Richard Avedon
Richard Avedon (May 15, 1923 – October 1, 2004) was an American fashion and portrait photographer. An obituary published in The New York Times said that "his fashion and portrait photographs helped define America's image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century.In 1944, Avedon married Dorcas Marie Nowell (1925—2011); she became the model and actress Doe Avedon; they divorced after five years of marriage. In 1951, he married Evelyn Franklin; she died on March 13, 2004. Their marriage produced one son, John Avedon, an author and authority on Tibet.In 1970, Avedon purchased a former carriage house on the Upper East Side that would serve as both his studio and his apartment. In the late 1970s, he purchased a four-bedroom house on a 7.5-acre estate in Montauk, nestled between the Atlantic Ocean and a nature preserve; in 1998, he put the place on the market for $10 million and sold it for almost $9 million in 2000.On October 1, 2004, Avedon died of a brain hemorrhage in San Antonio, Texas, while shooting an assignment for The New Yorker. At the time of his death, he was also working on a new project titled Democracy to focus on the run-up to the 2004 U.S. presidential election.Avedon is survived by his son John, and his four grandchildren William, Matthew, Michael and Caroline.
W.Eugene Smith
William Eugene Smith (December 30, 1918, Wichita, Kansas – October 15, 1978, Tucson, Arizona) was an American photojournalist known for his refusal to compromise professional standards and his brutally vivid World War II photographs.Smith graduated from Wichita North High School in 1936. He began his career by taking pictures for two local newspapers, The Wichita Eagle (morning circulation) and the Beacon (evening circulation). He moved to New York City and began work for Newsweek and became known for his incessant perfectionism and thorny personality. Smith was fired from Newsweek for refusing to use medium format cameras and joined Life Magazine in 1939 using a 35mm camera. In 1945 he was wounded while photographing battle conditions in the Pacific theater of World War II.As a correspondent for Ziff-Davis Publishing and then Life again, Smith entered World War II on the front lines of the island-hopping American offensive against Japan, photographing U.S. Marines and Japanese prisoners of war at Saipan, Guam, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. On Okinawa, Smith was hit by mortar fire. After recovering, he continued at Life and perfected the photo essay from 1947 to 1954.In 1950, he was sent to the United Kingdom to cover the General Election, in which the Labour Party, under Clement Attlee, was narrowly victorious. Life had taken an editorial stance against the Labour government. In the end, a limited number of Smith's photographs of working-class Britain were published, including three shots of the South Wales valleys. In a documentary made by BBC Wales, Professor Dai Smith traced a miner who described how he and two colleagues had met Smith on their way home from work at the pit and had been instructed on how to pose for one of the photos published in Life.Smith severed his ties with Life over the way in which the magazine used his photographs of Albert Schweitzer. Upon leaving Life, Smith joined the Magnum photo agency in 1955. There he started his project to document Pittsburgh. This project was supposed to take him three weeks, but spanned three years and tens of thousands of negatives. It was too large ever to be shown, although a series of book-length photo essays were eventually produced.
Henri Cartier Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson (August 22, 1908 – August 3, 2004) was a French photographer considered to be the father of modern photojournalism. He was an early adopter of 35 mm format, and the master of candid photography. He helped develop the "street photography" or "life reportage" style that has influenced generations of photographers who followed.In the spring of 1947, Cartier-Bresson, with Robert Capa, David Seymour, William Vandivert and George Rodger founded Magnum Photos. Capa's brainchild, Magnum was a cooperative picture agency owned by its members. The team split photo assignments among the members. Rodger, who had quit Life in London after covering World War II, would cover Africa and the Middle East. Chim, who spoke most European languages, would work in Europe. Cartier-Bresson would be assigned to India and China. Vandivert, who had also left Life, would work in America, and Capa would work anywhere that had an assignment. Maria Eisner managed the Paris office and Rita Vandivert, Vandivert's wife, managed the New York office and became Magnum's first president.Cartier-Bresson achieved international recognition for his coverage of Gandhi's funeral in India in 1948 and the last (1949) stage of the Chinese Civil War. He covered the last six months of the Kuomintang administration and the first six months of the Maoist People's Republic. He also photographed the last surviving Imperial eunuchs in Beijing, as the city was falling to the communists. In Shanghai, he often worked in the company of photojournalist Sam Tata, whom Cartier-Bresson had previously befriended in Bombay.From China, he went on to Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), where he documented the gaining of independence from the Dutch
Annie Leibovitz
In 1978 Annie Leibovitz became the first woman to photograph Joan Armatrading for an album. She did the photography for Armatrading's fifth studio album To the Limit, spending four days at her house capturing the images.Since 1977, Leibovitz licensing images have been represented by Contact Press Images, a photojournalism agency based in New York City. She ceased to be represented by Jim Moffat at A Corporation for Art & Commerce in 2009.Leibovitz had a close romantic relationship with noted writer and essayist Susan Sontag. They met in 1989, when both had already established notability in their careers. Leibovitz has suggested that Sontag mentored her and constructively criticized her work.After Sontag's death in 2004, Newsweek published an article about Leibovitz that made reference to her decade-plus relationship with Sontag, stating that "The two first met in the late '80s, when Leibovitz photographed her for a book jacket. They never lived together, though they each had an apartment within view of the other's."Neither Leibovitz nor Sontag had ever previously publicly disclosed whether the relationship was familial, a friendship, or sexual in nature. However, when Leibovitz was interviewed for her 2006 book A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005, she said the book told a number of stories, and that "with Susan, it was a love story."In the preface to the book, she speaks in greater detail about her romantic/intellectual relationship with Sontag, briefly discussing a book they were working on together and describes how assembling A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005 was part of the grieving process after Sontag's death. The book and accompanying show include many photographs of Sontag throughout their life together, including several on her deathbed.