 | This article contains promotional content .(August 2024) |
Robert Farber | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Occupation | Photographer |
| Years active | 1975–present |
| Known for | Nudes, fashion, still life, landscapes |
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, four of them revised into later editions. He continues to exhibit classic and new work worldwide.
Farber was born on February 29, 1944 [1] Leap Year day, in Newark, New Jersey and grew up in Maplewood-South Orange. He was interested in art from an early age and his mother, a painter, encouraged him to make his own "art studio" in the basement where he worked in oils, drawings and watercolors. He later attended the University of Miami to study marketing and business. [2] [1] While in school Farber kept his ambition to one day work in the arts and described how he was initially inspired to take up photography:
"One day I was walking on Miami Beach and saw a very large woman wearing the tiniest string bikini I had ever seen, sitting on the beach, knitting. I thought to myself, 'I wish I had a camera.' I suddenly saw photography as a way to capture a moment for storytelling. I kept this thought in my mind, and after college I bought my first camera, a Petri 35mm SLR. I was not a technical person, I often made mistakes like color shifts and grainy pictures. But I realized the mistakes made my photographs look a lot like paintings." [3]
In 1970 Farber moved to New York City and began experimenting with photography. He entered his early photographs into outdoor art shows around Manhattan in the "graphics" category because photography was not widely recognized as a legitimate art form in the late 1960s and early 1970s. [4] At one show a woman approached him and asked if his entries were paintings or photographs and he replied that yes, they were indeed photographs. She revealed herself to be the show's director and informed him that photography was not allowed and he would have to leave immediately. [2] [4] "She actually stood there while I packed up everything and took it away," he recalled in an interview with the magazine Photographer's Forum. [3]
At a different show he was approached by the creative director from a major advertising agency who was taken by his painterly style of an interior image, and said to him, "If you can capture that mood placing a model in that environment with that lighting, I will commission you to do a fashion ad." [2] This led to his first national ad with Cotton, Inc. and further assignments that jumpstarted Farber's career in fashion and commercial work.
Farber's first book Images of Woman, published in 1976, was a series of delicate, painterly, and sensual female nudes in naturally-lit interiors and impressionistic landscapes that outlined an aesthetic vision that evolved in parallel with his fashion/commercial career. The book caught the eyes of publishers, advertising art directors and gallerists that led to new commercial assignments and fine art exhibitions. When working with more erotic publications, such as Playboy and Penthouse, Farber often chose to publish under different names to not to affect his growing reputation as a fine art photographer.
In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s he was shooting with major fashion clients such as Bloomingdales, Saks Fifth Avenue, Macy's, Bill Blass, Anne Taylor, Christian Dior, Geoffrey Beene, Loden Frey, L'Oreal, Gillette, Revlon, Wrangler, ABC, Paramount Pictures, amongst others; with magazines GQ, Vogue, Elle, Esquire, Playboy, Viva, Cosmopolitan, and Vanity Fair; and with top supermodels Beverly Johnson, Gia Carangi, Linda Evangelista, Carol Alt, Christie Brinkley, Janice Dickinson, and Iman.
Farber's experiences in fashion resulted in the publication of his next two books, Professional Fashion Photography (1978) and The Fashion Photographer (1982). Both explored the creative process by going behind the scenes at fashion shoots and documenting how to work with clients. These large format books served Farber well, helping to escalate his reputation in fashion photography as well as enable him to publish an atmospheric collection of new works, Moods (1980), his first book to combine still lives, landscapes, and nudes.
In the early 1980s Farber was approached by musicians and video producers to adapt his visual style to motion pictures. In 1985 he directed his first music video, "Rumours of You" by Aldo Nova that led to his own experiments with long-form film. He went on to direct national and international television commercials for clients such as Wrangler, Toyota, Loden Frey, and Neutrogena, and later signed with The Gersh Agency.
His fifth book Farber Nudes (1983) attracted the eyes of Doubleday senior editor and former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. [5] She arranged a meeting to discuss a potential collaboration and Farber showed her recent photographs he had taken around the French Riviera that included many seaside images. Mrs. Onassis was entranced by them and said, "Let's call the book ‘By The Sea’ and add images from various parts of the world." [6] [7] The book exhibited a unique concept: Farber asked colleagues and friends what their feelings were to be by the sea and their thoughts were published in their own hand writing adjacent to his photographs. A wide range of people were asked, from a commercial clam digger to famous celebrities. First published in 1987, then revised for paperback in 1994, ‘’By The Sea’’ went on to win the Art Director's Award for Color Photography with designer Larry Vigon.
