Photographer Bios: Rinko Kawauchi | Ray Metzker | Imogen Cunningham | LaToya Ruby Frazier | Ina Jang | Roy DeCarava | Hellen Van Meene | Alex Webb | Andre Kertsez | Lee Friedlander | Laslo Moholy Nagy

Photographer Bios:

Rinko Kawauchi | Ray Metzker | Imogen Cunningham | LaToya Ruby Frazier | Ina Jang | Roy DeCarava | Hellen Van Meene | Alex Webb | Andre Kertsez | Lee Friedlander | Laslo Moholy Nagy

RINKO KAWAUCHI  

Rinko Kawauchi is a contemporary Japanese photographer known for her lyrical images of elemental subjects. Kawauchi’s photographs capture ordinary moments with a profound and dreamlike perspective. Born in 1972, Kawauchi became interested in photography while studying graphic design at Seian University of Art and Design in the early 1990s. She first worked in commercial photography and advertising for several years before embarking on a career as a fine art photographer. Kawauchi published her first 3 photo books in 2001 and went on to release several others. Kawauchi's art is rooted in Shinto, the ethnic religion of the people of Japan. According to Shinto, all things on earth have a spirit, hence no subject is too small or mundane for Kawauchi's work; she also photographs "small events glimpsed in passing," conveying a sense of the transient. Kawauchi puts a great deal of focus on equipment and most of the time photographs with a Roliflex 6×6. She currently lives and works in Tokyo, Japan. Today, Kawauchi’s works are held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Huis Marseille in Amsterdam, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, among others. 

“Experiences are the important thing. The experience is the most important part of the process of taking the picture.”  - Rinko Kawauchi  

THOUGHTS & WORDS:  

Personal, minimal, pale, pastel, nature, small, detail, seen, quiet, whisper, still, enigma, language, silence, light, perspective. (filter-no-filter). 

RAY METZKER 

Ray Metzker was an American photographer known chiefly for his bold, experimental B&W cityscapes and for his large "composites", assemblages of printed film strips and single frames. His work is held in various major public collections and is the subject of eight monographs. Metzker quietly made extraordinary and influential photographs over the course of a five-decade career. Metzker was born in 1931 in Milwaukee and attended the Institute of Design, Chicago--a renowned school that had a few years earlier been dubbed the New Bauhaus-- from 1956 to 1959. After graduate studies, Metzker traveled extensively throughout Europe in 1960-61, where he had two epiphanies: that "light" would be his primary subject, and that he would seek synthesis and complexity over simplicity. 

Early in his career, his work was marked by unusual intensity. Composites, multiple-exposure, superimposition of negatives, juxtapositions of two images, solarization and other formal means were part and parcel of his vocabulary.  He was committed to discovering the potential of black and white photography during the shooting and the printing and has shown consummate skill in each stage of the photographic process. Metzker's unique and continually evolving mastery of light, shadow, and line transform the ordinary into a realm of pure visual delight. In the mid-1980s, Metzker turned from the city as subject to the natural landscape. These works combined selective focus with a newly luminous tonal palette and a visual or compositional density.  

Metzker often said the artist begins his explorations by embracing what he doesn't know. He is recognized as one of the great masters of American photography, a virtuoso who pursued his chosen medium passionately throughout the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st. 

Thoughts & Words:

Touching, vast, essential, bare, stripped, technique, extreme, limits, no-limits, shifts, tough, graceful, dominating, isolation, fragmentation, selective, observation, intention, urban, space, old, fleeting, unassuming, a thing of pure beauty. 

IMOGEN CUNNINGHAM

Imogen Cunningham is renowned as one of the greatest American women photographers. Cunningham learned to use a 4x5 view camera via correspondence school. She later studied chemistry at the University of Washington and, after graduating, worked in a studio making commercial platinum prints. Her early work was Pictorialist in style, depicting allegorical figures in soft-focus tableaux. Her widely reproduced series of close-up plant photographs were first shown in the landmark Film und Foto exhibit in Stuttgart in 1929. The precisionism of American West Coast straight photography reached its height from 1932-35 with the f/64 group, an informal association that included Cunningham, Weston, and Ansel Adams, whose members advocated the use of large-format view cameras, small lens apertures, and contact printing. The clarity of vision and strong, uncluttered compositions of Cunningham's photographs of people and plants exemplify this aesthetic, even after she began to use a smaller-format camera in 1945. Her work is characterized by a potent formalism and an interest in design and structure, tempered by a humanizing capacity obvious in her memorable and sympathetic portraits. Cunningham opened a successful studio in Seattle in 1910, and made a living with portrait commissions; her sitters included Martha Graham, Alfred Stieglitz, Frida Kahlo, Herbert Hoover, Gertrude Stein, Edward Weston, Morris Graves, Merce Cunningham, Man Ray, August Sander, and Minor White. Cunningham's work is in major collections. She taught and lectured widely and continued to photograph until late in her life.

