Pierre Molinier – Painter, Photographer, "Maker Of Objects"

Pierre Molinier (April 13, 1900 – March 3, 1976) was a painter, photographer and "maker of objects". He was born in Agen (France) and lived his life in Bordeaux (France). He began his career by painting landscapes, but his work turned towards a fetishistic eroticism early on.Molinier began to take photographs at the age of 18. When Molinier’s sister died in 1918, he is alleged to have had sex with her corpse while left alone to photograph it. "’Even dead, she was beautiful. I shot sperm on her stomach and legs, and onto the First Communion dress she was wearing. She took with her into death the best of me."

Molinier started his erotic production around 1950. With the aid of a wide range of specially made ‘props’ – dolls, various prosthetic limbs, stiletto heels, dildos and an occasional confidante – Pierre Molinier focused upon his own body as the armature for a constructive form that ultimately produced a large body of photographic work. Most of his photographs, photomontages, are self-portraits of himself as a woman.

He began a correspondence with André Breton and sent him photographs of his paintings. Later Breton integrated him into the Surrealist group. Breton organized an exhibition of Molinier’s paintings in Paris, in January–February 1956.

Pierre Molinier’s enigmatic photographs have influenced European and North American body artists since the 1970s, including Jürgen Klauke, Cindy Sherman and Ron Athey, and his work continues to engage artists, critics, and collectors today.In the 1970s, Molinier’s health began to decline. Like his father before him, Pierre Molinier committed suicide at 76 years of age by a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Text from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Herb Ritts – Photographer

Herb Ritts began his photographic career in the late 70’s and gained a reputation as a master of art and commercial photography. In addition to producing portraits and editorial fashion for Vogue, Vanity Fair, Interview and Rolling Stone, Ritts also created successful advertising campaigns for Calvin Klein, Chanel, Donna Karan, Gap, Gianfranco Ferré, Gianni Versace, Giorgio Armani, Levi’s, Pirelli, Polo Ralph Lauren, Valentino among others. Since 1988 he directed numerous influential and award winning music videos and commercials. His fine art photography has been the subject of exhibitions worldwide, with works residing in many significant public and private collections.

In his life and work, Herb Ritts was drawn to clean lines and strong forms. This graphic simplicity allowed his images to be read and felt instantaneously. They often challenged conventional notions of gender or race. Social history and fantasy were both captured and created by his memorable photographs of noted individuals in film, fashion, music, politics and society.

Ritts was committed to HIV/AIDS related causes, and contributed to many charitable organizations, among them amfAR, Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, Project Angel Food, Focus on AIDS, APLA, Best Buddies and Special Olympics . He was also a charter member on the Board of Directors for The Elton John Aids Foundation.

Text from “herbritts.com”

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Andreas Feininger – German-American Photographer

Andreas Bernhard Lyonel Feininger (27 December 1906 – 18 February 1999) was a German American photographer, and writer on photographic technique, noted for his dynamic black-and-white scenes of Manhattan and studies of the structure of natural objects.

Biography
Feininger was born in Paris, France, to an American family of German origin. His father, painter Lyonel Feininger, was born in New York City, in 1871. His great-grandfather emigrated from Durlach, Baden, in Germany, to the United States in 1848. His younger brother was the artist T. Lux Feininger (1910-2011).

Feininger grew up and was educated as an architect in Germany, where his father painted and taught at Staatliches Bauhaus. In 1936, he gave up architecture itself, moved to Sweden, and focused on photography. In advance of World War II, in 1939, Feininger immigrated to the U.S. where he established himself as a freelance photographer and in 1943 joined the staff of Life magazine, an association that lasted until 1962.

Feininger became famous for his photographs of New York. Science and nature, as seen in bones, shells, plants and minerals, were other frequent subjects, but rarely did he photograph people or make portraits. Feininger wrote comprehensive manuals about photography, of which the best known is The Complete Photographer. In the introduction to one of Feininger’s books of photographs, Ralph Hattersley described him as "one of the great architects who helped create photography as we know it today." In 1966, the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) awarded Feininger its highest distinction, the Robert Leavitt Award. In 1991, the International Center of Photography awarded Feininger the Infinity Lifetime Achievement Award.

