The Weston Gallery in Carmel is one of the premier venues for fine art photography in the world. Founded in 1975 and located in the charming downtown of Carmel-by-the-Sea, it specializes in both vintage and contemporary photography. The gallery features works by iconic photographers such as Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Imogen Cunningham, as well as modern masters like Richard Avedon and Yousuf Karsh.

Visitors describe the gallery as intimate and expertly curated, providing a serene space to appreciate the historical and artistic significance of the works on display. It is particularly notable for its representation of Group f/64, a movement emphasizing sharp-focus photography, of which Edward Weston was a co-founder. The gallery's connection to the Weston family legacy—run by Matthew and Davi Weston, descendants of Edward Weston—adds a deep personal and historical dimension to the experience.

Many reviews highlight the gallery's knowledgeable and friendly staff, who offer insight into the pieces without being intrusive. The gallery's small size also ensures a focused and enriching experience, making it a must-visit for photography enthusiasts.

Berenice Abbott left the American Midwest in 1918 to study in New York City, Paris, and Berlin. In Paris she became an assistant to Man Ray and Eugène Atget. In 1925 she set up her own studio and made portraits of Parisian artists, writers, collectors and expatriates. She retrieved and catalogued Atget's prints and negatives after his death. In the 1930s she photographed New York's neighborhoods for the WPA Federal Art Project, documenting its changing architecture; many of the photographs were published in Changing New York (1939).

The work of Eugène Atget is one of the richest pictorial embodiments of French culture. Working as a photographer mainly in and near Paris from the late 1890s until his death in 1927, Atget made a total of about 10,000 individual images. Over the course of his long career he discovered and progressively mastered photography’s capacity to transform plain fact into visual poetry. In the rapid unfolding of modernist photography in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Atget’s work soon became the exemplar of the medium’s new creative power. No major photographer in the half-century following his death was untouched by Atget’s influence. At his death in 1927, the French government purchased a portion of Atget’s negatives; the remaining contents of his studio and greater body of his work were purchased by photographer Berenice Abbott and art dealer Julian Levy. Carefully looked after by Abbott, the collection was later sold to the Museum of Modern Art.

Richard Avedon (1923–2004) was one of the most influential American photographers, celebrated for his groundbreaking work in fashion, portraiture, and documentary photography. Over a career that spanned more than five decades, Avedon revolutionized the role of the fashion photographer and expanded the boundaries of photographic art.

Early Career and Fashion Photography

Avedon began his career in the 1940s as a photographer for Harper’s Bazaar, working under the mentorship of Alexey Brodovitch. His dynamic, high-energy style was a departure from the stiff, traditional fashion photography of the time. Avedon shot models in motion, capturing a sense of liveliness and emotion. His photographs were known for their innovative compositions and bold use of space. His work for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar defined fashion photography for much of the 20th century, capturing models like Dovima, Veruschka, and Twiggy in highly stylized settings.

Iconic Portraiture

While Avedon became famous for his fashion work, his portraits are considered some of the most iconic in photographic history. His signature portrait style was stark and direct, often featuring subjects against a white backdrop. This minimalist approach stripped away context and forced the viewer to focus on the expressions and personalities of his subjects. He photographed a wide range of people, from celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, and Bob Dylan to ordinary individuals.

In 1976, Avedon published Portraits, a book that showcased many of his most famous portrait works. His portraits often revealed a psychological depth, showing vulnerability or power, depending on the subject. He was particularly skilled at eliciting intimate emotions, even from the most public figures.

Documentary and Social Commentary

Avedon’s work went beyond the realm of fashion and celebrity. In the late 1970s, he began focusing on American life through more documentary-styled projects. One of his best-known series, In the American West (1985), featured stark black-and-white portraits of working-class Americans, ranchers, miners, and drifters. Shot between 1979 and 1984, this series showcased a raw, unsentimental vision of life in the American heartland.

This work contrasted sharply with his earlier glamorous fashion photography, highlighting his ability to move between different worlds. His focus on ordinary people and their hardships revealed his deep empathy for his subjects and a keen social consciousness.

Legacy

Richard Avedon's influence on photography is immeasurable. His ability to shift between fashion, portraiture, and documentary work, while maintaining his unique artistic vision, set him apart as one of the great photographers of the 20th century. His images remain iconic, celebrated for their psychological depth, technical precision, and cultural significance.

Many institutions, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Smithsonian, have exhibited his works, and his impact on both fashion and portrait photography continues to resonate today. Avedon redefined the role of the photographer, blending the lines between commercial and fine art, creating a legacy that endures long after his death in 2004.

After briefly considering a career in journalism, Morley Baer began his artistic career as a landscape and architectural photographer. Having seen an Edward Weston exhibition in Chicago, Baer’s mind was made up; he was California-bound to pursue photography and to meet Weston himself. Following naval service during WWII, Baer returned to Carmel once again, where Weston was still living. A close friendship was formed between the two photographers over these years. Baer’s work elicits a kind of intimate pleasure, evoking in many a sense of familiarity with what may often be an unknown land. Morley Baer represents a generation of photographers whose aesthetic interest in the landscape was inseparable from their love of the land itself.

John Anthony Baldessari was an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lived and worked in Santa Monica, California. Initially a painter, Baldessari began to incorporate texts and photography into his canvases in the mid-1960s. In 1970 he began working in printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture and photography. He has created thousands of works that demonstrate - and, in many cases, combine - the narrative potential of images and the associative power of language within the boundaries of the work of art. His art has been featured in more than 200 solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe.

Édouard Baldus was born in 1820 in France and worked as a painter in the 1840s photography peeked his interest. He was a founding member of the Societe Heliographique and an important influence to the art of heliogravure, a photomechanical process. He used the calotype process from 1851 and began using collodion wet-plate negatives and albumen prints in 1956. A pioneer of the photographic medium, he documented architectureal monuments of France as well as landscpes, paintings and the documentation of the Rhone Floods. In 1851 he was commissioned by the Comite des Monuments Historiques to photograph monuments in Paris, Fontainebleau, Burgundy, the Dauphine, Normandy, Auvergne and Provence. During 1854-1855 Baldus created 1,500 photographs of a new wing of the Louvre in Paris and was commissioned by Baron James de Rothschild to photograph the railroad lines in France.

In his photography Jeffrey Becom combines an architect’s love of geometry, pattern, and texture with a painter’s sensitivity to color, light, and composition. He spent the 1980s creating a series of photographs in the lands bordering the Mediterranean Sea. These were collected in his book Mediterranean Color (1990) with Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Paul Goldberger. Becom then documented the painted color traditions of the living Maya throughout Mexico and Central America, culminating in his second book, Maya Color (1997). In 2008 Becom voyaged to India, producing a body of work depicting the beauty and power of the colorful traditions of vernacular Indian architecture. Becom’s latest work focuses on the painted villages of Ecuador as part of a project spotlighting Andean color customs across South America. His extraordinarily vivid images are a testimony to his eye for form and composition. Becom’s photographs are represented in public and private collections throughout the world.

In a career spanning more than seven decades, Ruth Bernhard has created an imposing body of work. Distinguished by their exquisite use of light, her images have been internationally recognized and acclaimed by her peers. Radiant still-life studies and nude forms reflect her passionate search for the universal connection of all things. Said by Ansel Adams to be the finest photographer of the nude, Bernhard is associated with the history of Northern California's wealth of eminent photographers, among them Adams, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and Dorothea Lange. Bernhard's work has been exhibited and included in the permanent collections of major museums and universities in the United States, Europe, Japan, and Mexico, and has been published worldwide.

Boubat was born in Montmartre, Paris. He studied typography and graphic arts at the École Estienne and worked for a printing company before becoming a photographer. In 1943 he was subjected to service du travail obligatoire, forced labour of French people in Nazi Germany, and witnessed the horrors of World War II. He took his first photograph after the war in 1946 and was awarded the Kodak Prize the following year. He travelled the world for the French magazine Réalités, where his colleague was Jean-Philippe Charbonnier, and later worked as a freelance photographer. French poet Jacques Prévert called him a "peace correspondent" as he was humanist, apolitical and photographed uplifting subjects. His son Bernard Boubat is also a photographer.

Having apprenticed to Man Ray, Brandt originally began his career working as a photojournalist on assignment. His photography was a singular and idiosyncratic mixture of straight reportage with a consistent, if subtle, streak of strangeness - the legacy of surrealism. He would eventually turn from “straight” photography, so dominant in the post-war culture of the time, towards abstracted images in which figures were distorted or wide-angle lenses used. Highly respected for the intensity and power of his images, Brandt is considered one of the preeminent photographers to have emerged in England.

The themes in Nick Brandt’s photographic series always relate to the destructive impact that humankind is having on both the natural world and now humans themselves too. Brandt has had solo gallery and museum shows around the world, including New York, London, Berlin, Stockholm, Paris and Los Angeles. Born and raised in London, where he originally studied Painting and Film, Brandt now lives in the southern Californian mountains. In 2010, Brandt co-founded Big Life Foundation, a non-profit in Kenya/Tanzania that employ more than 350 local rangers protecting 1.6 million acres of the Amboseli/Kilimanjaro ecosystem.

Manuel Alvarez Bravo was one of the founders of modern photography and considered the main representative of Latin American photography in the 20th century. His work extends from the late 1920s to the 1990s. Álvarez Bravo was born in downtown Mexico City on February 4, 1902. He left school at the age of twelve in order to begin making a contribution to his family’s finances after his father's death. He worked at a textile factory for a time, and later at the National General Treasury.

Both his grandfather (a painter) and his father were amateur photographers. His early discovery of the camera awakened in him an interest that he would continue to cultivate throughout his life. As a self-taught photographer, he would explore many different techniques, as well as graphic art. Influenced by his study of painting at the Academy of San Carlos, he embraced pictorialism at first. Then, with the discovery of cubism and all the possibilities offered by abstraction, he began to explore modern aesthetics. He had his initiation into documentary photography in 1930: when she was deported from Mexico, Tina Modotti left him her job at the magazine Mexican Folkways. He also worked for the muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Álvarez Bravo is an emblematic figure from the period following the Mexican Revolution—often called the Mexican Renaissance. It was a time of a creative fertility, owing to the happy—though not always tranquil—marriage between a desire for modernization and the search for an identity with Mexican roots, in which archaeology, history and ethnology played an important role, parallel to the arts. Álvarez Bravo embodied both tendencies in the field of visual arts. Between 1943 and 1959, he worked in the film industry doing still shots, which inspired him to realize some of his own experiments with cinema.

