Born on This Day

Edmon Sproquette was born Sept. 22, 1901. He is the inventor of the film take-up spool for the first Rolleiflex camera (1929). Originally fashioned from wood, it was eventually manufactured from metal. Today's version is high impact plastic, but still very much resembles Sproguette's original design.

Born On This Day

Irving Penn (June 16, 1917) American photographer noted for his sophisticated fashion images and incisive portraits.
Beginning in 1945, he photographed fashion for Vogue Magazine (for which he produced over 100 covers) and began making portraits of writers, dancers, wrestlers and others.l These photographs are noted for their formal qualities, which are enhanced by elegance of line, simplified lighting and radically minimal settings.
In 1950 he began photographing his Worlds in a Small Room project. This work was initially concerned with portraits of tradespeople in Paris, London and New York, but later included gypsies and the peoples of Dahomey, Cameroon, Nepal, New Guinea and Morocco. Penn worked in rented studios and in a portable canvas studio that was erected on location, photographing individuals and groups against blank backgrounds in natural light, with an almost ethnographical directness.

Born On This Day

Margaret Bourke-White is a woman of many firsts. She was the first photographer for Fortune magazine, in 1929. In 1930, she was the first Western photographer allowed into the Soviet Union. Henry Luce hired her as the first woman photojournalist for Life magazine, in 1935, and one of her photographs was its first cover (November 23, 1936). She was the first woman war correspondent and the first to be allowed to work in combat zones during World War II.

Born on This Day

Julia Margaret Cameron (June 11, 1815 – January 26, 1879) was a British photographer, became known for her portraits of celebrities of the time, and for Arthurian and similar legendary themed pictures.

Cameron's photographic career was short, spanning the last eleven years of her life. She did not take up photography until the age of 48, when she was given a camera as a present. Her work had a huge impact on the development of modern photography, especially her closely cropped portraits which are still mimicked today.

Born On This Day

Dorothea Lange was born May 26, 1895. Lange's best-known photograph is titled "Migrant Mother". The woman in the photo is Florence Owens Thompson.

In 1960, Lange spoke about her experience taking the photograph:

I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.

Born on This Day

Edwin Herbert Land was born on May 7, 1909. Land was the American inventor and physicist whose one-step process for developing and printing photographs created a revolution in photography - instant imagery called Polaroid. The first Polaroid camera was sold to the public in November, 1948.

Born On This Day

Imogen Cunningham was born on this day in 1883. She is one of the major photographers of the 20th century. Imogen studied chemistry at the University of Washington, where she wrote a 1907 thesis on the chemical process of photography. One of her first photographs was a 1906 nude self-portrait, taken on an isolated spot on the UW campus with a 4" x 5" mail-order camera.

After graduation, Imogen worked for Seattle photographer Edward Curtis, who documented the American Indian culture. She established her own studio in 1910, becoming one of the very first professional woman photographers.

In 1932, Imogen, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and others, founded Group f/64, which helped to establish photography as an art form. After several of her photographs of dancer Martha Graham were published by Vanity Fair in the early 30s, the magazine employed her to photograph many celebrities and political figures of the time.

Imogen became widely known for her portraits, flower images, and nudes. She worked as a photographer until her death at the age of ninety-three in 1976. Learn more.

Edward Steichen, born on this day

Edward Steichen (1879-1973) was an American photographer, painter and museum curator who helped transform photography into an art form.
Steichen was co-founder, with Alfred Stieglitz, of the Photo-Secession movement, an organization dedicated to photography as a fine art, and its exhibition gallery, called "291."
At the age of 68 Steichen was named director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Of the many exhibitions he created, the largest and most famous was "The Family of Man." This exhibition of 503 photographs toured throughout America and overseas. The book of the same title became a best seller. His involvement as a curator helped promote photography to the status of an acknowledged art form. Learn more.

Edward Weston was born on this day

Edward Weston was renowned as one of the masters of 20th century photography. His legacy includes several thousand carefully composed, superbly printed photographs which have influenced photographers around the world for 60 years. Photographing natural landscapes and forms such as artichoke, shells, and rocks, using large-format cameras and available light. Weston's sensuously precise images raise to the level of poetry. The subtle use of tones and the sculptural formal design of his works have become the standards by which much later photographic practice has been judged. Ansel Adams wrote: "Weston is, in the real sense, one of the few creative artists of the day. He has recreated the matter-forms and forces of nature; he has made these forms eloquent of the fundamental unity of the world. His work illuminates man's inner journey toward perfection of the spirit."
Learn more.

Diane Arbus born on this day

Diane Arbus, 3/14/1923 - 7/26/1971, was a New York photographer known for her black and white portraits of eccentrics, carnival performers and, as she put it, "freaks." The daughter of well-to-do fur merchants, she married her teenage sweetheart, Allan Arbus, soon after she turned 18. Together they had a fashion photography business for more than a decade, but in 1959 they ended their partnership and marriage and Diane began studying fine art photography. In the 1960s she worked as a photojournalist, received two Guggenheim fellowships (1963 and 1966) and received critical praise for her vaguely disturbing portraits of society's fringe members. After her 1971 suicide, a national touring exhibit by the Museum of Modern Art and a book of her photographs by Aperture magazine made her one of the most famous fine art photographers in the U.S. Her most famous photos include Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C., 1962 and Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J., 1967. View her work.

Ernst Haas born on this day...

Ernst Haas (March 2, 1921 – September 12, 1986) was an artist and influential photographer noted for his innovations in color photography, experiments in abstract light and form, and as a member of the Magnum Photos agency. He was without professional training, twenty six years old, when he shot into fame with his first essay, "Homecoming Prisoners of War," photographed in his native Vienna.
With this essay Haas set a new standard for delicacy of feeling and empathy in photojournalism. Its publication brought Haas two invitations: one from Robert Capa to join Magnum, the year-old cooperative of international photojournalists; the other to join the staff of LIFE magazine. Haas chose Magnum, becoming the first photographer to be invited to do so by its founders, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, and David Seymour. View his work.

Ansel Adams, born on this day

Ansel Adams, the famous landscape photographer of the American West, was born Feb. 20, 1902.

William Henry Fox Talbot born on this day

William Henry Fox Talbot (Feb. 11, 1800 – Sept. 17, 1877), was the inventor of the negative / positive photographic process, the precursor to most photographic processes of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was also a noted photographer who made major contributions to the development of photography as an artistic medium. His work in the 1850s on photo-mechanical reproduction led to the creation of the photoglyphic engraving process, the precursor to photogravure.

Alfred Stieglitz, was Born on This Day

Alfred Stieglitz was born January 1, 1864. He was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an accepted art form. In addition to his photography, Stieglitz is known for the New York art galleries that he ran in the early part of the 20th century, where he introduced many avant-garde European artists to the U.S. He was married for most of his life to painter Georgia O'Keefe.

Louis-Jacques Daguerre Born on This Day

Louis-Jacques Daguerre was born on this day in 1787.
On January 7, 1839, members of the French Académie des Sciences were shown products of an invention that would forever change the nature of visual representation: photography. The astonishingly precise pictures they saw were the work of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre a painter and printmaker most famous until then as the proprietor of the Diorama, a popular Parisian spectacle featuring theatrical painting and lighting effects. Each daguerreotype (as Daguerre dubbed his invention) was a one-of-a-kind image on a highly polished, silver-plated sheet of copper.