Thoughts & Words:
Powerful, naked, navigate, sensuality, pulse, life, beauty, staged, freedom, organic, female. 

LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER

LaToya Ruby Frazier is an American artist. From Braddock, Pennsylvania, Frazier began photographing her family and hometown at the age of 16, revising the social documentary tradition of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange to imagine documentation from within and by the community, and collaboration between the photographer and her subjects. Inspired by Gordon Parks, who promoted the camera as a weapon for social justice, Frazier uses her tight focus to make apparent the impact of systematic problems. In addition to her most famous work, the series of family portraits Notion of Family, Frazier has worked with other contemporary issues from racism to deindustrialization to environmental degradation, on individual bodies, relationships, and spaces. In her work, she is concerned with bringing to light these problems, which she describes as global issues. Her work includes both images of personal spaces, intensely private moments and the story of racial and economic injustice in America. Informed by documentary practices from the turn of the last century, Frazier explores identities of place, race, and family in work that is a hybrid of self-portraiture and social narrative. Frazier is a professor of photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

THOUGHTS & WORDS:

Intimate, truth, accuracy, real, young, complex, women, crises, harsh & soft, simultaneous, performance, intergenerational, interior, participant, self-portrait, private, public, psychological, connection, collaboration. 

INA JANG

Ina Jang was born in South Korea in 1982 and currently lives and works in New York. Jang graduated with a BFA in Photography and completed her studies in the MPS Fashion Photography Program from the School of Visual Arts in 2012. Jang creates work with a playful and poetic spirit. Minimalistic it is the simplicity of her work that reveals so much power. Constructive and deconstructive alike, her work is physical, gentle, and humorous, introducing new meanings to familiar objects while exploring a collapse of dimensions in photography. She makes images that are minimal and two-dimensional by layering people, places, and things to precisely execute ideas, but with the intention of discarding information. While wanting the ideas to be tangible, Jang’s photographic process becomes rigorously physical and related to her personal experience; it often contains cutting, gluing and pasting mundane objects from real life, such as paper and cotton balls. The photographs are often figurative and unidentified, casting suspicion upon the photograph’s agenda. She allows the viewers to question whether they are truly subjects or merely objects and strives to depict an image that remains pristine and foreign to the viewers.

ROY DECARAVA

In his 1950 application for a grant from the prestigious Guggenheim Foundation, Roy DeCarava said that he wanted to devote a year to photographing Harlem and its people “[But] I do not want to make a documentary or sociological statement. I want a creative expression.” And he did just that. DeCarava, who was born in Harlem, NY, was the first African American photographer to win a Guggenheim Fellowship, and as a result of the fellowship, was able to photograph his community and New York City for one year. His was a work of achingly beautiful art, expression. Roy's early creative impressions through the black and white silver gelatin process focused on his chief areas of interest: the streets, the home, and jazz. After studying painting, sculpture, and printmaking, DeCarava first began to use photography as reference for his paintings but was so enthralled by the medium that he began devoting all of his time to it and championed black and white silver gelatin photography as an art form of its own.  

DeCarava resisted explicit politicization, but keeping in mind the context of the time, his art was deeply political in nature. Portraying Black America with a sense of normalcy and beauty was transgressive and subversive, intentionally or not. DeCarava once wrote, ”in spite of poverty, you see people with dignity and a certain quality that contrasts with where they live and what they’re doing.” 

DeCarava’s photography was a matter of steady immersion and acute observation. He brought to photography an exquisitely attuned sense of composition and tonal finesse. His images demonstrate a rare capacity to find and articulate poetry in ordinary life. Velvety tones in subtle gradation, punctuated by deep, inky blacks and selective gleams of white, an attuned sense of composition and tonal finesse, are characteristic of DeCarava, whether his subject is a quotidian still life, the stack of dirty dishes at a vacated table or Billie Holiday, tightly framed in performance, face clenched with intensity. His images articulate profound poetry in ordinary life.

