Creative Photography Module

What makes a photographer influential? Photographers capture emotion, represent stories, and convey history. If you look at portraits of modern celebrities, you are likely to come across the name Annie Leibniz. She has taken portraits of everyone from John Lennox and Queen Elizabeth II to Michael Jackson and Bill Gates. Her photographs have appeared in a number of different fashion and music magazines over the course of her career. Leibniz was born in Waterbury, Connecticut in 1949. Her father was a member of the UnitedStates Air Force, and the family moved frequently around the world. It was in the Philippines that Leibniz took some of her first photographs, and her interest in art and music flourished in high school. Returning to the United States after living in Israel, Leibniz took a Job with Rolling Stone magazine. Her first cover image appeared on January 12, 1971, and she became the chief photographer for the magazine in 1973. For the next ten years, her style of photographing celebrities helped to define not only the magazine that she worked for, but also the style of portraits that appeared in other magazines and mediums.In the sass, Leibniz left Rolling Stone and went to work for Vanity Fair, continuing to photograph celebrities for the magazine. Leibniz continues to photograph celebrities, producing often- talked-about portraits. 1 1. 2 Ansell Adams Ansell Adams is credited with moving photography into the realm of fine art. Known for his black and white photographs of the western United States, Adams took landscape photographs that brought remote places to people long before travel was possible and highlighted environmental concerns. Ansell Adams, born in February 1902 in San Francisco, California, was an only child.Drawn to nature at an early age, e explored the sea coast and collected insects. He was also trained as a concert pianist. During a family trip to Yosemite National Park, Adams' father gave him a Kodak Brownie camera, beginning his love for photography. Adams returned to the park the following year to do more photography. He learned darkroom techniques by working part time for a photo finisher. At seventeen, Adams Joined the Sierra Club, a group dedicated to preserving natural spaces, and spent several summers as the caretaker for its lodge in the Yosemite Valley.In 1921, Adams sold his first photographs. Despite experimenting with different photograph techniques, Adams referred realism. In 1927, he completed his first portfolio and earned about $3,900, which led to commercial assignments for portraits. By 1931, Adams had his first solo museum exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution that featured sixty photographs he had taken of the Sierra Mountains. With Edward Weston, M. H. De Young Museum, and Imagine Cunningham, Adams formed Group f/64, with a commitment to â€Å"straight† photography instead of artistic interpretation.The name came from the small aperture setting (f/64) which gave the greatest depth of field for a photograph. Adams also opened his own photography gallery in San Francisco. One of Adams' contributions to photography was the development of his Zone System. The Zone System was a way of adjusting the exposure in a photograph to maximize shadows and highlights. It separated the tones between white and black into eleven different zones that corresponded to an f/stop, with middle gray at the center. The system helped to correctly expose a photograph to avoid being under- or overexposed.A photographer would choose an area of the photograph, meter the area, and then adjust the exposure using the system to put the area of the photograph into the exposure that best measures the area. For example, if you are photographing a mountain scene, bright snow might be metered at a zone V (5), but you want it at a zone IX (9). Using the system, you would know to increase the f/stop by four f/stops to get the exposure that you want for the photograph. The Zone System was later applie d to color film and with digital images. 1 1. Edward Weston Edward Weston emphasized the beauty of natural form. His photographs reveal and focus on the natural form of a single item, taken in sharp detail. His photographs are among the most expensive ever sold. Edward Weston was born in Highland Park, Illinois in 1886. He received his first camera, a Kodak Bulls-Eye No. 2, as a present for his sixteenth birthday. He took the camera on a family vacation in the Midwest before buying a 5 x 7 camera and beginning to learn darkroom techniques. Soon, he was photographing Chicago parks and the areas around his aunt's farm.In 1906, he submitted a photograph to Camera and Darkroom, which published the photograph in a full-page reproduction. In 1906, Weston moved to California, but moved back to Illinois a year later to attend the Illinois School of Photography. After finishing the coursework, Weston again moved to California and began work in several hoteliers' studios, learning the busines s. In 1911, he opened â€Å"The Little Studio† and took photographs of children and friends, gaining recognition for his work. In the sass, Weston attention shifted to the everyday objects such as seashells, fruits, and vegetables.Weston began the â€Å"Edward Weston Print of the Month† to create income. For five dollars a month, subscribers received a limited edition print from his work. Success was minimal with only about eleven subscribers to the program. In 1937, Weston received the first ever Guggenheim Foundation grant for a photographer, which allowed Weston to travel and photograph. The following year, he received another grant and published Seeing California with Edward Weston, another publication of his travels, in 1939. The following year, California and the West was published.In 1945, Weston began to exhibit signs of Parkinson disease. By 1948, he was no longer physically able to use a camera but continued to exhibit his work and publish some of the photogr aphs that he had taken earlier in his life. He died in 1958. One of his favorite beaches, and the subject of many photographs in Point Lobos, California, was later renamed Weston Beach in his honor. 1 1. 4 Throated Lange Best remembered for her images of the Southern poor and those starting over in the West, Throated Lange documented the hard times of the Depression era and revealed social difficulties.Her iconic images have come to be the face of the Depression. Lange was born in 1895 in Hoboken, New Jersey. After a childhood marked by polio, Lange became an informal apprentice in several New York photography studios. She moved to San Francisco in 1918 and opened her own studio. When the Great Depression hit the United States in the late sass, Lange was moved to document the people hardest hit by the financial crisis. She was hired by the Resettlement Administration, later renamed the Farm Security Administration. Lane's photographic focus was the unemployed and homeless.In 1941, L ange worked for the War Relocation Authority to document the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans on the West Coast to relocation camps. She photographed the relocation process and the lives of the Japanese Americans in the camps, focusing most of her attention on Manager, one of the first permanent relocation camps in California. The government considered the photographs too critical of the relocation and impounded them; they are now available for viewing through the National Archives. After WI, Lange continued her work in photography with a slightly different position than her earlier social commentary work.Ansell Adams offered Lange a faculty position at the California School of Fine Arts, which had the first fine arts photography department. Lange also helped to co-found the photography magazine Aperture. In 1965, at the age of 70, Throated Lange died of esophageal cancer. As a woman, Lange also served as an inspiration for other female photographers working in a field that w as at that time dominated by men. 11. 5 Alfred Assassinated Called the â€Å"father of photojournalism,† Alfred Assassinated is known for his candid hotplates and spontaneous moments.Essentialist's most famous image is of a United States sailor in uniform kissing a woman in a white dress, taken on the day that World War II ended. Assassinated was born in Germany in 1898. His interest in photography began when he was given a Kodak camera at the age of fourteen. After serving in the German army during World War l, Assassinated began working as a freelance photographer. He sold his first photograph in the sass and began taking photographs for the agency that would become the Associated Press in 1928. In 1935, Assassinated immigrated to the United States, as Germany became more oppressive awards Jews.He would reside in New York for the rest of his life and work for Life magazine for more than thirty-five years. During his career, Assassinated photographed musicians, politicians, writers, and royalty. But his candid photographs, often of unknown people, became his legacy and illustrated the need to be ready to capture spontaneous moments. Assassinated said, â€Å"l still use, most of the time, existing light and try not to push people around. I have to be as much a diplomat as a photographer. People often don't take me seriously because I carry so little equipment and make so little fuss. †