While he was alive, he held over 150 individual exhibitions and participated in over 200 collective exhibitions. According to several critics, the work of this "poet of the lens" expresses the essence of Mexico. However, the humanist regard reflected in his work, the aesthetic, literary and musical references it contains, likewise endow with a truly universal dimension. He died on October 19, 2002, at the age of one hundred.

Wynn Bullock began his photographic career at the age of 42 studying at the Art Center School in Los Angeles, California. A lifelong friend of Edward Weston, his work and influence thrived in Bullock's photographs and in 1968, he became a trustee and chairman of the exhibition committee during the formative years of Friends of Photography in Carmel, California. Bullock is recognized as an American master photographer of the 20th Century. His work is included in over 90 major museum collections around the world including The Museum of Modern Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Hallmark Collection of Photography and The Center for Creative Photography which holds the archives of Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, Frederick Sommer and Aaron Siskind.

Since 1985 Linda Butler has worked as an independent art-photographer and is known for her explorations of other cultures. Her most recent book, Yangtze Remembered: The River Beneath the Lake, is an historical document of the Three Gorges Dam project in China. During a three-year period (from 2000 – 2003) Butler made eight trips to China. She captured the complexity of the Three Gorges Project and the beauty of the Yangtze before life was changed forever by the dam. Through her photographs we see common people, architectural interiors and dramatic landscapes. We watch the destruction of the old way of life and the construction of the new in before-and-after photographs of the river and its shores. Published by Stanford University Press (©2004), Yangtze Remembered explores the historical and environmental context of the dam through 109 photographs and 55 pages of text. Butler’s other books include Italy: In the Shadow of Time (Rizzoli International ©1998), Rural Japan: Radiance of the Ordinary (Smithsonian Institution Press ©1992), and Inner Light: The Shaker Legacy (Knopf ©1985).

Butler was born in Appleton, Wisconsin in 1947; she graduated from Antioch College and did her graduate degree at the University of Michigan. Since her graduation, she has lived with her husband, Steven Nissen, in Ann Arbor, MI, Sacramento, CA, and Lexington KY. At present, they make their home outside of Cleveland, Ohio.

Butler has had more than 50 one-person shows in the United States, Canada and Japan. Her work has been exhibited in many major museums, including Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of Art and the Yokohama Museum of Art in Japan.

Harry Callahan was an American photographer born in Detroit. Self-taught, he began taking pictures in 1938 as a hobby and, inspired by the work of Ansel Adams, began to produce professional-quality photographs in the 1940s. His mature work is said to mingle the precision of Americans like Adams with the experimentalism of Europeans like Lázló Moholy-Nagy. His black-and-white city streetscapes and rural landscapes combine the commonplace with the starkly abstract, exploring contrasts of sunlight and shadow, tone and texture, static buildings and hurried passersby, while his many lovingly distinctive portraits of his wife and daughter are extremely personal and intimate. He sometimes used multiple exposures, and experimented with color slide film in the 1940s, again making color images from 1977 on. An influential figure in modern photography, he taught at Chicago's Institute of Design (1946-61) and the Rhode Island School of Design (1961-77).

Sparky Campanella is a Los Angeles based self-taught photographer who switched careers in 2001 from software marketing to fine-art photography. His figurative works are typically conceptual and abstract, with a minimal aesthetic. Sparky grew up in Pittsburgh and has been photographing almost as long as he’s been walking. He has shown his work in group exhibitions nationally including Center for Photography at Woodstock, Woodstock; Umbrella Arts, NYC; The Print Center, Philadelphia; Texas Photographic Arts, San Antonio; SF Camerawork, San Francisco; Gallery 825, Los Angeles; and Irvine Fine Arts Center, Irvine. He holds an undergraduate degree from Duke University and a graduate degree from Stanford University. He has been an instructor at the Harvey Milk Institute in San Francisco and at Prescott College in Arizona. He has been awarded residencies at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and Anderson Ranch in Colorado.

Paul Caponigro is one of America's most significant master photographers. Born in Boston in 1932, he began photographing as a youth at thirteen. He has subsequently sustained an artistic career spanning over forty years, which began in earnest in 1951 and involved studies with Minor White and Benjamen Chinn. Caponigro's first one-man show at the George Eastman house took place in 1958. Since that time he has been widely exhibited throughout the United States and Europe. Two Guggenheim Fellowships and three NEA grants have been awarded to Caponigro over the course of his photographic career in recognition of his singularly masterful and uncompromising artistry. His work forms a visual bridge between the material world of physical forms and the living spirit behind them.

Patty Carroll has been known for her use of highly intense, saturated color photographs since the 1970’s. Her most recent project, “Anonymous Women,” consists of a 3-part series of studio installations made for the camera, addressing women and their complicated relationships with domesticity. By camouflaging the figure in drapery and/or domestic objects, Carroll creates a dark and humorous game of hide-and-seek between her viewers and the Anonymous Woman. The photographs are published as a monograph, Anonymous Women, officially released in January, 2017 by Daylight Books.

The Anonymous Woman series has been exhibited internationally and has won multiple awards including Carroll being acknowledged as one of Photolucida’s “Top 50” in 2104. Her work has been featured in prestigious blogs and international magazines such as the Huffington Post, The Cut, Ain’t Bad Magazine, and BJP in Britain. Her work has been shown internationally in many one-person exhibits in China and Europe, as well as the USA. (White Box Museum, Beijing, Art Institute of Chicago, Royal Photographic Society, Bath, England, among others.) She has participated in over 100 group exhibitions nationally and internationally, and her work is included in many public and private collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, MCA in Chicago, MoMA, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and the Nelson Atkins Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. After teaching photography for many years, Carroll has enthusiastically returned to the studio in order to delight viewers with her playful critique of home and excess. She is currently Artist in Residence at Studios Inc. in Kansas City, Missouri.

Patty Carroll has her BFA from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana in Graphic Design, and her Master of Science (MS) in Photography from the Institute of Design at IIT, Chicago. Since leaving graduate school, in 1972, she has taught photography continuously at the University level, both full and part-time. Carroll was Adjunct Full Professor at School of the Art Institute of Chicago until 2014, and previously taught at Columbia College in Chicago, The Institute of Design at IIT and the Royal College of Art in London, as well as other universities. Carroll is an Adobe Certified Instructor in Photoshop, and teaches for Ascend Training in Chicago. She has participated in numerous group and one-person exhibitions, and has work in several museums internationally. Her work has been shown at Schneider Gallery in Chicago. She is the photographic author of 5 books; Spirited Visions a book and exhibit of portraits of Chicago artists in 1992 with James Yood, Culture is Everywhere, published by Prestel in 2002 with Victor Margolin, and Living the Life: The World of Elvis Tribute Artists, 2005, and Man Bites Dog: Hot Dog Culture in America, with Bruce Kraig 2012, and the monograph of her series, Anonymous Woman, published by Daylight Books in 2016. Her work is also included in various Photography anthologies.

Henri Cartier-Bresson was persuaded by Robert Capa to call himself a photojournalist rather than an artist or a Surrealist for his first New York show. Best known for his concept of the "decisive moment" in photography. At its best this leads to a dynamic image but easily becomes - even occasionally in the hands of the master himself - a formal stasis. Cartier-Bresson is the recipient of an extraordinary number of prizes, awards and honorary doctorates including the Overseas Press Club of America Award (1948, 1954, 1960, 1964), The A.S.M.P. Award (1953), the Prix de la Société Française de Photographie (1959), the Culture Prize, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie (1975). Capa also persuaded Cartier-Bresson to become one of the founders of Magnum.

Mark Citret has always been intrigued by the everyday wonders of the visual world. The sense of expansive awareness that for Citret is a prerequisite to photography enables him to capture the small everyday flashes of insight that come when we are open to them and often go before we can fully grasp or appreciate them. Sights that most of us tend not to notice—a weathered phone book, an empty bulletin board, a twisted chain link fence—seem full of meaning, made spectacular and somehow poignant through his eye. Citret’s images are a sort of meditation in seeing; though they rarely contain human forms, they are powerful testaments to the relationship between human presence and transitory nature. Fascinated from his earliest work with the delicate nuances possible in black and white, his work with vellum paper allows him to convey the ideas of softer ranges in his work. Luminous and warm, the vellums heighten the sense of everyday epiphany found in his images.

Growing-up near southern England's beautiful New Forest and coast, Paul Coghlin developed an interest in creative photography from a young age, regularly traveling out with a camera to capture the natural surroundings. Now based in eastern England, the award-winning photographer has continued to expand his creative style across a range of subjects, with his images regularly appearing in exhibitions and international publications, and is a Fellow of the British Institute of Professional Photography (BIPP). In 2011, Paul's work was also selected for the high profile “Wild Aid Auction” in San Francisco and for the prestigious Royal Academy of Arts' “Summer Exhibition” in London. At the beginning of 2013, Paul released his largest body of work to date: "Petalum", a series of thirty stunning black and white botanical studies, featuring the fine-art photographer's distinctive style and attention to subtle detail. In addition to his photographic qualifications, Paul also holds a BSc(Hons) Degree in Environmental Science from Plymouth University and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Remote Sensing (Earth imaging/Photogrammetry) from University College London/Imperial College.

Mariana Cook is a fine art photographer whose work is held in numerous private and museum collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York City; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Bibliothèque Nationale and Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, among others. Eleven books of her work have been published, including the best-selling Fathers and Daughters(1994) and the most recent, Lifeline (2017). Stone Walls: Personal Boundaries was her first book of landscapes, which was released in 2011 to much acclaim.

Imogen Cunningham occupies a singular position in the history of American art of the twentieth century. For over half the history of photography, she explored- with innovation and a new perspective- all the major traditions associated with the medium as fine art. She has been most widely acclaimed for the photographs made during the 1920s and 1930s, particularly close-up images of plants and nudes. She also made portraits which are now considered classics in photography, including images of Alfred Stieglitz, Spencer Tracy, and Martha Graham. She was a founding member of the West Coast-based Group f.64, which championed an un-manipulated, direct approach with the camera, or “straight” photography. Her photographs are represented in major collections and museums around the world. The Weston Gallery represents the Imogen Cunningham Trust and have vintage, modern as well as posthumous prints available. Please contact us for acquisitions.

