Artist Biographies
William Henry Jackson
American, 1843-1942
Although considered primarily a photographer of the American frontier, William Henry Jackson's long life and early start in photography allowed him to
bridge several different eras during his nearly 80 years in the field. Jackson (born in Keesville, New York) worked as a photographic retoucher in 1858 and served as a staff artist in the 12th Vermont Infantry, Company K, for the Union army in 1862. After the war, he worked at several establishments in the Northeast
before opening a studio, Jackson Brothers, with his brother Edward in Omaha in 1867. Two years later he photographed along the newly opened Union Pacific
Railroad, making approximately 10,000 stereoviews.
In 1870 Jackson began an eight-year assignment as official photographer to the U.S. Geological and Geographical Survey of Ferdinand V. Hayden,
producing important views of the American West: Wyoming and Yellowstone, Colorado and the Rocky Mountains, and lost cities in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah,
and Colorado. He went on to become a photographic publisher and entrepreneur in Denver, specializing in commissioned landscapes for the railroad. In 1893
Jackson was the official photographer for the World's Columbian Exposition. He painted as well, accepting a substantial mural commission in his 90s.
Selected for a photography exhibition juried by Ansel Adams in 1939, Jackson also saw his work exhibited in 1942 at the Museum of Modern Art,
New York. His legacy includes thousands of negatives and prints that contributed to the picturing of America in the 19th century. It was Jackson's photographs
of Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, and Mesa Verde that inspired the government to make these areas national parks. T.W.F.
Reverend Calvert Richard Jones, Jr.
British, b. Wales, 1804-1877
Calvert Jones was part of the circle of Welsh amateur photographers that emerged around John Dillwyn Llewelyn and were strongly influenced by William
Henry Fox Talbot. Educated at Oriel College, Oxford, Jones returned to Wales in 1829 after his ordination to serve as rector of Loughor near his native town
of Swansea. A man of varied interests, including mathematics, music, and painting, he was introduced to photography by Welsh members of Talbot's family.
In 1845, after lessons and practical experience in calotyping with Talbot in Britain, Jones embarked on a trip to Malta and Italy, during which he
produced a number of views. On his return, he sent 22 small calotypes and 102 larger ones to Talbot, who sold them on commission. Jones's training in art, especially
marine painting, lends his images considerable confidence of composition, tone, and scale. T.W.F.
André Kertész
American, b. Austria-Hungary, 1894-1985
André Kertész was one of the first photographers to work with the small, 35mm camera, becoming famous for his skill at capturing the fleeting moments of
everyday life. In 1911 he bought his first camera and began taking photographs in his native Budapest and the surrounding countryside. The following year,
after graduating from Budapest's Academy of Commerce, Kertész took a job as a clerk at the Budapest stock exchange. His interest in photography continued,
and he began making spontaneous photographic studies of the city's people and street life.
Kertész also took photographs recording the daily life of his fellow soldiers during his service in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I. After
his discharge in 1918, he returned to Budapest and worked there until 1925. He moved to Paris, establishing himself as a freelance photographer, and soon
became a member of the avant-garde. His work was published in a variety of magazines and newspapers, including the
Münchner Illustrierte Presse, Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, Uhu,
Vu, the London Sunday Times, and L'Esprit
nouveau. In 1927 he had his first exhibition at the progressive Galerie au Sacre
du Printemps and two years later took part in the
Film und Foto show in Stuttgart.
Kertész became known for his candid photography and was recognized as a leader in modern, subjective photojournalism. In the early 1930s he
also made his well-known series called
Distortions, featuring almost 200 studies of the nude female figure reflected in a parabolic mirror. In 1936 Kertész came
to New York to work for Keystone Studios under a one-year contract. He remained in the city, producing pictures on a freelance basis until joining the staff of
Condé Nast Publications in 1949.
Following his retirement in 1962, Kertész focused on his own work, remaining active as a photographer until his death. Over the years he published
a number of books and was featured in many exhibitions and publications, including
André Kertész: Of Paris and New
York, a major show organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1985). M.M.
Anselm Kiefer
German, 1945-
One of the most significant and reclusive artists of the past 20 years, Anselm Kiefer was born in Donaueschingen, Bavaria, two months before the end of
World War II. His enormous mixed-media canvases, as well as his smaller bookworks, are laden with cultural, political, mythic, and religious symbolism. These
works are made in direct response to his Teutonic heritage and, in particular, Germany's war experience. Kiefer addresses questions regarding German identity in
the postwar world, a highly sensitive subject that has brought him both critical acclaim and adamant opposition.
Kiefer studied law and French at the University of Freiburg in 1965 before turning to painting. He graduated in 1970 and began informal study at
the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf with Joseph Beuys, who encouraged him to paint despite dominance of conceptual art at the time and the
declaration that painting was dead. Kiefer often spends years on a piece, working intermittently, and retains rigid control of the placement of his paintings after they leave
his studio.
