Career
Upon finishing his studies, Arbeit moved to New York, and was hired by Irving Penn as a platinum print retoucher. After working for Penn, Arbeit moved to Milan to launch his own fashion photography career, and shot regularly for Linea Italia , Donna magazine and Vogue Bellezza .
In 1985, he settled in Paris to further his career as well as expand his artistic boundaries. To explore the experimental side of photography, Arbeit and a few ambitious photographer friends from the Art Center formed a group called 'The Cauldron.' Its mission was simple: to take pictures that had never been done before. Arbeit chose focus as his tool, and launched In & Out of Focus, a series of photographs in which in the foreground Arbeit focuses sharply on a flower and in the background; an out-of-focus female nude mimics the shape and movement of the bloom.
Arbeit continued work editorially, splitting his time between Paris and New York, shooting fashion for French Vogue and Marie Claire , and portraits for In Style magazine , People magazine and Forbes . In 1992, he launched a second series, 'Artist Atelier,' a series of female nudes in painter/ sculpture studios in Paris. Following the Atelier series, Arbeit launched a project called 'Polajunk Constructions': a collection of photomontages made of the Polaroid's positive/ negative and incorporating all the paraphernalia that comes in a Polaroid box.
In 1994, on vacation visiting family on Oahu, Arbeit began working with an 8X10 inch Deardorff camera on a study of the Hawaiian Islands. For it, he has photographed the island people, the stunning mountainous landscapes and the flawless beaches.
In 2009, June Newton conceptualized a tribute exhibition to Helmut, based around three photographers who had trained extensively under Helmut: Mark Arbeit, Just Loomis , and George Holz . All three had been photography students at The Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California in 1979 when they became Newton's longtime assistants, and all three went on to independent careers. The exhibit premiered at the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin and combined the work of all three with personal snapshots, contact sheets, and letters from their time with Helmut.
In 2005 Arbeit moved back to Honolulu, Hawaii, shooting fashion and celebrity editorial for local and national magazine. During this period Arbeit work on two important photographic series. ‘Torso’, a surreal look at the female nude; covering the head, arms and legs of the model with black velvet, exposing only the torso. The second series, ‘Photograms’, began with a message Arbeit received from Helmut Newton , eight years after his death. Life size photograms of female nudes, lying on silver gelatin photo paper, photographed and developed all in a darkroom.
Mark Arbeit continues photographing Fashion and Celebrity editorial and pursuing his personal artistic work.
Helmut Newton was an Australian photographer. The New York Times described him as a "prolific, widely imitated fashion photographer whose provocative, erotically charged black-and-white photos were a mainstay of Vogue and other publications."
Juergen Teller is a German fine-art and fashion photographer. He was awarded the Citibank Prize for Photography in 2003 and received the Special Presentation International Center of Photography Infinity Award in 2018.
Franco Fontana is an Italian photographer. He is best known for his abstract colour landscapes.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to photography:
Albert Watson OBE is a Scottish fashion, celebrity and art photographer. He has shot over 100 covers of Vogue and 40 covers of Rolling Stone magazine since the mid-1970s, and has created major advertising campaigns for clients such as Prada, Chanel and Levis. Watson has also taken some well-known photographs, from the portrait of Steve Jobs that appeared on the cover of his biography, a photo of Alfred Hitchcock holding a plucked goose, and a portrait of a nude Kate Moss taken on her 19th birthday.
Paolo Roversi is an Italian-born fashion photographer who lives and works in Paris.
Bruno Bisang is a Swiss fashion photographer. His photography has been seen in features of many international magazines, such as Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Max, GQ and Amica, and he has shot advertising campaigns for various major fashion and beauty labels, including Chanel, Wolford, Guerlain, Palmers and Givenchy.
Nude photography is the creation of any photograph which contains an image of a nude or semi-nude person, or an image suggestive of nudity. Nude photography is undertaken for a variety of purposes, including educational uses, commercial applications and artistic creations.
Henry Talbot, born Heinz Tichauer was a German-Australian fashion photographer noted for his long association with the Australian fashion industry, particularly the Australian Wool Board.
George Holz was born in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, graduated from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and assisted for Helmut Newton, whom he credits with guiding his career. As a fledgling photographer, he lived in Milan and Paris, where he shot beauty and fashion for major European magazines such as Italian Vogue and French Elle. Afterward, he moved to New York City, where he set up his famous studio on Lafayette Street, traveling frequently to Los Angeles and Europe to shoot fashion, advertising, and portraiture for major publications such as Vanity Fair and Harper's Bazaar. His fine-art nudes have been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world. His shows have included “Original Sin” and “Three Boys from Pasadena – A Tribute to Helmut Newton” with fellow Art Center alumni Just Loomis and Mark Arbeit. Holz has collected a variety of prestigious industry awards over the years including a Grammy and a Clio.
Staley-Wise Gallery is a fine art photography gallery located in New York City, focusing on fashion photography, as well as portraiture, landscape, still life and nudes. The gallery was founded in 1981 by Etheleen Staley and Taki Wise.
Ruby Spowart is an Australian photographer whose award-winning images of outback landscapes are based on some 40 safari tours in Australia and New Zealand. Spowart is a triple Master of Photography, Fellow and Honorary Fellow of the Australian Institute of Professional Photography. She also achieved a Certificate in Art from the Queensland College of Art as well as an Associate Diploma of Visual Art from Queensland University of Technology. Co-founder of the Brisbane Imagery Gallery in 1982, she exhibited there until 1995. From Polaroid colour photograms in the 1980s to large-scale photo mosaics in the 1990s and photobooks since 2000, she has created a considerable body of work. Spowart is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Professional Photographers (AIPP).
Vincenzo Laera is an Italian photographer.
Werner Pawlok is a German artist and photographer known for his celebrity and art photography, especially for his work with the 20×24-inch Polaroid Camera.
Just Loomis is a fine art photographer known for his portraiture and fashion photography. His work has been published and exhibited internationally and has appeared in Harper's Bazaar, British Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. His book of American portraits, "As We Are" was published in 2010 by Hatje Cantz.
Robert Farber is an American photographer and lecturer known for his work with nudes, fashion, landscapes and still lives. He has published eleven books of original collections that have sold over half-a-million copies, four of them revised into later editions. He continues to exhibit classic and new work worldwide.
Mikael Jansson is a Swedish fashion photographer and director. Jansson regularly contributes to publications such as American and French Vogue, Interview Magazine as well as photographing campaigns for luxury brands such as Estée Lauder, Coach, Calvin Klein and Louis Vuitton.
William "Bill" Helburn was an American fashion and advertising photographer, best known for images published in magazines including Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Life, Town and Country, Esquire and Charm. Over the course of his career, Helburn won more than 46 professional awards for magazine and television ads. He died in November 2020 at the age of 96.
David Lebe is an American photographer. He is best known for his experimental images using techniques such as pinhole cameras, hand-painted photographs, photograms, and light drawings. Many of his photographs explore issues of gay identity, homoeroticism, and living with AIDS, linking his work to that of contemporaries such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, and David Wojnarowicz. Though his style and approach set him apart from these contemporaries, "Lebe is now incontrovertibly part of the history of twentieth-century queer artists."
Bernis von zur Muehlen, born 1942, is an American fine arts photographer.
