Famous Photographers
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Eddie Adams
Felice Beato
Robert Capa
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Walker Evans
Roger Fenton
Lewis Hine
Dorothea Lange
Helen Levitt
James Nachtwey
Eddie Adams was born on June 12, 1933. Adams “as a photojournalist, covered 13 wars.” When he was taking photographs of the Vietnam War he took his most famous photograph, a photograph of a “General…executing [a] Viet Cong Captain.” Because of this photograph “Adams won a Pulitzer Price and a World Press Photo award.” He “died [on September 19, 2004] in New York City from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.”
Source: Wikipedia
Source: Wikipedia
Felice Beato was born in c. 1825 or c. 1834; it is not clear when he was born. Beato “was a British and Italian photographer.” Beato “was one of the first photographers to take pictures in East Asia and one of the first war photographers.” Most of the time he took photographs of landscape featuring “Asia and the Mediterranean region.” He traveled a lot and because of this he had the opportunity to take photographs that were “powerful and lasting images of countries, people and events that were unfamiliar and remote to most people in Europe and North America.” Beato’s “photographs represent the first substantial oeuvre of what came to be called photojournalism. Beato “predominantly produced albumen silver prints,” but he also did “hand-colour photographs and made panoramas,” these techniques he “pioneered and refined.” Because he hand-coloured his photographs he was “frequently misattributed to Stillfried & Andersen.” Beato was also confused with his brother Antonio Beato because they both worked together and shared a signature. Beato died in 1907 but it is not known exactly when.
Source: Wikipedia
Source: Wikipedia
Robert Capa was born as Ernest Andrei Friedmann in 1913 in Budapest. He “covered five different wars: the Spanish civil war, the Japanese invasion of China, World War II across Europe, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the First Indochina War.” He photographed these five wars because he always was there at the right time at the right moment. He worked for Collier’s Weekly and also for Life Magazine. He founded Magnum Photos in 1947, with team work of some of his friends.
Source: Wikipedia
Source: Wikipedia
Henri Cartier-Bresson was born on August 22, 1908 in Chanteloup-en-Brie, France. Cartier-Bresson “was commonly considered the undisputed master if candid photography,” and was also “considered by most to be the father of photojournalism.” Cartier-Bresson “develop[ed] the photojournalistic ‘street photography,’” this technique influenced other photographers of that time and still today. Cartier-Bresson “believed in composing his photographs in his camera and not in the darkroom,” he not only believed in this but took action by “print[ing] at full-frame and completely free of any manipulation.” His family was very wealthy which permitted him to have the education that he wanted and study what he wanted in depth. He decided to paint and leave photography behind. He painted for a while, and then in 1931 he saw a photograph by Martin Munkacsi and began photographing again. Inspired by the photographed he said “I suddenly understood that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant.” He was inspired by other photographers and took his job very seriously. He “was first published as a photojournalist in 1937 when he was assigned to cover the coronation of King George VI,” he took these photographs “for the French weekly Regards.” Cartier-Bresson also took photographs for the “French Communist’s evening paper, Ce Soir.” He quit that job and joined the French Army because he was not a communist, and he became a captive and tried to escape, but it took him a long time to succeed. When he escaped he kept on taking photographs of World War II, “working with the underground photographic unit recording the Nazi occupation and the liberations.” He took photographs “of Gandhi’s death in India in 1948 and the Maoist revolution in China in 1949,” for this he was recognized as a photojournalist. He was known to have “become the first Western photographer to photograph ‘freely’ in the post-war Soviet Union.” Cartier-Bresson died “in Cereste on August 3, 2004 at the age of 95.”
Source: Wikipedia
Source: Wikipedia
Walker Evens was born in November 3, 1903 in St. Louis, Missouri. He worked for the Farm Security Administration, and like Dorothea he “document[ed] the effects of the Great Depression.” He not only documented the Great Depression but “he also focuses on the landscapes and architecture around him” He photographed “Cuba during the revolt against dictator Machado.” He published Let Us Praise Famous Men that included his work from the documentation of the Great Depression and other works. His photographs were like Dorothea’s; they were “icons of [the] Depression-Era misery and poverty.” After doing that work he “went on to work in an abstract modernist, using the tools of both black-and-white and colour photography to cover both socio-political issues and more conceptual artistic ideas.”
Source: Wikipedia
Roger Fenton was born in Heywood, England in 1819. He first started by studying painting with “historical painter Edward Lucy.” Fenton went to the “Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851,” this exhibition inspired him to start photographing. In 1855 he “went to the Crimean War,” to take photographs of the troops and of the different events that were taking place, during this war. He was forced to stop taking photographs and instead went to take photographs of The Valley of Death, and because he thought that the photographs were not exciting enough he added different negatives to the photograph to make them look more interesting. He “may, therefore, have also been the first photographer to fake or falsify pictures.” He died in 1869.
Source: Wikipedia
Lewis Hine was born in September 16, 1874 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. He studied sociology in three different colleges. Hine said that “the camera was both a research tool and an instrument of social reform.” In 1904 he began to photograph the immigrants at Ellis Island. Later in 1908 “he became the photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC).”
Source: Wikipedia
Source: Wikipedia
Dorothea Lange was born in May 26, 1895 in Hoboken New Jersey. She began to do documentary photography in New York. She is best “known for her Depression-era work.” She was living in San Francisco when the Great Depression started; the Great Depression attracted her so she started to take picture of people that were hit the hardest. She also worked for the Federal Resettlement Administration which later became the Farm Security Administration. Working for this administrations Dorothea had to take photographs of the “poor and forgotten…farm families and migrant workers.” By taking photographs of this people the farm families and migrant workers became known in public because the photographs were being displayed publicly, her photographs also became icons of the era of the Great Depression. Lange died on October 11, 1965, when she was 70. She last lived in San Francisco.
Source: Wikipedia
Helen Levitt was born on August 31, 1913 and “grew up in Brooklyn, New York.” Levitt quit school so she started to teach herself how to use a camera and the history of photography. In the year of 1937 she began to teach art classes to kids and at the same time “became intrigued with the transitory chalk drawings that were part of the New York children’s street culture of the time.” She decided to photograph the chalk drawings and the artists which were the children, her photographs turned into a later published book. She had her first solo exhibition in 1943; the exhibition was made possible by Edward Steichen which worked for the Museum of Modern Arts. Because of her exhibition “she began to find press work as a documentary photographer.” Levitt “has remained active as a photographer for nearly 70 years and still lives in New York City.”
Source: Wikipedia
James Nachtwey was born in 1948 in Syracuse. He began photographing because he was “influenced by imagery from the Vietnam War and the American Civil Rights movement.” In 1976 he started to photograph for “a small newspaper in New Mexico.” He “documented a variety of armed conflicts and social issues.” He has been around South Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Russia, Eastern Europe, The Soviet Union, Western Europe and the United States, photographing different events and the socio-political issues. He did a series of photographs from the September 11 attacks and also when the United States went to Iraq to the war. He was injured in Iraq; a bomb exploded in the vehicle he was in. He recovered from that and went to Asia to do a remarkable series covering what the Tsunami ion December 26, 2004 had caused. He has been contracted to work for the Time Magazine since 1984. He is also a “founding member of the photo agency VII.” He is still alive today.
Source: Wikipedia
This timeless picture of Nguyen shows the brutaliy in Viatnemese countries.
