Diane Arbus was an American photographer. She photographed a wide range of subjects including strippers, carnival performers, nudists, people with dwarfism, children, mothers, couples, elderly people, and middle-class families. She photographed her subjects in familiar settings: their homes, on the street, in the workplace, in the park. "She is noted for expanding notions of acceptable subject matter and violates canons of the appropriate distance between photographer and subject. By befriending, not objectifying her subjects, she was able to capture in her work a rare psychological intensity." In his 2003 New York Times Magazine article, "Arbus Reconsidered", Arthur Lubow states, "She was fascinated by people who were visibly creating their own identities—cross-dressers, nudists, sideshow performers, tattooed men, the nouveaux riches, the movie-star fans—and by those who were trapped in a uniform that no longer provided any security or comfort." Michael Kimmelman writes in his review of the exhibition Diane Arbus Revelations, that her work "transformed the art of photography ". Arbus's imagery helped to normalize marginalized groups and highlight the importance of proper representation of all people.
Pictorialism is an international style and aesthetic movement that dominated photography during the later 19th and early 20th centuries. There is no standard definition of the term, but in general it refers to a style in which the photographer has somehow manipulated what would otherwise be a straightforward photograph as a means of creating an image rather than simply recording it. Typically, a pictorial photograph appears to lack a sharp focus, is printed in one or more colors other than black-and-white and may have visible brush strokes or other manipulation of the surface. For the pictorialist, a photograph, like a painting, drawing or engraving, was a way of projecting an emotional intent into the viewer's realm of imagination.
Robert Frank was a Swiss American photographer and documentary filmmaker. His most notable work, the 1958 book titled The Americans, earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and nuanced outsider's view of American society. Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014, said The Americans "changed the nature of photography, what it could say and how it could say it. [ ... ] it remains perhaps the most influential photography book of the 20th century." Frank later expanded into film and video and experimented with manipulating photographs and photomontage.
Edward Jean Steichen was a Luxembourgish American photographer, painter, and curator, renowned as one of the most prolific and influential figures in the history of photography.
William Eggleston is an American photographer. He is widely credited with increasing recognition of color photography as a legitimate artistic medium. Eggleston's books include William Eggleston's Guide (1976) and The Democratic Forest (1989).
Street photography is photography conducted for art or inquiry that features unmediated chance encounters and random incidents within public places, usually with the aim of capturing images at a decisive or poignant moment by careful framing and timing. Although there is a difference between street and candid photography, it is usually subtle with most street photography being candid in nature and some candid photography being classifiable as street photography. Street photography does not necessitate the presence of a street or even the urban environment. Though people usually feature directly, street photography might be absent of people and can be of an object or environment where the image projects a decidedly human character in facsimile or aesthetic.
Thaddeus John Szarkowski was an American photographer, curator, historian, and critic. From 1962 to 1991 Szarkowski was the director of photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
The Family of Man was an ambitious exhibition of 503 photographs from 68 countries curated by Edward Steichen, the director of the New York City Museum of Modern Art's (MoMA) department of photography. According to Steichen, the exhibition represented the "culmination of his career". The title was taken from a line in a Carl Sandburg poem.
Shirin Neshat is an Iranian photographer and visual artist who lives in New York City, known primarily for her work in film, video and photography. Her artwork centers on the contrasts between Islam and the West, femininity and masculinity, public life and private life, antiquity and modernity, and bridging the spaces between these subjects.
Lorna Simpson is an American photographer and multimedia artist whose works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally. In 1990, she became one of the first African-American woman to exhibit at the Venice Biennale. She came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with photo-text installations such as Guarded Conditions and Square Deal that questioned the nature of identity, gender, race, history and representation. Simpson continues to explore these themes in relation to memory and history using photography, film, video, painting, drawing, audio, and sculpture.
