Artist Biographies

A B C-D E-F G-H J-L M N-P R S T U-Z

Harry Callahan
American, 1912-

Detroit native Harry Morey Callahan is recognized as one of the most influential American photographers and teachers of the second half of the 20th century. A self-taught photographer, he became interested in the medium in the late 1930s while working in the accounting department at Chrysler Corporation. He joined the Detroit Photo Guild and in 1941 was greatly inspired by Ansel Adams, who was invited to give a workshop and lecture at the guild.

In 1944 Callahan took a job with the General Motors Photographic Laboratory and two years later began teaching photography at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, in Chicago. He headed the institute's department of photography from 1949-61, then left to establish the photography department at the Rhode Island School of Design. Callahan served as head of the photography program at Rhode Island until 1973 and continued teaching there until his retirement in 1977.

Interested in photography as a means of self-expression, Callahan's subjects have ranged from an ongoing series of his wife, Eleanor, to landscapes, seascapes, nature studies, and street scenes. He has also experimented with high-contrast images as well as double exposures, and since his retirement has focused on color work. Among his awards are fellowships from the Graham Foundation (1956) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1972). His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including one-artist shows at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1976), the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson (1984), and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1996). Callahan lives in Atlanta. M.M.

Julia Margaret Cameron
British, 1815-1879

Born in Calcutta to a French mother and an English father employed by the East India Company, Julia Margaret Cameron was a key figure in the development of photography both in Britain and abroad. She was sent, under the care of her grandmother, to France for her education. Marriage to jurist Charles Hay Cameron took her back to India in 1838, and to England in 1848, where in 1860 the family finally settled on the Isle of Wight. Three years later Cameron received her first camera, a gift from her daughter, as a way to pass the time while her husband was away on an extended trip to Ceylon.

For the next 15 years, Cameron's passion for photography, and her fortunate position among Britain's cultural elite, allowed her to produce a series of portraits, allegories, and illustrations that are among the most admired and influential of photographic images. Frequently marked by a loose, soft style, her portraits of well-known figures, such as Sir John Herschel, Thomas Carlyle, and Ellen Terry, reveal her subject's character in an unusually forceful manner. Her alle
gories and tableaux often include neighbors and friends like Lord Tennyson and her artistic mentor, the Pre-Raphaelite painter G. F. Watts. In 1874 she illustrated Tennyson's popular long poem Idylls of the King.

In 1875, after the death of her daughter, Cameron returned to Ceylon with her husband, joining their five sons. There she continued to photograph until her death in 1879. A later generation was introduced to Cameron's work by Alfred Stieglitz, who reproduced a selection from it in Camera Work. T.W.F.

Lewis Carroll
(Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) British, 1832-1898

Known primarily as the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872), the enigmatic Lewis Carroll was also a mathematician, poet, novelist, and photographer. A lifelong teacher and writer of children's books, it is perhaps no surprise to find the photography of children his principal focus. Born in Daresbury, Cheshire, and educated at Rugby and Oxford, Carroll lectured in mathematics for 25 years at the prestigious Christ Church College at Oxford. His best known photographic subject is probably the daughter of the dean of Christ Church, Alice Liddell, his model for the heroine of the Alice adventures.

Carroll's photographic activity took place largely from 1856-80. At his death he left some 3,000 negatives, among them portraits and tableaux of children, along with portraits of various members of his cultured circle: Lord Tennyson, Ellen Terry, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Michael Faraday. Carroll's fine images of children are noted for their exceptional combination of innocence and revelation, leaving many viewers guessing even to the present day as to his ultimate motives and intentions. T.W.F.

Henri Cartier-Bresson
French, 1908-

Henri Cartier-Bresson (born in Chanteloup) has achieved fame for his work as a pioneering photojournalist and for his ability to capture the "decisive moment" in candid images of people and events around the world. After studying painting in the 1920s (including one year with cubist André Lhote), Cartier-Bresson became interested in photography while recuperating from illness in 1930-31. Working first with a box camera and then with a 35mm Leica camera, he began to take pictures for magazines and newspapers. In the early 1930s his photographs were featured in exhibitions at the Julian Levy Gallery in New York and the Club Atheneo in Madrid. During this period he traveled and photographed in France, Italy, Spain, Morocco, and Mexico.

