Portrait Photography. with Claudia Ruiz-Gustafson

Transcription

1 Portrait Photography with Claudia Ruiz-Gustafson

2 A daguerreotype made by Louis Daguerre in 1838, is generally accepted as the earliest photograph to include people. It is a view of a busy street, but because the exposure lasted for several minutes the moving traffic left no trace. Only the two men near the bottom left corner, one of them apparently having his boots polished by the other, remained in one place long enough to be visible.

3 First selfie ever. Robert Cornelius, self-portrait, in 1839, an approximately quarter plate size daguerreotype. On the back is written, "The first light picture ever taken". This is the oldest known intentional photographic portrait/self-portrait of a human.

4 Cameras for Everyone (1900) Photography became more common when the Eastman Kodak Company introduced the Kodak No. 1 camera in Kodak made photography easier for everyone by doing the developing and sending the reloaded camera and developed prints back to the customer. These cameras made photography more accessible to the general public. Their 1900 Brownie Box camera was the first mass market camera. Slogan: You press the button, we do the rest

5 Julia Margaret Cameron ( ) She was a British photographer, became known for her portraits of celebrities of the time, and for photographs with Arthurian and other legendary or heroic themes. At the age of 48, Julia Margaret Cameron received a camera from her daughter and son in-law as a birthday gift. Little did she and her family suspect that it would mark the beginning of a celebrated artistic career. Quick to gain mastery of the nascent art of photography, Cameron developed into one of its most noteworthy pioneers and innovators. With her hallmark soft-focus lens and dramatic lighting effects, she remains known for her unique portraits of famous men and her romantic, allegorical images of women.

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10 Alfred Stieglitz ( ) He was the founder of the Photo Secession Group, the first influential group of American photographers that worked to have photography accepted as a fine art. These photographers pursued Pictorialism, or techniques of manipulating negatives and prints so as to approximate the effects of drawings, etchings, and oil paintings. Sharp photos were associated in the public mind with advertisements and textbooks. To differentiate themselves, art photographers directed their efforts toward capturing mood making use of papers with reduced contrast, alterations to the negative or print, and soft focus, to produce images in a style that became known as pictorialism.

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12 Stieglitz believed that portraiture concerned more than merely the face and that it should be a record of a person's entire experience, a mosaic of expressive movements, emotions, and gestures that would function collectively to evoke a life.

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14 Clarence H. White ( ) He was also from the Photo Secession Group. His work is now showing at the Davis Museum of Art in Wellesley College until June 3rd.

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16 Dorothea Lange ( ) An American documentary photographer best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration. After the stock market crash in 1929, photographers were hired to document what was going on in the farmlands of America. Dorothea Lange s Migrant Mother, Nipomo, CA (1936) is one of the most iconic images to come out of The Great Depression in America. Drafted to photograph for the Resettlement Administration a government program intended to aid rural workers affected by the Depression Lange s images of migrant workers are both illuminating records of poverty and intimate portraits born out of empathy. Lange was able to authentically capture subjects in the context of their social and cultural landscape.

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18 Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

19 Henri Cartier-Bresson ( ) French photographer who is believed to be the father of photojournalism. The master of candid photography and an early user of 35 mm film. He pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed photography as capturing a decisive moment

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23 To photograph is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.

24 Imogen Cunningham ( ) One of the first professional female photographers in America, best known for her botanical photography, though she also produced images of nudes, industrial landscapes, and street scenes. After studying photography in Germany, Cunningham opened a portrait studio in Seattle, producing soft-focus allegorical prints in the tradition of Pictorialism a style of photography influenced by academic painting from the turn of the century as well as portraiture. In 1932 she joined an association of West Coast modernist photographers known as f64, rejecting sentimental soft-focus subjects in favor of greater sensuousness. Cunningham was also interested in human subjects and frequently took pictures of the hands of musicians and artists.

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26 The thing that s fascinating about portraiture is that nobody is alike.

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29 Philippe Halsman ( ) An American photographer, originally from Russia, lived in Paris. Moved to the US when France was invaded by Germany. He collaborated with Salvador Dali and worked for many important publications in the US.

30 "When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping and the mask falls so that the real person appears.

31 The rule of the added unusual feature is an effort by the photographer to capture the audiences attention by drawing their eye to something unexpected by introducing an unusual feature or prop into the photograph

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33 Irving Penn ( ) His work is famous for isolating his subjects from their context. He does this by employing simple white or grey backdrops, which allows the viewer to put all the focus on the subject. I personally am greatly influenced by Japanese Zen and minimalist aesthetics. There is some sort of harmony that occurs when you are able to take all the chaos of a scene, and simplify it. By pruning away the inconsequential you focus on what you truly find important in the scene.

34 When you are making portraits of other people, see how you can elicit a reaction from them. You can do this by telling a joke, telling a story, or saying something shocking or unexpected.

35 Irving Penn was infamous for making his models repeat the same gesture or movement for an entire morning. When his models would become tired of posing, then he would start to take photos seriously.

36 Helen Levitt ( ) A native of Brooklyn in NY, now considered one of the leading street photographers of the last century. During the late 30s and early 40s, she produced and published photographs that masterfully captured the poetry and subtle drama of urban human life and anticipated her transition to filmmaking in the late 1940s. The year she turned 30, Helen Levitt s pioneering images of New York City s streets were recognized with a major solo exhibition at MoMA.

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39 Yousuf Karsh ( ) Was an Armenian-Canadian photographer best known for his portraits of famous individuals. He has been described as one of the greatest portrait photographers of the 20th century. An Armenian Genocide survivor, Karsh migrated to Canada as a refugee. By the 1930s he established himself as a significant photographer in Ottawa, where he lived most part of his adult life, though he traveled extensively for work. His iconic 1941 photograph of Winston Churchill was a breakthrough point in his 60-year career, through which he took numerous photos of known political leaders, men and women of arts and sciences. Over 20 photos by Karsh appeared on the cover of Life magazine, until he retired in 1992.

40 Karsh wrote of his fascination with the inward power of his sitters. He said that it was his goal to photograph the great in spirit, whether they be famous or humble.

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46 You can see many of his portraits at the Armenian Museum of America located in Watertown, including this portrait of Georgia O Keeffe.