Although Kiefer's work has changed little throughout his career, his earlier imagery relied on figurative elements and his later paintings have
become more abstract, often incorporating architectural elements. He frequently begins with an enlarged photographic image, which he distorts by such techniques
as scorching, staining, and burning. His materials include molten lead, tar, straw, and claymetaphorical substances associated with the German land and its
mythologies. The transformative process also recalls alchemy, a subject that interested Beuys, who believed art had the power to evoke a change of state
from physical to spiritual.
Kiefer has had numerous international exhibitions and published monographs, and is represented in major American and European collections. In
addition to one-person exhibitions in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, France, Israel, and England, the Philadelphia Museum of Art organized a retrospective of
his work that toured the United States in 1987-88. In recent years, Kiefer has begun to make films that, rooted in the medium of photography, extend the
physical and narrative qualities characteristic of all his work into the realms of motion and time. He lives in Barjac, France. A.W.
Heinrich Kuehn
Austrian, b. Germany, 1866-1944
Carl Christian Heinrich Kuehn (also spelled Kühn) was a key figure in the aesthetic movement in photography, as well as a teacher, writer, and theoretician.
Born in Dresden, he studied medicine and science in Innsbruck, Leipzig, Berlin, and Freiburg before beginning to photograph in 1883. In Austria and
Germany, Kuehn's role was not unlike that of Alfred Stieglitz in the United States. Not surprisingly, after the two men met in 1904, they remained close friends for
many years.
Kuehn believed in the artistic manipulation of the photographic image and was responsible for refinements in the gum bichromate process,
through which a photograph could be made to resemble paintings and prints more closely. Among his influences were the early Scottish calotypists David Octavius
Hill and Robert Adamson, who were also acknowledged by Stieglitz, and whose prints combined the softness conveyed by their paper negatives with a formality
of composition and depth of tone derived from painting.
Kuehn had a long, productive career, during which he worked with Hans Watzek and Hugo Henneberg on multiple gum bichromate processes.
Besides exhibiting and publishing widely, he founded and directed the Schule für Kunstlerische Photographie in Innsbruck (1914-20) and formed the Viennese
Trifolium (Das Kleeblatt). He wrote and published two technical manuals and many articles. An inventor and designer of photographic processes and equipment,
Kuehn was elected into the Linked Ring in 1895, was a member of the Vienna Camera Club, and received numerous awards and recognition for his work. T.W.F.
Dorothea Lange
American, 1895-1965
Dorothea Lange was a well-known documentary photographer who created memorable images of depression-era America. Born in Hoboken, New Jersey,
Lange gained her first photographic experience working for Arnold Genthe in New York City. She then studied with Clarence H. White at his School of Photography
and in 1919 opened a portrait studio in San Francisco. The following year she married painter Maynard Dixon and continued to work as a studio photographer
until the early 1930s, when she began photographing unemployed laborers and labor strikes.
Paul Taylor, a University of California economics professor who later became Lange's second husband, was impressed by her documentary work and
in 1934 hired her to photograph migrant agricultural workers for the California State Emergency Relief Administration. Lange's work for Taylor led to a job with
Roy Stryker at the U.S. Resettlement Administration (later called the Farm Security Administration) in 1935, photographing unemployed and homeless migrant
workers, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers. In 1942, the year after she received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Lange
began photographing Japanese-American internment camps in the United States.
Later Lange worked for the Office of War Information and as a freelance photographer for
Life magazine and other publications. She also traveled
with Taylor to Asia, Latin America, and the Near East. In 1966, the year after her death, a major retrospective of Lange's work was held at the Museum of
Modern Art, New York. M.M.
Gustave Le Gray
French, 1820-1882
A master both technically and aesthetically, Gustave Le Gray (born in Villiers-le-Bel) was one of the most important figures in 19th-century French
photography, bringing to the medium artistic integrity and visual imagination. Le Gray, trained as a painter, was exhibiting his work in the Paris Salons in the late 1840s
and early 1850s when he became interested in photography. Along with Henri Le Secq and Charles Nègre, he was a student of Paul Delaroche, a painter of
considerable reputation and ability who was one of the first to grasp the importance of photography.
In 1851 Le Gray announced his invention of a waxed paper negative, a significant improvement over earlier paper methods that was later adopted
by Louis de Clercq, Dr. August Jakob Lorent, and others. That same year the Commission des Monuments historiques named him as one of five photographers
of the Mission héliographique, for which he produced well-known studies of army maneuvers at Chalons. Le Gray also worked with François Arago, the
scientist and champion of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, and later proposed a new method of toning prints, among other innovations.
Le Gray was perhaps most admired for the effects he achieved with water and sky. To capture the subtle qualities of cloud patterns in some of his
seascapes, he employed two negatives to produce the final image. His commissioned studies of historic monuments are classic examples of early architectural
photography. In the early 1850s he worked in the Barbizon tradition at Fontainebleau and, in 1860, documented the uprising against François II in Palermo. He was
a founding member of the Société héliographique and the Société française de photographie. Despite his influence and artistic success, Le Gray left Paris in
1865 to become a professor of design at the École Polytechnique in Cairo. He died in Egypt. T.W.F.