Edward Sheriff Curtis devoted his life to producing a definitive and unparalleled work, the North American Indian, the most extensive and expensive photographic project ever undertaken. Between 1900 and 1930, Curtis traveled by foot and horse deep into Indian territories, living among dozens of Native tribes. In 1906, J.P. Morgan provided Curtis with $75,000 to produce a series on Native Americans. This work was to be in 20 volumes with 1,500 photographs. He captured the authentic ways of life of over 80 Native cultures, producing over 40,000 glass plate negatives, 10,000 wax cylinder recordings, 4,000 pages of anthropological text, and a feature length film.

Eugène Cuvelier was born in Arras in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais. His father, Adalbert Cuvelier (1812-1871), was a merchant, amateur painter, established photographer, and one of the co-inventors of the cliché-verre technique. He was friends with Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, the leading painter of the Barbizon school of France in the mid-nineteenth century. Eugène became friends with Corot around 1852-53 at home in Arras and visited Barbizon for the first time in 1856. When he married to Louise Ganne in 1859, they moved to Barbizon, placing Eugène in the midst of the many artists working in the 42,000 acres of the forest of Fontainebleau.

As well as the introduction to this artistic circle and a close friendship with Corot, Eugène owed his photographic skills to his father. Besides teaching him the practical aspects of photography, Aldabert taught his son that a successful photographer had to have more than just technical proficiency—to be a good photographer, he believed, one needed to be an artist and capture the sentiment of painting. Instead of carrying his paint box and easel, Eugène took his camera through the streets of Barbizon and Arras, and along the trees in the forest of Fontainebleau. With his carefully composed and richly printed photographs —printed on both albumen and salted papers—he achieved a painterly effect similar to the pre-Impressionist paintings of his friends with who he shared an aesthetic milieu. While Cuvelier was drawing inspiration from the work of Corot, Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet, and others, these painters were in turn influenced by his photographs and vision.

Few prints were made from Eugène Cuvelier’s negatives, and were only exhibited at the Société Française de Photographie in 1864, 1869, and 1870. In 1924 a few of his works were donated to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and around 1950, others were collected by specialists in nineteenth-century French photography. The rediscovery of Eugène and Albadert Cuvelier’s works in the early 1980s raised the profile of these photographers and we now know 250 images by Eugène, probably more than half his oeuvre. In 1991, some of Eugène's works were exhibited in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Five years laters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art organized a traveling exhibition and publication, Eugene Cuvelier, Photographer in the Circle of Corot. ~ Renske van Leeuwen

Harold Davis is an internationally-known digital artist and award-winning professional photographer. He is also the author of many bestselling photography books including The Way of the Digital Photographer (Peachpit Press, awarded as a Best Photography Book of the Year by Photo.net). Harold’s book, Achieving Your Potential As a Photographer: A Photographer’s Creative Companion and Workbook (Focal Press), has been termed “a great accomplishment” by Steven Pressfield.

His Photographing Flowers (Focal Press) is a noted photography “classic,” and is rated the Best Guide to Flower Photography by Digital Photographer Magazine. Harold Davis’ latest book, The Photographer’s Black & White Handbook (Monacelli Press, distributed by Random House), combines technique with travel adventure stories in an art-book presentation.

In August 1859, twenty-three-year-old Louis de Clercq was invited to accompany the young historian Emmanuel-Guillaume Rey on a government-sponsored expedition to the crusader castles of Syria and Asia Minor. Aware of the potential contribution of photography to archaeological research, as demonstrated by Auguste Salzmann's earlier project, Rey thought that de Clercq would prove a valuable travel companion for his skill as a photographer as well as for his friendship.

Among the sites visited by Rey's team was Tripoli (in present-day Lebanon), a major intellectual and trading center for northern Syria before and during its control by Frankish crusaders from 1109 to 1289. In addition to individual plates that record Tripoli's remaining crusader fortifications, de Clercq produced this three-part panorama showing the general aspect of the town's port, a view more interesting for its animated roofscape and shipyard than for its archaeological data.

After returning to Paris in 1860, de Clercq published 222 of his views in six volumes. This plate appears in the first volume, Voyage en Orient. Villes, monuments, et vues pittoresques de Syrie. Together, the six volumes include virtually all of de Clercq's known photographs, though Rey's writings indicate that de Clercq was already an experienced photographer before the expedition. On later trips to the Middle East, de Clercq's passion for the region would find expression in the formation of a collection of historical artifacts that is now an important part of the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the Louvre. ~ The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Robert Doisneau is one of the most famous French photographers ever to have lived. He made photographs of common people, in ordinary situations, wandering the streets of Paris and its suburbs. His interest in the medium of photography started in 1929 and worked for Renault until 1939 when Doisneau became a photojournalist. He worked for Vogue under contract from 1949 until 1952 and produced his most famous photograph, Kiss by the Hotel de Ville in 1950.

Rod Dresser began his photographic career having been introduced to Ansel Adams and eventually asked to serve on his staff as a special photographic assistant, working at the Adams studio until the late 1980s. Shortly after, he began to take commercial commissions in San Francisco, his clients including Apple Computer, Harvard University, and Union Bank. He returned to the Monterey Peninsula to act as business manager for the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, and has continued to photograph and to conduct workshops from that time on. While Dresser usually seeks the landscape as his subject matter, his interpretation has become increasingly abstract, driven by an affinity for both simplicity and texture. This has resulted in a vision that approaches minimalism. In 2002 he published the monogram Artist’s Choice. His photographs are represented in major collections and museums around the world.

Richard Ehrlich was born in New York City in 1938. He received his Bachelor’s of Arts degree from Cornell University and went on to study medicine, receiving his medical degree from Cornell in 1963. He first began painting, influenced by 19th century artists, especially Cezanne, and turned to photography. His work is in many collections worldwide including the J. Paul Getty Museum, Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, UCLA Hammer Museum, The George Eastman House, Denver Art Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, The Holocaust Archives Portfolio is held in the permanent collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, The Jewish Museum in New York City, The Jewish Museum, Berlin, Musee d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaism, Paris, France, Charles E. Young Reseach Library at University of California, Los Angeles, Shoah Foundation, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca New York, among others. He has published a number of books and currently resides in California.

Frederick Evans began his photographic career in 1898, upon his retirement from bookselling. He became internationally famous for his exquisite platinotype images of architectural subjects, principally English cathedrals, manors, and cloisters. Refusing to manipulate his prints in any way, Evans rendered the cool, massive stone buildings with an unsurpassed grandeur in straightforward contact prints from his plates. He was known to wait hours for the delicate, captivating light so evident in his images. He exhibited and wrote extensively and was widely, if unsuccessfully, imitated. Evans was also the first British photographer whose work Alfred Stieglitz published in Camera Work, his influential journal of photography. He ceased making prints in 1915 when platinum was no longer commercially available.

Roger Fenton was England’s most celebrated photographer during the 1850s. During a decade of work he mastered every photographic genre he attempted: architectural photography, landscape, portraiture, still life, reportage, and tableau vivant. His photographs combine the clarity of a newly modern world with the poetry of a Romantic sensibility. In 1855 he was commissioned to document the Crimean War, a labor intensive ordeal as well as a major moment in the history of documentary and war photography. His haunting images of Balaklava are some of the most important pieces of photographic documentation of the 19th century.

Nine Francis holds a Masters of Fine Art degree from the University of Texas at Austin. Her photographs have been internationally exhibited and are included in numerous public and private collections. Her work has appeared in Communication Arts, Foto & Video (Moscow) and The British Journal of Photography, among many others publications. Nine currently lives in Austin, Texas where she has taught photography at Texas State University, the University of Texas at Austin and Austin Community College. She teaches workshops focusing on creativity, visual storytelling and making meaningful, project–oriented work. Currently, she’s working with middle school students on the Neighborhood Stories Project that she founded in 2013. Nine’s passion lies in de-coding and effectively using the language of photography to connect people. To this end, she is frequently working on self-started projects that in some configuration involve taking pictures, telling stories and building community.

Robert Frank began studying photography in 1941 and spent the next six years working for commercial photography and graphic design studios in Zurich, Geneva, and Basel. In 1947 he traveled to the United States, where Alexey Brodovitch hired him to make fashion photographs at Harper's Bazaar. Although a few magazines accepted Frank's unconventional use of the 35-millimeter Leica for fashion work, he disliked the limitations of fashion photography and resigned a few months after he was hired. Between 1950 and 1955 he worked freelance producing photojournalism and advertising photographs for LIFE, Look, Charm, Vogue, and others.

He also garnered support for his independently produced street photographs from important figures in the New York art world, including Edward Steichen, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Walker Evans, who became an important American advocate of Frank's photography. It was Evans who suggested that he apply for the Guggenheim Fellowship that freed him to travel throughout the country in 1955 and 1956 and make the photographs that would result in his most famous book, The Americans, first published in France as Les Américains in 1957. After its publication in America in 1959, he devoted an increasing amount of time to making films, including Pull My Daisy and Cocksucker Blues, both of which exemplify avant-garde filmmaking of the era. Since 1970, Frank has divided his time between Nova Scotia and New York; he continues to produce still photographs in addition to films.

The Americans was one of the most revolutionary volumes in the history of photography, and it was a source of controversy when it was published in the United States. Frank's cutting perspective on American culture, combined with his carefree attitude toward traditional photographic technique, shocked most Americans who saw it at the time. During the next decade, however, these qualities of his photography became touchstones for a new generation of American photographers; indeed, Frank's work continues to shape contemporary photography.
- Source Lisa Hostetler: Handy et al. Reflections in a Glass Eye: Works from the International Center of Photography Collection, New York: Bulfinch Press in association with the International Center of Photography, 1999, pp. 215-16.