DeCarava encouraged other fine art photographers and believed in the accessibility of the medium. In 1963, he co-founded the Kamoinge Workshop, a Harlem-based collective that supported the work of black photographers through exhibitions, public programs, group critiques, and published portfolios. 

HELLEN VAN MEENE

Dutch artist Hellen van Meene (the Netherlands,1972) is best known for her carefully staged yet intimate square format photographic portraits of adolescent girls and androgynous boys, revealing the psychological tension and ambiguity of this transitional stage of life. Although based in reality, van Meene’s portraits have a distinctly detached and otherworldly quality to them. Her subjects often appear immersed in their own thoughts, their gaze fixed upon something out of the frame, or their eyes closed. Figures without faces, sheaths of hair concealing their identity, and girls hovering above the ground confront the viewer, leaving the method and intent behind each portrait deliberately ambiguous. The artist seems to aim to produce a slowing down effect with her photographs, as she captures the moment between girlhood and womanhood. This timeless quality extends to the photographs themselves, which appear both contemporary and entirely from another era. Van Meene’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at Guggenheim Museum and MoMA in New York.

Hellen van Meene studied photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. During this time, she briefly studied at the College of Art in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1995. Through her particular use of form and natural light, it is clear to see the influence of her Dutch predecessors, such as Vermeer. She originally chose her subjects within her hometown of Alkmaar. However, as her work progressed, she also photographed models from other countries. In 2004, she portrayed teenage mothers and mothers-to-be from Russia, Latvia, and the United Kingdom in the midst of palpable coming-of-age turning points. 

ALEX WEBB 

Alex Webb (San Francisco, CA 1952) is a photographer known for his complex and vibrant color photographs of serendipitous or enigmatic moments, often in places with socio-political tensions. Over the past 45 years, Webb has worked in places as varied as the U.S.-Mexico border, Haiti, Istanbul, and a number of American cities. He became interested in photography during his high school years. He majored in History and Literature at Harvard University and studied photography at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Webb attended the Apeiron Workshops in 1972 and began working as a professional photojournalist in 1974. His photographs began to appear in such publications as the New York Times Magazine, Life, Geo, and eventually in Stern and National Geographic. Webb joined Magnum Photos as an associate member in 1976, becoming a full member in 1979.

During the mid-1970s, Webb conducted reportages in the US south, traveling extensively, documenting small-town life in black and white. He also began working in the Caribbean and Mexico. In 1979, Webb began a body of colorwork that he continues to pursue today. Since then he has traveled throughout the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa.

Webb has exhibited at museums worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of Art, NYC and the Metropolitan Museum, NYC. He has received numerous awards and grants including a Hasselblad Foundation Grant in 1998, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1990, and the Leica Medal of Excellence in 2000. Webb has published 16 photography books.

"I take complex photographs because I experience the world — particularly more and more as I get older — as a very complicated and ultimately inexplicable place. My experiences in the world, my travels as a photographer, lead me to believe that there are no simple solutions, no easy answers, just a lot of difficult and perhaps unanswerable questions."

ANDRÉ KERTÉSZ

André Kertész was born in Budapest in 1894 and studied at the Academy of Commerce until he bought his first camera in 1912. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I, and in 1925 had one of his photographs published on the cover of Erdekes Ujsay. That same year, he moved to Paris, where he did freelance work for many European publications. He bought his first 35-millimeter camera, a Leica, in 1928, and his innovative work with it on the streets of Paris was extremely influential. In 1936, he came to the United States, and began freelancing for Collier's, Harper's Bazaar, and House & Garden, among other mass-circulation magazines. Eventually, and until 1962, he worked under contract to Condé Nast. Between 1963 and his death, his independently produced photographs became more widely accessible, and Kertész became one of the most respected photographers in America. His work was the subject of many publications and exhibitions. Kertész's work had widespread and diverse effects on many photographers, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and Brassaï, who counted him as a mentor during the late 1920s and early 1930s. His personal work in the 1960s and 1970s inspired countless other contemporary photographers. 