In 1935 Cartier-Bresson studied cinematography with Paul Strand in New York City, returning to France the following year to work as an assistant on Jean Renoir's films La vie est à nous and Une partie de campagne. In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, Cartier-Bresson made Victorie de la vie, a film documenting conditions in Spanish hospitals. Three years later, while serving in the French army during World War II, he was captured by the Germans. He escaped from prison in 1943 and joined the French resistance. Following the war his work was featured in a major one-artist exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1946), and in 1947 he joined Ropert Capa, George Rodger, and David Seymour in founding magnum Photos, the well-known cooperative agency for photojournalism.

Over the next two decades Cartier-Bresson traveled the world as a freelance photojournalist. His work appeared in a number of exhibitions during this time (Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, International Center of Photography, New York, and others) as well as in numerous magazine articles and more than a dozen books, including Images à la sauvette (The Decisive Moment, 1952), D'une Chine à l'autre (1954; From One China to Another, U.S. publication, 1956), Les Européens (The Europeans, 1955), Mouscou, vu par Henri Cartier-Bresson (People of Moscow, 1955), and the Face of Asia (1972). In 1966 Cartier-Bresson left magnum, retiring from photojournalism to concentrate on his drawing. M.M.

William Clift
American, 1944-

Throughout his career, William Brooks Clift III has photographed the land and architecture as quiet yet complex subjects filled with cultural and spiritual metaphor. Celebrating the nuances of light and composition in his images, which are primarily black and white, he is a careful and thoughtful technician. He digests, rather than dramatizes, his subjects, often spending several years exploring a theme before completing it.

Born in Boston, Clift first took an interest in photography at age 10, building his own darkroom. As a teenager, he attended a workshop with Paul Caponigro. Beginning in 1962, Clift spent eight years specializing in architectural subjects, commissioned on a freelance basis by various organizationsincluding the Massachusetts Council on the Arts for an extensive documentation of Old Boston City Hall (1970). He moved to Santa Fe in 1971 and began to photograph the landscape that continues to inspire his work. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1972, 1979) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1973, 1980).

Returning to Boston in 1975, Clift photographed the architecture of Beacon Hill. During 1975-76 he worked for the Joseph Seagram and Son's bicentennial project on American county courthouses. In 1977 he traveled to France to take pictures of Mont-Saint-Michel and began an ongoing project picturing the sculpture of Juan Hamilton. Commissions followed from AT&T for their American Images project (1978) and from the Reader's Digest Association (1985-86) to photograph the Hudson River Highlands with Steven Shore, who eventually discontinued the endeavor.

A one-person exhibition of Clift's work, Certain Places, was on view at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth (1987). That same year he received the Governor's Award for Excellence and Achievement in the Arts in New Mexico and began a color project with Polaroid materials, making family pictures that were exhibited in the Equitable Gallery, New York (1992). He has produced and distributed two books, Certain Places (1987) and A Hudson Landscape (1994).

Clift continues to photograph the mountain and desert landscape throughout the southwestern United States. He lives in Santa Fe. A.W.

John Coplans
British, 1920-

Before launching into a full-time pursuit of photography at age 60, John Coplans (born in London) was a teacher, curator, and editor. He served in the British armed forces (1938-46), taking up painting in London and Paris in the years following.

Immigrating to the United States in 1960, Coplans settled in San Francisco to teach at the University of California, Berkeley. Two years later, he founded the periodical Artforum and continued as its editor until 1980. He also worked as curator of the Pasadena Art Museum (1967-70) and then as director of the Akron Art Museum (1978-80), during which time he founded the midwestern art magazine Dialogue.

Coplans moved to New York in 1980 and turned his attention to photography. Since 1984 he has worked on an extended series of self-portraits. Standing before a stark white background, he observes himself through a video monitor and works with an assistant who snaps Polaroid negatives at the artist's discretion. The photographs, varying in scale and largely excluding the face and head, suggest psychological and emotional states through gesture, abstract composition, and the symbolic connotations of the male nude subject.

One-person exhibitions of Coplans's work have been held at the Art Institute of Chicago (1981, 1988), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1988), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1988), the Musée de la Vieille Charité, Marseille (1989), the Frankfurter Kunstverein (1990), the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1990), and the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford (1991). He has received numerous awards for both his photographs and his criticism, including the Frank Jewitt Mather Award of the College Art Association (1974), and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1969, 1985) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1975, 1980, 1986, 1992). His artist's books include A Body of Work (1987), Hand (1988), and Foot (1989). Coplans lives in New York. A.W.

