John Sexton is an American fine art photographer who specializes in black and white traditional analog photography.
John Sexton was born in 1953. Education: Bachelor of Arts, cum laude, departmental honors, Art – Photography, Chapman University, Orange, California; Associate of Arts, with honors, Photography, Cypress College, Cypress, California
Sexton worked for Ansel Adams from 1979 to 1984 (when Adams died), first as Technical and Photographic Assistant, then as Technical Consultant. Sexton served as Special Projects Consultant to the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust following Adams' death.
Sexton has taught at numerous photographic workshops in the past, and continues to do so, with his wife Anne Larsen, a talented photographer in her own right, through his long-running eponymous fine art photography workshop program. [1] For many years he was a co-director of the Owens Valley Photography Workshops with fellow co-directors Bruce Barnbaum and Ray McSavaney.
Sexton also has lectured at many museums and universities. His work is in numerous permanent collections and exhibitions, and he has been the subject of many articles in the photographic press. [2]
Sexton's process consists of large-format 4x5 photography and black and white silver gelatin prints. [3] Like his mentor Ansel Adams, his prints are characterized by great tonal quality resulting from his darkroom virtuosity - Sexton provides abundant technical notes in his books. Most of Sexton's subjects are the natural world, however, unlike Adams, he is more interested in intimate scenes than wide or dramatic vistas, and often photographs them in long exposures made in the "quiet" light of dusk. [4]
The following books of John Sexton's work have been published:
Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating "pure" photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph. He and Fred Archer developed a system of image-making called the Zone System, a method of achieving a desired final print through a technical understanding of how the tonal range of an image is the result of choices made in exposure, negative development, and printing.
Group f/64 or f.64 was a group founded by seven American 20th-century San Francisco Bay Area photographers who shared a common photographic style characterized by sharply focused and carefully framed images seen through a particularly Western (U.S.) viewpoint. In part, they formed in opposition to the pictorialist photographic style that had dominated much of the early 20th century, but moreover, they wanted to promote a new modernist aesthetic that was based on precisely exposed images of natural forms and found objects.
Pure photography or straight photography refers to photography that attempts to depict a scene or subject in sharp focus and detail, in accordance with the qualities that distinguish photography from other visual media, particularly painting. Originating as early as 1904, the term was used by critic Sadakichi Hartmann in the magazine Camera Work, and later promoted by its editor, Alfred Stieglitz, as a more pure form of photography than Pictorialism. Once popularized by Stieglitz and other notable photographers, such as Paul Strand, it later became a hallmark of Western photographers, such as Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and others.
Ruth Bernhard was a German-born American photographer.
Kim Weston is an American photographer known for his fine art nude studies.
Joyce Tenneson is an American fine art photographer known for her distinctive style of photography, which often involves nude or semi-nude women.
Don Worth was an American photographer. His childhood on an Iowa farm inspired an abiding love of exotic horticulture, which later became the primary focus of his photography. He attended Juilliard as well as the Manhattan School of Music, receiving a graduate degree in piano and composition in 1951. During college, he began photographing and eventually became Ansel Adams' first full-time assistant in 1956. He taught photography at San Francisco State University for thirty years becoming a Professor Emeritus of Art.
Marie Cosindas was an American photographer. She was best known for her evocative still lifes and color portraits. Her use of color photography in her work distinguished her from other photographers in the 1960s and 1970s. Most of her photographs were portraits and pictures of objects like dolls, flowers, and masks.
George Cedric Wright was an American violinist and a wilderness photographer of the High Sierra. He was Ansel Adams's mentor and best friend for decades, and accompanied Adams when three of his most famous photographs were taken. He was a longtime participant in the annual wilderness High Trips sponsored by the Sierra Club.
Morley Baer, an American photographer and teacher, was born in Toledo, Ohio. Baer was head of the photography department at the San Francisco Art Institute, and known for his photographs of San Francisco's "Painted Ladies" Victorian houses, California buildings, landscape and seascapes.
Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico is a black-and-white photograph taken by Ansel Adams, late in the afternoon on November 1, 1941, from a shoulder of highway US 84 / US 285 in the unincorporated community of Hernandez, New Mexico. The photograph shows the Moon rising in a dominating black sky above a collection of modest dwellings, a church and a cross-filled graveyard, with snow-covered mountains in the background. Adams captured a single image, with the sunset lighting the white crosses and buildings. Because Adams did not date the image, attempts have been made to determine a date from astronomical information in the photograph. It is one of Adams' most popular works.
Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras is a portfolio of 18 silver gelatin photographic prints made by Ansel Adams in 1927. It was the first publication of a portfolio of his prints, produced not long after he decided to become a professional photographer, and has since been called "a landmark work in twentieth-century photography."
Dody Weston Thompson was a 20th-century American photographer and chronicler of the history and craft of photography. She learned the art in 1947 and developed her own expression of “straight” or realistic photography, the style that emerged in Northern California in the 1930s. Dody worked closely with contemporary icons Edward Weston, Brett Weston and Ansel Adams during the late 1940s and through the 1950s, with additional collaboration with Brett Weston in the 1980s.
Rondal Partridge was an American photographer. After working as an assistant to well-known photographers Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams in his youth, he went on to a long career as a photographer and filmmaker.
Barbara Crane was an American artist photographer born in Chicago, Illinois. Crane worked with a variety of materials including Polaroid, gelatin silver, and platinum prints among others. She was known for her experimental and innovative work that challenges the straight photograph by incorporating sequencing, layered negatives, and repeated frames. Naomi Rosenblum notes that Crane "pioneered the use of repetition to convey the mechanical character of much of contemporary life, even in its recreational aspects."
Friends of Photography was a nonprofit organization started by Ansel Adams and others in 1967 to promote photography as a fine art. During its existence the organization held at least 330 photography exhibitions at its galleries in Carmel and San Francisco, California, and it published a lengthy series of monographs under the name Untitled.The organization was formally dissolved in 2001.
Untitled was a serial publication published by the Friends of Photography from 1972 to 1994. A total of 58 numbered publications were issued, first as a small magazine format and later as a series of booklets and full-size books. Numbers 1-10 displayed the series name and issue number on the cover, but as the publications became more specialized each number was titled independently in addition to the series name. The smallest publication in the series was Number 1, with 10 pages, and the largest was Number 43, with 156 pages.
Liliane de Cock Morgan was a Belgian-born American photographer who won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1972, and was assistant to Ansel Adams.
Ray McSavaney was an American fine-art photographer based in Los Angeles, California. Throughout a spartan but active life, practicing classical Western black and white fine art photography, he made enduring photographs of buildings, bridges, and street scenes of the vast city, ancient ruins and panoramic vistas of the Southwest, and studio setups with varied floral subjects. He died from lymphoma in Los Angeles Veteran's Hospital. Warm tributes to his life and career by some of his close friends and colleagues appear in a ‘celebration of life’ memorial recounted in ‘View Camera’ magazine.
Arthur Ollman is an American photographer, author, curator, professor emeritus (San Diego State University, and founding director of The Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego. He served as MoPA director from 1983 to 2006, and as director of the School of Art, Design and Art History, SDSU, from 2006 to 2011. He was president of the board of directors for the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography and has authored and contributed to more than twenty-five books and catalogs.