Today, Feininger’s photographs are in the permanent collections of the Center for Creative Photography, Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, and the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York.

Text from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Germaine Krull – Photographer And Political Activist

Germaine Krull (29 November 1897 – 31 July 1985), was a photographer, political activist, and hotel owner. Her nationality has been categorized as German, Polish, French, and Dutch, but she spent years in Brazil, Republic of the Congo, Thailand, and India. Described as "an especially outspoken example" of a group of early 20th-century female photographers who "could lead lives free from convention", she is best known for photographically-illustrated books such as her 1928 portfolio Métal.

Biography
Germaine Luise Krull was born in Wilda, Poznań, then on the border between Germany and Poland in East Prussia, of an affluent German family. In her early years, the family moved around Europe frequently; she did not receive a formal education, but instead received home schooling from her father, an accomplished engineer and a free thinker but a bit of a neer-do-well. Her father may have influenced her in at least two ways. First, he let her dress as a boy when she was young, which may have contributed to her ideas about women’s roles later in her life. Second, his views on social justice "also seem to have predisposed her to involvement with radical politics."

Between 1915 and 1917 or 1918 she attended the Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt für Photographie, a photography school in Munich, Germany, at which Frank Eugene’s teaching of pictorialism in 1907–1913 had been influential. She opened a studio in Munich in approximately 1918, took portraits of Kurt Eisner and others, and befriended prominent people such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Friedrich Pollock, and Max Horkheimer.

Krull was politically active between 1918 and 1921. In 1919 she switched from the Independent Socialist Party of Bavaria to the Communist Party of Germany, and was arrested and imprisoned for assisting a Bolshevik emissary’s attempted escape to Austria. She was expelled from Bavaria in 1920 for her Communist activities, and travelled to Russia with lover Samuel Levit. After Levit abandoned her in 1921, Krull was imprisoned as an "anti-Bolshevik" and expelled from Russia.

She lived in Berlin between 1922 and 1925 where she resumed her photographic career. She and Kurt Hübschmann (later to be known as Kurt Hutton) worked together in a Berlin studio between 1922 and 1924. Among other photographs Krull produced in Berlin were nudes that one reviewer has likened to "satires of lesbian pornography."

Having met Dutch filmmaker and communist Joris Ivens in 1923, she moved to Amsterdam in 1925. After Krull returned to Paris in 1926, Ivens and Krull entered into a marriage of convenience between 1927 and 1943 so that Krull could hold a Dutch passport and could have a "veneer of married respectability without sacrificing her autonomy."

In Paris between 1926 and 1928, Krull became friends with Sonia Delaunay, Robert Delaunay, Eli Lotar, André Malraux, Colette, Jean Cocteau, André Gide and others; her commercial work consisted of fashion photography, nudes, and portraits. During this period she published the portfolio Métal (1928) which concerned "the essentially masculine subject of the industrial landscape." Krull shot the portfolio’s 64 black-and-white photographs in Paris, Marseille, and Holland during approximately the same period as Ivens was creating his film De Brug ("The Bridge") in Rotterdam, and the two artists may have influenced each other. The portfolio’s subjects range from bridges, buildings (e.g., the Eiffel Tower), and ships to bicycle wheels; it can be read as either a celebration of machines or a criticism of them. Many of the photographs were taken from dramatic angles, and overall the work has been compared to that of László Moholy-Nagy and Alexander Rodchenko. In 1999–2004 the portfolio was selected as one of the most important photo books in history.

