Leif Skoogfors

Last updated
Photographer Leif Skoogfors ventured into the jungles of Panama to get shots of the Navy here for News week magazine. Leif Skoogfors in Panama.jpg
Photographer Leif Skoogfors ventured into the jungles of Panama to get shots of the Navy here for News week magazine.

Leif Skoogfors (born 1940 in Wilmington, Delaware) is a documentary photographer and educator. He was born in Wilmington, Delaware, one month after his family, including brothers Olaf and Eric, fled Sweden as World War II broke out. His family crossed the North Atlantic in December 1939 on a neutral Norwegian ship.

The family returned to Sweden in 1946 and Skoogfors attended a primary school in a small town in Dalarna County. When the Russian blockade of Berlin raised fears of war, the family returned to the U.S., and settled near Philadelphia.

His brother, Olaf Skoogfors, is a silversmith and jeweler who was instrumental in influencing his interest in art and photography. Skoogfors joined the U.S. Army and served three years with the Alaska Communications System.

In 1961, he studied with the noted art director Alexey Brodovitch in the Design Laboratory in New York.

He began a freelance photography career in 1962, documenting the Civil Rights and anti-war movements and social issues.

He began teaching photography at Temple University's Tyler School of Art in 1964 while continuing his photography career. In 1966 he founded the BFA photography program at Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, where he continued teaching as a tenured professor until 1983.

His book on the war in Northern Ireland, "The Most Natural Thing in the World, [1] " was published by Harper & Row in New York and London in 1974. Photographs from the book have been exhibited widely. [2] Rudolf Arnheim commented on the work that "The photographs … combine documentary impact with a pictorial originality and beauty that is always strictly at the service of the subject, its meaning and mood."

He has worked extensively for both Time Magazine and Newsweek Magazines in numerous conflict zones. [3] His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Paris Match, National Geographic and publications in more than forty countries. [4] [5]

His work is in the permanent collections of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The George Eastman House, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and Princeton University.

He has actively been involved in copyright protection for photographers and was a plaintiff in an action against Google, [6] [7] and has assisted journalists facing potential issues with post-traumatic stress injuries.

In 2008 Skoogfors suffered a traumatic brain injury while covering tornado damage in Atlanta.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Photojournalism</span> Using images to tell a news story

Photojournalism is journalism that uses images to tell a news story. It usually only refers to still images, but can also refer to video used in broadcast journalism. Photojournalism is distinguished from other close branches of photography by having a rigid ethical framework which demands an honest and impartial approach that tells a story in strictly journalistic terms. Photojournalists contribute to the news media, and help communities connect with one other. They must be well-informed and knowledgeable, and are able to deliver news in a creative manner that is both informative and entertaining.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">André Kertész</span> Hungarian photographer (1894–1985)

André Kertész, born Andor Kertész, was a Hungarian-born photographer known for his groundbreaking contributions to photographic composition and the photo essay. In the early years of his career, his then-unorthodox camera angles and style prevented his work from gaining wider recognition. Kertész never felt that he had gained the worldwide recognition he deserved. Today he is considered one of the seminal figures of 20th century photography.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Steichen</span> American photographer (1879–1973)

Edward Jean Steichen was a Luxembourgish American photographer, painter, and curator. He is considered among the most important figures in the history of photography.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Francesco Scavullo</span> American fashion photographer

Francesco Scavullo was an American fashion photographer best known for his work on the covers of Cosmopolitan and his celebrity portraits.

Bill Brandt was a British photographer and photojournalist. Born in Germany, Brandt moved to England, where he became known for his images of British society for such magazines as Lilliput and Picture Post; later he made distorted nudes, portraits of famous artists and landscapes. He is widely considered to be one of the most important British photographers of the 20th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Street photography</span> Photography genre

Street photography is photography conducted for art or inquiry that features unmediated chance encounters and random incidents within public places. It usually has the aim of capturing images at a decisive or poignant moment by careful framing and timing. Street photography overlaps widely with candid photography, although the latter can also be used in other settings, such as portrait photography and event photography.

Documentary photography usually refers to a popular form of photography used to chronicle events or environments both significant and relevant to history and historical events as well as everyday life. It is typically undertaken as professional photojournalism, or real life reportage, but it may also be an amateur, artistic, or academic pursuit.

