Artist Biographies
Édouard Baldus
French, b. Prussia, 1813-1889
The large and regal prints made by Édouard-Denis Baldus are widely agreed to be among the finest photographic images ever produced. After serving as
an artillery officer in the Prussian army, Baldus left his native country for France during the 1830s to become a painter. He exhibited his paintings of religious
subjects, portraits, and genre scenes in the Paris Salons from 1841-51 and was naturalized as a French citizen in 1849, the same year his interests turned to
photography.
Combining his training in painting with an inquisitive, inventive technical expertise, Baldus produced a body of work of exceptional quality and
interest. His subjects included architecture, landscape, and engineering feats. In 1851 the Commission des monuments historiques selected him for the
Missions héliographiquea government project that sponsored the photographing of endangered classical and medieval architecture in France. For this important
series Baldus produced views of Burgundy, Provence, and the Dauphiné, and the following year he completed a commission for the Ministry of the Interior. In 1855
he began his photography of railroads, some of his most distinctive work. A copy of his album recording the line between Paris and Boulogne was presented
to Queen Victoria. He also documented the flooding of the Rhone, as well as construction of the new Louvre and other Paris views.
A founding member of the Société héliographique and a member of the Société française de photographie (1857), Baldus exhibited his
photographs widely in London, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Brussels, and Paris and won numerous medals of award. A master printer, he produced combination prints in
the early 1850s, frequently retouching his images with pencil and ink. His best work appears most often in specially assembled albumssuch as
Les principaux Monuments de la France reproduits en héliogravure par E.
Baldus, published in 1875 from plates drawn from earlier negatives. Today, his work continues to
be much sought after and to set a standard by which other photographers are judged. T.W.F.
Lewis Baltz
American, 1945-
In his work, Charles Lewis Baltz makes visible the banality of human activity. His austere black-and-white photographs of industrial warehouses, suburban
tract houses, and prefab structures were included in the 1975 exhibition
New Topographics at the George Eastman House, Rochester, establishing him as one of
several photographers concerned with a changing American landscape. His related publications include
The Tract Houses (1972), The New Industrial Parks
Near Irvine, California (1975),
Maryland (1976), Nevada (1978), Park
City (1980), San Quentin Point (1986), and
Candlestick Point (1989). Other publications
include Rule without Exception (1990), a survey of his work from 1967-90, and
Lewis Baltz: Five Projects (1991).
On one level, Baltz's photographs are investigations of space, architecture, materials, and technology. Yet, often devoid of human figures, the
images also read as skeptical commentary on the relation of economic expansion at the expense of environmental preservation. With the advance of recent
technologies, Baltz has turned his eye from the industrial to the virtual landscape in large color photo/text murals. For these installations, Baltz addresses issues of
surveillance, power, and control in the information age by forcing the viewer to confront a confused knot of media imagery and its mechanical underpinnings.
Born in Newport Beach, California, Baltz earned a B.F.A. in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute (1969) and an M.F.A. in photography
from Claremont Graduate School (1971). His work has been exhibited internationally in more than 50 one-person shows, and he has received numerous awards,
including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1973, 1976), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1977), and the United
States-United Kingdom Bicentennial Fellowship (1980). Baltz lives in Paris and Sausalito, California. A.W.
George N. Barnard
American, 1819-1902
Born in Connecticut, in 1843 George Barnard opened one of America's first daguerreotype studios in Oswego, New York, shortly after the invention of
photography. Ten years later, he produced a daguerreotype of the Ames Mill fire in Oswego (now in the collection of George Eastman House, Rochester). Considered
the first news photograph, this image was reproduced as an engraving and circulated widely, gaining Barnard the public's attention.
In 1854 Barnard moved his studio to Syracuse, where he began to use the collodion process. By the time of the Civil War, he had been hired by
Mathew Brady and soon met many other fellow photographersincluding Timothy O'Sullivan and Alexander Gardner, who also had adopted the wet plate process
and whose work during these years paralleled Barnard's. Over the course of his career, he had several professional partners, including Alonzo C. Nichols and
James F. Gibson.
Barnard's Civil War work is probably his best known. In 1864 he was appointed official photographer for General William T. Sherman's march to the
sea, a position that resulted in the 61 plates that constitute his
Photographic Views of Sherman's Campaign (1866). A classic work of photographic reportage,
its somewhat romantic style is quite distinct from that of his colleagues. After the war, Barnard operated a studio in Chicago, which was destroyed by the Great
Fire of 1871a scene that he photographed. He later worked briefly with George Eastman and from 1884-86 operated a studio in Painesville, Ohio, before his
death in New York state. T.W.F.
