Born in Zurich 1921, Karlheinz Weinberger is a photographer best known for his portraits encapsulating the punk youth subculture in the late 1950s and early 1960s, continuing on to photograph Hells Angels and other characters pushing societal norms. As a self taught photographer, Weinberger did not have an opportunity to show his work until the early 2000s when he had his first solo exhibition at the Design Museum in Zürich. Weinberger passed away in 2006.
Monthly Archives: February 2012
Todd Webb (1905-2000)
Todd Webb (1905-2000) was an American photographer known for documenting architecture and everyday urban life over the course of his long career and extensive travels. He was notably close friends with Georgia O’Keeffe, Ansel Adams, and Harry Callahan; and his work has been likened to that of Callahan, as well as Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, and Eugène Atget. Webb’s photographs are included in major museum collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York City and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Larry Sultan (1946-2009)
Karl Struss (1886-1981)
Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946)
Peter Stackpole (1913-1997)
Luke Smalley
1955-2009
Luke Smalley was an American artist known for his photographic work, which pairs a coolly minimalist aesthetic with a retro nostalgia. Images from his early in his career were inspired by fitness manuals and yearbooks c. 1910. This is not surprising since Smalley graduated with a degree in sports medicine from Pepperdine University and worked for a number of years as a model and personal trainer. Smalley shot the bulk of his photographs in his home state of Pennsylvania. He used real high school athletes as models, who engaged in unusual, imaginary competitions he conceived, designing and crafting many of the outfits and equipment himself.
Mel Roberts (1923-2007)
Mel Roberts was born in Toledo, Ohio in 1923. He started creating his own imagery as a teenager by shooting 16mm movies of his friends. He was drafted in 1943 and served as a cameraman documenting World War II in the South Pacific. After the war, Roberts moved to California. Like many, he wanted to work in Hollywood. He studied cinema and graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in filmmaking. One of Roberts’ earliest projects after graduation was working on the blacklisted film, “Salt of the Earth,” as music editor.
Roberts became involved in the newly-formed Mattachine Society—one of the earliest political organizations of the gay movement—and lived as an openly gay man. A turning point occurred while Roberts was working for a large aircraft manufacturer in San Diego: “I was right in the middle of directing a film when I went to the office and was told to leave the building immediately. I couldn’t figure out why. They never told me. I didn’t pass the security clearance, obviously. I assumed there were two reasons: I had worked on ‘Salt of the Earth’ and because I was gay.”
Roberts then found work as a model for the La Jolla Museum of Art, and spent his days surfing and combing the beach. It was the beginning of a new direction in his life.
Shortly thereafter, Roberts returned to Los Angeles and began getting work from a variety of Hollywood studios as a director, cinematographer, and film editor, which kept him busy through much of the mid- to late 1950s. Roberts bought his first still camera during this time, and began shooting his friends and lovers.
From the late 1950s through the late 1970s, Roberts’ photographs of young men were published in a variety of American and European magazines, including Young Physique. The artist then began receiving requests for prints from mail-order customers worldwide.
In 1977, and again in 1979, the Los Angeles Police Department raided Roberts’ home. During the 1979 raid, the LAPD seized all of Roberts’ negatives, prints, cameras, and even mailing lists. Without any ability to contact his customers or fill orders, Roberts’ business was on the verge of collapse. The LAPD refused to release the impounded property for over a year, even though the city attorney found nothing actionable and charges were never filed against Roberts. By 1981, Roberts decided to end his professional photography career. In 1992 the LAPD raided Roberts’ home a third time, seizing portions of the same material as before. Again, no charges were filed.
Mel Roberts died in 2007.
PaJaMa
(Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret French)
PaJaMa is an acronym of the first two letters of the first names of Paul Cadmus (1904-1999), Jared French (1902-1989), and Margaret French (Early 20th century-1998). Paul Cadmus and Jared French became friends in New York City around 1925. In 1937 Jared French married Margaret Hoening, also an artist. And then for the next eight years Cadmus and the Frenches summered on Fire Island, where they formed their photographic collective.