Edward S. Curtis
American, 1868-1952

Edward Sheriff Curtis, born near White Water, Wisconsin, was a well-established commercial photographer before he undertook his best known work shortly before the turn of the century. Working first as photographer for the Edward H. Harriman expedition in Alaska (1899), he later secured the endorsement of Theodore Roosevelt and the support of J. P. Morgan for an extensive anthropological and photographic study of Native Americans. Curtis's work from 1906-20 resulted in The North American Indian and eventually generated 40,000 negatives, of which 1,200 were presented in gravure form in the 20 volumes and 20 accompanying portfolios of his study.

Although his intentions were anthropological and scholarlyto preserve the appearance and customs of a dying raceCurtis nevertheless was affected by the artistic styles of his time. His portraits and tableaux were often strongly pictorialist, as their presentation on imported papers and in rarefied media such as orotone would suggest. His scientific aims were frequently undercut by a personal interpretation of his subjects, to whom he often supplied costumes and props. Time has proved Curtis, in this era of his career, equally an artist and an anthropologist. His later work in Los Angeles, which deserves further study, focused on Hollywood and the world of movies. T.W.F.

Eugène Cuvelier
French, 1830-1900

A painter and photographer in Arras, Eugène Cuvelier focused on the natural landscape of Fontainebleau and its environs. His father, Adalbert, who also painted and photographed, taught Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot the process of cliché-verre, an early printmaking process based on sensitivity to light. The works of the father and son are often difficult to distinguish.

Eugène expanded the link between photography and painting, producing a substantial series of calotypes of natural subjects in the style of the Barbizon School. A member of the Société française de photographie, he continued to use paper negatives at a late date, preferring their soft aesthetic result that suggested painting. The Cuveliers were also members of the Barbizon artistic community: At the wedding of Eugène to Louise Ganne, daughter of the celebrated innkeeper, Jean-François Millet and Théodore Rousseau took on the task of decoration and Corot served as best man. Today, Cuvelier's works are treasured for their direct portrayal of nature and the delicacy with which photography was adapted to the task. T.W.F.

Judy Dater
American, 1941-

Known for her powerful portraiture, Judy Dater relies on confrontation, revelation, empathy, humor, and parody to reveal her subjects. Her early 4 x 5-inch, black-and-white photographs reflect the influence of the California-based f/64 school, which included Ansel Adams and, in particular, Imogen Cunningham, whom Dater credits as a mentor. When Cunningham died in 1976, Dater embarked on a project to photograph and interview her relatives and friends, acting as editor for the resulting publication, Imogen Cunningham: A Portrait (1979). Dater's color work includes subjects from Egypt (1979-80) and a series of self-portraits that depict the artist in various guises as a means for critical feminist inquiry (1982). More recently, she has moved to computer-manipulated photography and installation and performance art.

Dater (born Judy Rose Lichtenfield in Hollywood, California) attended ucla (1959-62), where she studied drawing and painting. She met and married Dennis Dater in 1962, divorcing two years later. She continued her education at San Francisco State University, taking up photography as her primary medium (B.A., 1963; M.A., 1966). There, she studied with photographer Jack Welpott, whom she eventually married (1971-77). The two collaborated on the book project Women and Other Visions (1975), often using the same models.

Dater's work has been included in numerous one-person exhibitions, and the de Saisset Museum at the University of Santa Clara organized a major traveling retrospective, Judy Dater: Twenty Years, with accompanying monograph (1986). She has won the Dorothea Lange Award from the Oakland Museum (1974) and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1976, 1988) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1978). Dater lives in Palo Alto. A.W.

Roy DeCarava
American, 1919-

Roy Rudolph DeCarava is often credited as one of the first African Americans to document his culture with a devoted constancy. His images of his native New Yorkstreet scenes and children, family, and friends in Harlemexhibit both critical insight and compassion. A series of portraits of jazz musicians (begun in 1956) includes Lester Young, John Coltrane, and Billie Holiday. DeCarava also has worked for many commercial periodicals, including Fortune, Harper's, Sports
Illustrated, Look, Newsweek, Time, and Life.