Ilse Bing
American, b. Germany, 1899-
Ilse Bing became interested in photography while pursuing a doctoral degree in art history at Frankfurt University. Around 1927-28 she began taking
photographs to illustrate her dissertation and in 1930 decided to move to Paris to look for freelance assignments. Using the new 35mm Leica camera, she worked
as a fashion, portrait, and architectural photographer, as well as a photojournalist. During her years in Paris she took part in numerous exhibitions, including
the Museum of Modern Art's Photography
1839-1937 show in New York.
In 1941 Bing and her husband immigrated to the United States, settling in New York City. In New York she began to work on a different scale, using
the larger-format Rolleiflex camera as well as electronic flash. By 1957 she was working exclusively in color. Two years later Bing gave up photography to
concentrate on painting and poetry. M.M.
Bisson Frères
Louis-Auguste Bisson
French, 1814-1876; and
Auguste-Rosalie Bisson
French, 1826-1900
Bisson Frèresconsisting of brothers Louis-Auguste and Auguste-Rosalie Bisson, also known as the Bissons
âiné and jeune (older and younger)was one
of the most celebrated and widely known French photographic studios and publishing houses of the 19th century. Begun by their father, a heraldic painter,
the Bissons' first studio opened in Paris in 1841, shortly after the invention of the daguerreotype.
Louis-Auguste, a student of architecture and chemistry, learned photography directly from Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and went on to advance
the medium through a number of inventions and techniques, contributions for which the brothers received considerable praise. He retired from the business in
1865. Auguste-Rosalie, perhaps the better known of the two, was responsible for some of their more spectacular photographic successes, including the first
closeup views of the peaks of Mt. Blanc (1861).
Among the Bissons' many accomplishments and honors were a set of 900 daguerreotypes of the members of the French National Assembly, which
were later published in lithographic copies; their appointment as official photographers to Napoléon III and Pope Pius IX; their role as founding members of the
Société française de photographie; and their numerous and much-admired series of landscape, architectural, and portrait photographs. After his brother's
retirement, Auguste-Rosalie continued to work in photography, including a voyage to Egypt in 1869 and views of the Siege of Paris in 1871. As late as 1900, the year of
his death, he patented a heliochrome process for the printing of photographs in color with ink. T.W.F.
Margaret Bourke-White
American, 1904-1971
Margaret Bourke-White was a preeminent photojournalist who gained fame for her striking images published in
Fortune and Life magazines in the 1930s-50s.
In 1922, while at Columbia University Teachers College in her native New York City, Bourke-White studied photography with Clarence White. She attended
several other colleges before graduating from Cornell University (1927), then moved to Cleveland.
The city's industrial landscape was influential in the development of Bourke-White's photographic style. One of her images from this period,
Romance of Steel, was a first-place winner in the Cleveland Museum of Art's 1928 May Show, a regional juried exhibition. The following year Bourke-White moved back
to New York to work for Henry Luce's new business magazine,
Fortune. In 1934 she was sent by the magazine to cover the drought in the Midwest, an
assignment she credited with awakening her social conscience. Three years later she collaborated with writer Erskine Caldwell on
You Have Seen Their Faces, an acclaimed study of the plight of rural Southerners during the Great Depression.
Bourke-White's long association with
Life began in 1936 when she joined the magazine as one of its first staff photographers. When it premiered on
November 23, 1936, her photographs of Fort Peck Dam in Montana were featured on the cover and in the lead story. During her career, Bourke-White
covered many major world events: the Great Depression, World War II, the partitioning of India, and the Korean War. She continued to photograph throughout the
1950s, publishing her images in magazines and in a number of books, including
Eyes on Russia (1931), North of the
Danube, with Erskine Caldwell (1939), Say, Is
This the U.S.A.?, with Erskine Caldwell (1941),
Shooting the Russian War (1942), Dear Fatherland, Rest
Quietly (1946), Halfway to Freedom: A Report on the
New India (1949), and Portrait of
Myself (her autobiography, 1963). M.M.
Mathew Brady
American, 1823-1896
Mathew B. Brady was born in Lake George, New York, where he received instruction in art from itinerant painter William Page. He is said to have been
introduced to daguerreotyping by Samuel F. B. Morse, the American portraitist and inventor, who was a friend of Page and an early advocate of photography. Brady
is believed to have also studied with John W. Draper, another important American daguerrean pioneer.
While Brady is best known today for his Civil War work, he was also among the most successful portraitists of his time. He first opened a studio in
New York City in 1844, then a Washington studio in 1847, and two others in New York in 1853 and 1860. Ever aware of history and celebrity, as early as 1845 he
conceived an ambitious series of published portraits to be called
The Gallery of Illustrious Americans. The lithographed images, derived from Brady's
daguerreotypes and accompanied by explanatory texts, drew attention and acclaim, and initiated his association with celebrated sitters. The series, however, failed to
receive adequate backing for completion.
