Some of the Great Photographers of Our Era
|
Some of the Great Photographers of Our Era |
|
It always amazes me when I talk to someone who’s interested
in photography and who’s done a lot of it and find that he’s never heard of
Robert Frank or Brassaï or Henri Cartier-Bresson. Being interested in photography
and not knowing these people’s work is like being interested in English
literature but not knowing about the work of Shakespeare or Hemingway or T.S.
Eliot. To aspire to serious work in photography you need to know what’s gone before – how the photographic ideas
of the past relate to each other and to the present so that you can extend those relationships to
the milieu in which you live, today, out there on the street. Which is not to
suggest being derivative, or to copy what these people have done. But you need to
educate your eye. You need to learn what to look for. Here are some of the
people who can teach you. The list isn’t exhaustive.
Eugene Atget: a Frenchman who walked the
streets of Paris at the turn of the century carrying a huge load of cumbersome
equipment and making photographs that have been admired by photographers ever
since.
Jacques Henri Lartigue: another Frenchman, of a
wealthy family, who, as a child in the early part of the twentieth century,
made astonishing photographs of people, racing automobiles, airplanes, etc.
Walker Evans: American. Without question the
finest artist associated with the photographic arm of the Farm Security
Administration (FSA) during the depression.
Dorothea Lange, another
American FSA photographer, who shot “Migrant Mother,” probably the most
familiar American photograph ever.
Henri Cartier-Bresson: a Frenchman who, for all practical purposes, defined street photography. Probably the most influential photographer of the twentieth century. Cartier-Bresson, along with David Seymour, a sensitive photographer who used the byline, “Chim,” and Robert Capa, a famous combat photographer, formed the Magnum photo agency. Magnum has done a great deal of the century’s finest photojournalism. In an early book Cartier-Bresson said: “Photographing is nothing. Looking is everything.” Which pretty much sums up the situation.
Elliott Erwitt: An American son of Russian Immigrants. A long-time member and sometime president of the Magnum agency. A photographer with a real sense of humor. Probably my favorite among them all.
Ansel Adams: American. Without doubt the
greatest photographer of mountains and prairies and rivers, or as Wordsworth
put it, “rocks and stones and trees” ever. He was a contemporary of
Edward
Weston who also photographed rocks and stones and trees, but also seashells,
vegetables, and
people.
Robert Frank: a Swiss who became an American citizen. In 1959 he published The Americans, a book that caused a huge ruckus in the photographic community. The Americans is a penetrating look at the United States of the fifties, warts and all. If you’re living at Hawthorne I guarantee you’re old enough instantly to recognize what he’s doing in that book – especially if you’ve traveled across the United States on two-lane highways, eaten lunch in roadside ptomaine palaces along Route 66, and spent nights in "modern" (indoor plumbing) Dew Drop Inn, sanitation approved cabins.
Steve McCurry: an American who's been making big waves in the photographic world for at least the past decade. It's probably too early to tell, but I have a feeling Steve will end up as one of the greatest photographers of the turn of the 21st century.
There are many others I won’t take space to describe, but
you need to look at their work. Among them are
Andre Kertesz,
Brassaï,
Paul
Strand,
W. Eugene Smith,
Robert Doisneau,
Manuel Alvarez
Bravo, and
Karsh “of Ottawa,” surely the finest formal portraitist
ever.
Go to the library, check out books of photographs by these people, or go to the web and Google these names. You can learn more by looking at their photographs than you’ll learn from a lifetime of reading “how to” photography books.
