Sunday Salon index

Sex, death, and exquisite shoes. That’s the legacy of fashion photographer Guy Bourdin. And the shoes–they’re a distant third, almost an afterthought. He was born in Paris in 1928. His mother was Belgian, his father Spanish; both were very young. While he was still an infant, Bourdin’s parents abandoned him. He was sent to live […]

In December of 2000, Nick Brandt was in East Africa directing a music video for Michael Jackson. When the shooting for the video was complete, Brandt took some time off and visited some of the wildlife preserves. He took along a medium format camera and began to photograph the animals he saw from the car. […]

He’s generally described as the greatest—or one of the greatest—of all British photographers. That’s a lot of weight for a person to carry around. There’s always an inherent risk in writing about ‘the greatest’ in any field, including photography. Critics, admirers, other photographers—all sorts of people often have an emotional investment in ‘the greatest.’ It […]

He was born Gyula Halász in the ancient Transylvanian town of Brassó. In 1902, when he was three years old, his family moved to Paris for a year (his father, a professor of literature, had a one year lectureship at the Sorbonne). He couldn’t have actually remembered much about the city, but Paris became a […]

Anne Brigman was to photography what Isadora Duncan was to dance. She was a free spirit long before the phrase “free spirit” became a cliché. She was born in Hawaii, moved to California at age 16, married a sea captain at 25, and built a photographic career by photographing herself and her friends in the […]

The American Dream – get a good education, find a steady job that pays well, get married, buy a house in a nice neighborhood, raise a family, live happily ever after. Of course, there’s never been just the one American Dream; there are dozens of American Dreams. There’s the American Movie Star Dream—go to Hollywood, […]

He calls it ‘animal focused street photography.’ To me, that seems the perfect designation. What Giacomo Brunelli does isn’t really wildlife photography, though many of the animals he photographs are undeniably feral. It’s certainly not pet photography, although some of the creatures he photographs are undoubtedly somebody’s animal companion. And it’s not street photography in […]

Esther Bubley isn’t a familiar name to most photographers. Nonetheless, she was a quietly revolutionary figure. She wasn’t a revolutionary so much by choice; rather Bubley was a product of her time, and her time was one of radical change for women. She was born in 1921 and became interested in photography while in high […]

Larry Burrows arrived in Vietnam in 1962 at the age of thirty-six. He’d been a professional photographer for Life magazeine for almost a decade. He’d covered some violent places at violent times (tribal conflict in the Congo, sporadic hostility in the Middle East) and in 1962 Vietnam looked like just another local, low-intensity conflict. Burrows […]

Edward Burtynsky has been called the Ansel Adams of the ruined landscape. He creates large, stunningly beautiful images of nature…but not the organic nature celebrated by Adams. Burtynsky describes the essential theme of his photography as "nature transformed through industry." Using a large format camera, he photographs the detritus of industrial civilization. The abandoned quarries, […]

Debbie Fleming Caffery was born in 1948 in New Iberia, Louisiana on Bayou Teche. She is a product of the intersection of multiple cultures; a woman with an Irish name born in an American town founded by Spanish immigrants in a territory dominated by French settlers who were evicted from Canada and who relied on […]

For the first twenty-nine years of his life, he was pretty unremarkable. He was born in Detroit in 1912, took a degree in engineering from Michigan State, got a steady job in the Motor Parts division of Chrysler Corporation, met a good woman and got married. It was an ordinary life. Then, in 1938, he […]

This is going to be a slightly unusual Sunday Salon. The notion of doing a thorough salon on Henri Cartier-Bresson is too daunting. There’s simply far too much to cover—too much photography, too much of a life. To do even minimal justice to his life and work would require at least two—possibly three—normal salons. Instead, […]

Some people are confused by her name. Let’s clear that up quickly. Michal Chelbin is a woman. She was born in the Israeli city of Haifa in 1974, became interested photography at age 15 and attended a high school for the arts. After high school she served two years in the military—a mandatory service for […]

William Christenberry, born in Alabama in 1936, is an artist who works in several different media…sculpture, painting, photography. Like so many Southern artists of his generation, Christenberry left the South as soon as he could. He moved to New York City and began painting large abstract-expressionist canvasses. But like so many Southerners, he eventually found […]

He was a factory worker for a couple of decades. Now he works as a courier, driving up and down the Duwamish Waterway, an industrial estuary in Seattle, delivering packages to the sorts of factories where he used to work. And he takes photographs…weird, unearthly photographs…mostly at night, photographs that reveal aspects of the urban […]

I was prepared to like Gregory Crewdson before I ever saw his work. Why? Because I read an article in which he described his photographs as “images without narratives.” I’ve always been of the opinion that a single photograph cannot tell a story; it can only suggest one. Crewdson holds a similar point of view. […]

Some lives seem more fiction than reality. Edward Sheriff Curtis lived that sort of life. He was born in Wisconsin in 1868, the son of a minister. The family moved to Minnesota in the mid-1870s and Curtis’ father gave up the ministry and set up shop as a retail grocer. It’s unclear what sparked the […]

In October of 2005 in a suburb of Paris a group of teenagers of North African Muslim descent were returning from a soccer match when they saw police officers setting up a roadblock to conduct ID checks. Wanting to avoid being questioned (which could take up to four hours while the ID papers were double-checked) […]

When I was about fifteen years old I saw a photograph in a magazine that left me gob-smacked. A prim-looking old woman in a long black dress, a twin-lens reflex camera around her neck, standing in the woods. Peeking coyly around a tree, an exotic-looking nude woman. The old woman appears a tad startled and […]