By 1928 Krull was considered one of the best photographers in Paris, along with André Kertész and Man Ray. Between 1928 and 1933, her photographic work consisted primarily of photojournalism, such as her photographs for Vu, a French magazine. Also in the early 1930s,she also made a pioneering study of employment black spots in Britain for Weekly Illustrated (most of her ground-breaking reportage work from this period remains immured in press archives and she has never received the credit which is her due for this work). Her book Études de Nu ("Studies of Nudes") published in 1930 is still well-known today. Between 1930 and 1935 she contributed photographs for a number of travel and detective fiction books.

In 1935–1940, Krull lived in Monte Carlo where she had a photographic studio. Among her subjects during this period were buildings (such as casinos and palaces), automobiles, celebrities, and common people. She may have been a member of the Black Star photojournalism agency which had been founded in 1935, but "no trace of her work appears in the press with that label."

In World War II, she became disenchanted with the Vichy France government, and sought to join the Free French Forces in Africa. Due to her Dutch passport and her need to obtain proper visas, her journey to Africa included over a year (1941–1942) in Brazil where she photographed the city of Ouro Preto. Between 1942 and 1944 she was in Brazzaville in Republic of the Congo, after which she spent several months in Algiers and then returned to France.

After World War II, she travelled to Southeast Asia as a war correspondent, but by 1946 had become a co-owner of the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand, a role that she undertook until 1966. She published three books with photographs during this period, and also collaborated with Malraux on a project concerning the sculpture and architecture of Southeast Asia.

After retiring from the hotel business in 1966, she briefly lived near Paris, then moved to Northern India and converted to the Sakya school of Tibetan Buddhism. Her final major photographic project was the publication of a 1968 book Tibetans in India that included a portrait of the Dalai Lama. After a stroke, she moved to a nursing home in Wetzlar, Germany, where she died in 1985.

Text from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Alfred Eisenstaedt – German-American Photographer

Alfred Eisenstaedt (December 6, 1898 – August 24, 1995) was a German-American photographer and photojournalist. He is renowned for his candid photographs, frequently made using various models of a 35mm Leica rangefinder camera. He is best known for his photograph capturing the celebration of V-J Day.

Early life
Eisenstaedt was born in Dirschau (Tczew) in West Prussia, Imperial Germany. His family moved to Berlin in 1906. Eisenstaedt served in the German Army’s artillery during World War I, and was wounded in 1918. While working as a belt and button salesman in the 1920s in Weimar Germany, Eisenstaedt began taking photographs as a freelancer for the Berliner Tageblatt.

Professional photographer
Eisenstaedt was successful enough to become a full-time photographer in 1929. Four years later he photographed a meeting between Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in Italy. Other notable pictures taken by Eisenstaedt in his early career include a waiter ice skating in St. Moritz in 1932 and Joseph Goebbels at the League of Nations in Geneva in 1933. Although initially friendly, Goebbels scowled for the photograph when he learned that Eisenstaedt was Jewish.

Because of oppression in Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Eisenstaedt emigrated to the United States in 1935, where he lived in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York, for the rest of his life. He worked as a photographer for Life magazine from 1936 to 1972. His photos of news events and celebrities, such as Dagmar, Sophia Loren and Ernest Hemingway, appeared on 90 Life covers.

Photography
Eisenstaedt’s most famous photograph is of an American sailor kissing a young woman on August 14, 1945 in Times Square. (The photograph is known under various names: V–J day in Times Square, V–Day, etc.) Because Eisenstaedt was photographing rapidly changing events during the V-J Day celebrations, he stated that he didn’t get a chance to obtain names and details, which has encouraged a number of mutually incompatible claims to the identity of the subjects.

Text from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Robert Doisneau And The Nude In The Window

Un Regard Oblique, a 1948 photo taken by Robert Doisneau for his LIFE magazine assignment, was executed with Doisneau’s usual flair for humor. A couple looks at the window and the man is enthralled by the portrait of a naked woman (very vulgar picture by the standards of the time) while his wife talks to him about a photo which is presumably more modest. Although it was hailed as a decisive moment, the truth was that Doisneau carefully set his camera at the correct angle to the reclining nude and took a series of furtive photos of male admirers to the nude painting in the art shop window.