Like many commercial photographers, Brady employed "operators"technicians and artists who worked with him and often took his pictures. Brady
and other photographic entrepreneurs took responsibility for overseeing their studios, marketing prints, and devoting themselves to their most important clients
and images. It was Brady's innovation, at the outbreak of the Civil War, to outfit and send a number of talented operators into the field. The thousands of
negatives produced of the war's great generals and battlefields by Brady's firm are thus usually not the work of the famed photographer himself, but rather that of
George S. Cook, Alexander Gardner, Levin Handy, Michael Miley, and Timothy O'Sullivan. Nevertheless, Brady played a key role in envisioning and executing the
immense enterprise of photographing the Civil War. For example, he produced a number of portraits of Abraham Lincoln, who avowed that without Brady
to present him to the American public, he would have had considerably greater difficulty becoming known. T.W.F.
Constantin Brancusi
Romanian, 1876-1957
Constantin Brancusi was one of the outstanding sculptors of the 20th century. The Romanian-born artist also was actively engaged in making photographs of
his sculpture throughout much of his career, creating images that fall into two main categories: views of his studio and pictures of single works.
Following studies at the School of Arts and Crafts in Craivoa, the National School of Fine Arts in Bucharest, and the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts
in Paris, Brancusi began exhibiting his sculpture in Paris in 1906. It is not known when he first began to photograph his pieces. However, by 1921 he was
interested in improving his photographic skills and asked Man Ray for technical advice, as well as for suggestions for buying equipment and setting up a darkroom.
Brancusi used photography not only to document his sculpture, but also to promote it. He would make sets of photographs showing front, back, and
side views of a piece that could be sent to prospective buyers outside Paris. Although Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, among others, also photographed
his sculpture, Brancusi felt that only he could produce images that did justice to his work. Making his own photographs also allowed him to present his sculpture
as he wanted it to be seen. Well aware of the influence of light, Brancusi often experimented with lighting effects to emphasize the dynamic qualities of a
piece. When he died in 1957, more than 550 negatives and 1,000 prints were found in his studio. In addition to a Brancusi photograph, the Cleveland Museum of
Art's collection includes one of his sculptures. M.M.
Bill Brandt
British, b. Germany, 1904-1983
Born Hermann Wilhelm Brandt in Hamburg, Germany, Bill Brandt became known for his social documentary photographs of the 1930s and his experimental
series of nudes with distorted forms created in the 1940s-50s. Brandt, whose father was British, grew up in Germany and then spent six years in a Swiss
tuberculosis sanatorium. In 1927 he continued his treatment in Vienna, where he underwent psychoanalysis. Following his recovery, he became an apprentice
photographer in a portrait studio. From Vienna Brandt went to Paris, spending three months in 1929 as an assistant in Man Ray's studio. In 1931 he decided to move
to England and work as a freelance photojournalist.
Once in England he began making photographs for a variety of magazines, including
Weekly Illustrated, Picture Post, Minotaure, Verve, Lilliput,
Life, and Harper's Bazaar. In 1936 he published his first book,
The English at Home, which documented the various social types comprised by England's class
system. During the 1930s he also traveled to the Midlands and northern England to photograph industrial towns during the depression. At the end of the decade, he
produced his second book, A Night in London (1938), commissioned by Arts et Métiers Graphiques, the publishers of Brassaï's
Paris de Nuit (1933). That same year Brandt's work was featured in his first exhibition at the Galerie du Chasseur d'Images in Paris. Two years later, at the beginning of World War II, he
was hired by the Ministry of Information to photograph bomb shelters and in 1941 went to work for the National Buildings Record documenting historic buildings
and monuments endangered by air raids.
After the war, Brandt turned to photographing the landscape and the female nude. For his ongoing nude studies he used a Kodak box camera with
an antique wide-angle lens, which produced elongated and distorted images. Photographs from this series were included in his book
Perspective of Nudes (1961). During the 1960s Brandt experimented with color photography and collage, and in 1969 was the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern
Art, New York, followed by retrospectives at the Royal Photographic Society, Bath (1981), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1985), and the Barbican Art Gallery,
London (1993). M.M.
Brassaï
(Gyula Halász) French, born Austria-Hungary, 1899-1984
A photographer, painter, sculptor, and writer, Brassaï became known during the 1930s for his photographs of Parisian nightlife. Initially interested in painting,
he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest (1918-19), and the Academische Hochschule, Berlin-Charlottenburg (1921-22). He adopted the name
Brassaï (after his hometown, Brasso) following his move in 1924 to Paris, where he worked as a painter and journalist for Hungarian and German newspapers.