Throughout the 1980s, seventy-three of Farber's images were published into posters and distributed worldwide. [8]
While still shooting commercially and publishing a retrospective Classic Farber Nudes: Twenty Years of Photography in 1991, Farber became aware of the newly emerging Internet as both a unique marketing tool for his photography and purchased the URL, Farber.com, and became one of the first major photographers to display his work online. [6] [9] Within the following year an unusual opportunity emerged as the Internet grew in popularity: people began to email him creative, technical, and business questions about his work. [10] This led him to create a unique way to engage with other photographers — an online “photo workshop” in a virtual reality environment. The concept featured a 3-D interactive gallery tour where visitors could go into different rooms and look through his various collections and have their questions answered.
In 1996 he launched PhotoWorkshop.com with web designer Daniel Leighton. The site's content was aimed to attract serious amateurs and professionals alike with an expanded gallery tour to include workshops and tutorials taught by Farber himself as well as his recorded interviews with other prominent photographers. [11] Users were able to digitally meet in chat rooms and discuss their own work and experiences, as well as post their own photos. It became the most visited photography education website on the Internet (and later was Canon's official education site), and by 2007 was receiving 50,000 unique visitors day, with 185,000 registered users. [9]
In addition to his online teaching presence Farber toured extensively throughout the United States and internationally giving lectures at the Smithsonian Institution, the George Eastman House and many universities, as well as seminars and on-location workshops with models. Education about the craft and profession has always been an integral aspect of Farber's professional life. [12] In his books during this period Natural Beauty (2001) and American Mood (2004) he includes a technical glossary of the locations, camera, film speeds and processing for each photograph, a consistent theme throughout his literary oeuvre. When describing his teaching methods with the magazines Photo Insider and the British Journal of Photography he also emphasizes the unique perspective of every photographer: “I like sharing how I do my work. [But] even in the exact same settings, no two pictures turn out identically. All photographs reflect the photographer, the technical is just one side." [13] And further in his introduction to Natural Beauty:
“Of course, many powerful images are technically perfect, but that is not what makes them great. If the viewer is taken in by a perfect exposure, then the image lacks what is most important: the soul of its creator. All this translates as sensitivity: sensitivity to the subject, whether it be human or otherwise. A spark in the eyes is not merely a reflection of light, just as a tear is more than a drop of water. You have to feel your subject in the same way that a dancer has to feel the music.” [14]
In recent years Farber's work has been featured in art fairs as well as international solo gallery and museum exhibitions. In 2013 Farber was the subject of solo-retrospective show "Journey Through Moods" at the Museum of Modern Art in Dubrovnik, Croatia, featuring images of all genres taken throughout his 40-year career. [15] [16] In December 2013 he was a featured photographer for Canon at the Art Miami fair. [17] In 2016, the publisher 21st Editions collaborated with Farber on a fine art book entitled Colour. It compares the chemically degenerative effects of film positives discovered in Farber's archives with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Theory of Colours , and premiered at the AIPAD photography show in New York and participated in the Frieze VIP program. Since 2016 his Deterioration Series has been exhibited in Brussels, Paris, New York, Florence and Miami. In May 2017, Farber released a collection of provocative nudes spanning over 30 years entitled "UNSEEN / Midnight Studio" at WhiteBox NYC.
Farber has been described as a master of the nude [18] [19] [20] [21] and the "romantic mood." [9] [22] His visual sensibilities were influenced by "the directional light of the Dutch- and Flemish-school painters, and also by the soft focus of some impressionist painters." [23] [24] His early female nudes and still lives were often shot in locations in nature and pay direct homage to the Old Masters’ sense of color and texture while also employing his own custom filtering techniques. [25] The "Farber" look is often characterized by discreet, elegant and architectural compositions of the female form [26] and described as sensual, romantic, painterly, and moody while employing soft focus and grainy film texture. [9] [27] Farber now primarily shoots digitally, often achieving a filmic, grainy texture through digital film ‘noise’. His look is established with the camera and avoids Photoshop digital manipulation. [28]
Alfred Stieglitz was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his 50-year career in making photography an accepted art form. In addition to his photography, Stieglitz was known for the New York art galleries that he ran in the early part of the 20th century, where he introduced many avant-garde European artists to the U.S. He was married to painter Georgia O'Keeffe.