Text and images found at “Très Blasé”

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Franz Fiedler – Austria-Hungarian Photographer

Franz Fiedler (17 February, 1885, in Prostějov, Austria-Hungary – 5 February, 1956, in Dresden, GDR) was a photographer.

Fiedler was born in Prostějov, near Olomouc in Moravia. Fiedler was a pupil of Hugo Erfurth. He was regarded as an eccentric during his apprenticeship in Pilsen, and worked in 1905 and again in 1912 with Rudof Dührkoop in Hamburg, and from 1908 to 1911 with Hugo Erfurth in Dresden. At the 1911 world exhibition in Turin he won first prize and had another exhibition in Prague in 1913. He belonged to the circle of Jaroslav Hašek and Egon Erwin Kisch and in 1916 married Erna Hauswald in Dresden where he occupied a studio at Sedanstraße 7.

From 1919, and coincidental with his friendship with Madame d’Ora (Dora Kallmus, of Vienna who was later to move to Paris) he began to work with a 9×12 folding camera and in 1924 became one of the first professional photographers to use a Leica. After expanding his studio in 1925, he took part in the exhibition "Film und Foto" in Stuttgart.

The outstanding publication on the city of Dresden, conceived in the spirit of Die Neue Sachlichkeit, is one of the first illustrated works created according to the new principles of photography. It marks a turning point in his work. To the same series of publications, published by Adolf Behne, belongs ‘Berlin in Bildern’ by Sasha Stone. That work was the subject of a show at the turn of the year (2006/7) in the Berlinischen Galerie.

Fiedler’s studio was destroyed on 13 February 1945. All that was left was a box with photographs for exhibition which was deposited with his family in Moravia. After 1945 he did not have his own studio and earned a living in the GDR as author of books on photography. Anneliese Kretschmer, Dortmund, is one of his pupils.

Text from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Bettie Page And Bunny Yeager – Legendary Queens Of Pin-Up

The pairing of pinup Bettie Page and shutterbug Bunnie Yeager was a deadly one-two punch combining beauty and brains.  It was Bettie Page’s trademark black baby bangs, blue eyes, and red lips that are seared on our mind’s eye– but Yeager deserves a lot of credit for the photographic talent behind many of Page’s most memorable shots.  Together they undoubtedly created some of the most iconic, influential, and titillating pin-up images ever that paved the way for the countless female models, actresses, artists and performers that would follow.

Bunny herself knew from an early age that her life’s desire was to be a model, and set out by studying the “come hither” poses of classic painted pin-up art, and snipping pictures of sexy screen sirens Betty Grable, Jane Russell, Rita Hayworth, etc., that were hoarded away in her growing collection of scrapbooks.  Right after high school Bunny Yeager made it official. “I took a modeling course from an agency with the finest reputation in Miami,” she recalled.

Soon Bunny Yeager was Florida’s most stunning and sought after model. “I was never a pinup model,” she was quick to point out. “I did not pose for men individually like Bettie Page did.” Bunny made a name for herself as a fashion influencer as well– designing and donning her own two-piece bathing suits.  “All the other models were wearing one-piece Jantzen and Catalina suits. I made my own and am beginning to think I invented the bikini, after the French did it.”

It was 1954 when Bunny Yeager, now married, decided to make the switch and get behind the camera. Her own formal modeling experience and creativity gave Bunny a sensitivity, insight and eye that no male photographer could touch. Female models instantly found themselves comfortable working with her, and appreciated the refreshingly caring and honest approach.  It was this same year that Bunny met the baby-banged beauty who will forever be hailed as the gold standard of saucy pin-ups– Bettie Page. Up until that time Bettie was working with the likes of Irving Klaw, and anyone else who would pay, posing for pictures that were exploitive and fetishist at best, and pornographic (by 1950′s puritanical standards) at worst.