Helen Levitt
American, 1918-
Born in New York City, Helen Levitt is a documentary photographer known for her images of urban street life. She began her career in the mid-1930s, inspired
by the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans. In 1936 she purchased a 35mm Leica (the same type of camera used by Cartier-Bresson) and by the
following year was photographing people on the streets of New York, particularly children in the city's poor and working-class neighborhoods. From 1938-41
Levitt worked with Evans on a series made in New York's subways, and in July 1939 her first published image appeared in
Fortune magazine. By the early 1940s her photographs were also being reproduced in
U.S. Camera, PM's Weekly, Minicam, and Harper's
Bazaar. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, featured her
images of children in a one-person show in 1943 and three years later awarded her a photography fellowship.
In the 1940s Levitt also became involved with film, assisting director Luis Buñuel in editing documentary footage and working as an assistant editor
in the Film Division of the Office of War Information (1944-45). Encouraged by writer James Agee, Levitt began directing films in the late 1940s. She worked
with Janice Loeb and Sidney Meyers in 1949 on The Quiet
One, a feature-length documentary about a home for delinquent boys, and in 1951 made
In the Street with Agee and Loeb. During the 1950s she concentrated primarily on film, producing very little still photography.
In 1959-60 Levitt was awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to explore color photography and began
shooting 35mm color slides of street scenes and children. Her color slides were included in a three-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1963, and in
1974
her color images were featured in a solo exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Levitt's work was included in numerous one-person exhibitions
throughout the 1970s-80s, and in 1992 was the subject of a major retrospective organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Levitt lives in New York. M.M.
Sol LeWitt
American, 1928-
One of the most important and influential contemporary artists, Sol LeWitt has created a significant body of work in different media, including sculpture,
drawing, printmaking, and photography. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, LeWitt received a B.F.A. from Syracuse University (1949), beginning his career as a painter
but later abandoning the flat surface of the canvas in favor of three-dimensional minimalist forms. During the 1960s, he and other artists of his generation
challenged the basic nature of art by developing conceptual art, which holds that the idea behind a work of art is as important as its eventual visualization. While his
art tends to be systematic and intellectual, LeWitt acknowledges the arbitrary and unexpected that arise from the creative process, and that the viewer's response
is incidental to the artist's intention. According to this philosophy, his photographs document what he makes, acting as proof of the creative process but also
as independent art objects that relate to specific projects.
LeWitt's photographic works have been included in several group exhibitions, including
Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since
1960 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1978),
Target III: In Sequence at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1982),
Special Collections: The Photographic Order
from Pop to Now at the International Center of Photography, New York (1992), and
Beyond Boundaries: Art of the Sixties and
Seventies at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1993). The Cleveland Museum of Art also owns a sculpture by LeWitt. He lives in New York. A.W.
Enoch Long
American, 1823-1898
Enoch Long, a prominent St. Louis daguerreian, advertised that his photographs would "bear the strictest criticism, both as a likeness and a work of art."
This aesthetic concern set him apart from other photographers in smaller western towns. Praised in both the local and national press, Long was considered one
of the most serious and successful photographers in the region.
Born in Hopkinton, New Hampshire, Long and his older brother Horatio studied in Philadelphia with the respected pioneer daguerreian Robert
Cornelius in July 1842. For the next few years the brothers traveled the South and New England, working as itinerant photographers before jointly opening a studio in
St. Louis in 1846. Horatio died in 1851, and Enoch operated the studio until 1860, then moved to Illinois to open galleries in Alton, Quincy, and later Galena.
While in Missouri, Long and fellow photographer John Fitzgibbon represented the state in the Exhibition of the Industry of all Nations, held at New York's Crystal
Palace in 1853, where Long was awarded a medal of honorable mention. He also showed his work, presumably albumen prints, for several years from 1886-94
in the annual exhibits of the Photographers Association of America.
Long was the first photographer in his region to polish daguerreotype plates with a steam engine and is credited with introducing the first solar
photographic enlarger to St. Louis, for which he wrote two manuals in 1888. After his death his studio was run by his widow and sons. K.L.C.
Richard Long
British, 1945-
Richard Long derives inspiration from his interaction with nature, experiencing the land through the English tradition of walking. He collects materials from
these venturesstones, willow branches, seaweedand incorporates them into his on-site sculpture, often in arrangements such as a circle, spiral, line, or cross
that conjure ancient patterns. Using his camera to document these temporary sculptures, Long explores the themes of transformation, the ephemerality of
human existence on the land, and notions of time, place, and movement. Long's photographs record the transient aspects of his art-making process and address
human presence through implication rather than direct representation.
Long, who lives in his native Bristol, studied at the Bristol School of Art (1962) and St. Martin's School of Art, London (1966-68). He has been at
the forefront of contemporary art for the past 25 years, with many one-person exhibitions throughout Europe, Australia, the United States, and Canada. In addition
to his photographic triptych, the Cleveland Museum of Art owns a Long sculpture. A.W.
The biograhies were written by Karen L. Churchill, Thomas Weston Fels, Maureen A. McKenna, and April Watson.
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