested bohemianism and female liberation. Her work challenged the establishment's cultural norms and defied convention, instead embracing pagan antiquity. The raw emotional intensity and barbaric strength of her photos contrasted with the carefully calculated and composed images of Stieglitz and other modern photographers.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Jimmy Williams

"Before I lift my camera, I always open myself up to the moment and trust my emotions to dictate and inspire a compelling story. Whether I’m shooting a portrait or a landscape, my purpose always remains the same: to establish a connection with the subject and to produce utterly 'real' moments. The emotions are raw. Sometimes private. Always Honest."

Jimmy Williams Facebook Page

Jimmy Williams: Fine Art Photography

Jimmy Williams portfolio at The Open Shutter Gallery

Jimmy Williams Photography

"James," 2004

"Cool John Ferguson II," 2007

"Pat "Mother Blues" Cohen II," 2010

"Church Steeple, France," 2008

"Camper, South Core Banks, North Carolina," 2009

"Woman in Lobby," 2003

"Michela, Poggibonsi, Italy," 2007

"Sam and Charlie," 2005

"Captain Underpants, In Action," 2005

I want to thank Jimmy Williams for his kind cooperation and permission to reporduce his work on my Masters of Photography blog.

Jimmy Williams biography:

Jimmy Williams is a fine art and assignment photographer based in Raleigh, NC. He studied visual design at North Carolina State University, and shortly thereafter, opened an independent studio where he established himself as a successful and award-winning assignment photographer. Now, more than thirty years later, Williams devotes much of his time to personal photography endeavors, nurturing and maturing his photography into significant bodies of work. Two of Williams’ series, “Music Makers” and “Our Waters”, are presently on solo exhibit at the Block Gallery in Raleigh, NC and The Contemporary Art Center of Virginia respectively. Williams’ work is also permanently represented at John Cleary Gallery in Houston, TX, and Open Shutter Gallery in Durango, CO.

Williams has been honored with an Excellence Award by Color Magazine, Merit of Excellence for Nature Photography at the Masters Cup Awards; Outstanding Achievement in Photography at the International Spider Awards and 2nd place Deeper Perspective Photographer of the year at the Lucie Awards Gala at the Lincoln Center, NYC. Other recent accolades include: 1st place at Center’s Singular Image Awards, Fine Art Photographer of the Year at The International Spider Awards 2004, and editorial features in Lenswork, Rangefinder, Photo District News, B&W, Color, Communication Arts, and Graphis.

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Brian Duffy

"Self Portrait,"

Duffy Photographer, 1933-2010

BBC Documentary: Duffy, The Man Who Shot the Sixties

Chris Duffy rembers his father: BBC Radio London interview with Robert Elms

Brian Duffy Google portfolio

Preview from the Daily Mail of 2009 Brian Duffy retrospective in Chris Beetles London gallery

"Reggie Kray and Grandson,"

"Jane Birkin,"

"Twiggy,"

"Jean Shrimpton,"

"Joanna Lumley and Son,"

"David Bowie,"

"Sammy Davis, Jr. and May Britt,"

"Keith Waterhouse,"

"John Lennon,"

I want to thank Chris Duffy and The Duffy Archive for their kind cooperation and permission to reporduce Brian Duffy's work on my Masters of Photography blog.

Brian Duffy biography and obituary from The Telegraph:

Brian Duffy, the photographer who has died aged 76, was a central figure in the visual revolution that echoed the wider changes in British society during the 1960s.

With David Bailey and Terence Donovan, he formed what was dubbed the "Black Trinity" by Norman Parkinson, the photographer whose pastoral style seemed to embody all that the young trio wanted to challenge. If Bailey was the most creative of them, and Donovan the most amusing, the art school-trained Duffy was the most provocative and intellectual. "Before 1960 the fashion photographer was tall, thin and camp," he reflected. "But we three were different: short, fat and heterosexual."

Their outlook helped to replace a fashion Establishment built on deference with one that worshipped youth and celebrity: the people who wore the clothes became as important as the garments themselves. Influenced by Duffy's street-based locations, magazine images also started to reflect a more real, more urban way of living than the idealised fantasies of Irving Penn or Cecil Beaton. Above all, they were more sexualised. Famously, Duffy shot an article for Nova entitled "How to undress for your husband", using a model – Amanda Lear – whose true gender was then the subject of much gossip.