The union of Bettie & Bunny was short, but sweet. The famous Boca Raton-based Jungle Betty shoot, and Bettie Page’s 1955 January Playboy Playmate Christmas pic, are two notable highlights of their epic partnership. Bettie Page soon drifted away– posing periodically for a few more years here and there, before disappearing almost entirely from the limelight. The tabloids sizzled with sensational speculation on Page’s mysterious disappearance.  Bunny Yeager recalls the day she witnessed firsthand the shift in Bettie Page’s priorities:

“It was in the Florida Keys that one night she saw a neon cross on top of a little church, and was drawn to it to go inside. From that day on, she got religious and decided to give up posing.”

Text from “The Selvedge Yard”

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Frances Pellegrini – Photographer

Frances Pellegrini had a successful commercial career in New York from the late 1940’s through the 1980’s. Pellegrini pioneered her roles as a photographer and an independent business woman. She was a contemporary of the movement that saw photographers like Margaret Bourke-White and Walker Evans lend artistic ability to commercial purpose. Pellegrini herself worked for a decade at Harper’s Bazaar with legendary art director Alexei Brodovitch. Her images reflect an elegantly understated style and modern sensibility.

 Before starting her commercial career, Pellegrini joined the historic Photo League and worked with photographers Dan Weiner and Sid Grossman; their use of photography as a tool for social change and personal expression are ideas found in Pellegrini’s early work that never disappear entirely. Pellegrini’s street works are intuitive, loosely handled and depict an intimacy with the city.

Text from “dovima_is_devine_II’s” photostream on Flickr

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Eve Arnold, April 12 1912 – January 4 2012 – Photographer

If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.” –Eve Arnold

Marilyn Monroe in the Nevada desert going over her lines for a difficult scene she is about to play with Clarke Gable in the film "The Misfits" by John Huston. 1960 – Photographer Eve Arnold had known Marilyn Monroe for 10 years by the time she photographed her on the set of The Misfits.

Photographer Eve Arnold, who died Thursday morning at the age of 99, is probably best remembered for her celebrity photographs of Marilyn Monroe, made over the span of a decade from the early 1950s to those taken on the set of the movie star’s final film, The Misfits. But Arnold also traveled the world to make equally exceptional photographs of the poor and disposed.

Arnold, the daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1912. In the late 1940’s, she studied photography—alongside Richard Avedon—under inspirational art director Alexei Brodovitch at the New School for Social Research in New York. Her first photo story documented African-American fashion shows in Harlem and the project would lead directly to her being granted unprecedented access by Malcom X to document the Black Muslims and the way they worked over the next two years.

In the early 1950’s, she began working for the photo news publications of the day, first for Picture Post, then Time and Life magazines. And in 1957 she became the first woman photographer to join Magnum Photos.

She will perhaps be best remembered for her exceptional photographs of people: the famous, politicians, musicians, artists —among them Malcolm X, Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman, Jacqueline Kennedy and Monroe. “I look for a sense of reality with everything I did,” she once said. “I didn’t work in a studio, I didn’t light anything. I found a way of working which pleased me because I didn’t have to frighten people with heavy equipment, it was that little black box and me”

But it is the long term reportage stories that drove Arnold’s curiosity and passion. She traveled extensively to make work on regions that had been off limits to the west—to China, Mongolia, the Soviet Union, and also to Cuba, South Africa and Afghanistan. In 1971 she made a film, Women Behind the Veil, going inside Arabian harems and hammams.

Arnold continued to work for respected publications, most notably the Sunday Times color supplement. In 2003 she was honored with an OBE in recognition for her services to photography. Her work is renowned for its intimacy. Whether photographing celebrity or the everyday, Arnold’s portraits are magical, memorable and enduring.

