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.
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.
Martha Rosler is an American artist. She is a conceptual artist who works in photography and photo text, video, installation, sculpture, site-specific and performance, as well as writing about art and culture. Rosler's work is centered on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women's experience. Recurrent concerns are the media and war, as well as architecture and the built environment, from housing and homelessness to places of passage and systems of transport.
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.
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.
Lois Greenfield is an American photographer best known for her unique approach to photographing the human form in motion. Born in New York City, she attended Hunter College Elementary School, the Fieldston School, and Brandeis University. Greenfield majored in Anthropology and expected to become an ethnographic filmmaker but instead, she became a photojournalist for local Boston newspapers. She traveled around the world on various assignments as a photojournalist but her career path changed in the mid-1970s when she was assigned to shoot a dress rehearsal for a dance concert. Greenfield has since specialized in photographing dancers in her photo studio as part of her exploration of the expressive potential of movement.
Deborah Willis is a contemporary African-American artist, photographer, curator of photography, photographic historian, author, and educator. Among her awards and honors, she is a 2000 MacArthur Fellow. She is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at Tisch School of the Arts of New York University. In 2024, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
New European Painting emerged in the 1980s and reached a critical point of major distinction and influence in the 1990s with painters like Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer and Bracha L. Ettinger whose paintings have established and continue to create a new dialogue between the historical archive, American Abstraction and figuration. The major new European painters of this era show strong engagements with painful personal and general history, as well as shared history; its memory and its oblivion; and with life under the shadow of World War II, utilizing research in new and old materials, photography and oil painting.
The participation of women in photography goes back to the very origins of the process. Several of the earliest women photographers, most of whom were from Britain or France, were married to male pioneers or had close relationships with their families. It was above all in northern Europe that women first entered the business of photography, opening studios in Denmark, France, Germany, and Sweden from the 1840s, while it was in Britain that women from well-to-do families developed photography as an art in the late 1850s. Not until the 1890s, did the first studios run by women open in New York City.
Esther Shalev-Gerz is a contemporary artist. She lives and works in Paris.
The Neues Sehen, also known as New Vision or Neue Optik, was a movement, not specifically restricted to photography, which was developed in the 1920s. The movement was directly related to the principles of the Bauhaus. Neues Sehen considered photography to be an autonomous artistic practice with its own laws of composition and lighting, through which the lens of the camera becomes a second eye for looking at the world. This way of seeing was based on the use of unexpected framings, the search for contrast in form and light, the use of high and low camera angles, etc. The movement was contemporary with New Objectivity with which it shared a defence of photography as a specific medium of artistic expression, although Neues Sehen favoured experimentation and the use of technical means in photographic expression.
Visual Studies Workshop (VSW) is a non-profit organization dedicated to art education based in Rochester, New York, in the Neighborhood of the Arts. VSW supports makers and interpreters of images through education, publications, exhibitions, and collections. VSW houses a bookstore, microcinema, exhibition gallery, and research center, and hosts artists-in-residence.
Mikhael Subotzky is a South African artist based in Johannesburg. His installation, film, video and photographic work have been exhibited widely in museums and galleries, and received awards including the KLM Paul Huf Award, W. Eugene Smith Grant, Oskar Barnack Award and the Discovery Award at Rencontres d'Arles. He has published the books Beaufort West (2008), Retinal Shift (2012) and, with Patrick Waterhouse, Ponte City (2014). Subotzky is a member of Magnum Photos and his work is held in the collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Jörg M. Colberg is a German writer, educator and photographer, living in Northampton, Massachusetts, USA. He is the founder and editor of Conscientious, a blog dedicated to contemporary fine-art photography. He worked as a research scientist in astronomy and has been a professor of photography at the Hartford Art School.
Scotland played a major role in the technical development of photography in the nineteenth century through the efforts of figures including James Clerk Maxwell and David Brewster. Its artistic development was pioneered by Robert Adamson and artist David Octavius Hill, whose work is considered to be some of the first and finest artistic uses of photography. Thomas Roger was one of the first commercial photographers. Thomas Keith was one of the first architectural photographers. George Washington Wilson pioneered instant photography and landscape photography. Clementina Hawarden and Mary Jane Matherson were amongst the first female photographers. War photography was pioneered by James MacCosh, James Robertson, Alexander Graham and Mairi Chisholm.
Jochen Gerz is a German conceptual artist who lived in France from 1966 to 2007. His work involves the relationship between art and life, history and memory, and deals with concepts such as culture, society, public space, participation and public authorship. After beginning his career in the literary field, Gerz has in the meantime explored various artistic disciplines and diverse media. Whether he works with text, photography, video, artist books, installation, performance, or on public authorship pieces and processes, at the heart of Gerz's practice is the search for an art form that can contribute to the res publica and to democracy. Gerz lives in Sneem, County Kerry, Ireland, since 2007.
The Anonymous Was A Woman Award is a grant program for women artists who are over 40 years of age, in part to counter sexism in the art world. It began in 1996 in direct response to the National Endowment for the Arts' decision to stop funding individual artists.
Barbara Pugh Norfleet is an American documentary photographer, author, curator, professor and social scientist who used photography as social documentary and allegory to examine American culture. Her photographic work is represented in museum collections around the world. She is founder and curator of a photographic archive on American social history at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University.
Ten.8 was a British photography magazine founded in 1979 and published quarterly in Birmingham, England, throughout the 1980s, folding in 1992.
Rhonda Wilson MBE was a women's activist, photographer, writer, editor, and educator in British contemporary photography, best known for her initiation of the Rhubarb-Rhubarb International Festival of the Image.