Many of those whom he photographed – Terence Stamp, Christine Keeler, Harold Wilson, the models Paulene Stone and Jean Shrimpton – have since come to be seen as defining personalities of the decade. Duffy's pictures of them, however, have not.

Characteristically, this was the result largely of Duffy's refusal to treat with the world on any terms but his own. In 1979, having solved most of the technical problems that had originally interested him in the medium, and tired by its increasing commercialisation by advertising firms, he burned the greater part of his archive in the garden of his studio in Primrose Hill. He did not take another photograph for three decades.

He had never showed at a gallery or collected his images in a book, and the growing nostalgia for (and boom in value of) his contemporaries' work during the last 20 years passed him by. Duffy instead devoted that time to restoring Georgian furniture, and it was only last year that he allowed his son to organise an exhibition in London of what had survived the bonfire.

Brian Duffy was born on June 15 1933 in North London but grew up, as the eldest of four children, in East Ham. His parents were Irish Catholics, his father being a cabinet-maker who had been imprisoned for his involvement with the IRA. During the war years, following a brief period as an evacuee taken in by the actor Roger Livesey, Duffy roamed the bomb sites of London.

Then, at 12, he was sent to a progressive school in South Kensington which aimed to draw latent creativity out of troublesome children by exposing them to the arts. Frequent trips to the National Gallery fostered a love of painting in Duffy, and in 1950 he won a place at Central Saint Martin's. He was quickly intimidated by the talent of his fellow pupils – though not before grasping the need for artists to portray themselves as intellectuals – and switched to fashion design. This would later help him when photographing clothes, as he knew how they were constructed.

In 1955 he was offered an apprenticeship with Balenciaga in Paris, but the news of the imminent arrival of his first child necessitated his seeking steadier employment. He began working as a fashion illustrator for Harper's Bazaar, but, after seeing a contact sheet of photographs on a desk, thought them an easier way to make money and "to make women look good".

By 1957 he had found a post at British Vogue. The first job he was given was to take a portrait of Otto Klemperer, the conductor. As he was leaving, Klemperer asked Duffy if he usually left the lens cap on while shooting. But the darkroom covered for his error by pretending to spoil the film and Duffy was given a second chance.

With the support of Audrey Withers, the magazine's politically radical editor, and of Clare Rendlesham, its aristocratic but forward-thinking fashion editor, Duffy quickly prospered. His simpler style and youthful aesthetic became that of the magazine, whilst paradoxically infusing photography with something of the glamour hitherto reserved for the cinema.

Yet, though keenly aware of his market value, Duffy was not contented simply by success. In 1963 he left Vogue so that he could work from his own studio, and two years later began a long association with French Elle, whose artistic leanings corresponded more closely to his own. Meanwhile, with David Puttnam as his agent, he took on more advertising work.

One memorable campaign was for Benson & Hedges cigarettes. Influenced by Magritte, and playing on the brand's gold colour, the packet was seen instead of a canary in a cage, or as a lump of cheese outside a mouse hole. In the days before computer-aided editing techniques, the pictures presented considerable problems of scale and lighting. If the playful imagery exemplified Duffy's visual style, then perfectionism, to the point of intimidating assistants and models, characterised his approach to work.

Other significant commissions included two calendars for Pirelli, in 1965 and 1973, the latter a collaboration with the artist Allen Jones, although the two fell out over the degree of latitude Duffy gave himself in realising Jones's preliminary sketches. Duffy also shot the covers for three of David Bowie's albums, most notably Aladdin Sane (1973), which amply reflected the singer's theatricality.

Duffy's growing disillusion with photography was signalled as early as the late Sixties, when he set up a film production company with the novelist Len Deighton, a friend from art school. It made both Only When I Larf (1968) and the musical Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), but Duffy found that he had little time for the self-indulgences of actors.

Brian Duffy, who died on May 31, is survived by his wife June and their two sons and two daughters.