Text from “TIME LightBox”

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Erwin Blumenfeld, Photographers

Erwin Blumenfeld was a renowned photographer whose work is situated between 1930 and 1969. He was born in Berlin on 26 January 1897, moved to Holland late 1918, and started a professional career in photography in 1934. He moved to France in 1936. From 1937 to 1939, he published in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. When the Second World War broke out, he was interned in French camps as an alien, but was eventually allowed to leave for New York in 1941. He became a US citizen in 1946. His more personal work is in black and white; his commercial work in fashion, much for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, is mostly in color. In both media he was a great innovator. In black and white he did all his work personally in the dark room. In color he drew on his extensive background in classical and modern painting. He married Lena Citroen in Holland in 1921 and had three children there: Lisette, Henry Alexander and Frank Yorick. He died in Rome on July 4th, 1969.

For details of his life one should read his picaresque autobiography, which he wrote in German and on which he worked from 1955 till 1969. It has been published in German under the title: Einbildungsroman, Eichborn Verlag, 1998. It also has come out in English under the title: Eye to I, Thames and Hudson, 1999. It was first published in French under the title: Jadis et Daguerre, Robert Laffont, 1975, with a re-edition by Editions de la Martinière, 1996. It also has come out in Dutch: Spiegelbeeld, Uitgeverij de Harmonie, 1980. There were several earlier German editions under the title: Durch tausendjährige Zeit.

Text from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Bunny Yeager, Pin-Up Model And Photographer

Bunny Yeager getting ready to take pictures of Anita Ventura

Bunny Yeager (born Linnea Eleanor Yeager; March 13, 1930) is an American photographer and former pin-up model.

Born in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, U.S. Yeager became one of the most photographed models in Miami. After retiring from modeling, she began her career behind the camera. She met Bettie Page in 1954, and took most of her photographs of her that year. Along with photographer Irving Klaw, Yeager played a role in helping to make Page famous, particularly with her photos in Playboy magazine.[1] Yeager is also credited with discovering the model Lisa Winters. Following Page’s retirement, Yeager remained a successful photographer. She took the well-known still images of Ursula Andress on the beach in the 1962 James Bond film Dr. No, and discovered many other notable models. In 1968 she played the role of a Swedish masseuse opposite Frank Sinatra in Lady In Cement.

Yeager was played by Sarah Paulson in the 2005 film The Notorious Bettie Page. She was also featured on a CNN story about the 60th anniversary of the bikini.

In 2005, Cult Epics released the DVD 100 Girls by Bunny Yeager, a documentary with behind-the-scenes footage on Yeager’s photo sessions with Page and other pin-up models.

In early 2010, the Warhol Museum held the first exhibition of Bunny’s work. Most of the photographs in the exhibit came from Bunny’s book "How I Photograph Myself" published by A.S.Barnes & Co. in 1964.

In 2011, the Schuster Gallery (Berlin/Miami) became the official representatives of the photographic artwork of Bunny.

In November 2011, the Dezer Schauhalle  in Miami FL will host a retrospective exhibition of Bunny’s work. Included are some never before seen photos of various models including the late Bettie Page.

Text from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Horace Roye And The English Maid

Roye, who claimed to have seen more than 10,000 naked women through the lens, always helped the police when they were investigating obscene pictures, but he was himself prosecuted when he refused to airbrush out pubic hair — the convention of the time — from the image of a model called Desirée in his Unique Edition collection. He successfully defended himself in court, arguing that the representation of beauty should be untrammelled by prudery.

The English Maid:

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Nina Leen (1914- 1995) – LIFE Magazine Photographer

Nina Leen was one of the first women photographers for LIFE. She was born in Russia but grew up in Germany, Switzerland and Italy. She always wanted to be a photographer and her first camera, bought in Europe while she was still an amateur, was a Rolliflex that she continued to use throughout her assignments for LIFE. She is best known for her many pictures of animals, which grew from her fondness of them.

During her early years on the magazine, Nina Leen did a number of memorable stories about teenagers. As an expert observer of the manners and mores of her new country, her reactions to American youth were particularly acute. She photographed many fashion stories for LIFE and was a perceptive interpreter of “way of current life” stories.