Irving Penn was an American photographer known for his fashion photography, portraits, and still lifes. Penn's career included work at Vogue magazine, and independent advertising work for clients including Issey Miyake and Clinique. His work has been exhibited internationally and continues to inform the art of photography.
George Platt Lynes was an American fashion and commercial photographer who worked in the 1930s and 1940s. He produced photographs featuring many gay artists and writers from the 1940s that were acquired by the Kinsey Institute.
Fine-art photography is photography created in line with the vision of the photographer as artist, using photography as a medium for creative expression. The goal of fine-art photography is to express an idea, a message, or an emotion. This stands in contrast to representational photography, such as photojournalism, which provides a documentary visual account of specific subjects and events, literally representing objective reality rather than the subjective intent of the photographer; and commercial photography, the primary focus of which is to advertise products or services.
Night photography is the capturing of images outdoors between dusk and dawn. Night photographers generally have a choice between using artificial lighting and using a long exposure, exposing the shot for seconds, minutes, or hours in order to capture enough light to record an image. With the progress of high-speed films, higher-sensitivity digital sensors, wide-aperture lenses, and the ever-greater power of urban lights, night photography is increasingly possible using available light.
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.
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.
Amanda Means is an American artist and photographer.
Garry Gross was an American fashion photographer who went on to specialize in dog portraiture.
Emy Kat is a researcher, visual artist and photographer working in contemporary art and fine art photography.
Robert J. Doherty was an American photographer, scholar, and museum professional. His photographic work was first shown at Watertown, Connecticut, then at The Arts Club of Louisville, Louisville Art Center Association School, and at the Allen R. Hite Art Institute, University of Louisville. He became curator of the photography collection of the Hite Art Institute in 1962 and acting director of the institute two years later, and served as director from 1967 to 1972. From 1972 to 1981, he served as the fourth director of the George Eastman Museum. He has also written on Social Documentary Photography, Creative Photography, and World War I photographs.
Social documentary photography or concerned photography is the recording of what the world looks like, with a social and/or environmental focus. It is a form of documentary photography, with the aim to draw the public's attention to ongoing social issues. It may also refer to a socially critical genre of photography dedicated to showing the life of underprivileged or disadvantaged people.
Torkil Gudnason is a New York based fashion photographer.
Anthony Barboza is a photographer, historian, artist and writer. With roots originating from Cape Verde, and work that began in commercial art more than forty years ago, Barboza's artistic talents and successful career helped him to cross over and pursue his passions in the fine arts where he continues to contribute to the American art scene.
Lida Moser was an American-born photographer and author, with a career that spanned more than six decades, before retiring in her 90s. She was known for her photojournalism and street photography as a member of both the Photo League and the New York School. Her portfolio includes black and white commercial, portrait, landscape, experimental, abstract, and documentary photography, with her work continuing to have an impact.
Fine art nude photography is a genre of fine-art photography which depicts the nude human body with an emphasis on form, composition, emotional content, and other aesthetic qualities. The nude has been a prominent subject of photography since its invention, and played an important role in establishing photography as a fine art medium. The distinction between fine art photography and other subgenres is not absolute, but there are certain defining characteristics.
Charles Robert Gatewood was an American photographer, writer, videographer, artist and educator, who lived and worked in San Francisco, California.
John Borg Loengard was an American photographer who worked at Life magazine from 1961, and was its picture editor from 1973 to 1987. He taught at the International Center of Photography, New York, The New School for Social Research, New York, and at workshops around the country.
Leland Bobbé is an American photographer known for commercial portraiture and for personal work capturing fringe elements of society. He has made portraits of burlesque performers and drag queens; and street photography in New York City’s Times Square and the Bowery in the mid-1970s, eighteen of which are in the collection of the Museum of the City of New York.
Suzanne Szasz was a Hungarian-born American photographer of children and family life.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Artists | |
| Other | |
