B&W Portraiture - Artist Research

Black & White Portraits (mostly!)

Celebrating Diversity

Portrait Photography

Portrait photography is the art of photographing an individual or small group of people.

The real goal to portrait photography is to demonstrate the mood, personality or likeness of a person(s).

Diane ArbusHer controversial portraiture looked beyond the superficial and into her subjects often troubled souls. But her magazine work

show she could have a split personality.

Margaret Bourke-WhiteOne of the original Life magazine staff photographers, Bourke-White was a pioneer in both photojournalism and womens' work roles. Her images of World War II--especially

the liberation of concentration camps--were deceptively simple. Her images would often be the perfect combination of fact and beauty.

Richard AvedonHis up close, show-every-hair-follicle approach to portraiture can be jarring, but his ability to render both his and his sitters'

personalities in each image he creates is uncanny.

In the American West

BrassaiHis portraits and Paris street photos are touching and

perceptive.

Corinne Day

Sally Mannhttp://www.aperture.org/shop/books/immediate-family-2592

"Mann's subjects are her small children (a boy, a girl, and a new baby), often shot when they're sick or hurt or just naked. Nosebleeds, cuts, hives, chicken pox, swollen eyes, vomiting—the usual trials of childhood—can be alarmingly beautiful, thrillingly sensual moments in Mann's portrait album. Her ambivalence about motherhood—her delight and despair—pushes Mann to delve deeper into the steaming mess of family life than most of us are willing to go. What she comes up with is astonishing." —Vince Aletti, The Village Voice

Sally Mann "Immediate Family, which was published in 1990, must be counted as one of the great photograph books of our time. It

is a singularly powerful evocation of childhood from within and without..."

Portraiture Photography was also used as a form of official identification

Pierre Gonnord

• The idea of creating my own work in the lagoon and starting from scratch fascinated me. I have had to take other roads to reach its inhabitants and, trapped from the first moment by this human river, I asked myself, as Montesquieu did in his Lettres Persanes: “Comment peut-on être Vénitien?” The people, the human material present and constant from the start of my search, have once again helped to guide my steps and launch me on another fantastic, intimate adventure.

To experience Venice, share it, question it, leap from one scenario to another, to transgress and cross contemporary frontiers. There are still as many possible Venices as there are people and visions.

• Here are the seven chosen faces, portraits, fragments of my vision and experience of walking through Venice.

Pierre Gonnord

Katy Grannan

Edward CurtisCurtis built an illustrious career documenting Native Americans

in the 1900s. The images resonate 100 years later.

Fazal Sheikh• The portrait is central to Fazal Sheikh’s work. For more than two decades, as he has worked in

different communities around the world, the invitation to sit for a portrait has been the principal means by which he has established a link with his subjects and been allowed to enter and document their lives. Often these have been people in crisis: displaced from their homes and their countries, at risk from violence, poverty and prejudice.

Elliott ErwittA perceptive street photographer with a sharp sense of humor, a sensitivity

to the human condition, and an affinity for dogs. It is almost impossible to be depressed after looking at his work!

Steve McCurry

Dorothea LangeBest known for her famous photos of the Depression, including Migrant Mother,

Nipomo, California, Lange was active from the 1920s to the early 1960s and was one of the most influential photographers in American history.

Lewis HineBy championing the cause of poor immigrants, child laborers and other downtrodden folks

through his powerfully straightforward photos, Lewis Hine showed us how the "Other Half" lived. His passionate photographs enlightened the world and brought about legislation that has

protected millions since his work appeared in the early 20th century.

Henri Cartier-BressonThe father of Photo Reportage and co-founder of the legendary Magnum photo agency, "HC-B"

has influenced generations of photojournalists, documentary photographers and street photographers. Influenced and inspired by classical and impressionist art and freed by the

portability of the Leica, HC-B changed the way we look at the world around us.

Imogen CunninghamCunningham's carreer spanned the first three quarters of the 20th century

photographed many of her subjects draped in exotic clothes in images with moral themes and tableaux representing works of poets. Later nudes were shocking for their

time, but rather tame now.

