Torkel Korling (April 24, 1903 – October 22, 1998) was a Swedish-born American industrial, commercial, portrait and botanical photographer.
Torkel Korling was born into a 400-year line of Lutheran Church choir directors and organists in Kristdala, Sweden. His father, Felix Körling, was first to find success beyond the church as a composer and conductor in Sweden. Korling set out to be a botanist. Torkel's surname in its usage in the USA is normally spelled without the umlaut.
Korling migrated to Chicago at age nineteen to study North American flora and fauna and photograph it on his folding Kodak Brownie camera. He worked in the wheat fields and then in a Chicago foundry before becoming interested in camera mechanisms. [1] From his interests arose three strands in Korling’s subsequent career; as an inventor, commercial photographer, and as a naturalist.
Having devised an apple-picking device in his youth, in 1933 Korling invented and patented for Graflex camera corporation an automatic aperture control that enabled full-aperture viewing for accurate focus, closing to the pre-selected aperture opening when the shutter was fired and simultaneously synchronising the firing of a flash unit. [2] It was the forerunner of a feature adopted on 35mm single-lens reflex cameras from the late fifties. He also patented portable, collapsible tripods with extendable leg braces for stability [3] which he updated in 1943.
Even at seventy-nine years old, Korling developed, as an improvement on the conventional pan head tripod camera mount, a gimbal triaxial universal camera mount permitting the pivoting of the camera about three axes: a vertical axis, a horizontal axis, and a central lens axis; [4] his 'Optipivot' allows the photographer to focus on a scene and then move the camera in any direction and still stay in focus with relation to the subject.
A logging company in Wisconsin hired Korling to take pictures of landholdings it planned to sell. A Chicago magazine editor hired him in 1926 to take pictures of the city and Korling moved there. A friend encouraged Korling to show his pictures to a Chicago ad agency art director, and his career as a commercial photographer was launched. From the 1920s through the 1950s Korling was extensively published in Fortune and Life magazines and did annual reports for major companies; Container Corporation of America, Dow Chemical, and Standard Oil of California. His shot of business executives meeting in a boardroom of modern design was chosen by Edward Steichen for the world-touring Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Family of Man which was seen by 9 million visitors. [5] [6] [7] From the late 1940s to 1962 he was granted access to RR Donnelley's Chicago and Crawfordsville facilities, producing more than 300 images for them at a time when the company carefully guarded its innovations. He was favoured for his ability in staging and capturing the essential steps in manufacturing processes, often in the one image, since he rarely made more than one shot at each location. [8] At the same time as being documentary, Korling's Donnelly images are modernist in their composition, treatment of surface, and lighting. [9] In making his architectural photographs Korling never cropped his pictures and relied on available light whenever possible. [10]
Korling’s portrayal of children, in their own homes rather than in the studio, with his Graflex fitted with his automatic diaphragm and multiple flash units for lighting were noted in a number of articles as ‘natural’ and unselfconscious and were promoted by the Graflex company in their advertising. [11] His photograph of his son Peter’s hand in his was seen widely as used in an insurance promotions that won the 1937 National Advertising Award.
After becoming an important commercial and industrial photographer Korling went back to the subject of plant life for his third career his in old age. He lived long enough to reconcile his two passions, photographing indigenous plant life across the Midwest and around the country while on corporate assignments. He published several books of his nature work that sold more than 100,000 copies over the last four decades. [12]
In his book The boreal forest and borders, from nature [13] he remembers as a boy bicycling to the edges of his town on the West coast of Sweden and rediscovering same forest's edge in North America where, he writes, “Natural vegetation everywhere has done considerable retreating in our lifetimes. This book, as will each one in the series, Wild Plants In Flower, aims to provoke an appreciation for what remains, whether you can recollect what once was or not.” In Chicago on 20 acres near Dundee, he designed an arboretum frequently used for his nature studies. He became well known in Evanston during his last two decades.
Korling died at Lakeshore Health Care and Rehabilitation Center in Chicago after a severe stroke in the prior July, and was survived by his former wife, Diane Fawcett Korling; a son, Peter Felix Korling; and two daughters, Jenny Korling Nowlen and Annika Korling. He was remembered at a gathering at Bookman's Alley in Evanston which stocked his books. [12]
{{citation}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link){{citation}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)Edward Henry Weston was a 20th-century American photographer. He has been called "one of the most innovative and influential American photographers..." and "one of the masters of 20th century photography." Over the course of his 40-year career Weston photographed an increasingly expansive set of subjects, including landscapes, still-lifes, nudes, portraits, genre scenes and even whimsical parodies. It is said that he developed a "quintessentially American, and especially Californian, approach to modern photography" because of his focus on the people and places of the American West. In 1937 Weston was the first photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, and over the next two years he produced nearly 1,400 negatives using his 8 × 10 view camera. Some of his most famous photographs were taken of the trees and rocks at Point Lobos, California, near where he lived for many years.