Prizing emotional impact over technique, he famously remarked, “I just walk around, observing the subject from various angles until the picture elements arrange themselves into a composition that pleases my eye.” Kertész remains best known for his contributions to photojournalism, employing distinctively dynamic compositions throughout his influential photo essays. He notably maintained a palpable empathy for his subjects, setting aside political or social biases regardless of who he was photographing.

LEE FRIEDLANDER

Lee Friedlander was born in Aberdeen, Washington, and became interested in photography at age fourteen. He studied photography at the Art Center School in Los Angeles from 1953 to 1955 and then began freelancing. His work appeared in Esquire, Art in America, Sports Illustrated, and other periodicals, and he had his first solo exhibition at the George Eastman House in 1963. Friedlander has published books regularly: Work from the Same House (with Jim Dine, 1969), Self-Portrait (1970), Flowers and Trees (1981), Lee Friedlander: Portraits (1985), and Cray at Chippewa Falls (1987). He has also produced the book Nudes (1991), and The Jazz People of New Orleans (1992). Friedlander is also responsible for printing the negatives of the turn-of-the-century New Orleans photographer E.J. Bellocq, whom he rescued from oblivion.

Friedlander's photography follows in the tradition of documentary photography as practiced by Walker Evans and Robert Frank. It is unusual for street photography in that it possesses a constant awareness of the photographer's relationship to the picture plane and places at least as much importance on it as on the image's ostensible subject--usually something like an empty street, a store window, or an unremarkable piece of town statuary. Friedlander's photographs also often contain his shadow and/or reflection, which lends an odd, uncomfortable edge to his observations.

Friedlander is known for his innovative images of city streets. Often featuring candid portraits of people, signs, and reflections of himself in storefront windows, Friedlander’s street photography captures the unexpected overlaps of light and content in urban landscapes. “I’m not a premeditative photographer,” he has said. “You don’t have to go looking for pictures. The material is generous. You go out and the pictures are staring at you.” 

LÁSLÓ MAHOLY-NAGY

Láslo Maholy-Nagy (1895-1946) was born a Hungarian-born American painter, sculptor, photographer, designer, theorist, and art teacher, whose vision of a representational art consisting of pure visual fundamentals—color, texture, light, and equilibrium of forms—was immensely influential in both the fine and applied arts in the mid-20th century. He is also known for his original approach to art education. Moholy-Nagy studied law in Budapest and served in World War I. He began to paint in 1917. After joining the poetry circle of Endre Ady, he published Cubist-influenced woodcuts in the Hungarian avant-garde journal Ma (“Today”). 

In 1921, he went to Berlin, where from 1923 to 1929 he headed the metal workshop of the famous avant-garde school of design known as the Bauhaus. With the German architect Walter Gropius, director of the Bauhaus from 1919 to 1928, Moholy-Nagy edited the 14 publications known as the Bauhausbook series. During his Bauhaus years, Moholy-Nagy developed the theories of art education for which he is known. He created a widely accepted curriculum that focused on developing students’ natural visual gifts instead of teaching them specialized skills. His dictum was: “Everybody is talented.” At the Bauhaus itself, fine-arts training was abolished in favor of “designing the whole man.”

As a painter and photographer, Moholy-Nagy worked predominantly with light. He experimented with photograms, images composed by placing objects directly on light-sensitive paper, and he constructed “light-space modulators,” oil paintings on transparent or polished surfaces that included mobile light effects. After he left the Bauhaus in 1929, Moholy-Nagy became involved in stage design and filmmaking. Fleeing from Nazi Germany in 1934, he went to Amsterdam and London, and in 1937 he moved to Chicago to organize the New Bauhaus (later the Institute of Design of the Illinois Institute of Technology), the first American school based on the Bauhaus program.

László Moholy-Nagy is arguably one of the greatest influences on post-war art education in the United States. A modernist and a restless experimentalist from the outset, the Hungarian-born artist was shaped by Dadaism, Suprematism, Constructivism, and debates about photography. When Gropius invited him to teach at the Bauhaus, in Dessau, Germany, he took over the school's crucial preliminary course and gave it a more practical, experimental, and technological bent. He later delved into various fields, from commercial design to theater set design, and also made films and worked as a magazine art director. But his greatest legacy was the version of Bauhaus teaching he brought to the United States, where he established the highly influential Institute of Design in Chicago.