With his large-scale color photograms of water, babies, or, in this case, rabbits, Adam Fuss has breathed new life into the cameraless technique that became the hallmark of such modernist photographers as Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy in the 1920s. Fuss made this image by placing two slaughtered and eviscerated rabbits on a photosensitized sheet of paper and exposing it to light. The spectacular color effects result from the chemical interactions between the rabbits' viscera and the properties of the printing paper. Combining the expansive gestures of Action Painting with the composed symmetry of a heraldic seal, Fuss turns this traditional symbol of fertility into an emblem of the rapturous, often gut-wrenching intertwining of two selves united in love. ~ The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Oliver Gagliani was a master of large format photography. His darkroom work and proficiency of the Zone System great skill and technique. In 1945, Gagliani viewed a retrospective of the work of Paul Strand at the San Francisco Museum of Art. From this point on, Gagliani saw photography as a fine art and began his journey of being mostly a self-taught photographer. Gagliani studied under and worked with some of the most influential photographers of the 20th century including, Ansel Adams, Ruth Bernhard, Minor White, Paul Caponigro, Cole Weston and Paul Strand. In his later years he conducted photographic workshops in Virginia City, Nevada.

Born in Germany to a family of scholars, Genthe was a recent Ph.D. in classical philology when he came to the United States in 1895 to work for two years as a tutor. On his days off, he walked the streets of Chinatown in San Francisco, where he began to photograph. After publishing some of these images in local magazines, Genthe decided to open his own studio, specializing in portraits of prominent locals and visiting celebrities. Genthe's work and studio were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and resulting fire--save for the Chinatown images that had been stored in a bank vault. He published those early images in the 1909 book Pictures of Old Chinatown. After the fire, Genthe re-established his studio in San Francisco and in 1908 spent six months photographing in Japan. In 1911 he moved to New York, where he continued to work as a successful portrait and pioneering dance photographer. With New York as his new home base, Genthe also traveled and photographed throughout Europe and the United States. ~ The J. Paul Getty Museum

Having begun his acclaimed photographic career as an apprentice to the great documentarians Dorothea Lange and Robert Frank, Ralph Gibson is known for his highly distinctive vision in still photography. By intensifying contrast and emphasizing the grain of the film in his prints, Gibson concentrates on the minute details: the edge of a café table, the arc of a hip, the glint of a fork. Gibson’s works are both formally vigorous and eternally evocative. His photographs are in major private and public collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Bibliotheque Nationale.

Group f/64 was a group founded by seven 20th-century San Francisco Bay Area photographers who shared a common photographic style characterized by sharply focused and carefully framed images seen through a particularly Western (U.S.) viewpoint. In part, they formed in opposition to the pictorial photographic style that had dominated much of the early 20th century, but moreover, they wanted to promote a new modernist aesthetic that was based on precisely exposed images of natural forms and found objects.

As a photographer and photojournalist Ernst Haas was influential for his innovations in colour photography. Haas attended medical school in Austria, but, in 1947, left to become a staff photographer for the magazine Heute. His photo essay for the magazine on prisoners of war coming home to Vienna won him acclaim Robert Capa asked him to join Magnum Photos. Haas and Werner Bischof were the first photographers invited to join Magnum by the founders Capa, David "Chim" Seymour, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and Bill Vandivert. He received the Hasselblad Award in 1986.

Johan Hagemeyer started out in American as a fruit farmer, and an introduction to Anne Brigman in 1916 by Alfred Stieglitz prompted a bold move in his photographic career; he opened his first portrait studio in Berkeley, California. He developed close friendships with Imogen Cunningham, Tina Modotti, and Edward Weston and in 1923 Hagemeyer built a studio in Carmel, California later establishing the town's first gallery. Despite Weston's influence, Hagemeyer chose not to join Group f.64: a group of seven 20th century San Francisco photographers who shared a common photographic style characterized by sharp-focused and carefully framed images seen through a particularly Western viewpoint promoting a new Modernist aesthetic. Hagemeyer continued to make photographs and exhibit until illness and financial woes began to impede on his work.

Carol Henry is a darkroom artist that has spent decades making unique prints on Cibachrome paper without a camera and film. She has been represented in 34 galleries and 200 exhibitions with her camera-less technique. She calls her darkroom prints, Florachromes and Shadowgraphs, a process she developed when receiving a BFA from Northern Michigan University in photography. She has also studied at the University of Cincinnati and UCLA. Carol spent over three years as the fine print specialist for the Ansel Adams Gallery for Ansel’s signed originals, was a three year artist in residence at Studio Channel Islands Art Center, is a charter member of Women in Photography International and is currently the photography director at Carmel Visual Arts. Carol Henry’s work is widely collected both nationally and internationally and is in many permanent and corporate collections. She is especially interested in health care environments and the healing qualities of her imagery.

The partnership between David Octavius Hill (1802 - 1870) and Robert Adamson (1821 - 1848) was formed in Edinburgh in July 1843, just four years after the invention of photography was announced. In the four years that followed they produced a remarkable body of work that included portraits, landscapes and social documentary. Their work had an enduring influence on photography worldwide and stands as one of the earliest and most important contributions to the artform.

In the 1840s there were two competing photographic processes: the Daguerreotype, invented in France by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, and the calotype invented in England by William Henry Fox Talbot. It was Talbot’s invention, introduced to Scotland thanks to the scientist Sir David Brewster, that Hill & Adamson took up. Through his correspondence with Talbot, Brewster was able to pass on knowledge of the process to others in his St Andrews circle. It was Dr John Adamson, Robert’s elder brother, who became the first person to successfully produce a calotype in Scotland. John then instructed his younger brother, who became ‘well drilled in the art’ by August 1842.

Robert had suffered from ill health since boyhood, which had left him too frail for his chosen career as an engineer. Photography offered a less physically demanding alternative. So, in May 1843, he moved to Rock House at the foot of Calton Hill in Edinburgh, with the intention of setting himself up as a photographer.

In contrast, David Octavius Hill was already an established landscape painter, and twenty years older than Adamson, when the two met. Born in Perth in 1802, he moved to Edinburgh at the age of 16 to study painting and established himself as an excellent landscape and genre painter, becoming the secretary of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1843. ~ National Galleries Scotland

Lewis Hine was trained to be an educator in Chicago and New York. A project photographing on Ellis Island with students from the Ethical Culture School in New York galvanized his recognition of the value of documentary photography in education. Soon after, he became a sociological photographer, establishing a studio in upstate New York in 1912. For nearly ten years Hine was the photographer for the National Child Labor Committee, contributing to exhibitions and the organization's publication, The Survey. Declaring that he "wanted to show things that had to be corrected," he was one of the earliest photographers to use the photograph as a documentary tool. Around 1920, however, Hine changed his studio publicity from "Social Photography by Lewis W. Hine" to "Lewis Wickes Hine, Interpretive Photography," to emphasize a more artistic approach to his imagemaking. Having joined the American Red Cross briefly in 1918, he continued to freelance for them through the 1930s. In 1936 Hine was appointed head photographer for the National Research Project of the Works Projects Administration, but his work for them was never completed. His last years were marked by professional struggles due to diminishing government and corporate patronage, and he died in 1940 at age sixty-six. ~ The J. Paul Getty Museum

Chip Hooper's photographs of the Pacific Ocean and Tasman Sea capture transient moments when light and water coalesce in transcendent beauty. Hooper felt a kinship with the ocean from a young age; he began making prints at age 12 and constructed a darkroom in the basement of his childhood home. Through his work with a large-format 8x10 inch view camera, he embraced the patient and meticulous approach that it demands and achieved a high degree of technical mastery that is exhibited in his flawless and highly detailed prints. His subject matter joins him with a lineage of artists who have been profoundly inspired by the Pacific Ocean, including Ansel Adams and Minor White. Yet Chip Hooper developed a unique, contemporary vision of his own, refining the expressive power of landscape photography through his meditative studies of sea, sky, and light. California's Pacific is the first installment, and last, of a series of photographs that Chip Hooper made of oceans around the world. New Zealand's South Pacific and Tasman Sea was his most recent publication consisting of works from 2003 to 2005. The "Surf" series was exhibited at the Weston Gallery in February, 2014. Works from California's Pacific 2nd Set was on view both in New York City and at the Weston Gallery in 2016.

Hooper passed away on March 5, 2016 at his home in Carmel, CA. Though he was not granted enough time to visit all of the world’s oceans, he was able to perfectly capture the ocean and his relationship with it. Although the world suffered a great loss with Hooper’s passing, his spirit will live on through his artwork. Per Hooper’s wishes, his daughter, Valerie, is now managing his photography and honoring his legacy through his stunning works of art.

Chip Hooper's photographs of the Pacific Ocean and Tasman Sea capture transient moments when light and water coalesce in transcendent beauty. Hooper felt a kinship with the ocean from a young age; he began making prints at age 12 and constructed a darkroom in the basement of his childhood home. Through his work with a large-format 8x10 inch view camera, he embraced the patient and meticulous approach that it demands and achieved a high degree of technical mastery that is exhibited in his flawless and highly detailed prints. His subject matter joins him with a lineage of artists who have been profoundly inspired by the Pacific Ocean, including Ansel Adams and Minor White. Yet Chip Hooper developed a unique, contemporary vision of his own, refining the expressive power of landscape photography through his meditative studies of sea, sky, and light. California's Pacific is the first installment, and last, of a series of photographs that Chip Hooper made of oceans around the world. New Zealand's South Pacific and Tasman Sea was his most recent publication consisting of works from 2003 to 2005. The "Surf" series was exhibited at the Weston Gallery in February, 2014. Works from California's Pacific 2nd Set was on view both in New York City and at the Weston Gallery in 2016.

Hooper passed away on March 5, 2016 at his home in Carmel, CA. Though he was not granted enough time to visit all of the world’s oceans, he was able to perfectly capture the ocean and his relationship with it. Although the world suffered a great loss with Hooper’s passing, his spirit will live on through his artwork. Per Hooper’s wishes, his daughter, Valerie, is now managing his photography and honoring his legacy through his stunning works of art.

Rolfe Horn's fascination with photography began as a child when he used his father’s camera to capture memories of hikes around the trails of the East Bay and Lake Tahoe. His passion for photography blossomed in high school when he enrolled in his first photography class. Within a couple of months, he constructed a darkroom in his father’s workshop, where he spent much of his free time. This passion earned him several first place awards for images of Yosemite Valley and the Mt. Diablo area. His high school graduation honors include Awards for Excellence in photography.

