Artist Biographies

A B C-D E-F G-H J-L M N-P R S T U-Z

Berenice Abbott
American, 1898-1991

Berenice Abbott was one of the most accomplished documentary photographers of the 20th century. The Springfield, Ohio, native also achieved recognition for her critical role in preserving and promoting the work of French photographer Eugène Atget.

Abbott learned photography during the 1920s while serving as an assistant in Man Ray's Paris studio. In 1926 she opened her own portrait studio, photographing many of the artists and intellectuals then living in Paris, including Atget and James Joyce. Following Atget's death in 1927, Abbott was instrumental in preserving his prints and negatives and in bringing his work to public attention through exhibitions and publications. In 1929, the year that Abbott returned to the United States, her photographs were included in the important exhibition Film und Foto in Stuttgart.

Once back in the U.S., Abbott opened a portrait studio in New York City and undertook an ambitious project to document the city's rapidly changing landscape. In 1935 she received assistance from the wpa Federal Arts Project, and two years later images from her study were exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York. In 1939 her photographs were featured in Changing New York, a book with accompanying text by critic Elizabeth McCausland. It was also during the 1930s that Abbott began teaching at the New School for Social Research, a position she held until 1958.

In the 1940s Abbott published a manual of photographic instruction, A Guide to Better Photography (1941), as well as a book of photographs taken from 1947-48, Greenwich Village Today and Yesterday (1949). Her photographic subject matter broadened to include scientific phenomena, particularly physical and chemical reactions, an interest she pursued throughout the 1950s. American landscapes, however, continued to be a source of inspiration. In 1954 Abbott traveled U.S. Route 1 from Florida to Maine, photographing small towns encountered along the way.

Throughout her long career, Abbott's work was exhibited widely, beginning with a 1926 Paris show at the avant-garde gallery Au Sacre du Printemps. Over the years she participated in numerous group exhibitions as well as in one-person shows at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1970), the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego (1984), and the New York Public Library (1989). M.M.

Ansel Adams
American, 1902-1984

San Francisco-born Ansel Adams took his first photograph in 1916. More than a dozen years later (during which time he also trained as a concert pianist), he decided on photography as a career. A master of the natural landscape photograph, Adams became famous for his spectacular, reverential images of the American West. He also was known for his technical skill, conceiving the zone system method of exposure and development control.

An advocate of straight, unmanipulated photography, in 1932 Adams cofounded Group f/64 (among the other founding members were Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, and Willard Van Dyke), and that year exhibited his work with the group at San Francisco's M. H. de Young Memorial Museum. In 1936 his images were featured in a one-person exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz's New York gallery, An American Place, and three years later he took part in group exhibitions at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1940 Adams helped found the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, and later in the decade was awarded two fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to photograph America's national parks.

Beginning in the 1930s and continuing throughout his long, productive career, Adams published numerous books and portfolios of his images. His technical books on photography, including Making a Photograph, Basic Photo Series, and Polaroid Land Photography Manual, were also popular. Adams was influential not only as a photographer but also as a teacher, lecturer, and conservationist. In 1980 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian honor. M.M.

Robert Adams
American, 1937-

Robert Hickman Adams has been working as both a writer and a photographer since 1967. His portraits, landscapes, and seascapes are poetic documentations of a world that, in the artist's words, is "a troubling mixture" of ugliness, beauty, chaos, and alchemic order. The contemporary American West is Adams's favorite subject, one to which he has returned time and again. He tempers the heroic grandeur of his black-and-white vistas by including material evidence of human presence, revealing a relationship between man and land that is both troubled and hopeful.

Born in Orange, New Jersey, Adams moved from the East Coast to Colorado as a teenager and farther west to California where he attended the University of Redlands, receiving his B.A. in English (1959), and a Ph.D., also in English, from ucla (1965). He has had one-person exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1979), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1981, 1989), the Photo Gallery International, Tokyo (1991), the Centre d'Art Contemporain, Belgium (1992), and the Sprengel Museum Hannover, Germany (1994). His work was also included in New Topographics at the George Eastman House, Rochester (1975), and Photography Until Now at the Museum of Modern Art (1989).