Olaf Skoogfors was an artist, metalsmith and educator until his death in 1975, at the age of 45.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexey Brodovitch</span> Russian artist

Alexey Vyacheslavovich Brodovitch was a Russian-American photographer, designer and instructor who is most famous for his art direction of fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar from 1934 to 1958.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gertrude Käsebier</span> American photographer (1852–1934)

Gertrude Käsebier was an American photographer. She was known for her images of motherhood, her portraits of Native Americans, and her promotion of photography as a career for women.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Clarence Hudson White</span> American photographer

Clarence Hudson White was an American photographer, teacher and a founding member of the Photo-Secession movement. He grew up in small towns in Ohio, where his primary influences were his family and the social life of rural America. After visiting the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, he took up photography. Although he was completely self-taught in the medium, within a few years he was internationally known for his pictorial photographs that captured the spirit and sentimentality of America in the early twentieth century. As he became well known for his images, White was sought out by other photographers who often traveled to Ohio to learn from him. He became friends with Alfred Stieglitz and helped advance the cause of photography as a true art form. In 1906 White and his family moved to New York City in order to be closer to Stieglitz and his circle and to further promote his own work. While there he became interested in teaching photography and in 1914 he established the Clarence H. White School of Photography, the first educational institution in America to teach photography as art. Due to the demands of his teaching duties, his own photography declined and White produced little new work during the last decade of his life. In 1925 he suffered a heart attack and died while teaching students in Mexico City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lisette Model</span> American photographer

Lisette Model was an Austrian-born American photographer primarily known for the frank humanism of her street photography.

Jesse A. Fernández was a Cuban artist, photographer, and photojournalist. He was an art director of Visión Magazine in New York City and a photographer for the Revolución newspaper in Havana, Cuba. Fernández was granted the Cintas Foundation Fellowship for painting in 1967 and 1975.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Vestal</span> American photographer

David Vestal was an American photographer of the New York school, a critic, and teacher.

Dan Wynn (1920–1995) was an American editorial, portrait, and advertising photographer and film director. During his career, his work was published in many American magazines, including Esquire, New York, Travel + Leisure, Seventeen, Time, Newsweek, Harper's Bazaar, McCall's and Woman's Day. He also provided covers for books, record albums, and international magazines.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ken Light (photographer)</span> American social documentary photographer

Kenneth Randall Light is an American social documentary photographer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the author of twelve monographs, including Midnight La Frontera, What'sGoing On? 1969-1974,Delta Time, TexasDeath Row and, most recently, Course of the Empire, published by Steidl. He wrote Witness in our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers, a collection of recollections and interviews with 29 of the world's most well-known photographers, editors and curators of the genre. He has had his photographs included as part of photo essays and portfolios in newspapers, magazines and other media, has been exhibited worldwide and is part of museum collections such as SF Museum of Modern Art and International Center of Photography. Light was also a co-founder of Fotovision, the Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography and he is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and three National Endowment for the Arts photography fellowships. He is also a professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley where he holds the Reva and David Logan chair in photojournalism and he is the director of the school's Logan documentary photography gallery.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ron Tarver</span> American photographer

Ronald (Ron) Tarver is an American artist and educator. He was the first Black photographer at the Muskogee Phoenix and also worked at the Springfield News-Leader in Missouri (1980-1983), before joining The Philadelphia Inquirer. His career at the Inquirer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, spans more than three decades (1983–2014). Tarver currently serves as Associate Professor of Art specializing in photography at Swarthmore College.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ave Pildas</span> American photographer and designer (born 1939)

Ave Pildas is an American photographer and designer known for his work in both the music industry and fine arts. He gained recognition for his early photographs of jazz musicians, including Nina Simone, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane and Dave Brubeck, which were published in DownBeat magazine during the 1960s.

References

  1. Skoogfors, Leif (1974). The Most Natural Thing in The World. New York and London: Harper & Row. p. 100. ISBN   0060903856.
  2. Photo exhibit Skoogfors
  3. Leif Skoogfors/Corbis Assigned by TIME magazine
  4. "The Work, and Communities, of Mark di Suvero". The New York Times. 27 October 2016.
  5. "LightBox - Leif Skoogfors/Corbis Assigned by TIME magazine... |".
  6. "Dispatches- the Digital Journalist (July 2007) what?".
  7. "Google, Photographers Settle Litigation over Books". 5 September 2014.