George HurrellDuring Hollywood's Golden Era, publicity photos had the power to make or break stars. George Hurrell, who perfected the "glamour" portrait, was the most sought

after glamour photographer by the big names and the wanna-be's.

Andre KerteszKertesz used the camera to transform the chaos of the street

into lyrical scenes. A brilliant, influential teacher and artist.

William KleinHis brief involvement with photography yielded an influential body of work that has been called

confrontational and immediate. They seem to be a furious protest against the establishment. Uncompromising and bold, the images are mostly street photos that stare when others would

avert their gaze. He almost dares you to look at them.

Peter Dench

Hazel Thompsonhttp://www.hazelthompson.com

Alexander Rodchenko• 'I want to take some quite incredible photographs that have never been

taken before… pictures which are simple and complex at the same time, which will amaze and overwhelm people," wrote Alexander Rodchenko in his diary on March 14, 1934. "I must achieve this so that photography can begin to be considered a form of art."

Annie LeibovitzOne of today's most influential and admired artists, renowned for her vivid and distinctive style,

Annie Leibovitz is an American original and a master of self-promotion. Her portraits of Bruce Springsteen, Jody Foster, Michael Jackson, Miles Davis, Greg Louganis, Mikhail Baryshnikov, John

Lennon and more combine a keen eye with a quick wit.

Don McCullin

Nicholas NixonHis early work showed a remarkable mastery of large format photography in

situations where one would expect to see 35mm cameras; his portrait work includes a series on four sisters taken over a 15-year period and images of people with AIDS.

Nigel Parryeditorial images of Actors, featured in book: Sharp

http://www.nigelparryphoto.com/published-books/sharp

Nigel Parry

Nigel Parry

Cynthia Cortes.

Photographing Intimacy.

Sebastiao SalgadoA photojournalist in the best sense of the word, Sebasiao Salgado is fascinated with people who

work hard in all parts of the world. From landless workers trying to claim property for themselves in Brazil to Oil workers putting out fires in Kuwait, Salgado's lens captures the beauty in his

subjects' gritty reality.Look at his work: Workers and Genesis (below)

Cindy ShermanSherman uses photography as a tool to manipulate images of women that

have been spawned by popular culture, with herself as the leading character in most of the images she creates.

Julia Margaret Cameron

Jason TilleyThe Beautiful People Project – portraits taken across India over a 10 year

span

Edward SteichenAs the curator of the photo collection for the New York Museum of Modern Art, Steichen was the

man behind The Family Of Man, a late 1950's photo exhibition and recently-republished book that was a watershed in the history of photography because it gave photography mass appeal as an expressive, fine art. His curatorship brought about a grand era for "Concerned" photography.

Irving Penn – body of work: Small Trades

His Studio

Raghu Rai

• Magnum Photographer from and based in India.

Maurice Broomfield• Broomfield was “one of the first industrial and architectural photographers to use his corporate commissions to

make visionary photographic studies of the workers and the environments in which they worked,” writes the Host Gallery, which, last year, put on the first retrospective of the photographer’s iconic images of industrial Britain from the 1950s to the 1970s.

Helen Levitt

Paul StrandA white picket fence. A poor Adirondac family. Paul Strand's pure vision and

uncompromising technique gained him international accolades as a master of American photography, especially in the 1950s. His black and white photos are

exquisite and memorable.

WeegeeA crime news photographer in the 30s and 40s in New York, Weegee is possibly the

most well known street photographer. Crude and direct, his photos have an immediacy and impact that affect the viewer to this day. His later work, distorted portraits that he called "photo charicatures", have a similar in-your-face quality.

Edward WestonWeston's immaculately constructed images imbue forms of common objects with a sensuality that transcends the subject. Sharp, detailed and rich in tonality, his closeups, nudes and nature

photographs brought the power of photography as an objective tool of observation to new heights. You'll never look at a pepper quite the same way again.

Minor WhiteA teacher as well as a photographer, Minor White crafted works of beauty that were

also explorations of his inner self. His best known work was made of the natural wonders in the American West. He experimented with alternative processes, non-

narrative sequences and techniques that would stretch the bounds of photography.

Photographic image by Bill Brandt

Rineke Djikstra

Photographer Jikta Hanzlova

Boronda