Leen covered a wide variety of stories during her career. She is best known for her continuing story of a dog named Lucky which she adopted after it was found on a highway near death, and her famous 1950 photograph of the group of Abstract Expressionists, “The Irascibles”.

Leen published 15 books including Women, Heroes and a Frog; Love, Sunrise and Elevated Apes; and The World of Bats, an unprecedented photographic study in the behavior of bats.

Text from “photocollect.com”

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Horace Roye And The Scottish Maid

Horace Roye (born Horace Roye-Narberth, 4 March 1906 – 11 June 2002) was one of the 20th century’s pioneering British  photographers. Flamboyant, famous for his nudes and pictures of starlets – and for water-skiing into old age and whose familiarity with cinema and stage stars during the war years led to international fame — and some notoriety. Beginning with Perfect Womanhood in 1938, Roye produced a succession of studies of the female nude. The English Maid was next, followed by Welsh, Scottish, and Irish maids, all of whom proved extremely popular, especially during the war.

The other maids will follow together with other Horace Roye publications in the weeks to come – Ted

The Scottish Maid:

 

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Ruth Orkin And “American Girl In Italy”

Ruth Orkin (3 September 1921 – 16 January 1985) was an American photographer, filmmaker and a late member of the Photo League. She was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Orkin married photographer and filmmaker Morris Engel.

Orkin is perhaps best known for her photograph, American Girl in Italy, taken in 1951. She died of cancer in New York City at age 63. The subject of the now-iconic photograph was the 23-year-old Ninalee Craig (known at that time as Jinx Allen). The photograph was conceived inadvertently when Orkin noticed the men ogling Allen as she walked down the street. Orkin asked Allen to walk down the street again, to be sure she had the shot.

Text from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Andre de Dienes – Romanian Photographer

Andre de Dienes was born in Transylvania, Romania in 1913, he left home at fifteen and travleled through Europe, before ending up in Tunisia, where he worked odd jobs, learned to paint, and bought his first camera. In 1933 de Dienes arrived in Paris. He made a living selling photographs to the communist newspaper La Humanite and the Associated Press until 1936, when the couturier Captain Molyneux encouraged him to become a fashion photographer. He came to America in 1938 as a young photographer with the help of Esquire Magazine. In New York he worked as a fashion photographer while photographing Harlem street life. He traveled throughout the country, fascinated by the grandeur of the western landscape and the Native American people, documenting their rich culture.

In 1944 he moved to California where he photographed nudes in an outdoor setting, often incorporating his pioneering techniques of photomontage. Fascinated by the body builders and sun worshipers who congregated on Muscle Beach, he captured their exhibitionism and innocence. To support himself he freelanced for the studios and photographed Hollywood legends including Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, Henry Fonda, Fred Astaire, Ingrid Bergman, Ronald Reagan, Jane Russell, and Anita Ekberg.

Text from “Staley Wise Gallery”

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Paul Outerbridge – Photographer

Paul Outerbridge, Jr. (born, August 15, 1896; died October 17, 1958) was an American photographer prominent for his early use and experiments in color photography. Outerbridge was a fashion and commercial photographer, an early pioneer and teacher of color photography, and an artist who created erotic nudes photographs that could not be exhibited in his lifetime.

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Photography career
Paul Outerbridge, while still in his teens, worked as an illustrator and theatrical designer creating stage settings and lighting schemes. After an accident caused his discharge from the Royal Canadian Naval Air Service, in 1917, he enlisted in the U.S. Army where he produced his first photographic work. In 1921, Outerbridge enrolled in the Clarence H. White school of photography at Columbia University. Within a year his work began being published in Vanity Fair and Vogue magazine.

In London, in 1925, the Royal Photographic Society invited Outerbridge to exhibit in a one-man show. Outerbridge then traveled to Paris and became friends with the artists and photographers Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Berenice Abbott. In Paris he produced a layout for the French Vogue magazine, met and worked with Edward Steichen, and built the largest, most completely equipped advertising photography studio of the times. In 1929, 12 of Outerbridge’s photographs were included in the prestigious, German Film und Foto exhibition.

