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.