His publications include White Churches of the Plains: Examples from Colorado (1970), The New West: Landscapes along the Colorado Front Range (1974), Denver: A Photographic Survey of the Metropolitan Area (1977), From the Missouri West (1980), Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values (1981), Our Lives and Our Children: Pictures Taken Near the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant (1983), Perfect Times, Perfect Places (1988), Robert Adams: Photographs 1965-1985 (1988), To Make It Home: Photography of the American West (1989), Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews (1994), Listening to the River: Seasons in the American West (1994), and Cottonwoods (1995).

Adams has received numerous honors and awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1973, 1978) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1973, 1980), a Peer Award from the Friends of Photography (1982), an award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (1994), and the Spectrum International Prize for Photography (1995). He lives in Longmont, Colorado. A.W.

Shelby Lee Adams
American, 1950-

Like his mentor, Clarence John Laughlin, documentary photographer Shelby Lee Adams believes in the symbolic possibilities of the medium for exploring both the grotesque and the heroic sides of the human condition. Working in black and white, first with 35mm and later a 4 x 5-inch camera, he is best known for his extensive, penetrating portrait series of Appalachian families isolated from mainstream contemporary society. Born in Hazard, Kentucky, the nephew of a respected doctor in the region, Adams has used his background to gain entrance into this community. He typically spends time with a family in order to get to know its members before beginning to photograph, and sometimes follows his subjects over a long period of time.

Adams has also photographed the religious rituals of the Holiness Church, whose practices include snake handling, drinking poison, and speaking in tongues. The unsettling candor of his images, he says, reflects "a long autobiographical exploration of creativity, imagination, vision, repulsion, and salvation." Similar sentiments inform his interest in photographing members of the Colombian leper colony known as Auga de Dios, in South America.

Adams studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art (B.F.A., 1974), the University of Iowa (M.A., 1975), and the Massachusetts College of Art (M.F.A., 1989). His awards include a survey grant and photography fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1978, 1992), an excellence award from the Society for Contemporary Photography (1987), a gold medal from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, Kansas City Art Institute (1987), and support grants from the Elisabeth Foundation, Akron (1990), and the Polaroid Corporation (1989-92). He has taught photography at the Cincinnati Art Academy (1978-79), Illinois Central College (1981-84), and Salem State College (1985-present). His images are included in the anthology Appalachia: A Self-Portrait (1979) and his monograph, Appalachian Portraits (1993). Adams lives in Slemp, Kentucky, and in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he maintains his studio. A.W.

Diane Arbus
American, 1923-1971

One of the most influential and enigmatic figures in American photography, Diane Arbus rejected the safety and security of her comfortable upbringing. She was driven to "photograph evil" as she found it both within and outside American middle- and upper-class society. Her powerful psychological portraits of the physically deformed and socially marginalized reflect the influence of Lisette Model, with whom Arbus studied in New York at the Ethical Culture and Fieldston Schools. Another source of inspiration was the work of Weegee (Arthur Fellig), known for his gritty photographs of New York City crime scenes in the 1930s-40s.

Arbus (born Diane Nemerov in New York City) first took an interest in photography while working as an aide to her husband, fashion photographer-turned-actor Allan Arbus, whom she married in 1941 (divorced 1969). Her early subjects were traditional landscapes, nudes, and still lifes. She pursued more formal training in 1955-57, studying with Model. For the next five years, Arbus worked on freelance magazine projects. Esquire published her first photographs, "The Vertical Journey," in 1960. Assignments for Harper's Bazaar, Show, Glamour, and the New York Times Magazine soon followed.

An important turning point came in 1962, when Arbus switched from 35mm to a square format and began making the portraits for which she is best known. She supported her work on the "rites, manners, and customs" with the assistance of two fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1963, 1966). During this time she also taught at the Parsons School of Design (1965-66) and Cooper Union (1968-69) in New York and at the Rhode Island School of Design (1970-71). In 1967 photographs by Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand were included in New Documents, the Museum of Modern Art's influential exhibition about the "new social landscape" of the 1960s.