Returning to New York in 1929, Outerbridge opened a studio producing commercial and artistic work, and began writing a monthly column on color photography for the U.S. Camera Magazine. Outerbridge became known for the high quality of his color illustrations, which were done in those years by means of an extremely complex tri-color carbro process.

In 1937, Outerbridge’s photographs were included in an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art and, in 1940, Outerbridge published his seminal book, Photographing in Color, using high quality illustrations to explain his techniques.

Outerbridge’s vivid color nude studies included early fetish photos and were too indecent under contemporary standards to find general public acceptance. A scandal over his erotic photography led to Outerbridge retiring as a commercial photographer and moving to Hollywood in 1943. Despite the controversy, Outerbridge continued to contribute photo stories to magazines and write his monthly column. In 1945, he married fashion designer Lois Weir and worked in their joint fashion company, Lois-Paul Originals. He died of lung cancer in 1958.

One year after his death, the Smithsonian Institution staged a one-man show of Outerbridge’s photographs. Although his reputation has faded, revivals of Outerbridge’s photography in the 1970s and 1990s has periodically brought him into the public’s awareness.

Text from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Remie Lohse – Danish/American Photographers

Remie Lohse is sometimes included in lists of female photographers, but was in fact a man. He was born in Puerto Rico, where his grandfather and then his father were the Danish vice-consuls. He studied painting at the Danish Royal Academy, before emigrating to the USA in 1928. He supported himself with various odd-jobs before achieving overnight fame with a 1933 exhibition of candid photographs of New York, taken with a miniature Contax camera fitted with a right-angle telescope finder to fool his subjects into thinking he was looking elsewhere.

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Marianne Breslauer – Photographer

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Marianne Breslauer (married surname Feilchenfeldt, 20 November 1909 – 7 February 2001) was a German photographer during the Weimar Republic.

Marianne was born in Berlin, the daughter of the architect Alfred Breslauer (1866-1954) and Dorothea Lessing (the daughter of art historian Julius Lessing). She took lessons in photography in Berlin from 1927 to 1929, and became an admirer firstly of the then well-known portrait photographer Frieda Riess and later of the Hungarian André Kertész, although she saw her future as a photographic reporter.

In 1929 she travelled to Paris, where she briefly became a pupil of Man Ray. A year later she started work for the Ullstein photo studio in Berlin, headed up by Elsbeth Heddenhausen, where she mastered the skills of developing photos in the dark-room. Until 1934 her photos were published in many leading magazines such as the Frankfurter Illustrierten, Der Querschnitt, Die Dame, Zürcher Illustrierten and Das Magazin.

Marianne was a close friend of the Swiss photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach, whom she met through Ruth Landshoff and whom she photographed many times. She described Annemarie (who died at the young age of 34) as: "Neither a woman nor a man, but an angel, an archangel". In 1933 they travelled together to the Pyrenees to carry out a photographic assignment for the Berlin photographic agency Academia. This led to Marianne’s confrontation with the anti-Semitic practices then coming into play in Germany. Her employers wanted her to publish her photos under a pseudonym, to hide the fact that she was Jewish. She refused to do so and left Germany. However her photo Schoogirls won the "Photo of the Year" award at the "Salon international d’art photographique" in Paris in 1934.

She emigrated in 1936 to Amsterdam where she married the art dealer Walter Feilchenfeldt—he had previously left Germany after seeing Nazis break up an auction of modern art. Her first child, Walter, was born here. Family life and work as an art dealer hindered her work in photography, which she gave up to concentrate on her other activities. In 1939 the family fled to Zurich where her second son, Konrad, was born.

After the war, in 1948, the couple set up an art business specializing in French paintings and 19th-century art. When her husband died in 1953 she took over the business, which she ran with her son Walter from 1966 to 1990. She died in Zollikon, near Zurich.

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