William Eugene Smith was an American photojournalist. He has been described as "perhaps the single most important American photographer in the development of the editorial photo essay." His major photo essays include World War II photographs, the visual stories of an American country doctor and a nurse midwife, the clinic of Albert Schweitzer in French Equatorial Africa, the city of Pittsburgh, and the pollution which damaged the health of the residents of Minamata in Japan. His 1948 series, Country Doctor, photographed for Life, is now recognized as "the first extended editorial photo story".
Edward Jean Steichen was a Luxembourgish American photographer, painter, and curator, renowned as one of the most prolific and influential figures in the history of photography.
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.
Wynn Bullock was an American photographer whose work is included in over 90 major museum collections around the world. He received substantial critical acclaim during his lifetime, published numerous books and is mentioned in all the standard histories of modern photography.
Herbert List was a German photographer, who worked for magazines, including Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and Life, and was associated with Magnum Photos. His austere, classically posed black-and-white compositions, particularly his homoerotic male nudes, taken in Italy and Greece being influential in modern photography and contemporary fashion photography.
Bruce Landon Davidson is an American photographer. He has been a member of the Magnum Photos agency since 1958. His photographs, notably those taken in Harlem, New York City, have been widely exhibited and published. He is known for photographing communities usually hostile to outsiders.
Camera Work was a quarterly photographic journal published by Alfred Stieglitz from 1903 to 1917. It is known for its many high-quality photogravures by some of the most important photographers in the world and its editorial purpose to establish photography as a fine art. It has been called "consummately intellectual", "by far the most beautiful of all photographic magazines", and "a portrait of an age [in which] the artistic sensibility of the nineteenth century was transformed into the artistic awareness of the present day."
Louis Faurer was an American candid or street photographer. He was a quiet artist who never achieved the broad public recognition that his best-known contemporaries did; however, the significance and caliber of his work were lauded by insiders, among them Robert Frank, William Eggleston, and Edward Steichen, who included his work in the Museum of Modern Art exhibitions In and Out of Focus (1948) and The Family of Man (1955).
Wayne Forest Miller was an American photographer known for his series of photographs The Way of Life of the Northern Negro. Active as a photographer from 1942 until 1975, he was a contributor to Magnum Photos beginning in 1958.
J.R. Wharton Eyerman was an American photographer and photojournalist.
Leon Levinstein (1910–1988) was an American street photographer best known for his work documenting everyday street life in New York City from the 1950s through the 1980s. In 1975 Levinstein was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Humanist Photography, also known as the School of Humanist Photography, manifests the Enlightenment philosophical system in social documentary practice based on a perception of social change. It emerged in the mid-twentieth-century and is associated most strongly with Europe, particularly France, where the upheavals of the two world wars originated, though it was a worldwide movement. It can be distinguished from photojournalism, with which it forms a sub-class of reportage, as it is concerned more broadly with everyday human experience, to witness mannerisms and customs, than with newsworthy events, though practitioners are conscious of conveying particular conditions and social trends, often, but not exclusively, concentrating on the underclasses or those disadvantaged by conflict, economic hardship or prejudice. Humanist photography "affirms the idea of a universal underlying human nature". Jean Claude Gautrand describes humanist photography as:
a lyrical trend, warm, fervent, and responsive to the sufferings of humanity [which] began to assert itself during the 1950s in Europe, particularly in France ... photographers dreamed of a world of mutual succour and compassion, encapsulated ideally in a solicitous vision.
Willi (Willie) Huttig was a German photographer and alpinist.
Margery Lewis (Smith) was an American photographer active from the 1940s to the 1970s.
William Vandivert was an American photographer, co-founder in 1947 of the agency Magnum Photos.
Edward Wallowitch was an American art photographer who at age 17 had three prints in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the youngest photographer to be so honored, and who collaborated with Andy Warhol. He was active from the 1940s to the 1970s.
Inge Pål-Nils Nilsson, was a Swedish photographer and filmmaker active from the 1950s to the 1990s.
John Bertolino was an American photojournalist who photographed in Italy and the United States and was active in the 1950s and 1960s.
Sam Falk was an early- and mid-twentieth-century American photojournalist who worked for The New York Times from 1925 to 1969, and wrote and photographed for other publications.
{{citation}}
: |author1=
has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link){{citation}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)