Rolfe received his Associate of Arts degree from Diablo Valley College in 1993. During his years as a student, he worked as an assistant to a commercial photographer, where he learned a great deal about the zone system, as well as printing techniques.

Rolfe studied landscape photography with Mark Citret, an associate of Ansel Adams, prior to entering Brooks Institute of Photography, in Santa Barbara, California, in 1993. While a student at Brooks Institute, he studied with Nick Dekker, who introduced him to alternative processes and pushed him to create powerful images. He received multiple awards for his black and white photographs of the California landscape and recognition for pioneering interactive digital photography. When Rolfe received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Brooks Institute in the fall of 1996, he was named as the most outstanding graduate of his class and presented with a plaque in recognition of his accumulated achievements in landscape and digital photography.

After graduation, Rolfe moved to the Bay Area, where he continued his love for landscape photography while pursuing a career in digital interactive photography. He began to study the surrealistic nature of the land, searching out abstract forms or working at night, as he had done when he was a teenager.

In 1998 Rolfe decided to give up commercial photography in order to assist Michael Kenna. Working for Kenna allowed Rolfe to concentrate all his efforts in the fine arts. During the three years assisting, Rolfe created new work, found gallery representation and eventually was able “retire” from assisting in 2001.

Rolfe continues to live and work as an artist and photographer in the San Francisco Bay Area. His photographs have been in numerous exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Asia, as well as widely published in magazines and in several books, including three monographs.

Dale Johnson was raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Sao Paulo, Brazil and currently lives in Hawaii. In 1984, she graduated from the Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena, California with a degree in graphic design. Upon graduation, she became a partner in Johnson & Johnson Studio, in Honolulu, Hawaii, specializing in designing collateral for Resorts and Hotels. She illustrated a children’s book, "The Gorp’s Gift" promoting gun safety for small children. She also has production experience; she oversaw printing in Hong Kong for the entire line of wall calendars for Andrews & McMeel, Kansas City, MO including Gary Larson’s “The Far Side”, Calvin and Hobbes, and Ziggy. In 2008, she began experimenting with photographic lenses looking for one to emulate her painting style. This process grew into a love of the Holga lens and her current photographic style.

Robb Johnson creates haunting and mysterious black and white photographs reminiscent of the chiaroscuro style of the old Italian masters. The unusual atmospheric conditions he finds by photographing in the dark of night imbue his photographs with mystery. He sets a stage where the actors seem to have just stepped off or have yet to arrive for some unknown drama. Johnson’s photographs evoke a world where the viewer is free to explore with his or her own emotions and awareness – a drama unbeknownst but to them. Robb was a scholarship student at Art Center College of Design and earned a BFA in Photography. He worked in advertising photography for over 20 years, specializing in creating visual environments for national hotels with his wife Dale. He decided to turn his visual focus inward and pursue his art for himself. His work has been featured in B&W Magazine, Spotlight and B&W Single Image for 2006, 2007 and 2008 and his book, Robb Johnson Photographs was published by The French Press in 2008. Robb passed away on the island of Maui, HI in 2020.

Pirkle Jones lived in California from the mid-1940s on, photographing the state and its inhabitants with understanding and sympathy. In 1946, when Ansel Adams started the first-ever department of photography in an art school (at what is now the San Francisco Art Institute), Jones was one of the first students, and he returned later to teach classes of his own. Jones grew up in the rural Midwest on a family farm, and when he moved to California his great interests at first were the qualities of San Francisco itself: its moody fog, brilliant sun, tiny houses, and steep perspectives.

California experienced great changes in the postwar period, and Jones was riveted by the transformation. In 1956 Dorothea Lange invited Jones to join her in documenting the last year of the Berryessa Valley, in Napa and Solano counties, before it and the nearby town of Monticello were flooded to accommodate a new reservoir, the present Lake Berryessa. The project was commissioned by Life magazine but remained unpublished until 1960, when Aperture magazine reproduced the photographs in a special issue. That same year the series, titled Death of a Valley, was also shown at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA).

In 1968 Jones and his wife, the photographer Ruth-Marion Baruch, undertook a photographic study of the Black Panther Party. Intended to foster understanding of the group, the photographs drew large crowds when exhibited at San Francisco's de Young Museum and became emblematic of the era. ~ SFMoMA

Ira Elliot Kahn was born in San Francisco and introduced to photography as a seven year old boy while living in Cambodia. In 1965 Kahn began to develop his craft, doing beautiful work in the darkroom where his passion for fine prints was born as he learned how to make them. His work was first exhibited in 1967. Kahn studied studio art and film making at Stanford University, receiving his degree with distinction in 1972. Today, his work can be found in distinguished public and private collections.

Intimacy and form are the cornerstones of Kahn's work. Delight in seeing inspires it; abstraction and craftsmanship realize it. So much of our world is given to imitation. In contrast, Kahn works with conditions and subjects that reflect a genuine nature of their own. He renders them in a way that builds upon essential but often hidden and obscure characteristics. Kahn's photographs are true to their subjects though always interpretive and rarely representational. "The union of mystery and vitality in the art of so many ancient and tribal cultures is a fundamental influence in my work." Like ceremonial masks that reveal more than they conceal, Kahn's photographs are conduits through which otherwise unknown qualities are expressed.

"It's hard to characterize Ira Kahn's work. Some call him a photomuralist; he simply calls himself a photographer. But there is nothing simple about his fine art photography instalations; signature pieces that hang on the walls of some of the best-known businesses in America." - Vanessa Warner

Yousuf Karsh is the most renowned portrait photographer of our time. He has perceptively photographed the statesmen, artists, and literary and scientific figures that have shaped our lives in the 20th century. Known for his ability to transform “the human face into legend,” many of the portraits that he created have become virtually the image of the great man or woman they portray, whether Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Einstein, Georgia O’Keeffe or Helen Keller. In other words, “to experience a Karsh photograph is to feel in the presence of history itself.” His photographs are in major private and public collections throughout the world, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston holding the largest collection in the United States.

Michael Kenna’s work has often been described as enigmatic, graceful, or hauntingly beautiful. Born in England, and currently residing in Seattle, Washington, Kenna has consistently produced a highly compelling body of work on varied subjects, often photographing at dawn or in the dark hours of night with exposures up to 10 hours. His prints have been shown in numerous exhibitions through the world with permanent collections in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Kenna has also done commercial work for such clients as Volvo, Rolls Royce, Audi, Sprint, and Dom Perignon. He has published over 60 books, including two retrospectives.

André Kertész is one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century. In a career that spanned more than seventy years, he made some of the most deceptively simple yet compelling photographs ever created. Working intuitively, he sought to capture the poetry of modern urban life, revealing its quiet incidents and odd, occasionally comic, even bizarre juxtapositions. Combining an amateur’s love for the personal and immediate with a modernist’s sense of form, he created a purely photographic idiom that celebrated a direct observation of everyday life. A major retrospective of his work is traveling this year from the National Portrait Gallery to the Los Angeles County Museum and on to the International Center of Photography.

Bob Kolbrener's subjects, from landscapes to portraits, from symbols of man encroaching on nature to humorous signage, are all carefully and thoughtfully executed. A show with Brett Weston in Los Angeles over 35 years ago launched his work. Since then, it has been exhibited throughout the United States as well as in Austria, Great Britain, China, Indonesia and Japan. With photographs in numerous private and corporate collections, including Texaco, Polaroid, Southwestern Bell and A. G. Edwards, his images are also in collections at institutions such as the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Monterey Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art and Washington University. In 2019, following a retrospective of his work, the Booth Museum acquired nearly two dozen of his works for their permanent collection. Kolbrener began conducting workshops with Ansel Adams at Yosemite. In the past four decades since, he has continued teaching at other workshop venues in addition to serving as a guest lecturer at a number of universities and museums.

“Kolbrener stands apart because his photographs have a rare technical perfection - every print is ideal and masterful in light, tone, cropping and consistency.” - James D. Burke, Director, Saint Louis Art Museum

Paul Kozal is a self taught photographer, has been devoting his life to the exploration of fine art photography since 1989. Using black and white film he creates toned and hand-tinted gelatin-silver prints. Carefully masking significant portions of a print, Kozal selectively tones in selenium to render a rich purple-brown color or with sepia that produces a warmer tone. Often, he will apply both tones, in separate sections to the same photograph or hand-color with pencils and watercolors. Kozal also works in color printing Fuji Crystal Archive and Kodak Metallic prints. His subject matter consists mostly of landscapes of the Southwest and California.

His photographs have been selected for many prestigious national and international juried exhibitions and won many awards. He is represented in several galleries throughout the United States. His photographs are in numerous public and private collections including Tokyo Photographic Culture Center, Cantor Center for the Arts and the Monterey Museum of Fine Art.

Laughlin worked in New Orleans and found inspiration in the city’s faded grandeur. He developed what he termed as his own “visual poetry” by borrowing elements from modern photography—such as strong compositions and highly glossy printing techniques—and imbuing his images with mysterious symbolism. Here, Laughlin stages a tableau of enigmatic richness: a woman in black stands amid broken mirror shards and crumbling walls, holding a wood frame out of which stares the decapitated head of a sculpture. The blurred movement of the woman’s veil emphasizes the scene’s surreal, ghostly quality. ~ The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Gustave Le Gray has has been called the most important French photographer of the nineteenth century. Trained as a painter under Paul Delaroche, Le Gray made his mark in the emerging medium of photography. An experimenter and technical innovator, Le Gray pioneered the use of the paper negative in France and developed a waxed-paper negative that produced sharper-focus prints. In 1851 he began to use collodion on glass negatives, which further increased the clarity of his images. He became one of the first five photographers, along with Édouard-Denis Baldus and Hippolyte Bayard, to work for the missions héliographique, a government-sponsored commission to document the state of repair of important French monuments and buildings. He was also a founding member of the Société Héliographique, the first photographic organization in the world. In the early 1860s he toured the Mediterranean with Alexandre Dumas. He spent his last years in Lebanon and finally Egypt, where he became a professor of drawing and where he died, in 1884.

