Charles Sheeler

I feel like I see the world like this sometimes.


© Charles Sheeler, Amoskeag Mills #2


© Charles Sheeler, Study for Improvisation on a Mill Town, 1948

Walker Evans

This Polaroid is not typical of Evans' earlier documentary work.


© Walker Evans

Hiromu Kira

I liked this photograph from the Seattle Camera Club show at Henry Art Gallery in Seattle.

© Hiromu Kira

Walead Beshty

© Walead Beshty

David Hockney

© David Hockney

Uta Barth

© Uta Barth.

Masters | Yousuf Karsh

My parents recently saw an exhibit of Yousuf Karsh's work in Boston. Thanks Dad for telling me about him. It is worth your while to check out his website and watch a short video clip of him explaining how he caught this shot of Churchill. It is a great story. He photographed some of the world's most famous people...Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein. I am a big fan.

Masters | Irving Penn

Spencer Tracey, by Irving Penn

Penn captured the faces, and personalities, of celebrities from movie star Spencer Tracy (I948) to author Anaïs Nin (1971), gradually changing his approach to portraiture over the years. In the 1940s, Penn positioned his sitters in a narrow corner created by two bare, dull theater flats, a device of his own creation. The set both physically and psychologically confined the sitters, putting them on equal footing with Penn.

I myself have always stood in the awe of the camera. I recognize it for the instrument it is, part Stradivarius, part scalpel. - Irving Penn

Photographing a cake can be art. - Irving Penn - asserted when he opened his studio in 1953

Masters | Rodney Smith

The intriguing and mysterious Rodney Smith studied photography under Walker Evans at Yale, eventually earning a degree in Divinity. He was asked to lecture at schools like Columbia and Harvard, but he declined all invitations, instead riding slow trains in India, bicycling through the Camarque, strolling the streets in Paris. He still watches nothing but movies made before 1947. His favorite subject is men in hats.

Masters | Richard Avedon

George Bush, Director, CIA, Langley, Virginia, March 2, 1976

Richard Avedon is probably my favorite photographer. His simple, blank-backdrop style eliminates all other distractions and allows you to focus on the person. He often used large 8x10 view cameras causing the line-and-gap black border, a signature trademark of his photographs. He was primarily a fashion photographer.

A few Richard Avedon quotes I like:
If a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it's as though I've neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up.

I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment. They become in a sense . . .symbolic of themselves. I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune teller - to find out how they are.

Visit his website to see more.

Masters | Sally Mann

Damaged Child, 1984

"The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best. And unless you photograph what you love you're not going to make good art."

To learn more visit this website.

Masters | Diane Arbus

Penelope Tree in her living room, N.Y.C., 1962
This picture was featured in a Diane Arbus picture book. Arbus took a different approach:
"Tree was 13 when the legendary photographer Diane Arbus came across her - she cannot recall how - and photographed her for a feature for Town & Country magazine. She groans. 'It was torture, the whole thing. Now I know why everyone in her pictures looks like they do - because they have had to spend three hours with Diane Arbus staring at them.' It was a broiling August day, she was dressed top-to-toe in riding gear and told to lie down in a field. 'Now I know what she was trying to get: spoilt rich kid looking absolutely desperate in her own native habitat,' she says. When her father saw the images he was hopping mad and forbade them to be used."

"Regardless of how you feel inside, always try to look like a winner. Even if you are behind, a sustained look of control and confidence can give you a mental edge that results in victory." --Diane Arbus

This is how I often feel when photographing people. Inside I feel inadequate, questioning myself. It helps to put on the mask of confidence.