Hans Namuth (1915-1990)
Pierre Molinier (1900-1976)
“I suffer from a very serious sickness named eroticism.”—Pierre Molinier
Pierre Molinier was born in Agen, France, but lived his life in Bordeaux. He began taking photographs at the age of 18. By 1955, Molinier made contact with leading surrealist Andre Breton, who included his work in a number of exhibitions. Molinier produced self portraiture that chronicled his sexual fetishes and fantasies. Martha Kirszenbaum writes: “Costume was core to his experimental works. Whether dressing up for a self-portrait or using one of his male and female models—some of whom were his lovers—all subjects were disguised with outfits and wigs, posing against backdrops of dark fabric in swathes. This theatricality was also a key part of his practice, as he typically shot his erotic scenes in the bourgeois interior of his studio in Bordeaux, using baroque screens, velvet curtains and floral wallpapers as backgrounds. This provocative contrast between the erotic and the acceptable caused an electric tension in his images.” The artist committed suicide in 1976.
Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925-1972)
An optician by trade, Ralph Eugene Meatyard was a self-described “dedicated amateur” photographer. He pursued his own vision to produce an exquisitely enigmatic, widely admired body of work. Meatyard began taking photographs in 1950, roaming the backwoods and towns in Kentucky, experimenting with framing, multiple exposures, and blurring to produce haunting, abstracted images of natural and manmade environments. In the late 1950s, he began incorporating monstrous, oversized latex masks and hands into his photographs, in addition to plastic dolls. His family and friends were the protagonists in his carefully composed scenes. For Meatyard, who was inspired by literature, Zen Buddhism, and jazz, the masks served to equalize his subjects and shift focus elsewhere—to the poignant juxtaposition of otherworldly faces on human bodies, to the ambiguous and unknowable in human nature.
Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989)
Robert Mapplethorpe was an American photographer, most known for his black-and-white photographs consisting of celebrity portraits, nudes, self-portraits, and still-life images. His most controversial work documented the male BDSM subculture of New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
George Platt Lynes (1907-1955)
George Platt Lynes was a renowned American fashion and commercial photographer who enjoyed the prime of his career during the 1930s and 1940s. Although he was very sought after by major fashion publications for his beautiful images and stunning compositions, his real passion was the male nude, which he photographed extensively in the privacy of his studio. His connections with New York City’s cultural influencers granted him access to beautiful models, dancers, and actors whom he photographed without leaving behind his friends, lovers, and even studio assistants. Due to the revolutionary and sexually charged aspects of his work, many of his photographs remained unknown and unpublished for years, some of them coming to the light only after they were left to Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction after the artist’s death in 1955. Platt Lynes is recognized today as a master of 20th-century photography, and remains as one of the most important influencers of male portraiture and black-and-white photography.
Herman Landshoff (1905-1986)
Herman Landshoff was a German photographer. He studied to be a typographer and book illustrator, and moved into photography in the early 1940s.
Horst P. Horst (1906-1999)
Horst P. Horst is best known for his photographs of women and fashion. His work also includes interior architecture, still lifes of plants, and environmental portraits.
Wilhelm von Gloeden (1856-1931)
Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden was a German photographer who worked primarily in Italy. He is best known for his romantic pastoral nude studies of Sicilian boys with frequent references to Greece and antiquity.
Harold Edgerton (1903-1990)
Harold Eugene “Doc” Edgerton was a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Edgerton was a pioneer in using short duration electronic flash in photography, capturing such events as balloons at different stages of bursting; bullets impacting apples, bananas, and playing cards; and the surfaces of various liquids in motion. He created many striking images illuminating phenomena occurring too fast for the naked eye to see which now are housed in art museums worldwide.
Ted Croner (1922-2005)
Bruce Cratsley (1944-1998)
Over the course of more than two decades, Bruce Cratsley produced a personal and highly poetic body of work with the dominant theme being the mysteries of light and shadow. Cratsley’s images of inanimate objects, urban street scenes, and portraits of his friends and lovers, possess a metaphysical peculiarity reminiscent of Eugène Atget, André Kertész, or Cratsley’s mentor and friend, Lisette Model.
Cratsley’s work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.