Roman Loranc was born in Bielsko-Biala, Poland, in 1956 and immigrated to the United States in 1981. Moving to California in 1984 rekindled his feeling for landscape photography, and since settling in the Central Valley, Loranc has increasingly turned to subjects close to home: the delicate wetlands beneath the Pacific Flyway, the stirring and primeval contours of the Diablo Range, and the sinuous courses and radiant surfaces of once mighty rivers. Loranc’s work marks a return to landscape photography as intimate encounter with land and psyche. His work has been exhibitied in many public and private galleries was featured in the best-selling anthology Highway 99: A Literary Journey through California's Great Central Valley.

His first book, Two-Hearted Oak, The Photography of Roman Loranc” (Heyday Books, 2003) is an intimate portrait of a region often overlooked: California's Great Central Valley. His second book, Fractal Dreams, was produced in 2009. Both books are out-of-print. He is also one of the photographers featured in Why Photographs Work by author/photographer George Barr which analyzes 52 images of some of the world's top photographs.

Robert Mapplethorpe is known for his elegantly expressive black-and-white studies of male and female nudes, flowers, and celebrity portraits. He credited sculpture as an influence on his work and used traditional techniques of direct lighting and sharp focus to produce sleekly ravishing effects and gleaming surfaces. His photographs include homoerotic images, often glamorized and disturbing, which made him a controversial figure. Soon after his death from AIDS, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., canceled a traveling retrospective of his work in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid a debate in Congress over public funding by the National Endowment for the Arts of works deemed “objectionable” by fundamentalist religious groups and political conservatives.

Charles Marville was initially trained as a painter, engraver and illustrator before he became a landscape and architecture photographer. Many of his works were made in Italy, Germany and Algeria. He was commissioned to document some of the ancient architecture in Paris during the 1850's and was hired by the Musee du Louvre to make reproductions of artwork in the collection. Marville was made the official photographer in Paris in 1862.

Tina Modotti’s photographs blend formal rigor with social awareness. The Italian-born artist immigrated to the United States when she was 16. She acted in plays and silent films, and worked as an artist’s model during her first years in the country. In 1920 she met photographer Edward Weston, who mentored her and was a great influence on her subsequent work. By 1921 they had become lovers, and in 1923 they moved together to Mexico City, which had become a cosmopolitan center in the interwar years. There, cultural and political expatriates like Weston and Modotti, Sergei Eisenstein, and Leon Trotsky moved in bohemian circles with Mexican intellectuals and artists such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Modotti and Weston opened a portrait studio in the city.

With her camera, Modotti captured Mexico’s sights and people. She took its folk art and landscapes as the starting points for her most abstract images. Telephone Wires, Mexico isolates taut stretches of wire against a pale sky, finding gridded linearity in the skyscape. Staircase and Stadium, Mexico City record repetitions of stairs and shadows, creating complex images that push these architectural features toward abstraction.

Modotti’s social concerns emerge in photographs such as Worker’s Hands, a quiet celebration of a laborer’s dignity. Mella’s Typewriter reveals her leftist leanings and carries a subtle social heft. Modotti met Julio Antonio Mella, a Cuban revolutionary who was a hero among other Latin American radicals, in 1928, at a demonstration in Mexico City against the execution of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The following year, Mella was assassinated as he walked home with Modotti by his side. Her photograph of his typewriter, his instrument for recording his beliefs, is a symbolic portrait of Mella’s life and work, and an emblem of her own Communist sympathies — which ultimately led to her exile from Mexico in 1930.

Modotti eventually settled in Moscow, where she joined the Soviet Communist Party. She gave up photography completely in 1931 to dedicate herself to political work. When she died in 1942 from congestive heart failure, she left behind a small but intensely influential body of work that reflects her appreciation for the Mexican working class, filtered through the precise formal vocabulary of her photographic practice.

Abelardo Morell was born in Havana, Cuba in 1948. He immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1962. Morell received his undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College and his MFA from The Yale University School of Art. He has received an honorary degree from Bowdoin College in 1997 and from Lesley University in 2014.

His publications include a photographic illustration of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland(1998) by Dutton Children’s Books, A Camera in a Room(1995) by Smithsonian Press, A Book of Books(2002) and Camera Obscura (2004) by Bulfinch Press and Abelardo Morell(2005), published by Phaidon Press. The Universe Next Door(2013), published by The Art Institute of Chicago. Tent-Camera (2018), published by Nazraeli Press. His most recent body of work Flowers for Lisawill be published by Abrams in October 2018.

He has received a number of awards and grants, which include a Guggenheim fellowship in 1994 and an Infinity Award in Art from ICP in 2011. In November 2017, he received a Lucie Award for achievement in fine art.

His work has been collected and shown in many galleries, institutions and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Art Museum in New York, The Chicago Art Institute, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Houston Museum of Art, The Boston Museum of Fine Art, The Victoria & Albert Museum and over seventy other museums in the United States and abroad. A retrospective of his work organized jointly by the Art Institute of Chicago, The Getty in Los Angeles and The High Museum in Atlanta closed in May 2014 after a year of travel.

Wright Morris was a renowned writer and effective photographer. Pairing photographs with his own writing, Morris pioneered a new tradition of “photo-texts” in the 1940s that proved highly influential to future photographers. Devoid of figures, his photographs depict everyday objects and atmosphere. Morris’s poetic images exist in a fictional narrative, but reference documentary style.

Born in Nebraska, Morris attended Pomona College in Claremont, California. After graduation he traveled throughout Europe, purchasing his first camera in Vienna. Morris returned to California in 1934 determined to become a writer, but also continued to photograph. In 1935, he bought a Rolleiflex camera and began photographing extensively. Morris first exhibited his photo-texts in 1940, at the New School for Social Research in New York. This same year the Museum of Modern Art purchased prints for their collection and New Directions published images that would become his first book.

In 1942, Morris received the first of his three Guggenheim Fellowships, funding the completion of The Inhabitants. Published by Scribners, The Inhabitants (1946) documented domestic scenes of the South, Midwest, and Southwest and although visually influential enjoyed little financial success. His second photo-text book, The Home Place (1948) was a visual novel, with short fictional prose accompanying each photograph. Although groundbreaking, it remained unmarketable and after its publication Morris invested in his more successful career as a writer. In 1956, Morris won the National Book Award for his tenth book, the unillustrated A Field of Vision. Morris continued to write and publish while teaching English and creative writing from 1962-1974 at San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California. Morris’s acclaimed novel, Plains Song won American Book Award for Fiction 1981.

Born, raised and educated in the San Francisco Bay Area, Richard Murai recently transitioned away from academia after thirty five years teaching creative photography in Northern California's Central Valley. His ongoing fascination with documenting sacred sites has generated travel to locations within Asia, India, South America, the Middle East, Russia, Western Europe and Oceania. In addition to passionately pursuing his art, Richard actively exhibits, is widely collected and his work has been published here and abroad including Lenswork, Camera Arts, Silver Shotz International (AU), BBC Online and other respected journals. Recent honors include first place awards from the Travel Photographer of the Year (UK) in 2008, 2010 and 2011; a Jurors Award from the 2010 California State Fair; Best in Show from the Center for Photographic Art's (Carmel, CA) 2015 International Juried Portfolio.

This important English photographer pioneered work in photographic studies of motion and in motion-picture projection. He emigrated to the United States as a young man but remained obscure until 1868, when his large photographs of Yosemite Valley, California, made him world famous. Muybridge's experiments in photographing motion began in 1872, when Leland Stanford hired him to prove that during a particular moment in a trotting horse's gait all four legs are off the ground simultaneously. His first efforts were unsuccessful because his camera lacked a fast shutter. The project was then interrupted while Muybridge was being tried for the murder of his wife's lover. Although he was acquitted, he found it expedient to travel for a number of years in Mexico and Central America, making publicity photographs for the Union Pacific Railroad, a company owned by Stanford.

In 1877 he returned to California and resumed his experiments in motion photography, using a battery of from 12 to 24 cameras and a special shutter he developed that gave an exposure of 2/1,000 of a second. This arrangement gave satisfactory results and proved Stanford's contention.The results of Muybridge's work were widely published, most often in the form of line drawings taken from his photographs. They wer criticized, however, by those who thought that horse's legs could never assume such unlikely positions. To counter such criticism, Muybridge gave lectures on animal locomotion throughout the United States and Europe. These lectures were illustrated with a zoopraxiscope, a lantern he developed that projected images in rapid succession onto a screen from photographs printed on a rotating glass disc, producing the illusion of moving pictures.

The zoopraxiscope display, an important predecessor of the modern cinema, was a sensation at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. Muybridge made his most important photographic studies of motion from 1884 to 1887 under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania. These consisted of photographs of various activities of human figures, clothed and naked, which were to form a visual compendium of human movements for the use of artists and scientists. Many of these photographs were published in 1887 in the portfolio “Animal Locomotion, An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movement.” Muybridge continued to publicize and publish his work until 1900, when he retired to his birthplace.

William Neill, a resident of the Yosemite National Park area since 1977, is a landscape photographer concerned with conveying the deep, spiritual beauty he sees and feels in Nature. Neill's award-winning photography has been widely published in books, magazines, calendars, posters, and his limited-edition prints have been collected and exhibited in museums and galleries nationally, including the Museum of Fine Art Boston, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, The Vernon Collection, and The Polaroid Collection. Neill received a BA degree in Environmental Conservation at the University of Colorado. In 1995, Neill received the Sierra Club's Ansel Adams Award for conservation photography.

Neill's assignment and published credits include National Geographic, Smithsonian, Natural History, National Wildlife, Conde Nast Traveler, Gentlemen's Quarterly, Travel and Leisure, Wilderness, Sunset, Sierra and Outside magazines. Also, he writes a monthly column, On Landscape, for Outdoor Photographer magazine. Feature articles about his work have appeared in Life, Camera and Darkroom, Outdoor Photographer and Communication Arts, from whom he has also received five Awards of Excellence. His corporate clients have included Sony Japan, Bayer Corporation, Canon USA, Nike, Nikon, The Nature Company, and Sony Music/Classical.

