Arnold Genthe

Greta Garbo portrait, 1926.

Arnold Genthe was born in Berlin in 1869. In 1894, he earned a PhD in Philology at the University of Jena. In 1895, he came to San Francisco and became a self-taught photographer. He took many photos of Chinatown that are some of the only surviving ones that were taken before the 1906 earthquake. His most famous photographs are of the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake. In 1911, he moved to New York City and opened a portrait studio. He had many famous clients including Rockefeller, Woodrow Wilson and Greta Garbo. His portraits of her sent her career into orbit. He died in 1942 in NYC of a heart attack.

Note: I have a big sale on woodblock prints in my Etsy shop right now with free shipping!

Repetition

Swirls by Clarence Block


The use of an idea or motif more than once. Variety is achieved by altering the magnitude, guise, and relation of the motif repeated. (Ralph L. Wickiser)

Cecil Beaton

Irving Berlin and Mrs. Berlin by Beaton

Vanity Fair photograph with the caption: Marilyn Miller and Clifton Webb could have been seen any day this summer baking in the un-winking sun that beats on the Cap d'Antibes.

Gary Cooper by Beaton

Kathrine Hepburn by Beaton

1920's Vanity Fair photograph of champagne dinner in Antibes, France

Cecil Beaton: 1904-1980. English photographer whose elegant and sophisticated fashion pictures and society portraits often employed exotic props and settings. He adopted a more simple style for his wartime photographs of bomb-damaged London. He also worked as a stage and film designer, notably for the musicals Gigi 1959 and My Fair Lady 1965. (Brockhampton)

What a fabulous era of style!

Dorothea Lange

Maynard and son, 1920s

Woman of the High Plains, Texas Panhandle, 1938 (from An American Exodus book)

Field Worker's Home by a Frozen Pea Field, California, 1937

One Nation Indivisible, San Francisco, 1942

The Kitchen Sink Corner, Summer, 1957.

Dorothea Lange 1895-1965. US photographer who was hired in 1935 by the federal Farm Security Administration to document the westward migration of farm families from the Dust Bowl of the southern central USA. Her photographs, characterized by a gritty realism, were widely exhibited and sebsequentially published as An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, 1939. (Brockhampton)

Child with Doll

Hand Studies, Child with Doll (detail).

Alma Lavenson, American, 1897-1989. Platinum Print, 7 x 9 in. 1932. The Met - NYC.

Alma Lavenson was born in San Francisco in 1897 and was a self-taught photographer. She became quite well known and was friends with Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham. She famously documented the history of the Gold Rush by photographing rush towns and buildings. This Gold Rush collection now is at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. She was invited to join an exclusive group exhibition called "Group f/64". Alma remained more of an 'amateur' photographer and died at the age of 92 in 1989.

Julia Margaret Cameron

Profile (Maud), 1867, Photograph.
This photograph was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite Painters and was used as an illustration in Alfred Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King. I really think this looks like a painting. Love the Passionflower in the background.

'Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) was a British photographer who made lively and dramatic portraits of the Victorian intelligentsia, often posed as historical or literary figures. Her sitters included her friends Sir John Herschel and the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, whose Idylls of the King she illustrated in 1872, and Charles Darwin. She used a large camera, 5 minute exposures, and wet plates.' (Brockhampton)

Man Ray

Gift, MOMA NYC

Man Ray (1870-1976) an American Surrealist, was a contemporary of Marcel DuChamp, Kurt Schwitters as well as a part of the Dada movement. He was a painter, sculptor and probably most famously a photographer. "Man Ray used chance and dislocation of ordinary things from their everyday settings to surprise his viewers into a new awareness." (Gardner)

"Man Ray - nee Emmanuel Rudnitsky- was born in Philadelphia, but lived mostly in Paris from 1921. He began as a painter and took up photography in 1915, the year he met the Dada artist Duchamp in New York. In 1922 he invented the rayograph, a black and white image obtained without a camera by placing objects on sensitized photographic paper and exposing them to light." (Brockhampton)

Daguerreotype

In photography, a single-image process using mercury vapour and an iodine-sensitized silvered plate; it was invented by Louis Daguerre in 1838.

Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre 1789-1851: French pioneer of photography. Together with Joseph Niepce, he is credited with the invention on photography (though others were reaching the same point simultaneously.) In 1838 he invented the daguerreotype, a single-image process superseded 10 years later by Fox Talbot's negative/positive process. (Brockhampton)

I wonder what Daguerre would make of digital cameras and the intangible way we look at images today on computers? Still waiting for my computer to return so I can include images in my posts!!! An art blog is quite drab without visuals...