Donigan Cumming is an American-born Canadian multimedia artist who uses photography, video, drawing, sound, and text in experimental documentary films, collages, installations, and books based in Montreal, Quebec. Since 1983, Cumming's work has contributed to Canadian and international festivals and exhibitions dealing with themes of the body, truth/fiction, taboos of representation, and social engagement.
Carrie Mae Weems is an American artist working in text, fabric, audio, digital images and installation video, and is best known for her photography. She achieved prominence through her early 1990s photographic project The Kitchen Table Series. Her photographs, films and videos focus on serious issues facing African Americans today, including racism, sexism, politics and personal identity.
Jim Goldberg is an American artist and photographer, whose work reflects long-term, in-depth collaborations with neglected, ignored, or otherwise outside-the-mainstream populations.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya is an American photographer and artist. His photographs focus heavily on the relationship between artist and subject. He often explores the nude in relation to the intimacy of studio photography. The foundation of Sepuya's work is portraiture. He features friends and muses in his work that creates meaningful relationships through the medium of photography. Sepuya reveals the subjects in his art in fragments: torsos, arms, legs, or feet rather the entire body. Through provocative photography, Sepuya creates a feeling of longing and wanting more. This yearning desire allows viewers to connect deeply with the photography in a meaningful way.
Hank Willis Thomas is an American conceptual artist. Based in Brooklyn, New York, he works primarily with themes related to identity, history, and popular culture.
Dorit Cypis is a Canadian-American artist, mediator and educator based in Los Angeles. Her work has collectively explored themes of identity, history and social relations through installation art, photography, performance and social practice. After graduating from California Institute for the Arts (CalArts), she attracted attention in the 1980s and 1990s for her investigations of the female body, presented in immersive installation-performances at the Whitney Museum, International Center of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. Counter to much feminist work of the time, Cypis focused on interiority and personal mythologies rather than exterior political realms, and according to art historian Elizabeth Armstrong, made a significant contribution to discourse about the representation of women and female sexuality.
Preston is My Paris Publishing (PPP) is a photography-based project that creates publications, site-specific installations, live events, digital applications, education, writing, talks and workshops. It was started in 2009 by Adam Murray and Robert Parkinson as a photocopied zine with the intention of encouraging the exploration of Preston as a subject for creative practice and to focus more attention on the city. It has been described as "politically and photographically aware", "photographing and publishing a view of a disregarded, ordinary Britain" "in a playful way".
Sara Cwynar is a contemporary artist who works with photography, collage, installation and book-making. Cwynar was born in Vancouver, Canada in 1985 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Cwynar's work presents a marriage of old and new forms that are intended to challenge the way that people encounter visual and material culture in everyday life.
Mari Katayama is a Japanese multimedia artist known for her sculpture and photography work. Her work focuses on themes such as body image, identity, and her experience as an amputee.
Jonathan Green is an American writer, historian of photography, curator, teacher, museum administrator, photographer, filmmaker and the founding Project Director of the Wexner Center for the Arts. A recognized authority on the history of American photography, Green’s books Camera Work: A Critical Anthology (1973) and American Photography: A Critical History 1945–1980 (1984) are two notable commentaries and frequently referenced and republished accounts in the field of photography. At the same time Green’s acquisitions, exhibitions and publications consistently drew from the edges of established photographic practice rather than from its traditional center. He supported acquisitions by socially activist artists like Adrian Piper and graffiti artist Furtura 2000, and hosted exhibitions on Rape, AIDS, new feminist art, and the work of photographer, choreographer and dancer Arnie Zane, the Diana camera images of Nancy Rexroth, the Polaroids and imitation biplanes of folk artist Leslie Payne, and the digital photographic work of Mexican photographer Pedro Meyer. This alternative focus help prime Green and the competition jury to choose an unconventional, deconstructive architect, Peter Eisenman, previously known primarily as a teacher and theorist, as the architect for the Wexner Center for the Arts. Green has held professorial and directorial positions at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ohio State University, and University of California, Riverside.