Born in Leipzig, Germany, Sonya Noskowiak spent her upbringing in Chile, Panama, and California. At the age of 19, she started her photographic career in 1929 assisting Johan Hagemeyer. She then went on to work with Edward Weston based in Los Angeles, printing Weston's commercial work for him. She lived and worked with Weston from their meeting until 1934. Noskowiak along with the likes of Weston, Imogen Cunningham and Ansel Adams all worked with large format cameras using the f-stop which allows the sharpest focus and detail at this smallest aperture, f-64, which was the basis for Group f-64's foundation. Their push away from pictorialism showcased works of high contrast and modern abstractions of typical and atypical forms and subject matter.

Noskowiak exhibited her work in the first Group f-64 show at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in 1933 and went on to take part in several one woman and group exhibitions gaining much critical acclaim. She opened her own studio in 1935 in San Francisco where she worked until 1965. A large archive of her work is held at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. In 1992 The Oakland Museum published a book entitled, Seeing Straight Group f/64.

Manuello Paganelli grew up in Santo Domingo, Italy and Puerto Rico. After a mentorship with Ansel Adams, he worked as a photojournalist at the Chattanooga Times. In 1989, he began to explore Cuba, its land, its people, and its complex relationship with the USA. In 1995, he had his first solo photo show of his work on Cuba and that same year earned him a fellowship grant. The Washington Post wrote "Manuello Paganelli's Cuban photographs are a brilliant window on a land and people too long hidden from North American eyes. Working in the tradition of Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, Paganelli brings an artist's eyes and a native son's sensibility to his superb photographs."

In the early 1990s, he started work on his Black Cowboys series with a selection being featured at the Annenberg Space for Photography. In the summer of 2012, this same series was selected for the Photo Vernissage at the Manage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. His award-winning work has graced the covers and pages of many well-known magazines including Bloomberg Business Week, Bloomberg Market, Forbes, Newsweek, Men’s Journal, People, Time, Reader’s Digest, ESPN, Sports Illustrated and many more.

Kenneth Parker is a large-format landscape colorist working principally in remote pristine wilderness areas throughout the world. His early experience as fine art color pioneer Eliot Porter’s field assistant helped to nurture a loving eye devoted to isolating and capturing the mysteries in nature that he struggled for decades to unravel as a research scientist in oceanography and global climate change. Paul Caponigro has also been a principal influence on his development as a consistent mentor to Parker since the mid-70s. Over the past three decades, Parker has produced a body of work in several formats that has been widely exhibited and published. His work is in the collection of the Monterey Museum of Art as well as many private and corporate collections.

After graduating from Wellesley College with a degree in the History of Art, Parker began her career as a painter, and became involved in photography in 1970. Mostly self-taught she makes ephemeral constructions to photograph and experiments with the endless possibilities of light. She has had more than one hundred one-person exhibitions in the United States and abroad, and her work is represented in major private, corporate, and museum collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. Portfolios of her work have been published in Art News, American Photographer, Camera, Camera Arts, The Sciences and numerous other magazines in the United States, Europe, and Japan. There have been three monographs of Parker’s work: Signs of Life (Godine, 1978), Under the Looking Glass (New York Graphic Society, 1983), and Weighing The Planets (New York Graphic Society, 1987). She has lectured and conducted workshops extensively both in this country and abroad. In 1996 she received a Wellesley College Alumnae Achievement Award. Residencies include Dartmouth College in 1988, The MacDowell Colony in 1993 and The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1997. Currently she is working on Still and not so Still Life that comprises images of both the expected and the unexpected.

Penn, the brother of the motion-picture director Arthur Penn, initially intended to become a painter, but at age 26 he took a job designing photographic covers for the fashion magazine Vogue. He began photographing his own ideas for covers and soon established himself as a fashion photographer. In 1950 he married model Lisa Fonssagrives, whom he photographed for much of his best work.

His austere fashion images communicated elegance and luxury through compositional refinement and clarity of line rather than through the use of elaborate props and backdrops. Penn also became an influential portraitist. He photographed a large number of celebrities, engaging each subject to sit for hours and to reveal his or her personality to the camera. In his portraits the subject is usually posed before a bare backdrop and photographed in natural northern light. The resulting images combine simplicity and directness with great formal sophistication.

A memorable series of portraits he created in 1950–51, collectively called Small Trades, was of labourers in New York, Paris, and London formally posed in their work clothes and holding the tools of their trade. This project eventually extended to places such as Nepal, New Guinea, Dahomey (now Benin), and Morocco. Penn's later platinum prints of female nudes and of cigarette butts are characterized by the same tonal subtlety, compositional virtuosity, and serenity that mark his fashion photography and portraiture. Three hundred of Penn's pictures were published in Moments Preserved (1960). His other books include Worlds in a Small Room (1974), a collection of portraits of people he encountered in remote foreign locales, and Passage (1991), a retrospective survey of more than 400 examples of his work in portraiture, fashion, ethnic studies, and still life.

Eliot Porter was born in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, Illinois, the second of five children in an upper-middle-class family. His father, an amateur architect and natural history enthusiast, managed the family’s Chicago real estate and infused in his children a love of learning and the sciences. His mother, a Bryn Mawr graduate, shared her active support for liberal social causes. Given his first camera in 1911, Porter immediately challenged himself to photograph birds, first around his Winnetka home and then at the family’s summer retreat, Great Spruce Head Island, in Penobscot Bay, Maine. Sent East for high school, he followed family tradition by enrolling at Harvard, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in chemical engineering in 1923 and a medical degree in 1929. (AMERICAN, 1901 - 1990)

Initially, Porter took up a career as a biochemical researcher at Harvard. But he could never quite let go of his love of photography. Spurred by support from his brother, the realist painter Fairfield Porter, and introductions in the mid-1930s to the acclaimed artist-photographers Alfred Stieglitz and Ansel Adams, he found himself increasingly photographing the northern New England landscape. In 1938 Stieglitz offered to exhibit some of these black-and-white photographs, along with several images that Porter made on an excursion to Austria, at his important New York City gallery, An American Place. That one-person show signaled Porter as a leading artist, on a par with such respected photographers as Paul Strand, Adams, and Stieglitz himself. It induced Porter to quit his medical career and take up photography full-time. But rather than continue to work in black and white, Porter almost immediately took up color to create more accurate photographs of birds. Soon he added other woodland subjects to his repertoire and became the first established artist-photographer to commit to exploring the colorful beauty and diversity of the natural world.

Over much of Porter’s career, black-and-white photography continued to set the artistic standard, and he had to fight his colleagues’ prejudices against the medium. But in 1962 he gained a major boost when the Sierra Club published "In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World." That immensely popular book, combining his evocative color photographs of New England woods with excerpts from the writings of Henry David Thoreau, revolutionized photographic book publishing by setting new standards for design and printing and proving the commercial viability of fine art photography books. Its success set Porter on a lifelong path of creating similar photographic portraits of a wide variety of ecologically significant places the world over.

Building on the success of "In Wildness" and subsequent photographic celebrations of Glen Canyon (in Utah), Maine, and the Adirondacks, Porter moved increasingly farther afield to photograph and complete books heralding more distant and unusual sites. Such places included Baja California, Mexico, the Galápagos, East Africa, and Antarctica, all of which drew his attention because of their ecological diversity and the environmental stresses they faced. In the late 1960s, he added cultural topics to his agenda, eventually completing photographic studies of classical Greek sites, ruins of ancient Egypt, and modern China. All told, the artist published twenty-five books and was working on several more when he died in 1990.

Porter never gave up his passion for birds, continuing to photograph them almost every spring until failing health in the 1980s prevented that often strenuous work. He always remained fascinated by the scientific and ecological underpinnings of his subjects, be they animal, plant, or mineral. In the 1950s he would at times set himself such tasks as photographing new-born spiders or the life cycle of a mosquito. Lichen was one of his favorite subjects; he sought it out wherever he traveled. The publication of James Gleick’s book Chaos: Making a New Science (1987) led him to review his life’s work in recognition of his own implicit illustration of Gleick’s influential theory.

But Porter’s fascination with nature’s workings and strong environmentalist ethic never superseded his passion for art. Throughout his life, he remained committed to making and exhibiting meticulously rendered dye transfer color prints of his photographs. In the 1940s and 1950s, when lines between art and natural history museums were more fluid, he was just as likely to show at the American Museum of Natural History as the Museum of Modern Art. Art museums’ gradual acceptance of color in the 1960s and 1970s led to a regular stream of monographic exhibitions at both large and small venues. Highlights include Intimate Landscapes(1980), the first one-person show of color photographs presented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and major retrospectives sponsored by the Art Museum of the University of New Mexico (1973) and the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas (1987 and 2002).

Married twice, Porter fathered five sons. In 1946 he established his permanent home in Tesuque, just outside of Santa Fe. It was there that he made his prints and assembled his books. Visit Porter's Books and Portfolio in this section for a comprehensive list of his books and portfolios. ~ Amon Carter Museum of American Art

Alfred Stieglitz was an American The body of photography that represents Alfred Stieglitz's achievement as an artist was appraised by fellow photographer Edward Steichen as "like none ever made by any other photographer." Stieglitz's seminal role as artist and art impresario at a time when American culture was redefining its fundamental ways of seeing, thinking and experiencing the world is difficult to briefly define or describe. He is more than just one of the finest photographers of his time and the creator of some of the most iconic images in the history of the art. He is one of the pillars upon which 20th century photography stands. Through his galleries, 291 and An American Place, as well as through Camera Work, the photographic journal which he founded and edited, he fostered the careers of the most important photographers of the first half of the century, including Paul Strand, Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams.

Ryuijie was born in Otaru, Japan. As a young child he moved with his family to the US and subsequently lived in many places from Hawaii to New Hampshire, and again in Japan, until his father retired from the military. Throughout his childhood, Ryuijie showed a serious inclination to the arts. This interest began to materialize during his own military service. While stationed in Guam, Ryuijie learned underwater photography while pursuing his long time interest in scuba diving. After his tour, he came back to the Monterey Peninsula where he attended college and began a successful career in lithography.

