Shot in the Dark

Taking photos with my eyes closed was an unusual way of taking photos. I didn't get the reason for it until I actually had done it myself. I thought it was a very unique perspective because you see what you are going to take a picture and when you close your eyes, all you can do is visualize it. When I took my pictures, they were different than what i thought I was going to take a picture of. It had different details, like everything I saw wan't in the photos, and the photos showed me things that I didn't recognize at the time.

William Wegman

William Wegman went to art school where he studied painting. He then went to graduate school and became interested in many things besides painting. He began doing performance art, and making videos, some of which featured his first Weimaraner Man Ray. Soon he began taking photographs, too, first starting with making black-and-white prints, and then experimenting with an enormous Polaroid camera the size of a refrigerator. After Man Ray, he adopted a dog he called Fay Ray, and began photographing her using the Polaroid camera. Fay had puppies, Fay’s puppies had puppies, and Wegman photographed, and made videos, of them all. He made a series of children’s books, beginning with fairy tales: Cinderella and Red Riding Hood. His videos were featured on Sesame Street.

Anne Geddes

Anne Geddes is a self-taught photographer who began creating her unique style from the start. She first took photos professionally when she was living in Hong Kong with her husband. She started a very small portraiture business by photographing the babies and young children of her friends and neighbors. A couple years later, Geddes and her husband left Hong Kong to return home to Australia. She started working at home and made her first holiday photographic card for her family. This led to making cards for her friends. Soon after, she launched her own customized greeting card business. The family then relocated to Auckland, New Zealand. There, Geddes started a small studio and in 1988, her image of a little girl in a tutu became her very first published photo when it was printed in a local magazine. She received a great deal of attention for this photograph and that is when she decided on having a career in a unique style of children’s portraiture.

Edward Weston

In 1906, Weston moved to California and worked as a door-to-door portrait photographer. From 1908 to 1911, he studied photography at the Illinois College of Photography and later opened his own portrait studio in Tropico, California. In the beginning, the works of Edward Weston were soft-focused, pictorialist in style, and painterly. However, after attending the San Francisco World Fair in 1915, he was greatly influenced to use different techniques and renew his vision in photography. Weston found great commercial success in photography in the next few years, and he also won many prizes for his works. Though Weston succeeded in his photography career, he always struggled financially. He became a member of the London Salon in 1917. Five years later in 1922, Weston met Paul Strand and Alfred Stieglitz. The same year, Weston’s life took a dramatic turn from soft pictures to images that were sharply focused with powerful compositions. He also burned most of the negatives that he took before 1922, showing that he only wanted to be remembered for his later works.

Richard Avedon

Till date, Richard Avedon is remembered as the photographer who shaped and defined America’s sense of fashion and style in the late 20th century, captivating energy, freedom and excitement through his clicks. Best known for his minimalistic and probing portraits, Avedon acted as the driving force who added a sense of vibrancy into the realm of fashion photography. His breath-taking and awe-inspiring photographs have filled the pages of numerous prestigious magazines in the United States of America. One of the most renowned photographers in the world, Avedon was endowed with a brilliant sense of imagery and insight. He delved deep into the subjects he shot and created some of the most intensive and creative photographs for the world to behold. He gave photographers around the world a new vision in portrait photography, something that was quintessentially seen in his works. Avedon’s large gamut of work has been exhibited at various prestigious exhibitions all over the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, National Museum of American History, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the like. To learn more interesting and intriguing facts about his childhood, personal life and achievements in the field of photography and fashion, scroll down and continue to read this biography.

Alfred Stieglitz

A vital force in the development of modern art in America, Alfred Stieglitz's significance lies as much in his work as an art dealer, exhibition organizer, publisher, and editor as it does in his career as a photographer. He is credited with spearheading the rise of modern photography in America in the early years of the twentieth century, publishing the periodical Camera Work (1903-17) and forming the exhibition society, the Photo-Secession. He also ran a series of influential galleries, starting with 291, which he used not only to exhibit photography, but also to introduce European modernist painters and sculptors to America and to foster America's own modernist figures - including his later wife, Georgia O'Keeffe. Insistent that photography warranted a place among the fine arts, Stieglitz's own work showed great technical mastery of tone and texture and reveled in exploring atmospherics. In later years, influenced in part by Cubism and other trends, he became interested in straight photography, favoring more clarity and less lush effects.

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Paul Strand

Along with Edward Weston and Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand was one of the defining masters of early American modernist photography. Strand was introduced to photography by the renowned social documentarian Lewis Hine, who instilled in him an understanding of the photograph as a powerful tool that should be used for the betterment of humanity. Finding his own vision, in the early 20th century Strand began taking the photographs for which he is best known: scenes of urban hustle and bustle, formal abstractions, and street portraits.