Around 1929-30 Brassaï began to take photographs, receiving advice from Hungarian photographer André Kertész. His special interest was the city
at night; during his walks after dark he photographed Paris dance halls, cafes, bars, and bordellos, as well as the vagrants and thugs who roamed the dimly
lit streets. In 1933 Brassaï's nocturnal views of Paris were published as
Paris de Nuit (Paris by Night). The book was a great success and helped to launch his
photographic career.
Brassaï began to receive assignments from such journals as
Verve, Labyrinthe, and Minotaure, a new review of art and literature which
commissioned him to photograph artists and their studios. He also became associated with
Harper's Bazaar and over the next three decades completed many assignments
for the magazine. Among the artists and writers he came to know during this period were Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Alberto Giacometto, André Breton,
Tristan Tzara, and Man Ray.
During the German occupation of Paris in the 1940s, no longer able to wander freely through the streets, Brassaï turned to drawing; he also began
to photograph Picasso's sculpture in his Paris studio. After the war, Brassaï continued his photographic series
Graffiti and designed the photographic backdrops
for several plays and ballets; he also published
Histoire de Marie (1949), a surrealist poem with a preface by Henry Miller. In the mid-1950s he won a prize at
the Cannes film festival for his movie Tant qui'il y aura des
bêtes and in 1964 published a critically acclaimed book,
Conversations avec Picasso. Throughout his
career Brassaï exhibited his pictures widely, including a one-person exhibition of his photographs of graffiti at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in the
mid-1950s, followed by a retrospective of his work there in 1968. M.M.
Adolphe Braun
French, 1812-1877
Adolphe Braun, a French textile designer born in Besançon and trained in Paris, opened his own studio in Dornach, Alsace, before becoming involved in
photography in the early 1850s. He produced several early floral textile designs that were published as lithographs. In 1853 Braun began work on a large album
of some 300 photographic still-life studies of flowers, intended as aids for artists in the field of decorative arts. The work met with such success at the 1855
Exposition Universelle in Paris that he left the field of design for photography. Braun's carefully executed still lifes are considered to be among the finest ever done.
From the mid-1850s on, Braun's firm, Adolphe Braun et Cie., later headed by his son Gaston (1845-1928), became one of the world's largest
studios and publishers of topographical views and of reproductions of works of art. In the latter effort, their importance was in part due to Gaston's success with the
orthochromatic process, in which photographic reproductions retained a tonal range very close to that of the original work of art. Braun et Cie. were the
official photographers to Napoléon III and Pope Pius IX. Their reproductions of works in the Louvre, the Sistine Chapel, and many other subjects in architecture,
sculpture, painting, and drawing, sometimes using the more permanent carbon or Woodburytype processes, were offered in all sizes and formats, and became
the standard in their field. The number of negatives taken by the Brauns or their operators was variously estimated in 1870 to be between 4,000 and 8,000.
The Brauns were members of the Société française de photographie. Both were awarded the French Legion of HonorAdolphe in 1860, and Gaston in 1892. T.W.F.
Anne W. Brigman
American, b. Hawaii, 1869-1950
Anne W. Brigman was born in Honolulu, where she lived until her family moved to California in the 1880s. Around 1900 she became interested in
photography and in 1902 exhibited five of her prints in the Second San Francisco Photographic Salon. The following year Brigman joined Alfred Stieglitz's
Photo-Secession, becoming one of the few West Coast members of this elite New York-based group. Her images were reproduced in three issues of
Camera Work (1909, 1912, 1913), and her photographs were included in many of the Photo-Secession exhibitions organized by Stieglitz in this country and abroad.
Brigman also exhibited her work in numerous salons of pictorial photography and in 1909 was elected to membership in the Linked Ring. Active in
the Bay Area, Brigman made one trip east in 1910 to meet Stieglitz and other Photo-Secession members associated with the gallery "291." While on the East
Coast she took part in Clarence White's first summer school of photography in Maine.
During the first two decades of the 20th century Brigman became known for her allegorical images of nude or classically robed female figures
frequently posed in trees in the California Sierra. Following her move from Oakland to Long Beach in 1929, Brigman turned to photographic studies of the seaside.
During the 1930s she began writing poetry and in 1949 published
Songs of a Pagan, a book combining her photographs and poems. She died in 1950 while working
on a second book, Child of Hawaii. M.M.
The biograhies were written by Karen L. Churchill, Thomas Weston Fels, Maureen A. McKenna, and April Watson.
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