It was in Monterey that an exhibit of Jerry Uelsmann’s photographs inspired him and propelled him into the practice of fine art black and white photography. Ryuijie has steadfastly pursued his own photographic vision for over thirty years, and has acquired a reputation for his exquisite platinum/palladium prints, in addition to his traditional black and white work. An exceptionally prolific artist, Ryuijie’s career has been highlighted by a multitude of exhibitions. His work has appeared in View Camera, Photovision, Camera and Darkroom, Black & White, Lenswork, and Focus magazines. He has published three books Ryuijie: Photographs, Time and Place, and Fragments of Time, along with smaller catalogs. His first portfolio Ryuijie: Ten Photographs was published in 1990 and his second portfolio Ryuijie: Portfolio Two Platinum/Palladium was published in 2002. Ryuijie’s currently work involves large split toned black and white prints of frozen botanicals, and his third portfolio, P-Square a selection of square photographs taken with a 2 1/4 Rollei camera. In October 2005 Ryuijie returned to his first love the landscape, and the abstraction, creating panoramic visions of the natural world. Works by Ryuijie can be found in private and public collections word wide including the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

(JAPANESE, b. 1943)

Since the 1970s, Japanese photographer Tomio Seike has produced small format, hand printed images. Working slowly and methodically, he spends a number of years on a single series, producing only 4-5 images a year. Seike uses natural or pre-existing light and refuses to use a tripod. He has produced works in Paris and appreciates the still-lifes and nude form. Seike's work is featured in many international collections.

Edward Steichen is one of the most influential figures in 20th century photography, as well as the history of photography from its inception on. By his early twenties, Steichen was winning the praise of Alfred Stieglitz in New York as well as Auguste Rodin in Paris, both of whom went on to become close friends, for his brooding tonalist landscapes and brilliant psychological studies. The preferred portraitist of both the American and the European elite during his earlier career, and an acknowledged master of the Pictorialist style, Steichen denounced Pictorialism following WWI in favor of “straight” photography. He is also known for his fashion and advertising photography. Curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for over fifteen years, he was responsible for many important exhibitions, including The Family of Man.

One of the most important and influential photographers of the twentieth century, Paul Strand pushed the medium of photography into artistic terrain considered too difficult to describe with a camera. His undeniable success brought photography to its maturity. For concentrated power, formal coherence, and human sensitivity, Stand’s photographs are unsurpassed. In his early years, influenced by Cubism, he broke through the Pictorialist aesthetic through focusing upon purity of form and composition, evident in all of his work. Finding subject matter across the US, from New York City to the Southwest, as well as through Europe, Strand's dedication to straight photography makes him a critical figure in the history of photography.

Known as the “Poet of Prague” Sudek studied photography at the School of Graphic Art in Prague with Professor Karel Novak (1922-23). A lifelong passion for music also influenced his life and work. While Sudek is sometimes regarded as a modernist, this is true of only a couple of years in the 1930s, during which he undertook commercial photography. Primarily, his personal photography is neo-romantic. His early work included many series of light falling in the interior of St. Vitus cathederal. During and after World War II Sudek created haunting night-scapes and panoramas of Prague, photographed the wooded landscape of Bohemia, and the window-glass that led to his garden (the famous The Window of My Atelier series). He went on to photograph the crowded interior of his studio (the Labyrinths series). His first Western show was at George Eastman House in 1974 and he published 16 books during his life. He was awarded the Order of Work by the Czech government in 1966 and received the title Artist of Merit in 1961, the first photographer so honored by the Czech government.

Frank Meadow Sutcliffe was born in 1853 in Headingly, Leads, England. He became active in photography around 1870, and established a studio in the Yorkshire coastal town of Whitby, where he was very successful as a carte de visite and portrait photographer. He wrote extensively about photography and from 1908 until about 1930 had a column in the Yorkshire Weekly Post and contributed several other articles to magazines and newspapers, including Amateur Photography. Sutcliffe was a distinguished photographer of his day and was a founding member of The Linked Ring, as well as an Honorary Fellow of RPS. The first photographer to have a one-man show held by the Camera Club in 1888, his work was frequently exhibited and widely respected, as is demonstrated by the sixty-two medals he received throughout his lifetime. Sutcliffe experimented with many varieties of prints - albumen, silver, carbon and platinum - and in his later years also did experimental photography for Kodak, using their hand-held camera.

Although he was successful as a commercial photographer, Sutcliffe is best known for his personal landscape and genre prints, which he took in Whitby. He was influenced by P. H. Emerson and early realist French painters. Sutcliffe focused on the small-town inhabitants of Whitby - the fisherman, farmers, their wives and their children at work and at play. He is especially recognized as being able to capture people in a natural, unposed state despite the fact that the slow technique of wet plates that he often used made it difficult to do so. For further information on Sutcliffe see Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, published by Aperture with text by Michael Hiley.

Having studied art with an emphasis in painting, Jerry Takigawa began studying photography with Don Worth in the late 1960s and in 1969 made the transition from painting to working with photography exclusively. In the 1970s, he moved from the San Francisco Bay area to the Monterey Peninsula and began exploring with color photography. By 1977, his photography made a break from the traditional approaches and he began developing new visual solutions in both approach and concept to coincide with his changing views and perceptions. In 1982 he became the first photographer to create a color portfolio recognized by the Imogen Cunningham Award. The 90s gave way to a return to black-and-white and an expansion into digital printing techniques. He has published extensively and instructed at numerous workshops.

Making complex, multi-image allegories with sophisticated multiple-printing techniques, Uelsmann’s work contradicts the essential information we have come to expect from photographs. His photographic montages are ambiguous and dream-like, eliciting response from every viewer without necessarily revealing a certain meaning. Having taught at the University of Florida for nearly three decades, Uelsmann is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and was a founding member of the Society for Photographic Education, along with being a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain. Over the past thirty years he has had over 100 solo exhibitions and 10 books published. His photographs are in the permanent collections of renowned museums worldwide including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Balitmore Museum of Art, Center for Creative Photography, Crysler Museum, Denver Art Museum, Crocker Art Museum, George Eastman House, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Philadelphia Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Seattle Art Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris among many others.

George Tice is one of the finest photographers of his time. He is best known for his large format black and white photographs of New Jersey, focusing on American suburban and rural landscapes. Tice was born in Newark, New Jersey, and self-trained as a photographer. He is a master printer as well, printing for Edward Steichen as well as the portfolios of Frederick H. Evans and Edward Weston. His work is included in major museum collections around the world including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metroplitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and he has published many books of photographs, including 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). He received the Lucie Awards "Lifetime Achievement" in the fall of 2015

Brett Weston may be said to be the first successful artistic heir in the history of photography. The son of Edward Weston, Brett was taught the basics of photography by his father at the young age of fourteen, and set out on his own from that point on. At sixteen he had his first one-man show, and received international recognition at eighteen when a score of his photographs was displayed in the legendary “Film und Foto” exhibition of 1929 in Stuttgart. By the age of twenty, his photographs were on view in major shows in the US, Europe, and Japan. Since then, Weston’s photographs have been featured in hundreds of exhibitions around the world, and are staples in the collections of leading museums and galleries including the Getty Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago, George Eastman House, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Amon Carter Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum among others. Concerned with the elemental mass of forms, he is known for his great abstractions; he is also generally acknowledged as one of the finest printers in the medium.

Cara Weston was born and raised in Carmel, California, the daughter of photographer Cole Weston and Helen Prosser Weston and granddaughter to the world-renowned photographer Edward Weston and Flora Chandler Weston. Living in the photographic world all her life, in the 1970s, she worked for and with her father Cole Weston, and with her uncle, Brett Weston as an assistant and model. She also spent a short time assisting black and white photographer Rod Dresser. Cara initially photographed using only black and white film, she has broken with family tradition and has embraced digital photography. She also worked in the medium of stained glass for many years. Cara inherited another Weston family passion, sailing, which she did extensively, making trips to Hawaii, Costa Rica, the Channel Islands and Baja, Mexico. Cara's most personal and rewarding years have been raising her two daughters and being a mother. She strongly feels this is her greatest accomplishment in life and can't imagine anything else ever being as rewarding. Cara currently lives in Big Sur, California.

Edward Weston, an American photographer was born in Highland Park, Illinois. Weston began to make photographs in Chicago parks in 1902, and his works were first exhibited in 1903 at the Art Institute of Chicago. Three years later he moved to California and opened a portrait studio in a Los Angeles suburb. The Western landscape soon became his principal subject matter. In the 1930s, Weston and several other photographers, including Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and Willard van Dyke, formed the f/64 group, which greatly influenced the aesthetics of American photography. In 1937, Weston received the first Guggenheim Fellowship awarded to a photographer, which freed him from earning a living as a portraitist. The works for which he is famous–sharp, stark, brilliantly printed images of sand dunes, nudes, vegetables, rock formations, trees, cacti, shells, water, and human faces are among the finest of 20th-century photographs; their influence on modern art remains inestimable.

Weston made his last photographs at his beloved Point Lobos, California, during the decade from 1938 to 1948, 1948 being the year he was stricken with Parkinson's disease. His second son, Brett Weston, 1911-93, and his fourth son, Cole Weston, 1919-2003, were both photographers in their father's tradition. Cole Weston, Edward's youngest son, made prints from Edward's original negatives for approximately forty years. Each print was made according to Edward's specifications, created in the same format as his father's. The negatives are now safely stored at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona.

Edward Weston was one of the true regenerative artists: an awakener of the eye and the evolving mind it serves. Regeneration was a quality that Weston brought to photography for more than three decades, defining both the limits and the generosities of his medium. Point Lobos was only one of his subjects, though he returned to it again and again, and took his last photograph there. His career spanned crucial years in American photography, and a restless pursuit of his art created a body of work that ranged over nudes, still lifes, industrial scenes, portraiture, landscapes, and any other subject that touched his visual imagination." Aperture: Masters of Photography: Number 7, Edward Weston, 1988

Minor White was an American photographer, theoretician, critic and educator. He combined an intense interest in how people viewed and understood photographs with a personal vision that was guided by a variety of spiritual and intellectual philosophies. Starting in Oregon in 1937 and continuing until he died in 1976, White made thousands of black-and-white and color photographs of landscapes, people and abstract subject matter, created with both technical mastery and a strong visual sense of light and shadow. He taught many classes, workshops and retreats on photography at the California School of Fine Arts, Rochester Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, other schools, and in his own home. He lived much of his life as a closeted gay man, afraid to express himself publicly for fear of loss of his teaching jobs, and some of his most compelling images are figure studies of men whom he taught or with whom he had relationships. He helped start and for many years was editor of the photography magazine Aperture. After his death in 1976, White was hailed as one of America's greatest photographers.