In July 1971, Arbus committed suicide. Although her work had appeared in three major museum group shows before her death, the event generated increased interest in, and controversy over, autobiographical readings by some observers of her images as projections of a troubled mind and spirit. One year later, 10 of Arbus's images were selected for inclusion in the Venice Biennalethe first work of an American photographer to be included in the venue. That same year, the Museum of Modern Art organized a traveling retrospective. Publications of her images include two major monographs, Diane Arbus (1972) and Diane Arbus, Magazine Work (1984). A.W.

Eugène Atget
French, 1857-1927

Relatively unknown to the public during his lifetime, Eugène Atget is today an iconone of the most celebrated and influential photographers of the 20th century. Born near Bordeaux, Atget first directed his efforts to painting and the stage before turning to photography shortly before 1890. He is best known for his documentary scenes of Paris and Versailles, but he photographed a number of other sites as well. Atget viewed his work as a historical and aesthetic record, regarding it as documentation for use by artists. Indeed, several artists are known to have painted from his images.

Using relatively unsophisticated, even outdated equipment, Atget achieved a view of French architecture and culture that is both personal and factual. Along with the rediscovery of the images of Mathew Brady in the early 20th century, the recognition of Atget's artistic accomplishments shortly before his death by Berenice Abbott, Man Ray, and others helped turn photographers away from the mannered style of pictorialism toward the visual and technical clarity of modernism. Marked by a selective and highly individual method, his is among the most widely shown, published, and recognized work in photography today. T.W.F.

Anna Atkins
British, 1799-1871

Anna Atkins was the daughter of John George Children, a respected scientist associated with the British Museum and secretary of the Royal Society, who introduced her to science and its small, tightly knit community in Britain. Taking advantage of her father's position as a member of the society's Committee on Papers, Atkins was among the first to hear directly of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre's announcement of photography, as well as that of William Henry Fox Talbot, who disclosed the details of his own process to a meeting of the committee in February 1839. In 1842 another family friend, Sir John Herschel, whose early work in
photography played a key role in its development in Britain, sent John Children a copy of his paper on the invention of the cyanotype.

Combining her interests in botany, illustration, and the new cyanotype, the following year Atkins began production of the serial volumes of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843-53). This work is generally credited as the first photographically illustrated book, preceding by a year the first fascicles of Talbot's better known Pencil of Nature (1844-46). Atkins, whose earlier hand illustrations had accompanied her father's translation of Jean de Lamarck's Genera of Shells, intended British Algae as a companion to William Harvey's Manual of British Algae (1841). The finished work comprised a brief text and almost 400 captioned cyanotype plates. Atkins, possibly in conjunction with her friend Anne Dixon, went on to produce several more albums whose subjects included plants, ferns, feathers, and lace, all subjects popular with early experimenters in cameraless photography. T.W.F.

Charles Aubry
French, 1811-1877

A Parisian trained as an industrial designer, Charles Aubry was among those early advocates of photography who recognized its potential as an aid to art and design. Noting the inadequacy of the didactic tools used by academies and schools, Aubry wrote in the introduction to his Studies of Leaves (1864), which he presented to the Prince Impérial, ". . . in order to facilitate the study of nature, I caught it in the act, and I hereby offer to workers some models that may increase our productivity in the industrial arts . . . ." But he added significantly that he hoped his was a "revitalizing work," noting that apprentices should consider not only their future work, but also "that which develops the soul and the best sentiments, that is, beauty and truth."

While Aubry's works owe their origin to their practical intent, they are clearly imbued with a beauty and personality that reflects the artist's distinctive subjects and style. Today they are valued, not as study aids, but as works of art entirely on their own merits, on a par with those of predecessor Adolphe Braun. T.W.F.

The biograhies were written by Karen L. Churchill, Thomas Weston Fels, Maureen A. McKenna, and April Watson.