After graduating from high school in 1938, DeCarava began working in the poster division of the Works Progress Administration during the day and attending night classes at Cooper Union. He studied drawing and printmaking at the Harlem Art Center (1940-42), continuing at George Washington Carver Art School, where Charles White was his teacher (1944-45). DeCarava began to photograph in 1946 as a means to visualize ideas for his paintings, committing full-time to the medium one year later. In 1950 he had his first solo exhibition at Forty-Fourth Street Gallery. The same year he made his first print sales to Edward Steichen, director of the photography department of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Two years later, DeCarava was awarded a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the first given to a black artist and the ninth awarded to a photographer.

DeCarava directed A Photographer's Gallery (1954-56), one of the first spaces dedicated to promoting photography as a fine art. In 1955 he collaborated with writer Langston Hughes on one of his most acclaimed projects, the book The Sweet Flypaper of Life (reprinted 1967).

Never one to work in isolation, DeCarava has been a community organizer, curator and gallery director, and political activist throughout his career, receiving numerous honors for artistic achievement, community outreach, and contributions to African-American communities. He has taught photography at Cooper Union (1969-72) and Hunter College (1975-present), and has had more than 15 one-person exhibitions, including retrospectives at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1975), the Studio Museum, Harlem (1983), and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1996). DeCarava lives in Brooklyn. A.W.

Robert Demachy
French, 1859-1936

Born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Robert Demachy was a banker of independent means whose rarefied and varied interests ranged from racing cars to music, literature, and art. His American wife, Julia Adelia Delano, was related to Franklin Roosevelt. In the field of photography, Demachy was both practitioner and theoretician, writing five books and more than 1,000 articles on aesthetic and technical issues. He was a leader in the manipulative style in which the negative was used as the basis for producing prints that approached aquatint and other intaglio media in their overtly artistic, handworked qualities. He was especially known for his work with the gum bichromate and oil printing processes, the latter of which he pioneered and developed with Alfred Maskell. He later abandoned photography for sketching and drawing.

Demachy's photographs often have the quality of paintings, drawings, or intaglio prints and are frequently printed in color. His varied subject matter is often treated in an idealized manner, characteristic of the pictorialism prevalent during the time he worked (roughly 1880-1914). Demachy was a member of the Société française de photographie, the Linked Ring, and the Photo-Secession. In 1894 he helped to found the Photo Club de Paris. He was also a member of honor of the Royal Photographic Society and a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur. T.W.F.

Pierre Dubreuil
French, 1872-1944

A pioneering modernist photographer, Pierre Dubreuil was born into a wealthy mercantile family in Lille. He began his career as a pictorial photographer, joining the prestigious Photo-Club de Paris in 1896 and exhibiting his work in international salons. In 1903 he was elected to membership in the Linked Ring; seven years later his work was included in the important exhibition of pictorial photography organized by Alfred Stieglitz for the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo.

As did many other photographers of the time, Dubreuil experimented with various printing techniques, including platinum, gum bichromate, and the carbon process. However, around 1904 he came to favor oil-pigment printing, which offered freedom for manipulation, and soon mastered the process. From the latter part of the decade until World War I, Dubreuil began producing innovative images that embraced a modernist idiom, but continued to use the soft-focus technique favored by the pictorialists. He experimented with bird's-eye perspective and abstraction, and made pictures that emphasized the flat, two-dimensional nature of the photographic image. His photographs often upset the traditional ordering of objects by giving equal or greater prominence to those normally considered unimportant. During these years Dubreuil lived in Lille, except for two years spent in Paris (1908-10). In 1924 he moved to Belgium where he continued his innovative work, exploring fragmented images and the closeup.

Considered a leading innovator, Dubreuil was honored with a retrospective by London's Royal Photographic Society (1935). He returned to France during World War II, and after his death in 1944 his work was forgotten. Almost 40 years later, interest in Dubreuil was revived by Tom Jacobson, a San Diego photographer and collector, who sought out surviving examples of his photographs in Europe. Drawing upon these recently rediscovered images, an exhibition of Dubreuil's work was organized by the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1988). M.M.

The biograhies were written by Karen L. Churchill, Thomas Weston Fels, Maureen A. McKenna, and April Watson.